On Antisemitism Relativized
Some thoughts on Yair Lapid’s interpretation of antisemitism
Is antisemitism a variant of racism?
It’s been two weeks now since Israel’s Foreign Ministry held their 7th Annual Global Forum on Combating Anti-Semitism, and the polemical dust has yet to settle. At that conference, the newly appointed Foreign Minister, Yair Lapid, delivered a speech that drew the ire of right-wing critics, who accused him of misconstruing the history of antisemitism by denying its uniqueness. You can find my thoughts about the most salient critique of Lapid’s speech, leveled by former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, here.
To clear the air, Lapid published an oped in Haaretz earlier this week titled “Is Antisemitism Racism?” that sought to explain his speech at the conference. There, Lapid tried to synthesize two approaches to antisemitism, one that contextualizes it among other bigotries and another, championed by his detractors, that asserts its incomparability.
His answer to the oped title’s question affirmed both. “Antisemitism is indeed a unique phenomenon in human history, but it can only exist in a world in which racism has not been eradicated.” Lapid offered this argument to make the case for Israel to take on the fight against racism in all its forms. This, Lapid thinks, will win over for Israel new allies and curry new favor for Jews around the world.
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It isn’t very often that you hear a high-ranking Israeli official make this kind of argument nowadays.
As I wrote last week, Zionists since the movement’s beginning have tended to favor the opposite view, that antisemitism is unique in its timelessness, malleability, and ferociousness. On the contrary, it’s sometimes has been critics of Zionism who were most partial to iterations of Lapid’s presentation.
Take, for instance, the bête noire of mid-20th century Zionists, Hannah Arendt. Recall again that Arendt’s opus, The Origins of Totalitarianism, argued against the idea of “eternal antisemitism” or that antisemitism is a part of the natural order of things in all times and places no matter what Jews do (for more, see here). Instead, Arendt maintained that antisemitism is historically determined, the product of relations between Jews and non-Jews in a specific context. It emerged, she argued, at the chronological intersection between the collapse of the nation state in the late 19th century and the rise of “totalitarian” political ideologies in the early to mid-20th century. That process, according to Arendt, birthed both antisemitism as well as other forms of pseudo-scientific racism that became operational in imperial and totalitarian politics.
The argument that Jews had some hand in the atrocities inflicted on them in the 1940s earned Arendt heaps of opprobrium from contemporary Jewish intellectuals. It no doubt alienated her work from acceptable Jewish communal thinking for decades to come. But, as Scott Ury and other Jewish historians have observed, Arendt’s project of deparochializing antisemitism, or using it to understand broader historical and sociological developments, had a more lasting impact. In the United States in the early post-war era, in fact, émigré scholars like Theodor Adorno, Bruno Bettelheim, and Max Horkheimer produced a small library of literature on antisemitism as a conduit to understanding prejudice in general and the means for countering it.
Insofar as the goal was to merge antisemitism into wider contexts and phenomena, we could call this the integrative approach to antisemitism. Integrative thinking about antisemitism was characteristic of how many Jews in the United States conceived of antisemitism in the mid-20th century. Much of the work of Adorno and his confreres was subsumed under the five volume Studies in Prejudice series, an endeavor funded and coordinated by the leading Jewish defense agency of the era, the American Jewish Committee. For much of the post-war period, the American Jewish Committee played a key role in educating the public about “prejudice,” meaning antisemitism but other varieties of hate as well, and advocating for legal and other solutions to ameliorate it.
But that shouldn’t surprise us. Jews in Israel have a demographic majority and full political control over their security, but Jews in the United States constitute a tiny sliver of a diverse population. It made a great deal of political sense for leaders of the AJC and other organizations to seek out allies among more numerous minorities by linking antisemitism and other bigotries under the general category “prejudice.” And, in construing antisemitism as part of a larger problem, they headed off lingering assertions of the Jews’ stubborn uniqueness in a predominantly Christian country.
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The integrative approach to antisemitism still shapes the way many Jews around the world understand antisemitism in the present.
Consider, for instance one of the major antisemitism definitions to have emerged of late, Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism. In tones that are remarkably similar to Lapid’s article, its preamble, authored and endorsed by a diverse group of academics and NGO leaders, reads, “We hold that while antisemitism has certain distinctive features, the fight against it is inseparable from the overall fight against all forms of racial, ethnic, cultural, religious, and gender discrimination.”
In his article, however, Lapid endorsed the IHRA definition, not the JDA. This he did because, although the JDA definition is more aligned with Lapid’s understanding of antisemitism, it offers less protection for Zionists than does IHRA when it comes to criticism of the state. “I…support the IHRA’s explanation that disproportionate to Israel or efforts to apply a standard to Israel that is not applied to other countries constitutes antisemitism,” he wrote.
But this is precisely where Lapid’s merger of antisemitism and racism breaks down. It isn’t difficult to imagine Zionist-critical discourse that IHRA may deem antisemitic but that do not meet accepted definitions of racism.
Take “racism” as defined by one leading historian of the word, George Fredrickson: It “exists when one ethnic group or historical collectivity dominates, excludes, or seeks to eliminate another on the basis of differences that it believes are hereditary and unalterable” (170). Now, all antisemitism definitions-partisans would agree that there are clear and obvious strands of Jew-hatred that intersect with Fredrickson’s understanding of racism. Assertions that Jews are, by their very nature, associated with the nefarious forces of modern life — financial capitalism, communism, imperialism, what have you — is an obvious case of antisemitism as racism, for instance.
What about anti-Zionism — is that ipso facto racist? IHRA stipulates that any speech or action that denies Jews their right to self-determination or that applies a standard of critique to Israel not applied to other democratic countries qualifies as antisemitic (this is one of the key areas where it differs from the JDA, which does not necessarily see these things as such). But is a Palestinian activist being racist when they say that the only just and workable solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict is one in which all peoples have equal rights in a unified state?
Whether or not this is IHRA-level antisemitism (many would say that it is), it strains credulity to argue that this is an incontrovertible example of racism a la Fredrickson. That hypothetical claim isn’t being advanced with the goal to dominate or exclude, and it isn’t being made on the basis of immutable racial differences. The person making it believes that this claim will end a form of ethnic domination from which they themselves suffer. And it is being offered not because Jews have discreet racial traits that mark them as dangerous, but because Jews dominate a political reality that this hypothetical claimant opposes.
Or, to think about a concrete example from current events— is what the ice cream purveyor Ben and Jerry’s decided this past week, to desist from selling their products in the territories, racist? No matter how one feels about it, it is hard to see how that would be the case. Lapid, however, maintained that it was “a disgraceful capitulation to antisemitism.” American Jewish Committee, incidentally, agrees.
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This is all to ask: If, according to Lapid, antisemitism is to be the centerpiece of the racism tapestry, how can it be that there are examples of things that Jews like himself are convinced are antisemitic but that do not meet an acceptable definition of what racism entails?
This isn’t a problem for Netanyahu and his acolytes, who argue that antisemitism is unlike other forms of bigotry. Criticism of the state for them doesn’t need to be racist in order to align with a long and unique tradition of Jew-hatred. It isn’t clear to me, on the other hand, how someone with Lapid’s priorities — committed to IHRA while also adhering to the integrative antisemitism approach — resolves this conundrum.
But the conundrum raises another interesting and pressing question: Would it be worth it for Israeli leaders, and for Jews around the world, to narrow their understanding of antisemitism in order to more convincingly argue that Jew-hatred is in fact a variant of racism?
This question is germane to Lapid’s argument given that Lapid’s stakes his entire case on the presumption that there is a “crisis of modern antisemitism” that his integrative approach is well-suited to solve. Lapid argued that antisemitic attitudes have grown, and incidences have increased, over the last two decades, and previous Israeli governmental responses have proven inadequate. His call to see antisemitism as racism is propelled by his belief that this will secure for Israel “new partners” in the fight against antisemitism around the world and blunt a burgeoning crisis.
But what if Lapid’s elaborate understanding of antisemitism gets in the way of that project? What if Israel’s zealous campaign against criticism of the state jeopardizes Lapid’s objective of winning over new allies in order to piece together a broad-based global coalition in the fight against racism? How valuable is that campaign to the new Israeli government, and would the rewards outweigh the costs of giving a little on definitions of antisemitism in order to make racism coalition-building more feasible? Could Israel or Jewish leaders in diaspora adopt new terminological tactics whereby they label some forms of anti-Zionism as condemnable but not ipso facto antisemitic?
These are difficult questions and I’d imagine they are not ones that Israeli and American Jewish leaders are eager to answer. But they once again force us to think about the political implications embedded in our interpretations of antisemitism, and the tradeoffs Jews must evaluate when it comes to trying to subsume multiple and often conflicting priorities under a broad definition of the term.
