The antisemitism of things
I am of an age, and a generation, that had little to no personal experience of antisemitism. Like so many American Jews, I am the descendent of grandparents who came to the United States from Eastern Europe in the early years of the 20th century. My parents were first-generation Americans who spoke English, but also knew Yiddish, and both graduated from the City College of New York, often referred to in those days as the Jewish Harvard (a reflection of the fact that CCNY had an enormous Jewish population among its student body but also that admission to Ivy League colleges was severely restricted for Jews).
I grew up in Queens and Brooklyn with plenty of close friends, some of whom were Jewish, and some of whom were not. I spent most of my life as a student or faculty member at some of those very Ivy League institutions that were beyond the reach of American Jews just a generation or so earlier. I held high academic rank and significant leadership positions, and never once was I concerned that any of that would be unattainable because I was Jewish, and as far as I can tell, it never was. Certainly, I don’t really think that anyone ever thought that antisemitism had completely disappeared in the US. Prejudice and prejudicial attitudes never completely disappear, anywhere. But whatever antisemitism remained just didn’t seem to amount to anything. My own career and the careers of so many others in law, business, politics, the arts, and everywhere else, were testimony to that.
Much has been written of late about the resurgence of antisemitism in the United States. It’s a terrible turn of events, and whatever explanations have been put forward to explain it seem inadequate, as they always have been. Antisemitism exists because antisemites exist. But the antisemitism now in the US seems different and more dangerous than ever in my lifetime not so much because of its volume, but because of where it has found a home. The observation was once made that after the Holocaust what remained in the US was the antisemitism of people, but not the antisemitism of things. That is, individuals could and would think whatever they thought about Jews, but the important institutions of American life—the universities, professional schools, leading law firms, financial houses, hospitals, and most importantly, our two major political parties and the institutions of government—were no longer against us.
Very significant and influential institutional forces on both the political right and left have clearly taken positions that threaten the safety and well-being of the American Jewish community. The recent Turning Point USA meeting showed this clearly, when the leadership of the party in power was challenged, mostly unsuccessfully, to say what is plain to all decent people, that Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens and others—all with very significant political influence within the MAGA movement—are beyond the pale of acceptable thought and participation in the American political system precisely because of their open and proud antisemitism. One of the leading architects of the policies guiding the current administration, the president of the Heritage Foundation, couldn’t do it either.
On the political left, opposition to Zionism has become an organizing principle for increasingly influential players in the Democratic Party. It has become a commonplace that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, but most of the time it is. In a John Lennon-imagine-there’s no-countries-and-no-religion-too sort of world, anti-Zionism could just be the expression of opposition to nationalisms of any kind, but that’s not the world we live in, and the only nationalism that the political left seems to get really worked up about is the Jewish kind. The anti-Zionism of the left also seems to assume that Jews are of course people, but they are not a people. And even if they were, their presence in the Middle East represents only settler-colonialism, as if 3,500 years of Jewish history, culture, religion, community, and longing didn’t exist. This denial of Jewish history and of Jews’ ability to define their own identity rather than have other people define it for them is exactly what it seems to be.
It seems likely now that the post-Holocaust period was more of a course correction in history rather than a truly new trajectory, a time when the world realized that things had been allowed to go a little too far in terms of Jew-hatred. That time may be drawing to an end, and most worryingly, it may be ending within the major forces and institutions of American political life. America remains the best place Jews have ever lived in the diaspora but the emergence of the antisemitism of things, especially when those things are part of the political establishment, is a matter of grave concern. Once, America had a leader who wrote to reassure the congregants of a Rhode Island synagogue that the “Government of the United States… gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” Would that the highest leaders in both parties remember those words of George Washington and do everything they can to make it clear that the institutions of American political life have no place for antisemitism.
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Neil W. Schluger, M.D. is the dean of the School of Medicine of New York Medical College. (Affiliation is given for identification purposes only and does not imply endorsement of the views expressed in this piece by New York Medical College.)
