WHY SUGARCOAT ANTISEMITISM?

IT’S HUMAN NATURE TO SHUT DOWN WHEN ACCUSED OF RACISM OR OTHER ANTISOCIAL BEHAVIORS. SO SHOULD WE STOP CALLING THEM OUT?

If you say so.

I’ve been accused of preaching to the converted — and I’m sure I am. This forces me to ask, again, why I am doing this?

Why write pro-Jewish and pro-Israel bumf for Jewish and Zionist readers? It’s a subtle shift from the questions I asked myself at the start of my writing career, in that interregnum between Guttenberg and Zuckerberg, when I was a reporter and columnist for gay and lesbian media, a period I refered to as preaching to the inverted.

Why waste all this time writing things for people who already agree with what I pound out?

As I wrote in a sappy year-end reflection, there are a few reasons.

For one thing, in a time when almost all my Jewish friends feel like the world has gone mad and most non-Jews are either against them or couldn’t care less how they feel, I get tons of messages saying that my meanderings are a tiny ray of hope that you don’t actually have to be Jewish to get it.

I’m not a super-systematic person. I tend to throw out seeds and hope something grows. Right now, the levels of anti-Zionism and antisemitism are so horrific that it is hard to know where to begin. So I might as well flail. If I keep pumping this stuff out, something has to catch. Maybe?

Another factor is that some people have told me that they had not previously been able to articulate an argument until I put it a certain way. If I can empower people who are on the ground trying to make the case against antisemitism and anti-Zionism, that’s a good thing, right?

Am I blowing my own horn? Look — I’ve got one talent. I can’t change a car tire, throw a baseball or do simple math. But a lifelong obsession with words, fueled by outrage and caffeine, have given me one superpower. If you start a war of words with me, I will bury you. I fight fire with hellfire. (I can also slow cook a cheap piece of beef to such perfection it is known to a small circle of fortunates as “Pat roast.” So two talents.)

This conundrum came up again as I began reading a book yesterday about how minds change. (I’ll share more as I continue reading.)

I bring this up prematurely (wouldn’t you think I should finish reading the book before expounding on its lessons?) because it raised the Same Old Problem I have about why I do what I do. Accusing people of racism (or other antisocial pathologies) is a surefire way to get them to shut down and stop reading.

So why do I so often let my road lead back to that? Why do so many of my posts lead inevitably to the explanation that much of what we are seeing in the world’s approach to Israel is caused by the world’s approach to Jews?

Illustration: In a recidivism to past habits, I was on Facebook Reels the other day and stumbled upon a standup “comedian.”

His shtick was that Israelis complain that they live in a tough neighborhood and everyone who lives around them hates them. To great guffaws, he asked: If you lived in a neighborhood where everyone got along except the one new neighbor, who everyone hated, shouldn’t you ask yourself what that neighbor did to alienate the entire subdivision?

Good question.

In the 1950s and ’60s, a great many Americans (for example) had that precise experience. They moved into a neighborhood and were detested and alienated. What did they do? What had they done? They moved into a neighborhood that was all white — and they weren’t.

It’s a clunky analogy, for sure. It also kind of undermines the historical reality that Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel even if they had become a minority there over the centuries.

But like the Black Americans who courageously moved into all-white neighborhoods, Israelis aren’t hated because of, as the “comedian” said, anything they had done to piss off the neighbors.

They pissed off the neighbors by existing. By being different. By having the audacity to move into a homogenous neighborhood where their difference evoked loathing among their neighbors.

You can find plenty of reasons to condemn Israel right now. Armchair generals in Pittsburgh and Pretoria know far better than the generals in the Israel Defense Forces how this war should be waged, I’m sure. But the reason that this conflict — not only now, when casualties are catastrophically high, but any time there is so much as a tiny skirmish between Israelis and Palestinians — it makes above-the-fold global headlines. Why?

Because Jews.

Oh yes, we fancy it up with all sorts of explanations. But that’s the real reason. In a complex world, we need black-and-white. We need good guys and bad guys. And we have decided to find the bad guys exactly where our great-grandparents did.

We are so much more advanced, though. We don’t blame “The Jews,” we blame “The Zionists.” We couch it in “settler-colonialism,” “apartheid,” “imperialism” yada yada yada blah blah blah. It is, of course, the same old wine in new bottles.

How many times have I made this case? You either believe that attitudes about Jews inform our ideas about the Jewish state, or you don’t. Who is going to read something I write and slap their head and go, Oh my God, I’ve been an antisemite all along? Probably no one.

Moreover, for a huge swath of these people, as soon as you accuse them of being racist, they are going to shut down the conversation and stop listening because, well, it’s just human nature. (It’s a little more subtle than this, as I sometimes bother to explain. I don’t believe overt antisemitism is the main problem here. The core problems are inherent biases and unconscious assumptions. About which more soon.) No one likes to be called a racist — especially people who have built their entire self-identity on calling themselves antiracists.)

So why do I keep doing it? Honestly, I’m not entirely sure.

But I think maybe it’s because you don’t advance social justice by sugarcoating the problem or pretending it isn’t there. I’m not sure the progress we’ve made on gay rights came from pretending we weren’t up against a ton of homophobes. The advances in women’s equality depended, to some large extent, on calling out male chauvinist pigs. (Remember that one?) A core of the antiracist movement at the moment is the idea that we all carry biases and, even if we didn’t, we would still be complicit in the institutionalized white supremacy of our society.

If antisemitism is the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and it is — what possible advantage is there in beating around the bush and pretending the real problem is settlements, refugees, the final status of borders and Jerusalem?

Inevitable disclaimer: Everyone who condemns Israel isn’t an antisemite. But just as every white person (even if inadvertently) benefits from a white supremacist culture, all anti-Zionists stand on the shoulders of antisemites.

Should I stop calling out antisemitism?

If people are going to stop listening, they’re going to stop listening. In fact, that’s what they do every time they chant “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism.”

They keep shutting it down.

We need to keep opening it back up.

Because antisemitism is the nut of the problem.

More on that soon.

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