ZIONIST SHARKS AND JEWISH POWER: ASSUMPTIONS WE DIDN’T EVEN KNOW WE HAD

Perceptions of Jews as an advantaged minority may blind us to the fact that antisemitism exists.

Of course WE don’t believe any of this …

A day or two before Rosh Hashanah, I was at a grocery store in a neighborhood with (by local standards) a sizeable Jewish population. The cashier wore an official name tag, with his name professionally printed, and his name was also written with a felt pen in Chinese and Hebrew.

“Shana tovah,” I said when I got to the front of the line. He looked at me quizzically and I said, “That’s Hebrew on your name tag, isn’t it?”

He laughed. One friend had written his name in Chinese and another had written it in Hebrew. I explained that I had wished him a “happy new year” in Hebrew and he took the opportunity to ask me more about the holiday, probably assuming I am Jewish, which I didn’t clarify. We chatted briefly about the holiday as he scanned my items.

It was a pleasant exchange in multicultural Canada. I thanked him, happily turned to leave and, as I walked away, he called after me, “Nice to meet you. Good to have friends in high places.”

Here was a well-intentioned, multiculturally curious, friendly person who betrayed the fact that somewhere along the line he had absorbed the stereotype that every single Jew is powerful.

In the Middle Ages, Jews were perceived to carry supernatural powers. There are echoes of that extraordinary dominance today in the fantasies of “Zionist sharks” and other phenomena that are apparently believable enough to at least some Arab citizens that they don’t laugh in the faces of their dictators.

More common around here are the ideas that Jews control the media, Hollywood, the U.S. government (check out the blatant example of this conspiracy from Al Jazeera!), the banks of course and, the further one goes into the bowels of the internet, plenty more. 

The fact that Jewish people amount to just a fraction of a percent of the world’s population does not detract from this reasoning; it “proves” it. How powerful they must be to control so much with so few numbers! (This is one way antisemitism is the “perfect prejudice” — even evidence that debunks it is “proof” of the conspiracy.)

No one, of course, tallies up the British, Canadians, Protestants, redheads or left-handers in Hollywood, banking, government or media because, unlike Jews, they are not suspected of being a monolithic entity bent on some malevolent end.

We see and hear, even in mainstream political cartoons and discourse around American foreign policy vis-à-vis Israel, imagery of the Jew as manipulative puppet-master.

The idea that the United States supports Israel is routinely depicted as some devious plot. It disregards the very legitimate and mutually beneficial political and military relationships the United States has with Israel and the entirely moral and logical kinship between the two democracies.

All of the rational explanations for the American-Israeli fraternity can be dismissed because anything that is seen to benefit Jews is often viewed through a prism where presumptions of Jewish power and manipulation lead us to assume that, if Jewish people are gaining some benefit, someone else must be getting screwed. 

That is the message of books like The Israel Lobby and the ubiquity of the idea that Israelis and Zionists are pulling the strings of power in capitals around the world.

Now … there is no denying that Jewish people as a demographic group in North America are not a disadvantaged minority. There are poor Jews and there are Jewish people who are first-generation immigrants from the former Soviet Union or other places who may be lower on the economic ladder than Jews (or others) whose families have been established here for generations.

But Jewish success is not coincidental and there is nothing spooky about it. 

Jewish culture emphasizes reason, scholarship, supportive families, a balance of hard work and a day of proscribed rest and rejuvenation — all things that add up to success in meritocratic societies. 

Studies have indicated that, even in Jewish families where every other religious or ritual observance has been abandoned, the prevalence of post-secondary graduation remains far above North American averages. That’s not magic. It’s a cultural commitment to education and perseverance manifested in individuals’ successes.

Historically, Jews were banned from certain segments of society and the economy, pushing them into other areas and thereby inculcating a recognition of the importance of and a facility for resourcefulness, flexibility and responsiveness to economic and social change, again things that have proved advantageous in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Israel is the embodiment of that same phenomenon. Begun with almost nothing, and with no help and plenty of hindrance from the rest of the world, the country and its citizens put extraordinary efforts into turning what little they had into a success.

But Jews in North America and Europe, as a group, are subject to neither systemic racism (such as denial of housing, increased incarceration rates or police shootings because of who they are) nor economic barriers (like not getting call-backs when they send out their resumes or unequal pay for equal work). Combined with the successes of Jewish individuals, this has led to a scenario in which Jews are viewed as an advantaged minority, a privileged people.

These perceptions of Jews as advantaged may in some respects blind us to the fact that antisemitism exists. 

The very criteria we use to measure discrimination is economic. No matter where one is on the political spectrum, from far left to the most conservative Republican, we generally accept that discrimination is tangibly measured by increased unemployment, decreased income and reduced opportunities. African-Americans, First Nations peoples, visible minorities and women can all point to quantifiable outcomes from societal discrimination — and they are measured in economic terms.

Antisemitism differs from other prejudices and bigotries in a whole bunch of ways. One of the ways it differs is that it does not fall into the economic paradigm that we use most commonly to define prejudice.

As a result, when Jewish individuals are attacked, even antiracist people may struggle to assimilate the meaning.

A Jewish person may be beaten up, stabbed or otherwise assaulted in Paris or Brussels or Brooklyn, and we manage to convince ourselves it was a random attack because our definition of discrimination is economic.

Someone throws a Molotov cocktail in the window of a Jewish school and we conclude it’s a protest against Israel.

Because we adhere to a narrow, economic definition of discrimination, there is simply no other way for many progressive people to understand anti-Jewish discrimination within our worldview.

Consider the response by then-U.S. President Barack Obama when a terrorist aligned with ISIS held hostages and then murdered four people in a kosher supermarket in Paris in 2015, which occurred two days after aligned terrorists murdered 12 people at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, due to content deemed blasphemous of Islam.

“It is entirely legitimate for the American people to be deeply concerned when you’ve got a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris,” Obama said after the incident.

Even the U.S. president, a man as sensitive as any of his generation to discrimination, can fall into the trap of failing to see antisemitism where it so obviously exists. Violent, vicious zealots may behead people, but when one of them deliberately sets out to find a Jewish store to take Jewish hostages and commit mass murder of Jews, it’s a “random” attack.

The tendency is not uncommon. It happened again during an antisemitic attack in Jersey City, N.J., in December 2019, when six people were murdered. Police initially said they believed the kosher market was randomly chosen and that there was no evidence of racism or terrorism. Within hours, they acknowledged that the perpetrators had “targeted the location they attacked.”

There is little to be gained by speculating on motives before an investigation is completed, but if police are going to venture in that direction anyway, why err on the side of randomness? Especially at a time when the New York City region was seeing an unprecedented spate of antisemitic crimes? It’s almost as though the investigators, who presumably are expected to keep an open mind to all potentialities, simply could not believe such a thing could happen, despite evidence that it not only could happen, but was occurring quite frequently.

There is another possibility. Maybe our preconceptions of Jewish power make us believe that attacks on Jews are nothing to really worry about. We have already demonstrated a tendency to view Jews less as individuals than as part of a collective — a collective we tend to view as unusually powerful.

I’m not suggesting most of us consciously think this. I think that, like the sweet cashier I met at the grocery store, we carry these assumptions unconsciously and they come out in weird ways.

Do we dismiss Jewish people’s assertions, complaints, warnings, fears and entreaties about rising antisemitism because of the confidence, even among well-intentioned people, that no matter how dire the situation may look, how quickly Iran is approaching nuclear capacity, how the evidence piles up that antisemitism is becoming “mainstream” in Europe and North America, how many Jews are shot or punched or spat upon, how many synagogues or Jewish centers are burned or how many Jews are beaten up or murdered on European streets, it’s really nothing to worry about?

Jews are powerful.

They’ll be fine.