I think you’re right that the phenomenon is small and elite based. I think the real question is: “do you believe that elites have disproportionate influence in shaping the rest of the culture and/or are leading indicators?” To the extent that you believe that, Foer’s article is quite worrying.
Anti-semitism on the right tends to be blatant and obvious - the Ku Klux Klansman, the neo-Nazi, the preacher cursing the "Christ killers" - people who only get support from their cliques and face nearly universal opposition everywhere else, who despise Jews for their mere existence. Left-wing antisemitism in contrast is almost exclusively centered on Israel - the treatment of the Palestinians, the selective misunderstanding of Israeli history, and opposition to US military aid and the influence of AIPAC. We've all heard the defense "I'm not antisemitic, I'm anti-Zionist," and can argue that opposition to Jewish self-determination in our historic homeland is antisemitic even if the person won't admit it (or is Jewish themselves). But the fact remains that left-wing antisemitism is, without question, about Israel and not Jews in general as right wing antisemitism is (I've met right wing Jew-haters who love the idea of Israel and want to send all American Jews there).
I don't know what the answer is but it's important to understand this distinction. Presumably, if the Palestinian issue could be resolved to everyone's satisfaction (I know, a tall order), then left wing antisemitism would evaporate.
Left wing anti-Zionism is a boon to the alliance between Israel and the U.S. Playing it up promises opportunities for propaganda, greater resources and more power.
That’s true for two reasons. One, because opposition to the left is now our one great unifying force - liberal to far right, everyone wants their influence to end. They’re the perfect scapegoats to blame for a new antisemitism that may or may not be real, but is richly useful. Belief in it brings safety in numbers and a relief from conscience through allegiance.
Two, we weigh the advantage of threats and crises nowadays, and keep them going in our own interest. A resolution in Gaza is not in the interest of the US-Israeli alliance. It will not take place until no more power or resources can be accessed from keeping the war going.
I think that you’re entirely right here about the anti-Semitism being largely driven by a small number of elites, but we know that elite messaging can be very influential in shaping Intergroup relations and conflict. Let’s hope that it won’t be here.
Personally, I think the right-wing embrace in the U.S. (over a decade or so) of the current Israeli government has not been an overall positive for the Jewish community in the states. It makes it easier for the left to go where some of them are going.
"The elite" are the people with power. What they want matters. What the powerless people want doesn't matter. Most people in Europe were becoming less antisemitic in the 1920s. One anti-Semite became more powerful in the 1930s - and he got what he wanted. No other votes counted.
Right now there’s the culture elite and there’s power - an elite of loyalty, money and force. That’s the elite that’s declared the choice as follows: “Let us do to others the genocide that was done to us, or we will be genocided yet again - and it’ll be on your hands.”
The power elite is the one who will decide what happens in Israel. The culture elite is a boogeyman. It will take the blame for any bad outcome. And a bad outcome is all but inevitable. The Mideast is a region where rule number one is: we learn nothing.
So it’s only going to get uglier and more anti-Jewish for Jewish university students and faculty, and Jews working at newspapers, or in software, biology, and other tech, and in government, and in the arts. Ah! No problem at all there. Nothing to worry about. Nothing to worry about, really?
I disagree with that assertion, however despite the attempt to imagine the problem away, I think that the left as usual has overstepped itself with its open anti-Jewish hate, and along with other sociopathic positions will trigger a backlash.
I'm not making an assertion. I'm making an argument based on polling data. I might be wrong! You can dispute it by presenting additional data, which would be interesting,. What you're actually doing is -- wait for it -- making assertions.
Elites are no longer always powerful. Elites are who and what the powerful say they are. In a time when threats to power start inside people’s heads, why would they not claim that right.
That article avoided grappling with certain (upsetting) things in a way I found unsatisfying.
It’s a testament to the practical value of the ideology that under a culture of meritocratic pluralistic liberalism American jews punched way above their weight in elite fields—but regardless of what people *ought* to be like, many people (even those coded as left wing) are very tribal and outcome oriented. Many will turn against a system that does not give them or their preferred groups favorable outcomes, regardless of how good the process is. They will also have less sympathy for the “winners” under that system.
Likewise, if American Jews are at the forefront of progressive change then of course they will be subject to backlash. Working to replace the old WASP system with something else, begets “you will not replace us.” (Again, I’m being descriptive).
Since coming here, I saw a strand of hubris in elite *American* Jewish discourse that blithely assumed that, despite the Jewish experience across time and place, there would be few consequences (again, separate from whether their *should* be any) and that the good times would roll. I found that the article really didn’t reckon with that, and I wish it did.
( I also have seen (maybe unfairly) a lack of curiosity or understanding or lessons taken from the behavior other groups of Jews (like the Mizrahi or Soviet Jews that helped pull Israel right). The interesting part is watching elite American Jews gain some of that understanding now).
I am actually on record in 2 comments as saying that it is indeed not looking good for the comfortable liberal Zionist and pluralist way of life that was the default for American Jews. But Jews do not have a magic inoculation against illiberalism in their own communities. Trump was able to win over many Jews on the religious right even if he would be appalling as a Jewish communal leader because he worked overtime to cater to the things they wanted. Jews can also lose faith in liberal pluralism from the left as they see how certain groups are denied the recognition they need for full, equal participation in society and how majority groups have abandoned serious commitment to civil rights in the name of elite consensus.
The ADL has counted every anti-Zionist rally as an antisemitic incident, but in the last 3 months of 2023 they got 3283 incidents, more than they get in an average year. (I am missing virtual Never Is Now to write this.) To their immense credit they are not projecting despair because they can still hold various actors accountable for the National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism which they are proud to say contains 30 of their recommendations. They are still not without allies or friends.
To write this comment I checked what I remembered Kenneth Moss saying in "An Unchosen People" about how Polish Jews in the 1930s knew that university students were a problem. But that did not say what I thought it did. University students had been a problem ever since the 1890s. In the 1930s Polish Jews now had cause to seriously worry about which way Polish peasants would go and whether individuals who wanted to be leaders in general were hostile to Jews even if they had not been to university.
The left, especially the academic left and all the elites they train, are as illiberal as any MAGA contingent. When an “anti-Zionist rally” calls for genocide of Jews it’s simply anti-Jewish. When anti-Zionists attack American Jews they’re actually being nothing more than anti-Jewish. You’re trying to split hairs when the two are the same thing.
That sentence was very hard to write because I just accept that the Jewish Currents left is radical without looking under the hood of their anti-Zionism. But it is possible that some of these folks are against Israel because they cannot reconcile the occupation with their American Jewish liberal values.
Wait, not the sentence you mean. ADL accepts that anti-Zionism is antisemitism by definition. I went to a nice virtual event sponsored by Berkeley and UCLA on "Anti-Zionism on Campus: Legitimate Protest or Dangerous Hate Speech?" to which the people who stopped the IDF veteran from speaking were clearly paying no attention. Ethan Katz (Berkeley) reported Jewish students coming to him saying that a rally was calling for the genocide of Jews but that was not explicitly what was said although the Jewish students could readily imply it. "From the river to the sea" is the obvious example here. ADL has to go after every antisemitic statement, but when I choose to condemn things I will condemn the ones that are obviously malicious as opposed to ignorant. A lot of these people have had any information about the conflict for maybe 15 minutes before this and have been told that any acknowledgement of the Israeli narrative is racist. That is very disturbing and creates a hostile environment for many Jews but it might be possible to get them to the level of Jews who at least understand what Zionism means to the people they have been having these conversations for years with.
The recent events at UC Berkeley are investigated for going way past ignorant speech or malicious speech. Those always pave the way to the sort of action pro Hamas students have been doing - violently denying Jewish students their free speech rights, vandalism against Jewish institutions, and actual violence against Jewish students. We're months past "pro Palestinians" simply calling for a genocide of Jews, knowingly or stupidly, though it's absurd to claim that 150 days after October 7 any pro Hamas student doesn't know what their slogans mean.
The next step is domestic terrorism, and it is absolutely on the way, because violent people are emboldened when institutions do nothing at all as they escalate their hate speech and violence.
That JewishCurrents and other nominally Jewish fools of the far left still gaslight everyone about the intentions of "just anti Zionist people" is besides the point.
No, agree that once it has reached the stage of violence that is harassment and assault and should be dealt with accordingly. I saw that Berkeley opened a criminal probe of this incident.
However extremely bad the collapse of Enlightenment liberalism would be for Jews because it would mean that Jews are not promised free and equal citizenship, the history of Middle Eastern Jews shows that the alternatives are not liberalism or oblivion. The Jewish community may decide that accepting Enlightenment liberalism was bad for Jews because too much Jewishness was lost.
Yikes. Here in Utah it's pretty easy for a Latter Day Saint such as myself to feel integrated into the wider American culture but clearly I have more reason to be concerned than a Jewish person (or even an atheist).
Started reading this article but had to stop after reading " But in the 21st century, that sense of safety began to dissipate. At first, I thought the problem was Donald Trump"
It seems strange to me that would be your 1st thought of all the things that have occurred in the last 50+ years since Israel became a state/nation this is your 1st thought?
That article avoided grappling with certain (upsetting) things in a way I found unsatisfying.
It’s a testament to the practical value of the ideology that under a culture of meritocratic pluralistic liberalism American jews punched way above their weight in elite fields—but regardless of what people *ought* to be like, many people (even those coded as left wing) are very tribal and outcome oriented. Many will turn against a system that does not give them or their preferred groups favorable outcomes, regardless of how good the process is. They will also have less sympathy for the “winners” under that system.
Likewise, if American Jews are at the forefront of progressive change then of course they will be subject to backlash. Working to replace the old WASP system with something else, begets “you will not replace us.” (Again, I’m being descriptive).
Since coming here, I saw a strand of hubris in elite *American* Jewish discourse that blithely assumed that, despite the Jewish experience across time and place, there would be few consequences (again, separate from whether their *should* be any) and that the good times would roll. I found that the article really didn’t reckon with that, and I wish it did.
( I also have seen (maybe unfairly) a lack of curiosity or understanding or lessons taken from the behavior other groups of Jews (like the Mizrahi or Soviet Jews that helped pull Israel right). The interesting part is watching elite American Jews gain some of that understanding now).
I am very comfortable with the liberal semitic crowd. As a nonbeliever and nonSemitic, I feel like most liberal Jews are stifled by the Zionist crowd ( evangelicals, Jews, and others) and the fight within the " Tribe" is getting worse and that may be real area of concern. Our Civil War was fought on the question of what is morally right.
I think you’re right that the phenomenon is small and elite based. I think the real question is: “do you believe that elites have disproportionate influence in shaping the rest of the culture and/or are leading indicators?” To the extent that you believe that, Foer’s article is quite worrying.
Anti-semitism on the right tends to be blatant and obvious - the Ku Klux Klansman, the neo-Nazi, the preacher cursing the "Christ killers" - people who only get support from their cliques and face nearly universal opposition everywhere else, who despise Jews for their mere existence. Left-wing antisemitism in contrast is almost exclusively centered on Israel - the treatment of the Palestinians, the selective misunderstanding of Israeli history, and opposition to US military aid and the influence of AIPAC. We've all heard the defense "I'm not antisemitic, I'm anti-Zionist," and can argue that opposition to Jewish self-determination in our historic homeland is antisemitic even if the person won't admit it (or is Jewish themselves). But the fact remains that left-wing antisemitism is, without question, about Israel and not Jews in general as right wing antisemitism is (I've met right wing Jew-haters who love the idea of Israel and want to send all American Jews there).
I don't know what the answer is but it's important to understand this distinction. Presumably, if the Palestinian issue could be resolved to everyone's satisfaction (I know, a tall order), then left wing antisemitism would evaporate.
Left wing anti-Zionism is a boon to the alliance between Israel and the U.S. Playing it up promises opportunities for propaganda, greater resources and more power.
That’s true for two reasons. One, because opposition to the left is now our one great unifying force - liberal to far right, everyone wants their influence to end. They’re the perfect scapegoats to blame for a new antisemitism that may or may not be real, but is richly useful. Belief in it brings safety in numbers and a relief from conscience through allegiance.
Two, we weigh the advantage of threats and crises nowadays, and keep them going in our own interest. A resolution in Gaza is not in the interest of the US-Israeli alliance. It will not take place until no more power or resources can be accessed from keeping the war going.
I think that you’re entirely right here about the anti-Semitism being largely driven by a small number of elites, but we know that elite messaging can be very influential in shaping Intergroup relations and conflict. Let’s hope that it won’t be here.
Personally, I think the right-wing embrace in the U.S. (over a decade or so) of the current Israeli government has not been an overall positive for the Jewish community in the states. It makes it easier for the left to go where some of them are going.
I’m only 1/8 Jewish (not enough to brag about ) but after Charlottesville I went to the gun store and then went back to the range.
"The elite" are the people with power. What they want matters. What the powerless people want doesn't matter. Most people in Europe were becoming less antisemitic in the 1920s. One anti-Semite became more powerful in the 1930s - and he got what he wanted. No other votes counted.
Right now there’s the culture elite and there’s power - an elite of loyalty, money and force. That’s the elite that’s declared the choice as follows: “Let us do to others the genocide that was done to us, or we will be genocided yet again - and it’ll be on your hands.”
The power elite is the one who will decide what happens in Israel. The culture elite is a boogeyman. It will take the blame for any bad outcome. And a bad outcome is all but inevitable. The Mideast is a region where rule number one is: we learn nothing.
Part of the concern that’s sort of alluded to in the article is that in the UK, the problem appears to have gone well beyond the elite.
So it’s only going to get uglier and more anti-Jewish for Jewish university students and faculty, and Jews working at newspapers, or in software, biology, and other tech, and in government, and in the arts. Ah! No problem at all there. Nothing to worry about. Nothing to worry about, really?
I disagree with that assertion, however despite the attempt to imagine the problem away, I think that the left as usual has overstepped itself with its open anti-Jewish hate, and along with other sociopathic positions will trigger a backlash.
I'm not making an assertion. I'm making an argument based on polling data. I might be wrong! You can dispute it by presenting additional data, which would be interesting,. What you're actually doing is -- wait for it -- making assertions.
Your data did point to it being a specific problem with elites. That’s not an assertion.
Elites are no longer always powerful. Elites are who and what the powerful say they are. In a time when threats to power start inside people’s heads, why would they not claim that right.
That article avoided grappling with certain (upsetting) things in a way I found unsatisfying.
It’s a testament to the practical value of the ideology that under a culture of meritocratic pluralistic liberalism American jews punched way above their weight in elite fields—but regardless of what people *ought* to be like, many people (even those coded as left wing) are very tribal and outcome oriented. Many will turn against a system that does not give them or their preferred groups favorable outcomes, regardless of how good the process is. They will also have less sympathy for the “winners” under that system.
Likewise, if American Jews are at the forefront of progressive change then of course they will be subject to backlash. Working to replace the old WASP system with something else, begets “you will not replace us.” (Again, I’m being descriptive).
Since coming here, I saw a strand of hubris in elite *American* Jewish discourse that blithely assumed that, despite the Jewish experience across time and place, there would be few consequences (again, separate from whether their *should* be any) and that the good times would roll. I found that the article really didn’t reckon with that, and I wish it did.
( I also have seen (maybe unfairly) a lack of curiosity or understanding or lessons taken from the behavior other groups of Jews (like the Mizrahi or Soviet Jews that helped pull Israel right). The interesting part is watching elite American Jews gain some of that understanding now).
I am actually on record in 2 comments as saying that it is indeed not looking good for the comfortable liberal Zionist and pluralist way of life that was the default for American Jews. But Jews do not have a magic inoculation against illiberalism in their own communities. Trump was able to win over many Jews on the religious right even if he would be appalling as a Jewish communal leader because he worked overtime to cater to the things they wanted. Jews can also lose faith in liberal pluralism from the left as they see how certain groups are denied the recognition they need for full, equal participation in society and how majority groups have abandoned serious commitment to civil rights in the name of elite consensus.
The ADL has counted every anti-Zionist rally as an antisemitic incident, but in the last 3 months of 2023 they got 3283 incidents, more than they get in an average year. (I am missing virtual Never Is Now to write this.) To their immense credit they are not projecting despair because they can still hold various actors accountable for the National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism which they are proud to say contains 30 of their recommendations. They are still not without allies or friends.
To write this comment I checked what I remembered Kenneth Moss saying in "An Unchosen People" about how Polish Jews in the 1930s knew that university students were a problem. But that did not say what I thought it did. University students had been a problem ever since the 1890s. In the 1930s Polish Jews now had cause to seriously worry about which way Polish peasants would go and whether individuals who wanted to be leaders in general were hostile to Jews even if they had not been to university.
The left, especially the academic left and all the elites they train, are as illiberal as any MAGA contingent. When an “anti-Zionist rally” calls for genocide of Jews it’s simply anti-Jewish. When anti-Zionists attack American Jews they’re actually being nothing more than anti-Jewish. You’re trying to split hairs when the two are the same thing.
That sentence was very hard to write because I just accept that the Jewish Currents left is radical without looking under the hood of their anti-Zionism. But it is possible that some of these folks are against Israel because they cannot reconcile the occupation with their American Jewish liberal values.
Wait, not the sentence you mean. ADL accepts that anti-Zionism is antisemitism by definition. I went to a nice virtual event sponsored by Berkeley and UCLA on "Anti-Zionism on Campus: Legitimate Protest or Dangerous Hate Speech?" to which the people who stopped the IDF veteran from speaking were clearly paying no attention. Ethan Katz (Berkeley) reported Jewish students coming to him saying that a rally was calling for the genocide of Jews but that was not explicitly what was said although the Jewish students could readily imply it. "From the river to the sea" is the obvious example here. ADL has to go after every antisemitic statement, but when I choose to condemn things I will condemn the ones that are obviously malicious as opposed to ignorant. A lot of these people have had any information about the conflict for maybe 15 minutes before this and have been told that any acknowledgement of the Israeli narrative is racist. That is very disturbing and creates a hostile environment for many Jews but it might be possible to get them to the level of Jews who at least understand what Zionism means to the people they have been having these conversations for years with.
The recent events at UC Berkeley are investigated for going way past ignorant speech or malicious speech. Those always pave the way to the sort of action pro Hamas students have been doing - violently denying Jewish students their free speech rights, vandalism against Jewish institutions, and actual violence against Jewish students. We're months past "pro Palestinians" simply calling for a genocide of Jews, knowingly or stupidly, though it's absurd to claim that 150 days after October 7 any pro Hamas student doesn't know what their slogans mean.
The next step is domestic terrorism, and it is absolutely on the way, because violent people are emboldened when institutions do nothing at all as they escalate their hate speech and violence.
That JewishCurrents and other nominally Jewish fools of the far left still gaslight everyone about the intentions of "just anti Zionist people" is besides the point.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/uc-berkeley-under-federal-investigation-after-protesters-disrupt-israeli-speaker/amp/
No, agree that once it has reached the stage of violence that is harassment and assault and should be dealt with accordingly. I saw that Berkeley opened a criminal probe of this incident.
However extremely bad the collapse of Enlightenment liberalism would be for Jews because it would mean that Jews are not promised free and equal citizenship, the history of Middle Eastern Jews shows that the alternatives are not liberalism or oblivion. The Jewish community may decide that accepting Enlightenment liberalism was bad for Jews because too much Jewishness was lost.
Yikes. Here in Utah it's pretty easy for a Latter Day Saint such as myself to feel integrated into the wider American culture but clearly I have more reason to be concerned than a Jewish person (or even an atheist).
I cannot imagine sending Jewish kids to any Ivy League school today. This is a relatively new thing. This is bad.
Started reading this article but had to stop after reading " But in the 21st century, that sense of safety began to dissipate. At first, I thought the problem was Donald Trump"
It seems strange to me that would be your 1st thought of all the things that have occurred in the last 50+ years since Israel became a state/nation this is your 1st thought?
That article avoided grappling with certain (upsetting) things in a way I found unsatisfying.
It’s a testament to the practical value of the ideology that under a culture of meritocratic pluralistic liberalism American jews punched way above their weight in elite fields—but regardless of what people *ought* to be like, many people (even those coded as left wing) are very tribal and outcome oriented. Many will turn against a system that does not give them or their preferred groups favorable outcomes, regardless of how good the process is. They will also have less sympathy for the “winners” under that system.
Likewise, if American Jews are at the forefront of progressive change then of course they will be subject to backlash. Working to replace the old WASP system with something else, begets “you will not replace us.” (Again, I’m being descriptive).
Since coming here, I saw a strand of hubris in elite *American* Jewish discourse that blithely assumed that, despite the Jewish experience across time and place, there would be few consequences (again, separate from whether their *should* be any) and that the good times would roll. I found that the article really didn’t reckon with that, and I wish it did.
( I also have seen (maybe unfairly) a lack of curiosity or understanding or lessons taken from the behavior other groups of Jews (like the Mizrahi or Soviet Jews that helped pull Israel right). The interesting part is watching elite American Jews gain some of that understanding now).
Really nice combination of personal history and public polling.
I am very comfortable with the liberal semitic crowd. As a nonbeliever and nonSemitic, I feel like most liberal Jews are stifled by the Zionist crowd ( evangelicals, Jews, and others) and the fight within the " Tribe" is getting worse and that may be real area of concern. Our Civil War was fought on the question of what is morally right.
Just FYI using the phrase " liberal semitic crowd" is not great.
Thanks. I meant no slur. I have never seen the expression used before.