My introduction to the thoroughly inhumane attacks by a planned initiative from a Gaza militia on Israeli civilians came as an announcement from our Rabbi as we davened shacharit on Simchat Torah, a day in which traditional Jews keep the electronics turned off. In the ensuing six months, the responses from around the world, and many places in America where American Jews have been thoroughly engaged for some three generations, have made this an inflection point. A Sentinel Event for sure. A Never Event, probably. Hostility to Israel, the one place in the world that accepts Jews in political distress and offers us sovereignty, has always been an undertone of political discussion. It is no longer an undertone. In America, we have political displacement as those chronically uneasy affiliations with the minority communities sink with a predictable mutual detriment. I find opportunists only too eager to flip the majority Jewish vote a generation after the white wage-earner vote was flipped.
Within the Jewish community, I read essays by Jews on the political right too eager to purge their organizations of individuals who challenge their hardball pro-Israel and intersected politically conservative agenda. They seem totally oblivious to a certain reality that the people they wish to evict from their Jewish circles may be the people they need to support nursing homes, Hebrew Schools, and a campus presence. They've made certain Jews expendable by ideology.
Amid this, some people gifted with that blend of knowledge, experience, saichel, and the ability to craft paragraphs that flow from one to another have brought upper-tier analysis to the forefront. Two seminal essays appeared in The Atlantic, both rather lengthy but I read each in their entirety. A response of somewhat lesser length appeared in The Forward. Several years ago, I decided to add two subscriptions as a semi-annual initiative. I selected The Atlantic and The Forward. Good decisions, renewed each year since.
Since the response in The Forward incorporates the other two, and takes a very different position on how American Jews should best grapple with the many dilemmas and uncertainties of where we find ourselves, I add my own comments to that essay. And while anti-Semitism has become more publicly explicit, my own personal exposure has been mostly from afar. Shuls have more visible security, but that predated the Gaza attacks. And the synagogue where I was married had two vandalism events. But I still appear in public as the best representative of Judaism that I can be with no realistic fear for my personal safety.
These are the original publications:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/04/us-anti-semitism-jewish-american-safety/677469/
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/jewish-anti-semitism-harvard-claudine-gay-zionism/677454/
https://forward.com/opinion/600187/antisemitism-united-states-israel-gaza-war/
The growing panic about antisemitism isn’t a
reflection of reality
Yes, antisemitism is up — but
prominent voices are confusing protest with bigotry
American Jews are being whipped into a panic about antisemitism.
There is no doubt that incidents of antisemitism have increased since Oct.
7. But prominent voices in the American Jewish community are making it harder
to fight. Would challenge this They have
mistaken political protest — however misguided — for bigotry some of it is bigotry, conflated anti-Zionism and
antisemitism there are Americans being attacked because
they are identifiable as Jewish or their property is damaged because it
identified as belonging to Jews, and exaggerated the crisis on the far
left while ignoring the far greater one on the far right. We can argue whether
either is a crisis
I do not question the motivations of those who have spoken out against
antisemitism in this way. We are all in pain, and we all want a world in which
people of all backgrounds can live their lives in safety. But the rampant
hyperbole, confusion, and both-sidesing of this present moral panic are making
it harder, not easier, to respond effectively.
Antisemitism is rising because of a brutal war
For example, consider two widely circulated recent essays in The
Atlantic, “The Golden Age of American Jews is
Ending,” by Franklin Foer, and “Why The Most Educated People in
America Fall for Antisemitic Lies,” by Dara Horn.
Both attribute the rise in antisemitism to the resurgence of an ancient,
timeless hatred, rather than the obvious proximate cause: a brutal war, which
is producing images of unthinkable horror to be streamed daily on social media. I think it is. The response on campuses defending the
attackers as heroic was immediate. The
condemnation of the President’s response was immediate. And it was the Islamic, African-American, and
progressive elements that emerged essentially immediately. The very real human cost in Gaza came a short
time later. There was no acknowledgment
of the nature of the attack itself or condemnation of the glee many attackers
displayed.
In Foer’s 11,000-word piece, few sentences mention the ongoing catastrophe
in Gaza, where more than an estimated 32,000 Palestinians have been killed so far. “I don’t want to dismiss the
anger that the left feels about the terrible human cost of the Israeli
counterinvasion of Gaza, or denounce criticism of Israel as inherently
antisemitic — especially because I share some of those criticisms,” he writes. Much of it is very anti-Semitic, and has
been. The
exclusion of American Jews from progressive causes such as BLM was a work in
progress. So was the difficulty in
defining anti-Semitism for formal policy purposes as Jewishness has been
inseparable from Jewish sovereignty. While I think Franklin Foer is wrong about
the end of the American Jewish Golden Age (yes, I did read all 11K words over
two sessions) the virulence of the protests and its direction towards
American Jews speaks for itself. What I
think he got wrong is the ability of American Jews to create things, whether
institutions for our and public advancement, philanthropy, ideas, or expertise. Those all remain valuable and don’t seem
threatened.
But that is, effectively, exactly what he does, ascribing the increase in
antisemitism to anti-liberal trends in American culture, and describing
antisemitism as “a mental habit, deeply embedded in Christian and Muslim
thinking, stretching back at least as far as the accusation that the Jews
murdered the son of God.” The war is barely even an inciting incident. I think that’s
another area where Foer is wrong. Father Coughlin, Henry Ford, and Charles
Lindbergh have all been discredited on a one-way ticket in America, though my
Islamic medical colleagues tell me the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is
required reading in some of their history curriculum in their Middle Eastern
primary schools. The American parochial
school kids no longer seek out the Jewish kids for taunting when school lets
out. But in the Islamic communities and
in some of our community of color, mistrust of Jews as Jews is still conveyed
through household. And it is usually
tied to a justification, whether over-extending their dhimmi status by having a
sovereign state or oppression as slumlords.
Horn, like Foer, largely dismisses concerns about the war. The word “Gaza”
only appears six times in her essay. Yes, she writes, there are “the many
legitimate concerns about Israel’s policies toward Palestinians and the many
legitimate concerns about Israel’s current war in Gaza.” But those “cannot
explain these eliminationist chants and slogans” — e.g. “Palestine from River
to Sea” — “the glee with which they are delivered, the lawlessness that has
accompanied them, or the open assaults on Jews.” She got it right.
There are numerous omissions in this short passage: How many protests are
gleeful? Certainly the primary attacks were. I think they take more of a form of
revenge Defacing property, intimidating
expression, making credible threats to safety, and locking Jews in campus rooms
has its illegal elements. (Few
that I’ve seen.) What percentage are lawless? Is “‘river to the sea” always
‘eliminationist,’ despite what many pro-Palestine voices insist? It has that intent. f But as the response acknowledges later, these chants come from people with no authority and therefore no accountability. Having the onus of implementation of this desire would change the approach. Then again, the Gazans are eliminationinst in their manifesto and acted as if this attack were one episode in the larger initiative.
Most significantly, though, both Horn and Foer write as if this is the
first time in history that a war or catastrophe has provoked bigotry. But this
is always the case. Just as Islamophobia rose after 9/11, and just as
anti-Asian hate rose with the onset of the pandemic, so antisemitism is rising
now. One could even say the same about anti-German and anti-Japanese
stereotypes in the 1940s. or the ending of slavery
in America or calling sauerkraut Liberty Cabbage. The wars proceed because the sides object
vehemently to each other. But
irrespective of precedent, we need not tolerate this or rationalize it now.
None of this is to excuse these spikes in bigotry, or to deny that the
bigotry exists and is dangerous. It is only to note that the most obvious
explanation for the current eruption is not a grand meta-narrative of American
or European history, but rage at an ongoing war in which Israel’s conduct has
received widespread international condemnation.
No, anti-Zionism is not antisemitism
Second, the moral panic conflates legitimate anti-Zionism with illegitimate
antisemitism. Not
understanding why one is legitimate and another is not. Certainly Popes for a thousand years thought their
targeting of Jews was legit. So did
inquisitors. So did Romans and
Babylonias who created our diaspora. All
are interferences with pre-existing established Jewish norms.
Foer’s essay begins with a harrowing account of a Jewish high school
student in Berkeley, California, who was “scared” by “a planned ‘walkout’ to
protest Israel.” I do not doubt that this student was scared. But what actually
happened? A misguided political protest, along with unsubstantiated rumors of
“phrases shouted in the hallways, carrying intimations of violence.” It is not
antisemitism whenever Jewish people are upset by anti-Israel actions or
statements. No,
Jay, it is about fear for safety. The
statements were somewhat normative in a past era, whether by Spielberg’s
fictional portrayals in The Fablemans or by encounters with parochial school
students in my youth. The difference is
that the fear was not justified, though Spielberg’s character was in fact
assaulted. And Kristallnacht was a very
real episode in history. The kids at that Northern California HS attended that HS the year before.
Their fear is now.
Foer also reports secondhand accounts of Jewish students at other schools
in the Bay Area being targeted and harassed in ways that are clearly
antisemitic. But he lumps these incidents togethter as if they are the same,
which they are not. Protesting against Israel, however misguided or disturbing,
is not antisemitic; harassing Jews is. But one becomes justification for the other, and inseparable from the fears
of the victim of physical harm
Foer asserts, without support, that the left “espouses a blithe desire to
eliminate the world’s only Jewish-majority nation … valorizes the homicidal
campaign against its existence, and seeks to hold members of the Jewish
diaspora to account for the sins of a country they don’t live in.” Notice the
elisions: Foer blends together anti-Zionism, support for a “homicidal
campaign,” and targeting Jews. (Even the caricature of anti-Zionism is
incorrect, as many on the left support a democratic state where Jews would
still be a majority, but all would have equal rights.) Certainly most of the
anti-Zionists and Islamists do not attack Jews because they are Jewish. I’m sure Jewish and Islamic physicians share
patients as before, both in America and in Israel. But as we learned in Pittsburgh, where the
slain doctor was a college friend and in Monsey where I was raised, it only
requires a few real threats to be deadly, irrespective of how the majority
behave. What matters is the failure of
condemnation. That is new.
This conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism is far greater than a few
articles. As reported in the Forward, after Oct. 7, the Anti-Defamation League changed its criteria to define a
much broader swath of anti-Zionist activity as antisemitic; anti-Zionist
protests account for 1,317 of the 3,000-odd “antisemitic” incidents the
organization tracked in the three months after Oct. 7. So
they agree that Oct 7 is a demarcation point that changes what is acceptable
levels of intimidation. As Forward reporter Arno
Rosenfeld wrote, “a large share of the incidents appear to be expressions of
hostility toward Israel, rather than the traditional forms of antisemitism that
the organization has focused on in previous years.” Except that these incidents
are directed at American Jews because they are Jewish. Much like Venn diagram circles that
intersect.
The extremism of some left-wing responses to the war is indeed troubling. I
agree with Foer’s dismay that “a disconcertingly large number of Israel’s
critics on the left did not … share that vision of peaceful coexistence, or
believe Jews had a right to a nation of their own.” But are they
antisemitic? Yes.
Their Venn Diagrams also intersect with other things. And what
about Jewish anti-Zionists (many of whom are friends of mine) — are we really
to believe that they are all trapped in some neurosis of self-hatred? Or
do they have a political view to which many of us object? I’m not sure I know any Jewish
anti-Zionists who think that Herzl, Ben Gurion, and Holocaust refugees who
settled in Israel were a blight on world history. I think they don’t want the people there now
to have to move on like they did in Spain.
There are criticisms of the government and have been since Begin made
Likud the dominant party nearly fifty years ago. The gripes are with policies and innocent
human pawns, not with Jewish sovereignty.
I am a progressive Zionist. Even if the dream seems dim today, I believe in
a two-state solution with justice for Palestine and security for Israel. But
while Foer’s language of “a nation of their own” sounds benign in principle, in
practice, it has meant a nation that displaces another people and denies its 5
million members basic civil rights. Except that it was
prompted by a number of attacks that made an offense the best defense. That rarely appears in these essays from
either side. Nor does the other reality
that peace has been achieved among other former antagonists that acknowledge
the reality of their neighbor Israel.
For all the talks and proposals, the Palestinians, or the Egyptians before
them, never had to submit their wish list of what it would take to reconcile,
while the Israelis and the Americans did.
Baseball may have had the right idea.
Each states their demands. The more reasonable is accepted with little
negotiation. Deals are often better when
each side has an incentive to consider that if too demanding, they lose. Moreover, an entire generation of
American progressives has grown up during a period in which Israel’s right-wing
governments have successfully undermined any efforts toward peace and coexistence. It is not antisemitic to oppose this.
For many people, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, it is just. Begin was the first
right wing government. The Abrahamic
Accords came with Netanyahu at the helm.
Jews visiting Petra started in 1983.
It is much less the government than the partner’s trustworthiness.
Right-wing antisemitism remains the greatest threat
The moral panic regarding antisemitism also overlooks an essential truth:
that although antisemitism on the left is real, and arguably escalating, it
still pales in comparison to antisemitism on the right. Until they both become deadly. The right has had
lethal episodes for a while. From the American
left, this is new.
After a shocking upsurge during the Trump administration, right-wing
antisemitism has now reached unprecedented proximity to power. One particularly
serious example: Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor of North
Carolina. Robinson is an antisemite and Holocaust denier. In 2017, he wrote that “there is a REASON the liberal media fills the airwaves with
programs about the NAZI and the ‘6 million Jews’ they murdered.” (Robinson
is also a sexist, homophobe, and Islamophobe.) He hasn’t
been elected yet. And once in office, NC
has laws that limit his implementation of policies that target Jews for
harassment. Compare that to DEI programs
at our universities, which while well intended, function as zero sum game to
promote one identity, whether of color or LGBT over previously excluded minorities
who have proven themselves, as in Jews and Asians. There is political power of people you never
see and leverage against you by people that you encounter daily.
This man isn’t a misguided high school teacher or student activist. He may
become the next chief executive of the ninth most populous state in our union.
He’s been highly praised by Donald Trump. This is extreme antisemitism at the highest levels
of the GOP.
And, of course, there’s Elon Musk, who despite his
Auschwitz apology tour has platformed — and personally reposted — hardcore
antisemites, including Trump. Not to mention Kanye
West, now known as Ye, whose public antisemitism has
aligned with a sharp right-wing political turn, and whose most recent album
went to the top of the charts. But he doesn’t deny people on the left access to his
platforms either.
No one accused of antisemitism on the far left has a platform comparable to
either of theirs. Again, none of this is to excuse the presence or tolerance of
antisemitism on the left — only to put it in perspective. Actually I think DEI affects a
lot more Jews diligently striving to be their best self a lot more than anything
Ye can influence.
Yet in Foer’s telling, they are merely two manifestations of the same
phenomenon. “In the era of perpetual crisis,” Foer writes, “a version of this
narrative kept recurring: a small elite — sometimes bankers, sometimes
lobbyists — maliciously exploiting the people. Such narratives helped propel
Occupy Wall Street on the left and the Tea Party on the right.” Or in another era of
Mayor Lindsay, my HS era, you live in squalor because of your Jewish landlord
and his partner at the furniture store. Some
would say the quest for rights without accountability. My assessment of the Palestinian avocates
today.
But wait a minute. Occupy’s narrative is accurate, but the Tea Party’s is
not. Occupy rails against the 1% — they exist. The Tea Party rails against
imagined “elites” — now imagined, as part of the QAnon conspiracy
theory, as cabals of globalist pedophiles. And when a single protester in
Zuccotti Park raised an antisemitic banner, people intervened, and the
movement reaffirmed its opposition to antisemitism. There is no equivalence here. Or really, one is
more credible than the other.
Likewise, Foer claims that “America’s ascendant political movements — MAGA
on one side, the illiberal left on the other — would demolish the last pillars
of the consensus that Jews helped establish.
That’s the one part where he seems accurate. They
regard concepts such as tolerance, fairness, meritocracy, and cosmopolitanism
as pernicious shams.” Really? Rightly or wrongly, the left thinks they’re
fighting for fairness and tolerance — or at least against starving a million
children as part of a brutal war. Or BML or DEI. Noble concepts until you start excluding
people who would like to be helpful.
These long pre-dated the Gazan casualties. The right is fighting
for an American nationalist ethno-state. There is simply no symmetry here. I think more likely
there is a gap between what they claim they want and what they will insist upon
if returned to power. Moral Majority has
been around a long time, as have megachurches.
So has the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Never heard a peep about a legislative repeal. Not a word about restricting the cultural
practices of those already here. The
Asian and Middle Eastern restaurants in the Deep South are pretty safe. If migrant workers are needed to harvest
rural crops in George Wallace country, the hiring will go on as before. And from our end as Jewish multicultural
advocates that enabled our achievements in the wide culture, we have no reason
to restrict their hunting hobbies. Abortions
ended in my lifetime. My OB text, circa
1975, still had a chapter on septic abortions which disappeared. I doubt if the Christian nationalists, for
all their rhetoric, want that medical condition to return.
Terrified, tribalistic and isolated
The moral panic over antisemitism isn’t just factually unsound. It’s
helping make American Jews more isolated and paranoid. But with reason. We weren’t that way last Rosh HaShanah.
It’s obvious that American Jews are feeling disoriented, terrified and traumatized by Oct. 7, as well as by much of the world’s mixed response to that
day’s horrific violence. The trauma of the last several months — experienced,
in various forms, by Jews, Muslims, progressives and many others — has contributed to the degeneration of our
public discourse on the war. The public discourse on a lot of other things
had not gone well before that.
But our moral panic is at once born of this trauma and making it worse. It
has caused Jews to become even more terrified and tribalistic. Terrified isn’t the right word, nor is tribalistic. After the Pittsburgh massacre took my own
medical friend, the condemnation was universal.
The condemnation of the Simchat Torah attack is a long way from
universal. And we haven’t done well
protecting each other. On the Jewish
Trump side, there are calls to purge Jews who find him objectionable from some
mainstream organizations that they dominate.
And it has precedent. The
heavy-handedness of Hillel International on its own chapters that challenged
the Zionist litmus test of the parent organization took place before the
current millenium.ro The reality is that most of us go to shul at the appointed
times, though with enhanced security.
Companies have not withdrawn their Hechshers in solidarity with the
anti-Zionist or anti-Jewish pressures.
Hiring goes on as before. If we
were economically prosperous before, that has not been reversed. It has
undermined our solidarity with other vulnerable groups at precisely the time at
which we are threatened by the nationalist right. Forgive
me, but a number of progressiove organizations expressed their hostility to
Jewish participation in their movements years ago. And it has fed the illiberal campaigns of right-wing culture warriors, who have preyed on American Jewish fears to further their own agendas. Or they understand Maslow’s hierarchy. You protect your safety before you seek the
higher noble principles. We are being fed a diet of hyperbole and
misinformation, and we are reacting out of fear. Except that elements
of that fear are both legit and ever closer to home.
To be sure, some progressives responded abominably to Oct. 7,
and continue to use irresponsible, incendiary rhetoric about Israel. And we need to be very consistent about identifying them
and what they are about. We spend too much effort fighting with each other. There
are outrageous things happening on some college campuses. And we have to be openly oppositional to that
with negative consequences for outrageous activity. But let’s not lose
the thread here. The real crisis is not leftists on campus but white
nationalists, insurrectionists, election deniers, science deniers and
conspiracy theorists seizing two if not three branches of the federal
government. Actually it is the loss of partnership with the progressives that
make these people confident that their majority will eventually emerge. And we are not the
ones who undermined that uneasy but protective partnership. That is
the Titanic. College activists are the string quartet playing on
the deck.
Finally, the consequences of this fatalistic view that antisemitism is
everywhere, and that it can never be eradicated, are dark indeed. Professor
Shaul Magid has called it “Judeo-Pessimism,” taking a cue
from “Afro-Pessimism,” a view that holds that racism can never be eradicated. Like medical
conditions, rarely cured, mostly successfully managed.
For Judeo-Pessimists, antisemitism is a kind of immortal, recurring hatred
that simply is part of Western culture; again, Foer describes it as a “mental
habit, deeply embedded in Christian and Muslim thinking.” As such, antisemitism
can be fought but never destroyed. That seems to be where anti-Semitism has gone
historically. And as Bari Weiss recommended
in her book on this, the best defense is to be the most visibly honorable Jew you can
be,
The natural endpoint of such a view is perpetual paranoia, together with an
extreme form of right-wing Zionism. Not at all. Zionism
has always been part of our consensus.
What we have stopped doing internally is seeking the Middle. It tells us that we cannot trust the
international community, and can only trust Jewish strength. It dismisses human rights concerns, since the
oppression of our enemies is the regrettable price of Jewish survival. Often it is. Because if we are always and everywhere
oppressed, then the Jewish future lies not in engagement with wider society,
but in our strength in opposition to it. Not at all.
Even in our darkest times, we have always had buffers, whether the Turks
and Dutch of Inquisition times, Righteous Gentiles during Nazi domination, and the
liberal ideologies in America that Franklin Foer and Dana Horn described in their
essays.
This is a bleak vision, and reflective of the trauma which gave birth to
it. The
Lachrymose View of Jewish History has its element of accuracy.
To be sure, there are good reasons to be scared right now. But the human
capacity for freedom lies in our ability to transcend that fear — to recognize
it and not be controlled by it. We can recognize that the better angels of our
nature are not naive, but are wiser and more trustworthy than our passions,
even when they are felt strongly. Moral panic is not the way forward.
Rabbi Jay Michaelson is a contributing columnist for the Forward and
for Rolling Stone. He is the author of 10 books, and won the 2023
New York Society for Professional Journalists award for opinion writing.
