Plus Ça Change

I recently came upon a basket of old magazines gathering dust in the attic, and found some relics I decided were worth keeping: an issue of the Atlantic from October 2020 with the lead story about “making America again,” and the January 2021 Washingtonian with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on the cover cheerfully announcing it was “our turn.”

The sadness I felt about the optimism in those mags was nothing compared to my surprise upon opening an edition of Azure, an experiment that for its years of publishing aspired (and to my mind succeeded) to build new bridges that “spanned deep abysses of misunderstanding, alienation, suspicion, and even hatred.” The lead article in the issue I found had me doing a double-take about the pub date (Summer 2011): “The Secret Passion of the New Antisemitism,” by the then editor-in-chief, Assaf Sagiv.

Anyone caught up in discussions of today’s global antisemitism can’t avoid the question about whether and how new it is. We’re reeling in a barrage of essays pining for that “golden era” of Jews in their chosen “golden land,” along with other commentaries warning that we’re about to have a rerun of 1930’s Germany. Whether our situation today is better, worse, or about the same as it’s been for millennia has always been a hard question, now made more complicated by the latest acts of linguistic acrobatics. We are reassured, for example, that being antizionist is OK: if we are for human rights and social justice, deeply Jewish concepts after all, we cannot, God forbid, be antisemitic just because we disapprove of the Jewish State. Clowns from the “progressive” left sliding down those slippery tropes (J-Street leads the parade) join their nemeses from the extreme right, for whom good old-fashioned Jew hatred doesn’t need updating, in the tent of meeting where Israel-bashing is the main unifying event.

My goal here is not to join the debate over how to define and spot antisemitism, and I still don’t know if things today are measurably worse than before. But my ruminations are illuminated by Sagiv’s essay. If you don’t have time for the whole thing, then consider these few selections (copied and pasted verbaim) as you ask yourself: Is anything new under the sun? Can we think of something new to do now?

• Blatantly antisemitic attitudes, which were once met with scorn and revulsion, have slowly trickled into the mainstream of today’s European discourse. Key intellectual and cultural figures no longer hesitate to lash out at the Jewish people. The renowned Greek musician Mikis Theodorakis, for example, proclaimed in 2003 that the Jews “are the root of evil…” … José Saramago, the Portuguese winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in literature, sang a similar tune in 2002 when he announced that the Israeli blockade of Ramallah was “in the spirit of Auschwitz…”

• It is perhaps little wonder that the Jewish reaction to the so-called new antisemitism seems imbued with a sense of indignation, if not bitter disappointment, that many of those who pledged to fight racism and prejudice should choose to take a stand against the most persecuted nation on earth, and not with it. Some Jews, unable to digest this new reality, take pains to insist that fierce denunciations of the State of Israel and of Zionism cannot necessarily be equated with antisemitic sentiments. In fact, they assert, the motive for such criticism may actually be a deep concern for the Jews’ moral stature.

• Even Jean Jaurès, the socialist leader who came to Dreyfus’s defense (and consequently has streets named after him in Israel), was not always an advocate of philosemitism. In 1895, the very year Dreyfus was convicted of treason, Jaurès published an article in the daily La Dépêche de Toulouse in which he welcomed the growing hostility among native Algerians toward the Jewish presence in their midst. Why, he wondered, “isn’t there a serious antisemitic movement in Algeria, since the Jews are practicing their methods of appropriation and extortion on the Arabs?”…Thus spoke someone who is still considered a historical icon of the French Left. If this sounds all too familiar, it is because similar proclamations are regularly uttered today by those who swear undying devotion to the ideals of equality, justice, and love for all mankind.

• As far as purist liberals and radicals are concerned, Israel’s very essence is illegitimate: It is a racist apartheid state that brutally tramples on the rights of its non-Jewish citizens—not to mention the millions of Palestinians who live in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza under direct or indirect occupation. But opposition to Zionism, which paints itself in bold moral hues, frequently camouflages a deeper animosity, one that is directed against the Jews as a whole. This fact has been pointed out by Robert Wistrich, a leading authority on antisemitism…

• Good-hearted activists and intellectuals—Israelis among them—are lured into joining the growing public campaign against the Zionist state, all in the belief that they are fulfilling their moral obligation to humanity, and perhaps even to the Jewish people as well. True, their denunciations of Israel are often over-zealous, motivated by a fierce desire to prove themselves worthy in the eyes of their partners in the struggle. But most of them are not really self-hating Jews, as their critics assert. They are instead just terribly misguided, unwitting parties to an insidious campaign. We can only hope they sober up, before it is too late.

The Jewish story continues to be one of immense accomplishment and resilience, demonstrated again in Israel today, in the face of enemies desperate to eliminate us and others who believe it’s our own fault. History tests our capacity to endure foul odors from the past as we commit to the messy job of repair in the present. I’m grateful to Assaf Sagiv for giving us such high-precision tools. Maybe we can find some comfort knowing that we’ve been here before.