Understanding Anti-Semitism « The Dish

Good commentary by Steven Beller on antisemitism, and the need to view antisemitism in the overall context of hate, intolerance and fear of the other, not just as a Jewish issue:

The first sees antisemitism from the perspective of Jewish nationalism (Zionism), for which the answer to antisemitism is Israel, as the political expression of the Jewish people’s right to national self-determination. From this perspective attacks on Israel are against the national rights of the Jewish people and hence are antisemitic because anti-Zionist. This linking of antisemitism with anti-Zionism, conceptualized most recently in the theory of “the new antisemitism”, has garnered strong support in the world’s Jewish communities, and is also written into the European Union’s working definition of antisemitism. If we approach antisemitism as a Jewish problem alone, this has a certain sense. It makes little if any sense from the perspective of the second strategy, which sees antisemitism as the ultimate expression of the exclusionary logic of nationalism.

The Zionist perspective actually undermines the most powerful arguments of antisemitism’s main antidote: liberal pluralism. In this view, as Jean-Paul Sartre famously suggested, antisemitism is not a problem for Jews but rather for non-Jews, indeed for all of us. It is representative of a universal moral evil: the exclusion, fear and, ultimately, destruction of the other in society simply because of difference. “Never again” becomes a promise not about preventing Jewish genocide, but any genocide. It is the refusal or inability to accept and embrace difference within a society that is the root of the problem. The solution is to throw over the apparently modern, but actually primitive “either/or” logic of nationalism, and replace it with the more complex, but more supple, inclusionary “both/and” logic that underpins liberal pluralism, the ability “to agree to disagree”, to comprehend, and embrace difference.

Understanding Anti-Semitism « The Dish.