I live in fear. It isn’t an intense terror or that primal fear of imminent destruction. Rather, I live in a constant state of suspended apprehension that something is about to happen, something bad. It has happened before and, as Hannah Arendt noted, once evil is imaginable, it will happen again. It is a certainty authorized by the nightmares of history. I can live with it, or at least I have learned to, because there is no other option.
There are times when this persistent fear, buzzing subtly in the background of daily life and felt rather than truly heard, becomes a primal scream of existential dread. That is what l felt when a gunman murdered two people at a Jewish community event in Washington, DC two weeks ago, and again when a terrorist fire-bombed a gathering in Boulder this week.
These were attacks on Jews, as Jews, whatever slogans the attackers chose to shout. Both terrorists sought to murder people whom they could only have thought of as Jews. The Boulder bomber threw firebombs at people demonstrating for the release of hostages still held by Hamas. The Washington gunman attacked an event organized by a Jewish community organization at the Capital Jewish Museum. He knew that there would be Jews there, but he could not have known whether his victims would be Israelis or even Zionists.
That he murdered two Israeli Embassy staffers was nothing other than blind hazard. He was hunting Jews.
Support for Zionism and for the State of Israel does run deep in the American Jewish community. Yet, there is no direct correspondence of Israeli, or even Zionist, with “Jew,” except perhaps in the imaginations of antisemites and Maximalist Zionists. If you murder a Jew, there is a fair chance that you will kill a Zionist. There is also a good chance that you will kill someone like Peter Beinart or Ilan Papé or, indeed, me.
That does not seem to have mattered to these terrorists, since their point, whatever their slogans, was to murder and terrorize Jews. They did not stop to interview potential victims about their political beliefs; they did not check passports. They simply shouted, “free Palestine,” now a pro-forma slogan, and attacked Jews.
Whether the people they maimed and murdered were in any way responsible for the horrors of Gaza, whether they supported or condemned the Netanyahu regime, the State of Israel, or advocated for a two-state solution was irrelevant. The terrorists did not target people on the basis of their complicity in Israeli brutality, nor even because of what they might believe. They targeted Jews for murder on the assumption that all Jews are complicit. They targeted Jews.
The Zionist movement and the State of Israel are largely responsible for the equation of Israelis with Jew. It has served the interests of both admirably over the years. It is a basic premise of Maximalist Zionism, the ideological foundation of contemporary Zionist thought, that the State of Israel and the People of Israel are one and the same; Maximalist ideologues Natan Sharansky and Gil Troy have gone so far as to call hose of us who deny our fundamental identification with and allegiance to the State of Israel “un-Jews.”
This rhetorical equation is embodied in the IHRA “Working Definition of Antisemitism,” which has been widely adopted by governments and institutions eager to find a simple way to navigate the complex historical realities of antisemitism. The IHRA formula so completely associates the State of Israel with the Jewish people and anti-Zionism with antisemitism that it has been an iron-clad fig-leaf (what an image!) for Israeli depravity in Gaza.
The State of Israel, the Zionist movement, their sponsors in government and politics, and Jewish community organizations in the Diaspora (most of which have been thoroughly colonized by the State of Israel) have repeated the formula so often that it has taken on an air of reality and truth. It is a bit like how homophobes insist on saying dumb things like “it’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” as if that explains anything other than words sometimes rhyme but nevertheless assumes the illusion of truth in repetition.
Otherwise-well-meaning people who don’t really have an idea of what antisemitism really means, who don’t want to do or say something that can be interpreted as antisemitic – whether or not they hate or mistrust Jews – just keep repeating “Jews are Israel is Jews.” Don’t you dare criticize the State of Israel: “That’s antisemitic.”
Given all the repetition, it is no wonder that, for the left, antisemitism has become a meaningless category. To be sure, there are a great many people on the left who are not explicit antisemites or harbor any animus toward Jews individually or collectively. However, if the accusation of antisemitism is merely a rhetorical device meant to prop-up an oppressive regime (as the state of Israel and its proxies intend), then it can be disregarded. Even those people on the left who don’t hate Jews are, it seems, pretty sick of hearing about antisemitism. You can only cynically “cry wolf” before the wolf can safely be ignored.
The MAGA regime has made the accusation of antisemitism the primum mobile of its assault on higher learning, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies, and free speech. Many opponents of neo-totalitarianism have become deeply skeptical of these accusations, as rightly they should.
What this means, however, is that “antisemitism” often doesn’t have much meaning except as a floating signifier that has been appropriated by “the other side” like “religious freedom” (which doesn’t actually mean religious freedom) and “free speech” (which means silencing dissent). For many on the left, in fact, to raise the question of whether their criticism of the State of Israel crosses into antisemitism (as it sometimes does) is to “condone genocide.”
It often seems that one of the worst crimes that one can commit on the left is to insist that antisemitism does, in fact exist, and that Jews are vulnerable. To do so, I have been warned, is to concede to the right and to the “genocidaires,” and to undermine the Palestinian cause. In the commodity politics of social media (where most left politics is being done these days), there can be only one victim at a time, please!
In fact, a significant portion of the left has enthusiastically appropriated the Maximalist Zionist equation (the State of Israel=Jews=the State of Israel) for its own use. Meme factories churn out anti-Zionist content claiming that the “victims of genocide” (Jews, as is made clear by the use of images from the Shoah) are now the “perpetrators of genocide,” (illustrated with images of Israeli soldiers in Gaza). The Jewish boy being escorted to a death camp with his hands held high by a Nazi trooper has grown up to do the very same thing to Gazan children, they seem to say.
The message is clear: “The Jews, collectively and as Jews, have not learned the lessons of their own history.” This rhetoric explicitly blames the Jews for Gaza, the Nakba, and for the brutal excesses of the Israeli state, and it makes the problem a Jewish Problem.
I am certain that this was on the minds of the Boulder and Washington terrorists as they set out to murder Jews as Jews. But the notion also gives license to some of my friends on the left to ignore, and even deny, historical Jewish trauma, and to forget that the Shoah – the defining historical case of genocide – the ghettoes, the pogroms, and all the rest, ever happened.
Holocaust remembrance has been imposed on all of us for 80 years in school, popular culture, and moral lessons, and I guess it just got old. Elie Wiesel’s exhortation to “never forget” has become homework, a burden that has lost its meaning as the decades have receded. Even a good many Jews who never knew parents and grandparents with the numbers on their arms have become resistant to the constant repetition of the lesson.
But that memory was the main thing that made antisemitism, or at least its public expression, socially unacceptable and a matter of “bad taste” for decades. It was poor form to punch-down on a people who had suffered the most horrific genocide in history. As long as we collectively remembered Auschwitz and Babi Yar, Jews were tolerated, if not always necessarily welcomed, in the Gentile world.
Today, the antisemitic right cloaks its Jew-hate in a full-throated support of Maximalist Zionism and the State of Israel – after all, they have the same irredentist goal of shipping those pesky Jews in the Diaspora to the “Jewish Homeland” – and the left can abdicate the onerous moral burden of caring about Jews at all. After all, in 1948, the creation of the State of Israel was morally justified by the recent mass extermination of Europe’s Jews. Now that the State of Israel is accused of genocide, and now that we can all uncritically accept the Maximalist Zionist equation, then who really cares about them?
The Jews (collectively as Jews) are invited to resume the cultural role we filled before 1945. We are the “clannish” tribal outsiders who “always stick together.” The exceptions are the ones who don’t “stick together” and make an explicit public show of repudiating our people’s primitive ways by embracing modernity, liberal universalism, and the benefits of the saeculum. That made us acceptable as creators of popular culture, the court jesters (“damn, they’re funny”), and sometimes political leaders (“those Jews are so clever”) … as long as we change our names and don’t act too Jewish. So, David Daniel Kaminsky became Danny Kaye, Robert Zimmerman became Bob Dylan, David Losz became David Lewis, and Lev Bronstein became Leon Trotsky.
They are Jewish heroes in the Gentile world, but not as Jews.
Today, the left’s loyalty test for Jews is an explicit and public repudiation of Zionism in order to show that we are not one of “those Jews.” This often takes the form of saying “genocide” as a kind of oath which ensures the Jew’s reliability and separates them from their primitive tribe. Some of us are willing to take the oath; others are not. But it is always demanded. Any Jew who will not say “genocide” is suspect.
So, I have been deeply troubled by the very muted outrage most of my friends on the left have expressed about either Washington or Boulder. One of my social media connections (I hesitate to call them a “friend”) objected that characterizing the Washington attack as antisemitic violence unfairly “elides its political significance” as a pro-Palestine “direct action” and “plays into the hands of the Zionists.”
Another objected to the very suggestion that pro-Palestine activists and advocates (among whom, it should not have to be said at this point, I number myself) have an obligation to speak out against this kind of murderous antisemitism. Not to, I tried to explain, was to tolerate and legitimize it, and this is, in fact, itself antisemitic. My explanation fell on deaf ears.
For many on the left, antisemitism exists only in the past and, of course, anyone who supports Palestinian freedom and opposes the State of Israel is too progressive, too evolved – maybe too “woke?” – to be an antisemite. The fact that Jews have been victims of murderous antisemitic violence very recently, in Pittsburgh, Poway, Jersey City, and elsewhere, can be safely forgotten. I have the impression that a good many of my friends on the left just wish “the Jews would stop whining about antisemitism.” One put it in just those words.
After the very lengthy historic and contemporary butcher’s bill, and the inclination of so many of my friends on the left to regard reports of antisemitism as “Zionist propaganda,” or at least a “distraction from the real story,” we do in fact have something to complain about.
The problem with antisemitism, as George Orwell (himself not always a friend of the Jews) once observed, is that it is not merely a “disgraceful aberration,” a personal flaw, or poor taste; it is pervasive in Euro-American culture. It is ideological – the received knowledge and “common sense” that frame how we understand the world – and deeply rooted in the soil of the Euro-American culture which evolved from “Christendom;” a culture where Jews (as well as relative newcomers like Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs) have always been a suspect “other.”
Antisemitism is pervasive in, indeed foundational to, Euro-American culture, rarely interrogated and not the sole property of any particular class, belief system, political party, or movement. “Actually,” Orwell. wrote, “one has only to use a little observation to see that antisemitism is extremely widespread (and) is not confined to any one class.” The worker, the boss, and the farmer have historically hated Jews equally.
It is so pervasive that many Jews are often inclined to accept it as a fact of life, internalize it, or at least to tolerate it as the cost of admission to Euro-American culture. And since political movements are a part of culture, it is often the price for participating in movements like the pro-Palestine left.
We could always comfort ourselves that, while antisemitism is common across the political spectrum, “at least the antisemites on the left aren’t killing us.,” and there always seemed to be a modicum of truth to that. The people who burned down our homes, forced us into ghettos, imprisoned and murdered us were the nationalists, the Fascists, the Church, and the totalitarians. (Well… mostly, depending on what you think of Stalinism.)
The left, in contrast, invited us (with conditions, of course) to participate in labour unions, socialist parties, and campaigns for social justice and civil rights alongside Gentiles. Working for social justice is a mitzvah (read Abraham Joshua Heschel) and, besides, working for the rights of all could help lead to our own cultural emancipation, enfranchisement, and security. We always knew that, unlike the brownshirts, blackshirts, and Christian nationalists, the activists of the left weren’t going to murder us or stand by while our blood ran in the street.
It appears that we were wrong. The antisemitic terrorists in Washington and Boulder, whatever their slogans and stated motivations, targeted Jews as Jews; they were hunting Jews. I might have accepted that these were “disgraceful aberrations” but the silence of so much of the left, indeed the apologia that I have read seeking to explain the incidents away, say otherwise.
I live in fear.
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Photo: The Washington shooter shouts “free Palestine” as he is taken into custody.
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