ICEBERG THEORY OF ANTISEMITISM™

MAYBE KANYE AND THE TIKI TORCHERS AREN’T OUR BIGGEST PROBLEM.

It’s the part you don’t see …

(Yes, I’m in Israel — but, as I’ve said, I will be taking time to reflect on what I’m hearing and so stay tuned …)

Why haven’t we defeated antisemitism?

Because antisemitism is the “perfect prejudice” (as I’ve written recently). its very characteristics reinforce it.

Antisemitism carries a bunch of “poison pills” that prevent it from being overcome.

For example, we may not prioritize the fight against antisemitism because deep in our subconscious we carry the bias that Jews are powerful and therefore can’t be experiencing real discrimination.

In other words, antisemitism prevents us from confronting antisemitism.

There are many examples like this.

Jews are said to have a “persecution complex” — so we can ignore their concerns about discrimination.

They are always “crying wolf” (ditto).

“Jews aren’t a race” — so they can’t experience “racism” and on and on.

I have and will again address these elsewhere.

An important one I’ll address today is that we simply do not recognize antisemitism when we see it.

Sure, we all recognize the tiki torch-carrying, “Jews-will-not-replace-us” fasciodaddies as the antisemitic real thing. Whether we condemn them or not, we can all recognize overt antisemites like the Hitler-loving ahole Kanye West, who clearly didn’t get enough attention at home.

This sort of unconcealed, unrepentant Jew-hatred is obviously the most dangerous kind because it is the sort most likely to turn violent.

I would argue, though, that this overt antisemitism should maybe be less concerning than the less obvious kind. I’ll explain.

Frequent readers know I love to ™ some of my more brilliant ideas.

So let me introduce my Iceberg Theory of Antisemitism™.

The tip of the antisemitic iceberg — the part we see — is maybe 10% of the antisemitism in the world. (I’m totally pulling that number out of my ear. I’m just making a point.) The submerged 90% might be scarier in the long-run for a bunch of reasons.

Again — people who consciously hate Jews or admire Hitler are an immediate, tangible threat. They are the ones most likely to firebomb synagogues, beat up Jews on the street or shoot at Jewish schools.

The thing is … all decent people recognize these haters for what they are and condemn them. Even a lone wolf antisemite can do a lot of harm, but at least they are (probably) on our radar and can be confronted and maybe even rehabilitated.

The submerged 90% of the antisemitic iceberg is dangerous in a different way.

The people who make up this group do not appear to be antisemites — either to themselves or, without significant investigation, even to outsiders with some facility for spotting the signs.

First of all — and this is a problem in itself — the term “antisemite” does not really apply to them, because their prejudices and biases are mostly not conscious and, as a result, not overtly anti- anything. The prefix “anti” presupposes conscious opposition.

The submerged antisemitic iceberg is made up of (probably mostly decent) people who do not even know they carry assumptions about Jews and, indeed, probably condemn haters like Kanye and the tikidaddies.

But that’s what makes their prejudices so dangerous.

We are all products of our environments. And if our environments are European-descended Christian heritage (as mine is, and so this is the one I will focus on; Islamic and other forms of antisemitism are related but different) antisemitism is part of our civilizational DNA.

I recommend yet again the seminal book Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, by David Nirenberg. This masterpiece posits (I summarize crudely) that to create Western civilization, early Christians had to position themselves against an oppositional other and, well, guess who they chose.

You may agree or disagree with the theory of white supremacy infusing our society whether or not we are individually racist. (Please don’t @ me with your anti-DEI stuff, it’s a distraction. Thanks!) But consider it this way: Even if we are not overtly anti-Jewish, we are part of a civilization in which assumptions, biases, tropes and ideas about Jews (bad, but also ambiguously good) are baked into our society’s very foundations.

So what we are talking about here are unconscious or inherent biases, cultural conditionings, social imprinting, preconceived notions, internalized stereotypes, subconscious perceptions and so on. Call them what you will.

Humans carry these, to some extent, about almost every “other.” Other races. Other genders. Other sexual orientations. Other linguistic groups. Other cultural, economic, or any variety of others.

But we carry these, I daresay, most insidiously, stealthily and universally about Jews.

Even when we identify the tropes that partly define antisemitism, we may not recognize them either as ideas we carry or as antisemitic tropes (because we have never heard them before and so don’t know that they are tropes).

Brace yourself for a few …

Common antisemitic biases purport that Jews …

- Aim to dominate the world

- Are rich and control banks and the economy

- Are the root of all evil

- Incite wars

- Are untrustworthy and disloyal

- Enslave (or oppress) non-Jews

- Take things to which they are not entitled

- Are puppet-masters of governments and those in power

God forbid, you will say, that I carry all or any of these ideas.

But if, God forbid, you actually do, you will never find out if your response to the very idea is to deny you carry prejudices about Jews or refuse to plumb the variety of biases that permeate our society (and, therefore, ourselves) — the submerged antisemitic iceberg.

The thing that makes this form of antisemitism especially scary is not only that the carriers (most of us, to some extent or another) do not recognize it in ourselves. It is that, unlike the Kanye-type maniacal Jew-hatred, these more subtle forms can easily permeate our political system, our mainstream discourse, our zeitgeist in ways that the most overt hatred cannot (or, thankfully, has yet to do).

This is all a bit theoretical. In my next post, I’ll apply these theories to something very specific and tangible.

That’s where it will hit the fan.