A very well-written, heartfelt piece, Yotam.
I especially appreciate how you highlight the structural role of anti-Semitism in the power apparatus of the (historically) Christian West. It does, indeed, make one wonder whether, if Jews did not exist, power structures would have invented them to serve the special socio-political niche of ‘scapegoat-in-a-glass-jar’ (break in case of emergency) that they have filled throughout Christendom’s history.
That said, I think what many Jews don’t see, is that there is something about Jewish identity that makes it particularly problematic for the wider public, consciously or otherwise, whether on the Left or the Right. On the one hand, Judaism is (for many of us) an ethnicity, something immutable, literally defined by our genetic ancestry, and thus akin to African-Americans’ ‘blackness.’ From this perspective, it is a priori unjust to prejudge us on that basis, as our “Jewishness,” just like someone’s “blackness,” is not a choice, and says nothing about our character. Here, a struggle against anti-Semitism is largely analogous to MLK-type social justice, or the LGBT-rights movement: at its core is the liberal democratic proposition that ‘you can’t fault someone for how they were born, only how they behave as citizens.’
‘Jewishness,’ however, is a slippery concept. While some of us may feel it’s a genetic inheritance, many non-Jews (and, I would imagine, Jewish converts) see it not as an ethnic identity, but as a (religious) choice: Jews ‘choose’ to remain Jews, and to ‘believe’ what we ‘believe.’ We could, in this view, just as well renounce our ‘religion’ and convert to Christianity / Islam / Marxism / Western Triumphalism, and renounce our “self-imposed” otherness. This ‘otherness’ is, I believe, for many non-Jews, tied up with a vague notion that because of a misreading of some ancient book, Jews think they’re superior, that the rules don’t apply to them, and thus can’t be fully trusted. This makes the struggle against ‘anti-Semitism’ much more analogous to the struggle against Islamophobia — with all its complications about whether [fill-in-belief-system-or-identity-marker of choice] is even compatible with “our [Anglo-Euro-Christian-Progressive] way of life” to begin with. In other words, if the problem is not a skin colour, but an (ancient) set of ideas, then the rules of the game are entirely different.
Of course, for the vast majority of Jews, the reality is a blurred combination of all these things, further compounded by the stunning success of the 20th century’s near-total conflation of Judaism with (pick-your-flavour of) Zionism. The raw memory of ethnically-based, skull-and-nose-measuring, European anti-Semitism of recent history begets the existential fear that fuels the Zionist impulse (“they will always hate us for who we are — not what we believe — so we have no choice but to protect ourselves, consequences be damned”), while the mere decades-later shift in the West to a now (nominally) “post-racial” society has flipped the problem from one’s essential, genetic nature, precisely to the consequences of one’s beliefs. From that perspective, ‘Zionism’ — as it has played out in reality, not in liberal Zionists’ heads — is easily construed by justice-minded folk as “evil.” And so long as one’s Jewishness (again, viewed here as choice) remains inextricably tied to Zionism as an idea, the impulse to anti-Semitism, remains, I believe, (secretly) justifiable to many on the Left (let alone on the more openly bigoted Right).
The problem, then, is twofold: one, many non-Jews today genuinely do not comprehend the fear Jews have of ethnically-based discrimination — that, no matter how well we assimilate, we will always be genetically Jewish, and that the ever-menacing shadow of the ‘loose noose’ thus applies as much to us as to our unassimilated, kippa-and-peyot wearing cousins.
Two, because our fear of the loose noose is so pervasive, it makes it harder for us to see Zionism — and Jewish identity more broadly — through the (Leftist) Gentile lens, wherein our dogged, even ‘obnoxious’ clinging to a privileged “difference” is not analogous to blackness at all, but is a continual choice we make to identify with some degree of religio-ideological superiority. In this view, it seems we relish (slyly) playing by different rules, just as the white overlords did in the Jim Crow south, apartheid Africa, or pretty much any Western colonial enterprise.
It’s hard to see how anti-Semitism on the Left (or Right) can be effectively tackled when all these themes continue to be jumbled together, whether actively and consciously (such as the Zionist movement’s remarkably successful conflation of itself with Jewishness writ-large), or silently and implicitly (through the millennial non-Jews’ bemused ‘post-racial’ gaze, and lack of historical memory).
For that reason, I think you merely having penned your article is a valuable first step towards publicly untangling this mess of old and new categories, and (mis-)identifications.
At the same time, however, I don’t think this can be solved without an equal degree of reflection by self-identifying Jews regarding what’s truly ‘essential’ about our character in the 21st century West, versus what is, in fact, a matter of choice, or unthinking reflex. Virtually all self-identifying Jews today are probably carrying around inherited myths (glamorized half-truths) regarding Jewishness, ambient threat, and Zionism in particular. These myths developed lock-step with majority-Gentile perceptions and characterizations of Jews throughout history (e.g., “the wandering Jew,” resigned to his fate because of his rejection of the [false] Messiah). No one can sap them of their hidden power over our psyches, but ourselves.
