On the Antisemitism Question

Meditations on conceptions of Jew-hatred among the American Jewish left

This is the eighth installment in a series of essays that explores what Jews talk about when they talk about antisemitism.

Most of the essays have focused on trends, themes, and histories of antisemitism that are prevalent within mainstream American Jewish discourse. They have addressed, to name a few, pro-Israel organizations’ overheated critiques of Ihlan Omar, pundits’ likening of antisemitism to a disease or virus, some of the limitations of the IHRA (and, to be sure, the JDA) definition, a recent Lapid-Netanyahu debate, and much more.

However, I have until now ignored a conversation about antisemitism that has taken place over the past few years on the American Jewish left. This conversation harbors assumptions about antisemitism, Zionism, and Jewishness that are starkly different from what you typically find within legacy Jewish organizations. American Zionist pundits often overlook the nuances of the various positions of the Jewish left, but their views are vital insofar as they in some ways better reflect the mindset of a number of especially younger American Jews.

The Jewish Electoral Institute, for example, recently found that a fairly wide majority of American Jews, 61%, are more concerned about right-wing than left-wing antisemitism, a preoccupation as we will soon see of the Jewish left. And a recent Pew survey revealed that younger American Jews tend to be more “liberal” than older ones, and that they express a suite of attitudes regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict that are germane to the Jewish left.

So, let’s ask: how does the American Jewish left conceive of antisemitism?

Critics of the Jewish left often miss that the Jewish left’s understanding of antisemitism is not monolithic. In fact, one major dividing line within the Jewish left separates those who downplay the significance of antisemitism today from those who see it as expansive and grave. This divide was on full display in a recent Jewish Currents editorial that argued against over-emphasizing the prevalence of antisemitism, and a bevy of responses that disputed the claim.

This essay will explore how two Jewish leftist groups that lie on different sides of that divide understand antisemitism, and what larger points we can extrapolate from juxtaposing them.

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Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP) nicely represents one side in this intra-left debate.

The group’s preeminent objective is to create a diverse grassroots movement that can help put an end to Israel’s “apartheid” regime. One could argue that those goals drive their minimization of antisemitism as a major threat to American Jews today.

One source of antisemitism in the United States, JVP argues, stems from American racism. Yet, though they allow that racial antisemitism was at one time prevalent in American political culture, it has dissipated substantially since Ashkenazi Jews were inducted into whiteness over the course of the 20th century. Any sort of vestigial racial antisemitism that Ashkenazi Jews may encounter today “is not currently reinforced by state institutions in the same ways that racism, anti-immigrant, and anti-Muslim bigotry are through state violence, mass incarceration, and surveillance.”

The only instances of serious antisemitism that JVP is willing to acknowledge, in fact, are all in one way or another tied to support for Zionism. Along with racism, for instance, another source of American antisemitism that JVP addresses is antisemitism stemming from aspirations for Christian hegemony. This, JVP claims, is far more active today than racial antisemitism, ubiquitous as it is among Evangelical Zionists who support the state of Israel as a key step in their redemptive eschatology.

For JVP, more concerning than the minimal threat of antisemitism is the abuse of the charge “antisemitism”. Take this paragraph from their website’s statement on antisemitism, no doubt directed in part at advocates of the IHRA definition:

We are also concerned by definitions of antisemitism that posit that Jewish people are perpetually victims, or that antisemitism is a cyclical or permanently recurring feature of human society. These definitions of antisemitism often function to divert attention from the power and privilege that some Jews exercise, either as beneficiaries of white privilege, or as Jewish citizens of Israel, where Jewish people are privileged at the expense of non-Jews. These definitions of antisemitism have three kinds of effects that harm movements for justice: they single out antisemitism as an exceptional form of bigotry; they reinforce a narrative of perpetual victimhood; and they equate antisemitic microaggressions with structural inequality. It is essential for progressive movements to include analysis about Israel as we fight antisemitism.

To paraphrase, Jews in the United States and Israel possess power. Their non-Jewish neighbors in each of those places do not. Undue focus on antisemitism distorts this reality and thus shields Israel and those American Jews that support it from the criticism JVP feels is necessary to achieve its overarching goals.

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It seems to me that when most American Zionists criticize the Jewish left, they typically have in mind positions akin to JVP’s. But that italicized paragraph above stands in marked contrast to how Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ) articulated the problem in a 2017 guidebook titled “Understanding Antisemitism: An Offering to Our Movement.”

JFREJ bills itself as the home of the Jewish Left in New York City. Like JVP, they seek to forge a diverse coalition, but their goals lie not in foreign but rather domestic policy, specifically in pushing back against the neoliberal advances that they feel have made New York City a more unequal place.

Their focus on the costs of capitalism, I’d argue, influences their understanding of antisemitism. Antisemitism, they say, has its origins in European Christianity, but has remained potent over centuries because it serves a particular purpose. It “protect(s) the prevailing economic system and the almost exclusively Christian ruling class by diverting blame for hardship onto Jews” (11). Or, to take another guidebook formulation: “European capitalism developed hand-in-hand with antisemitism, and as such the oppression of Jews has been a systemic feature in the functioning of capitalism for centuries” (15).

JFREJ’s approach thus construes antisemitism as far more potent and threatening today than does JVP, even if they both agree that it is fundamentally a right-wing phenomenon. Take the following paragraph:

By contrast, antisemitism is often described as “cyclical.” The Jewish experience in Europe has been characterized as cycling between periods of Jewish stability and even success, only to be followed by periods of intense anti-Jewish sentiment and violence. This is directly related to the stereotypes and myths about Jews, which push the idea that Jews are secretly very powerful — that they control the economy of a town, a country or even the world and thus that they are ruining the “true” character of these places. In order for these myths to be plausible and gain purchase, Jews must accumulate at least some wealth and standing in society. You can’t say, “Jews are all-powerful,” unless Jews have at least a little bit of power. Rather than keeping Jews perpetually at the bottom, antisemitism often becomes most intense when Jews are afforded a measure of success. (15)

JVP, if you’ll recall, disavowed the idea of antisemitism and “cyclical,” and asserted instead that the antisemitism that once afflicted Jews in other eras is mostly inoperative in the US today. The JFREJ guidebook disagrees —for them, antisemitism is indeed cyclical, and, by implication, any security or comfort US Jews currently enjoy is likely illusory.

This all helps explain another key area of difference between JVP and JFREJ, how they talk about the Israel-Palestine conflict. Like JVP, JFREJ calls for the end of the occupation and oppression of Palestinians, but also warns against resorting to antisemitism to lambast the Israeli government. It then explains in empathic tones why so many Jews have come around to Zionism: “[F]or many Jews past and present, Zionism has not been seen as a colonialist project but as the right for Jews to have a physical place of self-determined safety…the State of Israel has felt like the only thing standing between them and another Holocaust. This fear, rooted in very recent historical trauma, is why grounded and valid protests against Israeli government policy or Zionism are sometimes heard by Jews as threats to the safety of the Jewish people as a whole” (21).

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There’s a couple of interesting points to draw from this cursory analysis.

It exposes, for one thing, a much deeper question that currently bedevils the Jewish left: should the Jewish left be working to win over wider Jewish communities to their vision of a Jewish, American, and global future, or is the wider American Jewish community incorrigibly opposed to their aims and beyond convincing?

The JVP statement on antisemitism takes the cadence of a polemic — it seeks to deny Jews a wide application of antisemitism because it believes that Jews utilize the word to shut down pro-Palestinian claims. But in so doing, it also implies that Jews who disagree with their vision for the Mideast are beyond persuasion because their opinions are reactionary and their fears either misinformed or disingenuous. The JFREJ guidebook, on the other hand, never writes off the larger Jewish community, and in some places, in fact, talks in clear terms about the importance of reaching out to draft them in key racial justice campaigns (see, for instance, 29). For Jewish leftists still aggrieved by the results of the Democratic primary for Ohio’s eleventh district congressional seat, one that saw the progressive favorite Nina Turner lose to the moderate Shontel Brown in part because Brown captured the Jewish vote there, it would behoove them to return to the language of the JFREJ guidebook in this regard.

On the flip side, mainstream Jewish organization’s and personalities may strive to talk less about the Jewish left and more with the Jewish left. As I stated at the outset, the Jewish left’s approach to antisemitism is not homogeneous. When Jewish pundits and organizations talk about the Jewish left on antisemitism, however, they often do so by relying on unflattering images stereotypes that elide a diversity of opinion on this topic. That’s a shame because many of these leaders feel that antisemitism is a problem that spans the political spectrum and that can only be fought through the forging of alliances that are politically-blind. According to this rationale, it’s essential to find partners on the Jewish left who they can enlist in this fight, and those potential partners might be easier to find if one is cognizant of the Jewish left’s ideological pluralism.

Finally, this comparison suggests that the Jewish left and Jewish pro-Israelists have more in common when it comes to talking about antisemitism than you might expect at first glance.

Some of the tensions within Jewish antisemitism discourse that I’ve identified among pro-Israel voices, for instance, are also apparent within the Jewish left. Evidently, Jews of all political stripes remain unsure whether antisemitism should be defined broadly or narrowly, or whether it should be seen as at least somewhat unique or of a piece with other hatreds. We saw, for example, how former prime minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu sees antisemitism as “eternal”, meaning as something that has followed Jews wherever they have domiciled and always lurks below the surface. Consider how similar this is to JFREJ’s “cyclical” view. And then consider how current foreign minister of Israel Yair Lapid’s argument for antisemitism as a member of the family of racism improbably aligns with JVP’s contention that racism was one of the major wellsprings of modern antisemitism.

Moreover, both parties seek to marshal putatively objective interpretations of Jewish history in order to advance their preferred understandings of antisemitism. I’ve written a bit about some of the shortcomings in the interpretations of IHRA and JDA advocates, but they aren’t any less glaring than the shortcomings one finds in the JVP and JFREJ analyses.

To varying degrees, JVP and JFREJ construe Jew-hatred as a singularly Christian/white/Euro-American/capitalist phenomenon. This has the effect of eliding or distorting the histories of anti-Jewish prejudice in Muslim countries in the medieval and modern eras, and especially Jew-hatred as it has percolated within the Palestine liberation movement both within and beyond Israel. It also reinforces a longstanding blind spot of Jewish leftist analysis — an ignorance of the difficult intellectual and political histories of Communist and Socialist movements and countries as they related to Jews. Once again we see here how trying to bridge historical understandings of antisemitism, on the one hand, with the deployment of the term in the realm of contemporary politics, on the other, has the effect of exposing how one’s historical understandings are politically-motivated.

But none of this should surprise us given that antisemitism is at once academically complicated and politically charged. Experts in the field disagree on an acceptable analytical framework to comprehend it, and that’s in part because Jews over the decades have invested the term with immense ideological freight. For Jew, it doesn’t just stand for a battery of animosities that have targeted them in a specific place or time. It also has and continues to signify for its definers what it means to be Jewish today. Those discursive high-stakes are as apparent in debates among the Jewish left as anywhere else.