Peter Beinart has a characteristically excellent post in Jewish Currents, Antisemitic Zionists Aren’t a Contradiction in Terms, explaining why, both historically and today, many anti-Semites around the world praise and admire Israel—because they want their countries to be as ethnically “pure” as they imagine Israel to be, and because they wish “their” Jews would get the Hell out of Dodge and go to Israel, so their nation could be “pure” too.
Beinart assembles an impressive supply of both recent and historical data to make his case, relying, for his discussion of attitudes in the U.S., principally on a 2020 study appearing in the Political Research Quarterly, Antisemitic Attitudes Across the Ideological Spectrum, by Eitan Hersh and Laura Royden. Beinart describes the authors’ bottom line as “stark”.
“Overt antisemitic attitudes are rare on the left,” concluded Hersh and Royden, “but common on the right.” Since left-leaning Americans are more hostile to Israel, the two scholars even added a preamble to their questions telling respondents that American Jews generally support the Jewish state. In so doing, they tested whether progressive anti-Zionism shades easily into antisemitism. Their conclusion: It does not. “Even when primed with information that most U.S. Jews have favorable views toward Israel,” they noted, “respondents on the left rarely support statements such as that Jews have too much power or should be boycotted.”
So are we lefties—for I do label myself as such—the good guys, as we so often believe? Well, would that it were so. Beinart notes, but does not, in my opinion, grasp the full significance of the results of a similar study in Europe by András Kovács, a sociologist and professor of Jewish Studies at the Central European University, and György Fischer, the former research director for Gallup in Hungary, Antisemitic Prejudices in Europe: Survey in 16 European Countries, appearing in the Institute for Jewish Policy Research. According to Beinart, Kovács and Fischer also found left-leaning “anti-Zionists” (in my own personal case, “anti-Likudist”) to be generally not anti-Semitic, with one exception:
Kovács and Fischer did find one European population that expressed comparatively high levels of both anti-Zionism and antisemitism: Muslims. European Muslims were particularly likely to affirm antisemitic statements that linked Jews to Israel (for example, “When I think of Israel’s politics, I understand why some people hate Jews”).
The problem is, a current fad on the left is rampant “philo-Islamism”, both at home and in Europe, the “woke” conviction that there are few things on this earth so dastardly as to say anything—anything—that might offend any Muslim. The recent furor over the decision of Fayneese Miller, president of Hamline University in Minnesota, to refuse to renew the contract of art-history professor Erika López Prater for showing a picture of the prophet Muhammad to her class is a case in point. The faculty of Hamline recently voted overwhelmingly to demand Miller’s resignation, which is all to the good, but coverage of the affair was still largely “disappointing”, to my mind.
It is admirable that several Muslim groups spoke out in support of Prater—the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), for example, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Both pointed out that Prater had “warned” the class beforehand about what she was going to do, and that the picture in question was created by a Muslim in praise of Muhammad—but, really, so what?
I mean, this is the United States of America, is it not? Imagine a course in the Reformation. Would it be beyond the pale to show some of the gross cartoons of the period, ones showing the Pope eating excrement, or Luther doing the same? Sure, give the students—who are adults, after all—some warning, but, after that, what about the First Amendment? Frankly, I can’t imagine a teacher being, effectively, “fired” from any but an intensely Catholic or evangelical school for showing some uninhibited propaganda for the “other side”, but here we have, in effect, a teacher being dismissed for showing a Catholic communion cup on the grounds that it offended Presbyterians.
Furthermore, to get back to Mr. Beinart, whom I seem to have left pretty far behind in the course of this diatribe, the European study he cites naturally contains no discussion of black anti-Semitism in the U.S., which has raged, largely under the coverage of silence, for decades, in New York City in particular. In one of his writings—which one, of course, I can’t remember—James Baldwin told what he surely believed was the truth of the matter, that Jewish merchants “take” from the black community but then spend “black” money in safe, white/Jewish communities, thus robbing blacks of wealth that is truly theirs. It’s clear that Baldwin had no understanding of how a “market” economy works—as an “artist” he was no doubt proud that he had no understanding of how a market economy works—so I will do him the dubious favor of “deconstructing” his language to reveal its “true” meaning:
Damn these Jews! They come in our neighborhood, and sell us junk—candy, cigarettes, and liquor—stuff we don’t need— stuff that’s bad for us—and they take our money and spend it on nice apartments uptown, and nice clothes, and fancy restaurants and Broadway shows. If only we blacks could be disciplined and frugal! You know, like the Jews! If only we worked hard and saved our money! You know, like the Jews! Then we could live uptown and live the good life. You know, like the Jews! Damn these Jews! It’s all their fault we can’t live like them!
It is the essence of Woke culture to adopt the mores of the out groups, and the more “out” the group and the more out the more—the more offensive it is to received, middle-class liberal opinion (like mine) it is—the more “woke” it is to embrace it. This is the reason why the execrable Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions “movement” (BDS),1 which is both anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic, has recently risen its dreary head on the college landscape. Of all the things there are to depress you these days, the combo of the “old” anti-Semitism and the new has to be one of the worst.
1. I once sourly described BDS as follows: nothing more than an anti-Semitic—or, if you want to be polite/hypocritical—an “anti-Zionist” screed masquerading as a moral crusade. It is “disappointing”—another gross understatement—that this has become a “woke” cause. If people want to boycott “wicked” countries, they could start with the U.S., which has spent the last 30 years causing mayhem around the globe in the name of peace and freedom, running up a body count that far exceeds that of Israel or anyone else. But, well, I guess it’s easier to pick on little countries.
