It is an astonishing feature of our era that we have made selective outrage over antisemitism into a kind of norm.
This criticism is directed particularly at the Jewish community.
But if you are managing to not notice this rash of violent attacks on Orthodox Jews, if you are willing to ignore the blatant antisemitism of the President’s lawyer’s comments about a Holocaust survivor, if you were willing to look the other way about the UK Labor Party...
If you found space for “all about the Benjamins” or Trump’s closing ad in 2016, then consider yourself criticized.
For tweets on antisemitism that are not political in character, I recommend following @bungarsargon, @Yair_Rosenberg, and @seffikogen.
Another thing: while antisemitism is often an expression of white supremacy, if you think it is only that, consider how much older antisemitism is than white supremacy. Violent antisemitism was more than a thousand years old by the time white supremacy was really born.
Conversely, if you are not persuaded that antisemitism is also a pervasive expression of white supremacy, it is really worth spending some time—a little will do—studying the history of the 20th Century.
Put another way, if you are unafraid of antisemitism on the right because the Trumpist right is “pro-Israel,” consider all the Jews in the world who don’t live in Israel and would prefer not to be attacked as part of a vast “globalist” elite of rootless cosmopolitans.
Bottom line: antisemitism will not align with whatever political narrative you are trying to map it on to. If you are a Jew, you should know better than to play these games. If you’re not, here’s my advice: Anybody who purports to speak on behalf of Jews who refuses to...
...talk candidly about the antisemitism of the political movement of his or her choice is using antisemitism as a weapon—and is more interested in how he or she can use the problem than in the problem itself.
That’s all I got.
That’s all I got.
