3 KEYS TO EXPLAIN “ANTIRACIST” ANTISEMITISM (FAN FAVE #16)

“PUNCHING UP” FREES ACTIVISTS TO ENGAGE IN ANTI-JEWISH RACISM.

Not sure how we get from A to B, but I guess I shouldn’t be looking for logic from racist kooks.

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Bigotry is a human trait that evolved at least partly to make us feel better about ourselves. This was certainly an underpinning of segregation in the United States and apartheid in South Africa. In these societies, subjugated peoples were generally safe as long as they didn’t get “uppity” or transgress against the prescribed social hierarchy.

This was the case in many societies, including the “Golden Age” of Jewish-Muslim relations, when Jews and other dhimmies survived under Muslim rule as long as they recognized themselves as, at best, second-class citizens. When we venerate the Golden Age of Muslim-Jewish relations in Moorish Spain or magnify examples of Jews living happily in Arab- or Muslim-majority countries before 1948, it may be analogous to nostalgia for the gentility of the Plantation South — a tranquil social scene in which people who know their place enjoy comparative comfort and security as long as they accept their position in the atrociously unequal, unjust hierarchy.

While viewing ourselves as better than members of another group makes us feel superior, the idea that another group thinks they are better than us does not make us feel better about ourselves. It makes us feel worse. It makes us want to upend this disordered situation. And this is one way that antisemitism differs from other forms of bigotry.

While there are a lot of permutations of antisemitism — and antisemitism is always ready and willing to adapt as necessary — the concept that Jews think they’re better than everyone else is enduring. A key tenet of the antisemitic catechism is that Jews have a “superiority complex.” You only need to scan the substrata of the internet (or, really, any part of the internet) to discover an obsession with the theological concept of “chosen people.” (I’ve written about this.) This dovetails with ideas of “Jewish power.” Together, this confluence of presumed Jewish “superiority” and the parallel of “Jewish power” manifests in the perpetrator the idea that Jews think they are better than everyone else. This can often go a step further. The antisemite might antisemitically believe not only that Jews think they are better than everyone else, but believe that Jews actually are better than everyone else — and the antisemite hates Jews for that. (Are you still with me?)

Keeping “the other” down is usually easy, especially if they are a demographic minority and politically weak. That’s called punching down. Addressing a minority that we perceive as believing they’re better than the majority, well, that requires punching up. Especially when we carry bigoted ideas that that group is uniquely powerful. And, for a movement that employs increasingly strident language against privileged elites, the perception of Jewish superiority and privilege creates a climate in today’s progressive spaces in which bringing the Jews down a peg or two is seen, consciously or otherwise, as a means of advancing egalitarianism.

It shouldn’t need to be said — though it clearly does — that intuiting that every abc person is xyz is the very definition of prejudice. And yet ideas that Jews are “powerful” and consider themselves superior are baked into our civilizational DNA.

The idea of “Jewish power” permeates Western civilization (among others). Individual Jews in positions of authority are extrapolated to represent a conspiracy of control. In times and places where Jews undeniably have had little or no worldly power — medieval Europe, the Soviet Union, various Muslim-dominated societies — Jews are accused of having gnarly supernatural powers (of doing the devil’s work on earth) or using their cunning to subvert the natural order and harm non-Jews (poisoning wells, eating babies, inventing pandemics, becoming doctors so they can poison communist leaders, yada yada yada).

Since Jews, in this power narrative, are not underprivileged, but overprivileged, equality demands that the status of Jews be reduced. Rational? Obviously, no. That’s the problem. In Western societies, irrationality has almost always defined our approach toward Jews. No matter how sophisticated or woke we are, when it comes to this one topic, this one people, we’re little better than the generations who came before us. It is why members of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labor party in the UK could seemingly be so fervently revolted by two things: racism and Jews.

The progressive approach to Jews and antisemitism is so disordered that to try to understand it would mean yanking the thread that threatens to unravel our entire movement. This is why we have had to resort to rote repetition of “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism,” a supposed tautology so artless yet adhered to so fanatically: because to stop and consider the issue would force us to look in a mirror and genuinely assess what is wrong with our approach to Jews and our relationship to antisemitism. If what we see in the mirror is not a bigot, it will be a well-meaning person standing on the shoulders of bigots. In either instance, not a self-image progressives relish seeing.

If the phenomenon of antiracists engaging in overt antisemitism causes cognitive dissonance, we have at least three escape hatches …

• We can deny that such a thing as antisemitism even exists, which is basically the “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” strategy undergirded by the certainty of Jewish power.

• We can employ the formulation favored by Norman Finkelstein and many others, which is that it’s the Jews’ own damn fault for bringing it on themselves. (Victim-blaming is a core tenet of antisemitism.)

• Or we can accuse Jewish people of lying by claiming discrimination when they really just want to keep us from criticizing Israel. (This is a variation on another core motif of antisemitism: devious, manipulative Jews exploiting their history of oppression.)

Or all three.

Employing one, two or all three of these exit ramps, self-styled antiracists can continue to engage in antisemitism without cognitive dissonance.

Any and all of these approaches let us off the hook and allow us to carry on without any introspection of ourselves or our movement and its serious, unaddressed and growing problem around Jews. And if there is anything less “progressive” than that, I cannot imagine what it could be.

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