Good piece on the risks of “conflating criticism of Israel with anti-Zionism and anti-Zionism with antisemitism:”
What makes these conflations powerful and long lasting is fear. I heard an extraordinary description of how this fear operates in a podcast interview with the Columbia University professor Shai Davidai. If you are familiar with his name, it’s probably because he has been a lightning rod, a hero to those who believe that American universities have become hotbeds of antisemitism. Columbia, for its part, suspended his campus access, saying he had harassed and intimidated other university employees.
Before any of this happened, Davidai identified as left wing, an opponent of the Israeli occupation and a critic of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. A couple of days after Oct. 7, someone showed him an open letter issued by the Columbia chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. It was the kind of strident, tone-deaf letter that student organizations were putting out at the time. It talked about the inevitability of armed resistance as a response to systemic oppression. It did not talk about Jews.
And then Davidai found himself on campus, looking at several hundred students wearing kaffiyeh and, at least as he understood it, celebrating the Hamas attack. A colleague leaned over to him, he said, “and says, ‘This is the antisemitism that our parents and grandparents warned us about, and we didn’t listen.’ And the moment he said that, everything changed for me.” Davidai started speaking out on social media and attracted a great deal of attention.
Davidai described his experience as an epiphany. For many people living in Israel — a nation founded by Jews for Jews — and many American Jews as well, antisemitism is an abstraction, the stuff of stories. (I have to give credit for this observation to my daughter, who moved from a very antisemitic society to New York City at the age of 12.) These stories come from great tragedy, especially for Jews of European origin, many of whom represent the lucky-survivor branches of their families. Seeing something you have only read about suddenly, at least seemingly, come to life is a kind of awakening — the kind that a person in grief and trauma is perhaps particularly open to.
Two recent brutal attacks in the United States have sent more fear through Jewish communities here and elsewhere: the shooting of two Israeli Embassy staff members outside of the Capital Jewish Museum, in Washington, D.C., on May 21 and the firebombing of a rally in support of Israeli hostages 11 days later, in Boulder, Colo. Both attacks have been widely denounced as antisemitic.
That’s no surprise — both were visible and deliberate attacks on public events with a high concentration of Jews. But that isn’t necessarily the end of the story. Daniel May, the publisher of the magazine Jewish Currents (I serve on its board), has argued in a powerful article that neither attacker made any obviously antisemitic statements — unless one considers “Free Palestine” an antisemitic slogan. The D.C. shooter’s 900-word purported manifesto didn’t contain the word “Jew” or even “Zionist.” Of course, someone could still act out of hatred even if he doesn’t shout it in a manifesto, but the absence in that document of any explicit mention does open the possibility that he had a different motive.
Neither of these events was exclusive to Jews, as a synagogue service might be. Both events were inextricable from the war in Gaza. And though the violence in Boulder was wide ranging, the shooting in Washington seems to have been very specifically targeted — at two representatives of the Israeli government.
None of this makes the attacks any less horrific. And none of it should offer any comfort to the victims or their families. The terrible human toll is the same no matter what the attackers’ motivation. But if we are looking to draw larger lessons from this brutality, it’s worth considering that violence that looks antisemitic may — even when it very effectively serves to scare a great many Jews — be something else.
What these attacks can be understood as is, undoubtedly, acts of terrorism. There is no universally accepted definition of terrorism, but scholars agree on some basics: It’s violence committed for political reasons, against noncombatants, with the goal of sowing fear. It’s notable that “terrorism,” a term that in this country has been used and misused to crack down on civil liberties, especially those of brown and Muslim immigrants, has been joined and even supplanted by the term “antisemitism,” wielded in similar ways, for the same purposes.
Terrorists aim to provoke a reaction. A violent and disproportionate response, because it amplifies their message that whatever they have targeted is absolute evil. They got that response in Israel’s devastation of Gaza following the Hamas attack on Oct. 7.
Terrified people tend to support disproportionate violence. Terrified people make perfect constituencies for politicians like Netanyahu because they can be convinced that the unrelenting massacre and starvation of Gazans is necessary to keep Israel safe, and for President Trump, because they may not question the justification for pre-emptively bombing a sovereign country.
My thoughts keep returning to that conversation with the historian of Stalinism. She studied an era of political terrorism carried out on the premise — crazy yet widely accepted — that the U.S.S.R. was full of people who wanted to kill their leader. Today, we may live in an even more cynical era, when political leaders, instead of acting on their own fears of violence, instrumentalize other people’s fear.
The conflations that underlie most political conversations about antisemitism make it seem as if everyone wants to kill Jews — that antisemitism is not just common but omnipresent. If you believe that the whole world wants you dead, then you are much less likely to stand up for human rights or civil liberties, other people’s or your own.
A casualty of this cynical era is our understanding of the actual scale of antisemitism, defined as animus against Jews as Jews. There are many reasons to think that antisemitic attitudes and attacks are on the rise, but the keepers of statistics often thwart the effort to get hard information, because they insist on conflating criticism of Israel with anti-Zionism and anti-Zionism with antisemitism.
New York City is home to the largest number of Jews outside of Israel. But for all the noise mayoral candidates and their supporters have made about antisemitism, Mamdani is the only one I have heard so movingly acknowledge the emotional toll that the real and imagined threats of antisemitism have been taking on Jewish New Yorkers. I wonder how many people can hear him through all the din.
Multicultural Meanderings 