On Antisemitism Used and Overused
When does criticism of Israel merit the accusation of antisemitism?
This question has preoccupied much of Jewish political discourse in the United States for the past decade or so. A recent imbroglio over comments made by Congresswomen Ihlan Omar reveal that the question is as stubbornly unresolved as ever, notwithstanding the best efforts of some antisemitism-definers in the past few months to clear the air.
A few weeks back, I wrote about how the left in the United States needs to come to terms with the anti-Jewish hostility percolating in their own camp made vivid during the recent Israel-Gaza flareup. That article called on all parties to make a firmer commitment to listening to Jews’ concerns, regardless of whether those concerns affirm this or that political priority.
In this piece here, I will argue that the overuse of the term “antisemitism” runs the risk of making it difficult for Jews to get their interlocutors to do just that. I examine how two Jewish organizations labeled a recent tweet of Ihlan Omar’s antisemitic, and how their arguments that the tweet is in fact so are unconvincing. I will then reflect on why it is unwise for Jewish organizations to continue deploying the term aggressively and uncarefully in the present political climate.
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On June 7, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken testified before the House Foreign Relations Committee.
Omar, a member of that committee, used her time to ask Blinken about how the United States and Israel, neither of whom are party to the International Criminal Court, make it impossible for the ICC to investigate war crimes. If victims cannot turn to the ICC, to which court can they turn? Blinken answered that the US and Israel have the ability to handle all such investigations on their own.
Afterwards, Omar took to Twitter to write the following: “We must have the same level of accountability and justice for all victims of crimes against humanity. We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban. I asked @SecBlinken where people are supposed to go for justice.”
Republicans and some Democrats expressed outrage over Omar’s remarks, alleging that she made a moral equivalence between the US and Israel on the one side and terrorists on the other. Many of those Republicans and a few of the Democrats accused Omar of peddling antisemitic rhetoric. Of interest to us here is that some Jewish groups have buttressed those critiques by arguing the same.
For example, over 200 rabbis associated with the Coalition for Jewish Values (CJV) sent House Majority Speaker Nancy Pelosi a letter in which they demanded Omar’s removal from the Foreign Relations Committee. This is because, they argued, Omar has a track record of antisemitism that her latest tweet affirms. Her claim that Israel committed “unthinkable atrocities” is antisemitic because it is, the letter surmises, “grounded in the blood libel and the calumny that Jews poisoned wells during the Black Death.” Her harsh rhetoric, they continue, resulted “directly” in mob violence against American Jews.
In view of the CJV’s hardline right-wing politics, their derision for Omar is not exactly surprising. For a less anticipated example, take Hadassah, a legacy philanthropy less commonly associated with vociferous criticism of Democratic congresspersons. Like CJV, Hadassah in a press release labeled Omar’s tweet antisemitic, but for two additional reasons. One, Omar allegedly “made a suggestion of an equivalency” between Israel and Hamas, and two, she “holds Israel to a higher standard” than she does other countries.
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As it happens, both CJV and Hadassah support the IHRA definition of antisemitism. In fact, both have called on the White House to adopt IHRA as the US government’s official definition for legal and other purposes. “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews,” the definition reads, and then examples are offered to illustrate what that looks like.
So, it’s worth asking: Do Omar’s remarks meet the bar for “antisemitism” as delineated by the examples the IHRA definition presents? Even as the IHRA definition is said to cast a wider net on anti-Israel discourse than does competing definitions like the JDA, a careful analysis suggests that such is not the case.
The CJV letter’s claim about blood libel talk indeed coheres with IHRA’s stipulation that “using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis” is antisemitic. Trouble is, Omar never actually used any of those symbols; they were only attributed to her by the CJV’s creative reading of her tweet. Whether CJV is right or wrong about what Omar’s statement is “grounded in,” it is a stretch to argue that what she said clearly violates this portion of the IHRA code.
As one might expect, IHRA does include a stipulation on incitement that reads: “Calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion.” Contrary to what the CJV authors assert, however, Omar did not call for or justify the harming of Jews. She made a statement about the actions of the Israeli government, and, no matter how odious one might find it, she did not follow up that statement with anything approaching a call for violence of any kind.
So much for the CJV letter’s arguments. What of Hadassah?
Hadassah’s claim about a moral equivalence cannot be supported by the IHRA text either, which has nothing to say about such a concept. The IHRA text does stipulate, however, that “applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation” constitutes antisemitism, which was the Hadassah statement’s second accusation. But in her tweet Omar did apply that same standard to another democratic nation, namely the United States, something the Hadassah statement initially acknowledged but then quickly ignored. The IHRA definition offers another statement more relevant to our case here that would lead us to conclude that this is in fact not a case of antisemitism: “Criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.”
To be sure, the IHRA definition states at the outset that its list of examples of antisemitism are not exhaustive. “Contemporary examples of antisemitism…include, but are not limited to…,” the text reads. Can one thus argue that what Omar said should be deemed antisemitic for reasons that lie beyond the IHRA definition (such as Hadassah’s moral equivalence claim)?
I don’t know the answer to that, but it’s worth pondering how sure one can be that Omar’s tweet is antisemitic when the definition you tout for antisemitism does not explicitly cover the offenses you seek to protest. It’s almost as if, in the eyes of these organizations, the IHRA definition should be cited when it can verify a case of antisemitism but ignored in cases where it cannot but there’s still some sort of impetus for using the term.
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The point of this analysis is not to defend Ihlan Omar’s line of questioning or to cast aspersions on the two organizations that decried her tweet. I have no brief with the former, and no axe to grind with either of the latter.
The point is to use the incident to reflect on how Jews sometimes deploy the term “antisemitism.” What I find interesting about this case is that one need not have resorted to using the word at all to protest what Omar said. In fact, a cohort of congressional Democrats did just that last week, criticizing her tweet in no uncertain terms without wading into the turgid waters of “antisemitism” talk. In response to that criticism, in fact, Omar ultimately disavowed that she intended in her tweet to equate the two countries with terrorist groups.
It would require wider space and deeper meditation to fully comprehend why some Jewish organizations have a habit of using the term “antitsemitism” as loosely as they do. Among the many plausible reasons, one worth considering is that in American political discourse minorities make exaggerated claims about race-based persecution all the time, and those claims typically have a great deal of purchase. Jews understand that, and play by the same discursive rules as everyone else. Likely, these two organizations felt that, for whatever, reason, calling Omar’s tweet antisemitic would have more rhetorical punch and thus more political payoff than would simply denouncing it devoid of the charged term.
The trouble is that when Jewish organizations deploy the term so freely, and do so in ways that seem to be propelled more so by political expediency than by the letter of the law of accepted definitions that those groups are committed to, they risk inflating the term’s meaning and undermining the term’s purchase in situations of far more imminent threat.
Sadly, we’ve seen examples over the last year of figures on the American right and left who ignore Jewish pleas to act on more blatant cases of antisemitism. Recall Tucker Carlson’s laundering of white nationalist theories of Jewish-orchestrated population replacement on national television and Fox News rejecting the ADL’s demands to address it. Or think more recently of the violence and intimidation some American Jews experienced during the Israel-Gaza flareup and the statements of some prominent leftists that Jews weaponize antisemitism to distract from Israel’s crimes and therefore these cases can be safely ignored.
Each of these point up the waning power of the term “antisemitism”, and it’s hard to imagine that continued overuse of the term will help fix that. Today, Jews need people of good faith across the political spectrum to commit to listening to their fears and concerns about white nationalism, anti-Israel hostility, and much else. And Jews need them to listen and empathize and act regardless of whether the incident in question bolsters or threatens prevailing political goals.
But in order for that to happen, Jews need to work harder to divest “antisemitism” of any political valence. That work should begin with a firm commitment to deploying the term with more circumspection than was in evidence over the past few weeks.
