New Rules for ‘Fighting’ Age-Old Antisemitism
Some fresh perspectives about the banality that is antisemitism.
Please note: This essay is for our premium subscribers. To get access to our growing library of 150+ essays, videos, and podcasts — plus new pieces of in-depth content added every week — become a premium subscriber!
I’m fortunate to have come face-to-face, literally, with antisemitism only twice in my 33-year life.
In 2014, I was at a restaurant named Mazal Tov in Budapest with some people I had just met from the hostel where we were all staying. As the server brought the bill and I grabbed for it, someone reflexively said, “Of course the Jew wants to handle the money,” and everyone (myself included) chuckled. Hehehe.
Then a few years later, while I was sitting at the communal table in a Los Angeles Starbucks, the police were called because of an unruly individual — a Black man — sitting across from me. After the policeman, who was also Black, kindly asked him to leave the premises following the local store’s request, the man gibed at the officer: “Are you really going to let the whites and Jews tell us what to do?” (My guess is he was referencing Starbucks’ then-chairman and CEO, Howard Schultz, a Jew.)
Antisemitism — more recently called “Jew Hate” — is uncomfortable and uncalled for, like any form of racism, prejudice, discrimination, or bigotry. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) defines antisemitism as a form of prejudice or discrimination directed toward Jews as individuals or as a group, based on age-old stereotypes and myths that target Jews as a people, their religious practices and beliefs, or the Jewish State of Israel.
But not all antisemitism is created equal, as columnist David Brooks pointed out in The New York Times, writing:
“There are three major strains of anti-Semitism circulating, different in kind and virulence, and requiring different responses.”1
Across the Middle East, he added, antisemitism “has the feel of a deranged theoretical system for making sense of a world gone astray. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, doesn’t just oppose Israel. He has called it the ‘sinister, unclean rabid dog of the region.’ He has said its leaders ‘look like beasts and cannot be called human.’ This sort of antisemitism thrives where there aren’t that many Jews.”
“The Jew is not a person but an idea,” Brooks continued, “a unique carrier of transcendent evil: a pollution, a stain, a dark force responsible for the failures of others, the unconscious shame and primeval urges they feel in themselves, and everything that needs explaining. This is a form of derangement, a flight from reality even in otherwise sophisticated people.”
In Europe, antisemitism looks like “a response to alienation” and is particularly high where unemployment is rampant, according to Brooks; roughly half of all Spaniards and Greeks express unfavorable opinions about Jews. “The plague of violence is fueled by young Islamic men with no respect and no place to go,” he wrote.
Finally, in the United States, the problem is the number of people who can’t fathom what antisemitism is or “who think Jews are being paranoid or excessively playing the victim,” Brooks purported, adding that there are others who see antisemitism as another form of bigotry. “But these are different evils. Most bigotry is an assertion of inferiority and speaks the language of oppression. Anti-Semitism is an assertion of impurity and speaks the language of extermination. Anti-Semitism’s logical endpoint is violence.”
In her book, How to Fight Anti-Semitism, Bari Weiss categories antisemitism differently, using terms like Purim anti-Semitism which, “as always, is clear and easy to spot. It is the Pittsburgh killer. It is Iran. It is Hamas officials like Fathi Hamad, who called on the Palestinian diaspora to murder Jews this summer,” she wrote.
Then there’s Hanukkah anti-Semitism, which “is more insidious” and “asks the Jews to commit cultural genocide, to abandon their traditions and to worship false idols to survive … You see manifestations of this tragic strain in what has become of the British Labour Party and in the activist and academic left in the United States.”
Weiss also makes note of Hitlerian anti-Semitism, which “announces its intentions unequivocally.” And finally there’s leftist anti-Semitism which, “like communism itself, pretends to be the opposite of what it is,” she wrote. “Because of the way it can be smuggled into the mainstream and manipulate us — who doesn’t seek justice and progress? who doesn’t want a universal brotherhood of man? — anti-Semitism that originates on the political left is more insidious and perhaps more existentially dangerous.”
Speaking of dangerous, a new Tel Aviv University study found a record-high amount of antisemitic activity throughout the world in 2021. Much of this activity is tied to the bloody conflict between Israel and Palestinian terror groups in the Gaza Strip in May of that year, as well as the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, according to the report’s authors.
In 2022, a disturbing report from the ADL found that antisemitic incidents reached historic highs in 2021 across the U.S. — which is home to the world’s second-largest Jewish population, outside of Israel. The report indicated that it recorded the most antisemitic incidents targeting American Jews since it began tracking such data in 1979.
“To some degree, the rise in reported antisemitic events around the world can be traced to improved data collection methods, but this is unlikely to account for all of it, given the rise in specific numbers that would not be affected by them,” wrote Judah Ari Gross, The Times of Israel’s religions and Diaspora affairs correspondent.2
Another report about antisemitic incidents in Britain in 2021 made for alarming reading: the highest-ever number recorded by the Community Security Trust, the report’s author, in a single year.
A quick Google search of recent news about antisemitism, performed at the time of writing this essay, offered articles such as:
“What The New Yorker Didn’t Say About a Famous Writer’s Anti-Semitism” (The Atlantic)
“Antisemitism Increased Under Trump. Then It Got Even Worse.” (The New York Times)
“Palestinian Poem Sets Off Antisemitism Fight at Georgetown” (The Intercept)
“Harvard Newspaper Endorses BDS Movement, Rejects Antisemitism” (Haaretz)
In April 2022, nearly 40 U.S. college presidents — including some from campuses that have seen high-profile anti-Israel or antisemitic activity — gathered at the Center for Jewish History in New York City to share best practices and discuss how best to create a safe environment for Jewish students. A handful of universities represented have been the subject of federal complaints alleging that their campuses were hostile to Jewish students — including New York University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Columbia University.3
Adam Lehman, the CEO of Hillel International — which organized this U.S. college presidents “meetup” — called on schools to educate students about Jewish identity and antisemitism, and to explicitly include Jews in their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies, which generally address topics like racial identity, gender, and sexual orientation.
Ironically, it might not be in the best interest of Hillel International to effectively fight antisemitism; the head of fundraising for a major U.S. university affiliate of the organization told me that when she fundraises for a Jewish culture event, very few donors come forward with a check for the organization. But when she fundraises for an antisemitism-related event, she said, donors line up with checks in their hands. Perhaps this is one of the reasons — not the only reason, to be sure — Jewish organizations place such a major emphasis on antisemitism.
“Groups fighting anti-Semitism sponsor educational campaigns and do a lot of consciousness-raising,” Brooks wrote. “I doubt these things do anything to reduce active anti-Semitism.”
‘You can’t fight antisemitism.’
At the end of 2021, I started what became a full-time, three-month research project to learn more about the Jewish world. I spoke with literally hundreds of Jewish thought leaders, rabbis, social activists, academics, and organization executives. The topic of antisemitism naturally came up with many of them, and some interesting perspectives were offered about it.
Ben Freeman, author of the book Jewish Pride, called antisemitism “a weed,” saying:
“There have been those who have tried to solve the problem by cutting the weed off at ground level. This has left the roots intact, enabling them to grow back. This is why antisemitism is still a problem today. It is why historical attempts to defeat it have failed.”
An Eastern European retiree, now living in the U.S. for many years, and the daughter of Holocaust survivors, told me that the Holocaust is an overstated and ineffective vehicle for dealing with antisemitism.
“It is much easier to describe how anti-Semitism works than what works against it,” wrote Kenneth Stern, director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate. “The first of the usual bromides is Holocaust education. Surely it’s important that people know about the Holocaust. But how is teaching about the Wannsee Conference and Kristallnacht going to change people whose anti-Semitism is connected to seeing Jews with guns lording over their Muslim brethren in the West Bank?”4
“Keeping our focus on finding new and better approaches, rather than assuming the usual answers like Holocaust education and hate crime prosecutions will suffice, the better we’ll be able to control anti-Semitism in the decades to come,” Stern added.
One Toronto-based Jewish donor went as far as to say: “You can’t fight antisemitism. You can’t cure it. You can’t fix it. You need to have a very strong Jewish identity and a very strong Zionist identity. If you don’t have that, all of the fighting against antisemitism doesn’t matter.” He went on to mention a rumored $5-million antisemitism campaign in Toronto, indicating it would be a disappointing waste of resources and money.
“In recent years, the fight against antisemitism has enjoyed extensive resources worldwide, and yet, despite many important programs and initiatives, the number of antisemitic incidents, including violent assaults, is rapidly escalating,” said Uriya Shavit, head of Tel Aviv University’s Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry, which produced the university’s aforementioned report.5
Authors of the university’s report called for major introspection as decades of efforts to curb antisemitism following the Holocaust appear to have come up short, writing in a statement: “It’s time to admit: The struggle is failing.”
Rabbi David Wolpe, the longtime Senior Rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, implied that antisemitism isn’t even the Jewish world’s most pressing problem, saying in a recent interview: “The greatest threat to Jewry is within Jewry.”6