Anti-Semitic Chic
A thought experiment please: on one side of the screen, picture the Unite the Right Rally of August 2017, in which a conglomeration of white supremacists, Christian nationalists, neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates and far-right militias marched through Charlottesville carrying Nazi and Confederate battle flags and chanting, “Jews will not replace us,” and “Blood and soil.” Next to this reel, watch as, in response to the Israel-Hamas war, college campuses exploded with shouts of “From the River to the Sea,” “Say it loud, say it clear, we don’t want Zionists here,” and “Globalize the intifada—” during which, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, over 1200 Israeli Jews were murdered.
If you’re standing within either ideological extreme, you might claim that the antisemitism of the far right bears no resemblance to the anti-Israel protests of the far left. But you’d be wrong. And that’s because the goal of both forms of anti-Jewishness (good old fashioned Christian nationalism versus good old fashioned denial of the right of the State of Israel to exist) has the same end point in mind: to strip Jews of their full humanity. But, you say, it’s mere sloganeering, the right to free speech and all that? Free speech is a good thing and is enshrined in the First Amendment, but from both the right and from the left, anti-Jewish rhetoric invariably turns to murdering Jews. Witness the 2018 gunning down of 11 elderly Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh perpetuated by a truck driver shouting “all Jews must die.” Then scroll up to the murder of a young Jewish couple emerging from a Jewish museum in Washington DC as recently as last year, perpetuated by a man shouting “Free Palestine,”—a chant beloved by anti-Israeli campus protesters.
Am I more horrified by right or left wing antisemitism? Depends on the day. But I can tell you that ever since President Trump’s first term, I’ve had to think twice every time I go to synagogue or to an event at a JCC, despite the fact that my own synagogue, like most these days, has erected bollards to prevent murder-by-vehicle and hired armed guards to prevent terrorism by gunman.
Yep, it’s kosher to hate Jews again. You could even say that, at least on the far left end of the ideological spectrum, it’s chic. From the far left, though, it’s easy to dismiss right wing anti-Semites, like the Pittsburg thug. A guy like that—a middle-aged white truck driver addicted to alt-right media whose hatred for Jews drove him to shed blood —what does he have in common with, for example, Mahmoud Khalil, who had recently earned a graduate degree from Columbia and became the lead voice of the anti-Zionist campus protests?
(On a side note: you have to wonder if Mr. Khalil knew that the federal judge who ruled that his detention in an ICE facility in Louisiana was illegal is Jewish.)
For that matter, what would right wing wackos yelling “Six million were not enough” and “international globalists” have in common with a Pulitzer prize winning columnist for the New York Times? I’m referring of course to Nicholas Kristoff, who in a recent opinion piece published in the newspaper of record, claimed, among other non-or-under sources whoppers, that Jews systematically trained dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners. Which among other things is a physical, biological and scientific impossibility.
Two obvious points to make here:
- On both the far right and the far left, those who point the finger at Jewish or Israeli perfidy tend to engage in age-old anti-Semitic tropes, though on the left they’re dressed up in liberal jargon.
- Both sides use unfounded accusations to whip up hatred of Jews.
I’m not arguing that the government of Israel is blameless—far from it. But a government, no matter how misguided, is not the same as its people. Jewish citizens of the United States are more at risk now than we have been since the early part of the 20th century. But if as recently as a few years ago most Jew hatred in the United States came from the right, now the left has not only caught up, but surpassed the right wing in their vehement wrath against Jews. Mazel tov to all those good liberals who have helped stir up the oldest hatred that humans have yet to devise.