I don't disagree with Al-Gharbi that most Americans are not anti-Semitic. Yet even Al-Gharbi does admit that "Critically, there has been a slight uptick in actual antisemitic beliefs among young people in recent years."
I do think there is increasing anti-Semitism. But if you look at averages, most Americans are not anti-Semitic. When averages shift even slightly, however, you often get large changes in the extremes. Matt has described the phenomenon many times in many different contexts based on how bell curves work. I think this is what we are seeing. Yes, the average American/liberal/college student is not anti-Semitic (and many are actively philo-Semitic). So if you look at averages, like Al-Gharbi does in his analyses, you're not going to recognize the problem. The focus on averages glosses over the fact that anti-Semitic incidents and the level of violence of such incidents are at the same time on the rise, because these things happen at the extreme ends of the bell curve.
(And I do think that even non-anti-Semitic Americans often have grave misconceptions about Jews/Judaism as well as Israel/Palestine, even if not coming from a place of animus, but that's a different story altogether).
Also I think in the pro-Palestinian movement in the US, there has been a radicalization that mirrors the radicalization that has occurred in the West Bank and Gaza (not to the same extreme, but in the same direction). I remember when I was in college, there was the Students for Justice in Palestine. And I remember not finding what they supported offensive at all because I also believe in bringing awareness to Palestininan issues. They used to have "Palestinian Awareness Week" (which I thought was great--let's bring awareness to Palestinian issues). A few years ago it became "Israel Apartheid Week". And now, at the same university, the SJP is chanting "intifada" in front of the student center and blocking Jewish students from getting to class. And now open support of Hamas among people on the far left and attempts to justify terror against Israelis is way more noticible than it has ever been (again even if these views don't reflect the average position of someone identifying as "liberal" or even of someone "pro-Palestinian").
I'd guess this has more to do with there being a war in the region than a bell curve shift (or at least, the war is the cause of both, not some ambient level of anti-semitism.)
I'm not also convinced that bell curve mechanics for social beliefs (which are generally not, actually, bell curves) mirror those for more randomly-distributed events (e.g. weather, test scores, whatever.)
Regardless of whether it's properly a normal distribution bell curve effect or not, my point is that the effects we are seeing are at the extremes and may not appear as large percentages of the population showing anti-Jewish animus. I do think that many of the effects preceded the war--the war is just making them more visible.
EDIT: And to add, I'm afraid we're seeing a shift in the Overton window on quite extremist views about Jews, Israelis, and Israel. And it's scary.
Some of the increase in antisemitism may be attributable to immigration: people are coming from countries where antisemitism is more prevalent. You see this in Europe, particularly France, where a larger Muslim population is (not surprisingly) more hostile to Jews.
The main weakness - and it’s a huge, glaring weakness - of this story is Al-Gharbi’s failure to grapple with the definition of anti-Semitism. There are very good reasons why the definition often includes what he wants to call “criticism of Zionism”. For a thorough introduction, I believe Yair Rosenberg has written about this at length.
So yes, if you say “Israel is uniquely the most evil country in the world, but I don’t hate Jewish people, just Zionists”, you’re an antisemite, your attempt to launder your antisemitism notwithstanding. And given that fact, quite a large chunk of Al-Gharbi’s story falls apart.
Obviously criticism of Israel is not inherently anti-Semitism. I think everyone agrees on that. However, judging Jews/Israel based on double standards can definitely motivated by anti-Semitism (for example, defining "genocide" differently for Israel than for other countries, I would say, is anti-Semitic, especially when Jews are themselves one of the greatest victims of genocide). And while there may be something defensible about judging your allies differently than your foes, I think that disproportionate approbrium for the Jewish state on the world state is anti-Semitic.
I think there are ways to be anti-Zionist without being anti-Semitic. Perhaps, you have a principled opposition to any kind of nationalism. Or perhaps you just believe that a single binational state solution is the most likely to bring about a positive outcome (something I personally disagree with, but I can accept that some people believe this). However, if you're an Arab/Palestinian nationalist that's simply just against Jewish nationalism because they're Jews, or if you deny the Jewish history of the land, or if your vision includes a very non-democratic aims like "sending Jews back to where they came from" (not uncommonly heard among Palestinian nationalists) or re-establishing them as a dhimmi class (something that some Islamists support), then yes, your opposition to Zionism is probably anti-Semitic.
The amount of arguments that have essentially start with 'anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism' lately has been very irritating, but it's not just a post 10/7 thing either.
Israel exists, so either anti-Zionism is a dead letter and meaningless, or it means that Israel (and presumably it's people) should be removed somehow.
That seems a little silly to me. To a first approximation, no one in the normie community would even be able to parse your first sentence. It assumes all this knowledge about people and events and the meaning of "Zionism" as a historical, political, and theoretical construct that I can tell you with absolute certainty that even many American Jews simply do not possess.
I base this belief on having taught a Modern Middle East undergraduate survey; it was an elective that kids took explicitly because they had an interest in the subject, and I was genuinely surprised by what they didn't know. And I'm talking kids who were very interested in their own Jewish identity, had taken trips to Israel, etc.--even most of those kids knew next to nothing about Zionism and definitely would not be able to meaningfully parse your first sentence.
People not knowing stuff is often frustrating, but it's a mistake to read meaning where it doesn't exist because it clouds--and darkens--your ability to analyze motive and intent.
Zionism is easily defined as a political movement that believes in a State for the Jewish people. I think normies totally understand this. The rest is very elementary logic.
What do you think a person on the street understands Zionism to mean? Clearly people (even and especially college students) think they understand enough to chant "From the River to the Sea". The next, very obvious question is "so what happens to the Jews who currently reside between the River and the Sea?"
The framing and references in this comment are really the same as in my first one, they lead to the same question. So no, I don't think it's silly to expect people to answer questions about their plainly stated political goals.
I get that this all seems very straightforward to you, and I get that it seems logical to you, and I get that it seems like not much to know to you. I get all that.
What I'm saying to you is that when I taught actual undergraduates with an actual stated interest in the Middle East, many of whom were self-described Jews with a stated interest in Israel, specifically--I'm telling you that even THOSE people would not have been able to reply, "Zionism is a political movement that believes in a State for the Jewish people."
Look: you can think that I'm lying, or you can think that I just was teaching at a school (today it is Jefferson University, but that's post two changes of leadership) where the undergrads were unusually stupid.
But if you accept that I'm telling the truth, and if you accept that I'm fairly describing my experience and that undergrads at my school were not unusually ignorant, then that's kind of a huge problem for your claim. That is what I am saying. And you can't get around that by saying, "I think normies totally understand this," because I am telling you that in my actual experience, they do not. Most of them literally did not know what "Zionism" was. Like, the word had no real meaning to them beyond, "isn't that something about Israel" if they were Jews and "isn't that something from the Bible" if they were Christians or vaguely American agnostic suburb kids.
So that's what I think "a person on the street" knows about Zionism: functionally nothing.
And I think this is true of a lot of this stuff, honestly. Real talk: I think if you grabbed a representative sample of kids at a protest chanting about the river and the sea and asked them to name the river in question and the sea in question that many of them would not be able to get both answers correct. I am fairly certain that a majority would not be able to locate the geographical features on an unlabeled map or to describe what the "Gaza Strip" or the "West Bank" actually are.
And this shouldn't surprise you; people endorse dumb slogans and stuff they don't understand all the time--here I will refer you back to "keep the government out of my Medicare," but only because it's hilarious. You could find a dozen examples in US politics of the last two decades without even trying. It's often the subject of this very newsletter.
All of that is a problem. It's partly a problem, in my opinion, because people vote for folks and support political movements without understanding what they are endorsing. It's also a problem in non-political areas of life--my book on radiation therapy partly chases how a bunch of people killed themselves and their patients with similar errors in thinking. The errors were genuine. So were the deaths. But I came to believe in the research and argue in the book that human cognitive processes are just kind of prone to certain kinds of errors because we make tradeoffs in order to more easily understand and move through the fearsomely, insanely complex system that is "reality."
The combination that is cognitive errors around cause-and-effect salted with ignorance is frustrating, has bad results, and makes people look dumb. But it is usually not malicious and is often even well-meaning, and if you fail to understand that, you fail to understand people's motivations, which then causes you to make a bunch of other downstream analytical errors. It is what it is (which is frustrating).
You're assuming a careful definition of what Zionism means which is generally used by neither its proponents nor its detractors in popular discourse. I find this fact deeply annoying and confusing, but it's the truth. I think it's disingenuous to make gotcha quips that rely on pretending otherwise.
I think it's disingenuous to say "AntiZionist" or "Defund the Police" and then act like *I'm* the one who's out of line for saying "There are problems with your plan".
My comment isn't a gotcha, it's a very honest, straightforward response to the actual words being spoken. If people mean something totally different from the plain reading if what they say, it's on them to clarify. I'm not a mind reader. I can only respond to the words that are put out there.
I don't think it's "careful" to define Zionism that way. I think it's a very unacademic, everyday way to define the movement that is very accurate and broadly useful. What is your idea of a better, more useful definition?
This is just the standard definition of Zionism, dude. It’s the one used by everyone in Israel and the mainstream Jewish community in the US. It means support for Jewish statehood. That’s what it’s always meant.
This is fair but also utterly baffling. What the actual f do these people think Zionism is? I’m not expecting anyone to give me a great answer but geez is it frustrating for all this debate about “whether antizionism is antisemitism” to occur when half the putative antizionism think it’s just “criticism of Israel”.
I mean if you want the honest answer, they think it just means Bibi-fan, or like, anti-Palestinian autonomy or rights. Like most terms that get abusively redefined, you'll have different people who motte and bailey this, ofc.
I mean, Zionism is the idea that there should be a Jewish state/homeland in the land of Israel. It doesn't mean you support any particular Israeli government policy. There are many anti-Zionist voices that try to change the definition of Zionism from the one I gave above, but anti-Zionists don't get to define what Zionism is--Zionists do.
This state was created in 1948 (before, as Matthew Yglesias has pointed out, most countries in the world were created), admitted to the UN, and has been recognized by most countries. So people who think that "anti-Zionism" is "anti-Semitism" I think are mostly just saying--hey it's done. Israel is here, and denying its right to exist is anti-Semitic. Perhaps debating Zionism 75 years ago was a legitimate question, but it's now a fact.
Now, I explained two types of anti-Zionism that I don't think are inherently anti-Semitic (principled opposition to all nationalism/ advocacy for a binational state). There are probably others. But frankly, these principled anti-Zionist positions are not the majority of anti-Zionist voices that Jews are facing these days. (Support for a binational state, for example, may be popular among Western leftists, but is pretty unpopular in the West Bank, Gaza, or Israel for that matter).
Post 1948, Israel is a recognized state. The Zionist project is now the perpetuation of the state of Israel, meaning the leaders of Israel are now the leaders of the Zionist project. How exactly can Israel's policies around it's border, especially pertaining the territory Israel owns, be disconnected from the Zionist project?
I think criticizing Israel on that ground is anti-Zionism and it is not anti-Semitic, but of course, the insistence is that Zionism is *just* the anodyne mission of a Jewish National project.
But the vast majority of Israeli Jews identify Zionists, and they criticize their own government all the time. Probably more vociferously than most people. I bet you that Netanyahu is more popular in America than he is in Israel right now. These anti-Netanyahu Israelis (right now about 75% of the Israeli population) are not anti-Zionists.
Zionism is simply the idea that there should be a Jewish homeland/state in the land of Israel. Alternatively, you could define it as supporting the self-determination of the Jewish people to have a state.
There are many types of Zionism: Labor Zionism, Revisionist Zionism, Religious Zionism, Progressive Zionism etc. Each kind of Zionism will have different views of what policies regarding borders and the territory it controls, and even within each type, people will disagree on various policies.
Just like criticism of Congress and the President is not anti-American, even though they are the leaders of the American project.
Anti-Zionists are those who are against there being a state to serve as a Jewish homeland in the land of Israel. So it's not just criticism of Israeli leaders and policy, but criticism of the very existence of a state with any kind of Jewish national character. Perhaps they want a single binational state (as I said). Perhaps they want a single Islamist state. Perhaps they want a big pan-Arab state. Perhaps they want a single secular Arab state. But they don't want a state with a Jewish character located anywhere in historical Israel/Palestine.
> identify Zionists, and they criticize their own government all the time
That's because they are Zionists, whose prescription of Zionism isn't in power. If those people were in power, I wouldn't be an anti-Zionist!
> Just like criticism of Congress and the President is not anti-American
It's never been my position that criticism of Israel per se is anti-Zionism, my position is that criticism of how it conducts the construct of Israel is anti-Zionist!
No, because by that logic 100% of Israeli citizens would be anti-Zionists, who criticize their government and its policies constantly. And they would tell you they are strong Zionists.
The Zionist project is objectively all but complete. The state is really not going anywhere.
And anyway criticizing the methods of achieving those goals would not make you an anti-Zionist - because again, that ropes in quite a few explicitly Zionist leaders and intellectuals into anti-Zionism.
I'd be willing to say "maybe sometimes antizionism isn't antisemitic" if not for the fact that the functional content of antizionism is 75 years of unrelenting war against the existence of the State of Israel. If a Taiwanese-American says, "the PRC is evil and should not exist, fucking commie scum", it is understood that there is no meaningful translation of that opinion into intention and action. With regards to antizionism, it is instead understood that while the actual likelihood of abolishing Israel remains low, there is a real movement killing Israelis to make it happen.
You ought to check out my exchange, above, with Lapsed Pacifist. I think your phrase "it is understood" is totally wrong. You are way, way, way overestimating what ordinary people understand and underestimating their capacity to hold nonfunctional beliefs bereft of genuine understanding of the causes, potential consequences, or historical context of those beliefs. I'm not saying that's great, but I'm pretty sure it is true.
Maybe but I'd be genuinely surprised to find out that most Americans are unable to tell an active war-zone from a matter of diplomatic tension, which is really the only distinction I was trying to make.
Thankfully, Matt Yglesias had the courage to let a Muslim lecture us Jews about what is and isn't antisemitism. What a brave independent thinker he is.
I’m trying to maintain the good spirit of the comment section and more broadly assume good intent on Matt’s part. But it does bother me that he’s ready to be totally chill about antisemitism (unless it comes from Trumpists!) while playing up his Jewishness, even as he and his family can simply blend into the background of the American ethnic landscape should he ever feel like it. Many of us do not have that option.
I don’t typically wear a kippa in public. Recently on my way out of a wedding in Williamsburg, I happened to be wearing one and immediately got heckled by some idiot going on about how Zionists are the devil and have no souls. Should I be comforted that this fellow laundered his antisemitism in the language of anti-Zionism?
>But it does bother me that he’s ready to be totally chill about antisemitism (unless it comes from Trumpists!)<
Where are you getting this? A) Matt isn't the author of this piece; B) It seems to me the author is seeking to shed light on the phenomenon of antisemitism. Antisemitism has been in the news a lot of late. It's a serious problem. But like any problem, in order to address it we need to *understand* it. And the author lays out the case that said phenomenon is much worse and more dangerous on the right than on the left. Obviously readers are free to dispute his findings, but they seems a far cry from suggesting people need "to chill."
Why does it specifically matter that al-Gharbi is Muslim? He's a sociologist; this is his field of study. You can disagree with his conclusions without making ad hominem attacks on his religion.
I don't think it's an ad hominem attack. The idea is now widespread that discussions of problems facing a certain group are more legitimate if they're made by members of that group. One can disagree with that idea—I do—but it doesn't mean that "white people shouldn't be writing about the Black experience" is an ad hominem attack against white people.
I'm Jewish and I thought his essay was just fine. Knowledge, analysis, and explanation can come from anyone. Some of the greatest experts on the Muslim world and its history were Jewish academics.
You'd be better off responding to his substance than playing the identitarian game.
As I was reading this article, I was thinking it’s exactly the usual sort of Yglesias thing - taking some mainstream trope of the New York Times liberals and showing that it is way overplayed. But then I realized that this one was defending the left rather than punching left, and predicted it was going to get a lot of pushback from the readers.
I like that Matt is being consistent even when the issue hits closer to home.
A lot of moderate jews (of which I am one) decried this kind of identitarian thinking when it was BLM, Asian and trans issues, but somehow embraced it when the discussion turned to anti-semitism. Kind of the mirror image of the charge against campus progressives.
It's been shocking to see so many people say things like "I don't hate Jewish people, just Zionists" who then turn around and call literally every Jewish person they can find a Zionist.
I mean what's weird about the anti-Zionism group is that they are often the ones that say "no human is illegal" or "no one is illegal on stolen land", and then complain about the legal migration of Jews in 19th century Ottoman Palestine/20th century Mandatory Palestine, or the illegal immigration of Jewish refugees escaping literal genocide 80 years ago to a British colony.
Well, I suspect if you asked most conservatives what their stance is 'cleanly', they'd say something along those lines.
The 'they should come here legally' rhetoric is mostly a response to liberals constantly trying to conflate opposition to illegal immigration with opposition to all immigration.
The other common approach on the more ardently pro-all-immigration faction is to just say 'well make what they are doing legal and there is no problem'.
It's unfortunate, but the combination of liberal dominance of the media, and the brain drain among conservatives, means that this bad framing is ubiquitous.
Anti-semitism doesn't need to be explained. It's "hostility to or prejudice against Jewish people." The author was right to assume we all understand that definition or can look it up.
"Zionism" is the word that means different things to different people (or at least, is misunderstood by a lot of people), but that's not what his article is about.
In the spirit of maintain a good attitude and assuming good intent in the comments section, I’m going to assume that you failed to read my comment since I addressed this already.
I read it, and just reread. I’m not sure what you’re objecting to. I’m certainly disagreeing with your comment, but if I’m misinterpreting it I’m open to correction.
>>>So yes, if you say “Israel is uniquely the most evil country in the world, but I don’t hate Jewish people, just Zionists”, you’re an antisemite<<<
I think we all know there is zero doubt plenty of antisemites engage in unhinged Israel-bashing. Likewise many attempt to cloak their antisemitsm in thinly veiled swipes at the Jewish homeland. Still, those who have even a modicum of influence are generally sophisticated enough to refrain from saying things like "Israel is uniquely the most evil country in the world."
I guess what I'm saying is hyperbole doesn't strengthen your case.
This article correctly points out that not too many people are running around yelling “I hate Jews!” This, along with some old tropes, seems to be the working definition of “antisemitism.”
Let me highlight a distinct concern that I believe is closer to what most Jews are concerned about: reflexive progressive allyship with antisemites who are higher on the “oppression stack” than Jews. This leads to a complete double-standard in many of our most culturally relevant institutions.
1. If an antisemitic activist tells progressives to yell “glory to the martyrs” at a vigil for those killed on October 7th, they’ll do it. A college administration is happy to permit this, whereas they’d never allow anyone to yell “George Floyd wasn’t murdered” out of fear of “harm.”
2. It becomes ok to harass Israeli business owners in America. Of course, yelling things at Chinese people about Covid is still unacceptable.
3. Antisemites like Mohammed el-Kurd will celebrate October 7th and talk about the unquenchable “Zionist” thirst for Palestinian blood. He can be invited to MIT’s campus, but of course anyone who complains about affirmative action is beyond the pale.
4. Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza, naturally. We should destroy Israel! (Don’t worry about the fact that probably 95% of Arabs killed in war are killed by other Arabs, those other countries are totally fine and should definitely continue to exist.)
Note that even Jewish progressives can get sucked into this behavior. The fact that the progressive ideology is strong enough to brainwash young Jews in this way makes things more worrying, not less.
All of this, however, has to be cloaked in the language of progressivism. You have to say “we only hate Israel, Jews suffer discrimination from evil whites, etc.”
I don’t want to exaggerate the significance of this problem. But the fact that progressives in culturally significant institutions will defer to claims made by antisemites is worrying. And Jews have no way to defend themselves, since they are lower in the hierarchy.
You realize though that the solution to this is to support getting progressive politics out of the identitarian mire, or at least the really weird reductionist forms of it prevalent on elite campuses and in other progressive institutions. It isn't like it wasn't completely obvious that this approach to politics, taken to its natural conclusion, would lead to exactly these kinds of intra coalition conflicts. It's only worked at elite levels to the degree it has because people that are part of them are so free of any material deprivation or oppression of any kind as to allow the worldview to operate as an abstraction, right up until the day it doesn't.
I completely agree! This is why I don’t want to paint myself as a victim. I’m completely happy to live in a world where lunatics can run around Harvard saying Israel is the devil as long as other similarly insane discourse is tolerated.
What I’m not happy with is a world in which only one type of lunacy is tolerated by intellectual and cultural institutions. Since these institutions squash expression in other ways, one can reasonably infer that they tacitly endorse apologia for jihadist maniacs.
I do not know a single Jew who wants anything else than to get progressive politics out of the identitarian mire. Will we settle for getting the same “special treatment” as every other nominally oppressed group? Yeah sure, in the absence of a better solution, we at least don’t want the system weaponized against us. But literally 100% of Jews I know just want that shit to stop. And I know a lot of Jews.
You’d need to change all the things pushing people to think that way, from the need to establish a personal identity online to colleges using “talk about your struggles” as a way to get around affirmative action bans.
Your point number 4 has a few fallacies going on. The second sentence ("we should destroy Israel") being unreasonable doesn't bear on whether the first ("Israel is committing genocide") is true; neither does the sentence about Arabs killed by other Arabs, which seems like a tu quoque. And I don't think "[the Assad regime in] Syria is fine and should continue to exist" is an uncontroversial sentiment, including among Arabs in the US.
The point was to parody how progressives think about the issue and highlight the double standard.
The first step is to use a ludicrously expansive definition of genocide. Then, once Israel is deemed guilty under this expansive definition, use its guilt as a justification to cheer for massacres and advocate for Israel not to exist as a state (I have no other way of making sense of the term "anti-Zionism.")
The point of including the fact about other Arab wars was that no progressive ever cries about genocide in any of those cases -- an entirely different (and more reasonable) definition of genocide is applied. Then, given that progressives don't deem other Arab countries to be guilty of the highest crimes, they don't call for the actual destruction of Syria (e.g., allowing the Kurds to rule it or something -- not sure what the equivalent would be).
I view toppling the Assad regime as a different sentiment from anti-Zionism. I guess I see it as more analogous to calling for the expulsion of Likud from Israeli politics. This seems far less outrageous to me.
At the height of discourse around Russia's invasion of Ukraine their actions were frequently called "genocide" despite probably not fitting the exact definition of the term. Most people viewed this for what it was: rhetorical hyperbole. They did not accuse the people making such claims of being deeply bigoted against Slavic people.
"whereas they’d never allow anyone to yell “George Floyd wasn’t murdered” out of fear of “harm.”"
Citation needed. Has anyone ever actually been expelled from a University for saying such a thing?
"It becomes ok to harass Israeli business owners in America."
I take it you're talking about the restaurant owner in Philadelphia? That was in fact roundly condemned by much of the media and even the white house.
"He can be invited to MIT’s campus, but of course anyone who complains about affirmative action is beyond the pale."
There have in fact been quite a few critics of affirmative action who have been invited to and employed in universities.
"Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza, naturally. We should destroy Israel!"
This... doesn't even appear to be citing a double standard, it's just throwing out a strawman point you disagree with.
You seem to be conflating actual university speech policies with views that may inform how popular one is with their peers on campus. This is largely unavoidable, holding views that others dislike tends to have consequences, conservatives have been whining about this for years.
Wasn’t a global warming expert disinvited from giving a talk at Berkeley because he had previously expressed disagreement with affirmative action? And at UCLA a would-be spousal hire was not hired following a petition calling attention to comments he made criticizing mandatory DEI statements. So it seems attitudes like these *are* beyond the pale in some sectors of academia.
“We were actually doing him a favor by disinviting him”? Weak, dude, very weak. On the off-chance you’re sincerely confused about what “beyond the pale” means, it means considered unacceptable. Abbot’s criticism of affirmative action caused MIT (not Berkeley as I wrongly said earlier) to change its mind about having him speak on an unrelated topic; clearly, his views were beyond the pale for them. That other people were rightly appalled by this approach to academic discourse and made a stink about it in no way affects whether or not MIT judged his statements to be beyond the pale. (Incidentally, since you brought up the scope of the problem…could we agree that advancing knowledge of global warming is an effort that shouldn’t be given up lightly?)
I also notice you didn’t address the example I gave with major material consequences. Maybe that NYU law student who got her job offer rescinded should be grateful for the free publicity too?
FWIW, that sounds really bad, and I am against it. Also, the festival happened *before* 10/7 as far as I can tell, making the pushback even less explicable:
I think you're wrong to extrapolate that to the congressional hearings though. If that's all it was, I don't think any of what came next would have happened.
This just reads to me like the usual progression: 1) it's not really happening. 2) it's happening, but it's not a big deal. 3) it's a good thing, actually. 4) people freaking out about it are the real problem.
You are on step 2. To avoid progressing to step 3, do you agree it's bad for a speaker to be disinvited over anodyne views on a completely unrelated subject?
If you weren't trying to say he was done a favor, what is the relevance of him being made into a cause celebre? All that proves is that something that is not beyond the pale in the broader discourse *is* beyond the pale in an academic context.
This also fits the familiar pattern where skeptics of campus censoriousness ask for examples, but then dismiss the examples because the subjects became prominent. Obviously the most familiar examples are going to be the ones that were most prominent!
The set of "faculty members in the US" is not the one to measure against to determine whether these attitudes are beyond the pale in academia. The relevant set is faculty members who have expressed these attitudes: are there examples of faculty members publicly expressing opposition to affirmative action but being able to go on delivering talks, etc., as before? That is what would be necessary to show that there is not a censoriousness problem, especially since one aspect of the problem would be faculty members avoiding expressing these attitudes for fear of professional consequences.
Finally, maybe I was too oblique before: what is your opinion of the case of Yoel Inbar, who stood to receive an offer as a spousal hire before graduate students organized a petition demanding he not be hired because of his previous criticisms of DEI statements?
This is a very good essay. It does a great job of explaining the nuances in this debate using data. I especially liked the analogy to Kang's "lonliest Americans" concept w.r.t. Asian-Americans, which I found very helpful in explaining how Jewish people feel about this topic. Thanks to Prof. al-Gharbi for writing.
The large majority of students and faculty are not protesting or speaking out on either side of the issue. It's the loud minority that gets media attention.
Obviously most people don't attend protests. Most Trump voters also didn't rush the capitol. But way more supported the action.. and even if that is still a minority should we ignore political/ethnic calls to violence if it's only from a small group?
What I am telling you, because I know my classmates, is that in this case, way more did not support the action. The vast majority of students are focused on their classes and social lives, not Israel-Palestine.
Yea but that's obvious, for literally anything. And as I stated in my analogy, that's irrelevant.
I don't think anyone is arguing there is a concern about anti semitism on college campuses specifically because the majority of students participate in it. You obviously don't need a majority or even a plurality. Even tepid support by faculty is massive (look at the effect of trump on the crazies)
It is in fact quite relevant as popular discourse vastly overstates the size of the group in question. What al-Gharbi does is point out how small this group actually is, using data, which should inform how people weigh this issue and the appropriate response.
This point can be made about every bad thing in America.
So it’s this kind of thinking : “The point you trying to land against my peeps may have some truth to it but it’s a small minority of people and therefore should not be worrisome. But my concerns about your sides small minority of trouble makers is valid and should be taken very, very seriously.”
Rod, I have a much better sense than you do of what things are and are not true when it comes to campus controversy in the Ivy League.
You should think carefully about whether you would support applying the same “silence is violence” standard to other controversies. Sometimes people simply don’t have much to contribute to a debate and would rather sit it out.
This talk of moral duty is the same argument used to pressure people to make statements supporting BLM or opposing Trump, by saying that if you don't publicly express one view, you're tacitly supporting the other. That argument was stupid when it came to BLM and Trump and it is stupid here, too. Faculty electing not to endorse a particular side does not mean they automatically support the opposite side. They may simply feel that they don't have anything useful or novel to contribute to the debate, or they may prefer to stay away from a sensitive subject. Again, think very carefully about whether you want to set a norm of faculty being pushed to accept "their duty of moral leadership" when it comes to contentious debates. The reason tenure exists is to free faculty from these kinds of pressures.
Maybe the prime example of the aphorism "the plural of anecdote is not data."
Also, this comment to me is a prime example of how smart phones are creating a gigantic "Streisand effect" on almost everything. Please go look at these protests more closely and see just how few people are protesting at lot of these things. Will not defend the uglier incidents of protestors harassing random Jewish passersby. But making a claim that this represents some common sentiment among college students at large is literally refuted by the data presented by the author and lived experiences of colleges students, like you know, Milan.
You are aware that this comments section is paywalled and private and read by precisely one other person I know from school and only because she works here?
Yes, actually, because—and I cannot stress this enough—I actually know my classmates. They're real, normal people, not the media caricature of wild-eyed leftist students. I also know how the Internet works and I would bet a large sum that none of my classmates are conducting opposition research on me.
I strongly want to avoid “spaces wherein victimhood serves as a form of social currency.” It is much better to attract envy than compassion, better to be strong than weak and better to be rich than poor. Sympathy is a poor consolation prize. Kids these days should ween themselves off of it.
I want to emphasize: literally 100% of Jews I know - on campus, off campus, liberal, conservative, religious, atheist, etc. - wants exactly that. Just get this dumb ideology out. We don’t want it.
In the *absence* of an actual solution? Sure we’ll take the same protection that every nominally oppressed group gets, just so that the system isn’t weaponized against us. But I have not met a single Jew that wants to keep this broken ideology-cum-lawsuit protection strategy around. And I know a lot of Jews.
I am generally sympathetic towards the weak and poor. I am befuddled why upper middle class liberals are so eager for sympathy. Maybe it’s a cheap form of egalitarianism. Maybe if one checks enough victim boxes, you don’t need to feel so bad about your trust fund/fancy degree/closet full of nice clothes.
I feel sympathy for Palestinians because most of their lives suck. I do not want to play the natural lottery in Gaza, precisely because most Gazans’ lives suck. If I get sick, I would like sympathy and compassion. I would much rather not get sick. If I go bankrupt, I would like sympathy and compassion, but much better to avoid that too.
Plus fifty points for extensive documentation - not just graphs, but links, and tons of them. Super important when making empirical statements, unexpected for me (not that SB is particularly bad or anything, just it's hardly the norm in general), you love to see it. Most serious and polished guest post by far.
Minus twenty five for, I think, not laying a strong enough definitional foundation. It's odd for a piece about misunderstanding antisemitism to not...actually define what antisemitism means, exactly. Can't clearly define a thing only by stating what it's not. Nor do I feel comfortable going by the ADL's particular goalposts, for the same reason I distrust other legacy bastions one would have looked to in the past for such guidance (SPLC, ACLU, etc). At this point the entire framework of "hate crime/hate speech" feels like just another unwinnable skirmish between Team Metis and Team Episteme.
Even taking those assumptions at face value though - I dunno, man, maybe that really is true in terms of the macro picture. But it's still weird and uncomfortable and, yeah, kinda scary to encounter Hamas apologia from otherwise-sane atheist liberal friends and acquaintances. The same people I usually expect to bet on The Right Side of History and all that, who seem to be making a weird exception to the usual rule of not supporting anachronistic sabre-rattling theocracies. Kills me a little inside every time I see a "Queers For Palestine" sticker or somesuch. As you note, such lonely fears do tend to get dismissed, and that's not helpful. Compassion isn't a zero-sum resource, we should have an abundance agenda for that too...
I don’t think I’ve seen anyone point this out: Al-Gharbi says “the more college Americans get, the more positive views they have on Israel” and includes a chart showing that adults with more education have more positive views of Israel. But this includes people who went to college as far back as the 60’s! Anti-Israel campus protests are most associated with the Second Intifada and following, and sure enough, Al-Gharbi’s chart shows that younger people today have more negative views of Israel. Are younger college students *today* graduating with significantly better views of Israel than their non-college peers?
Exactly, this is an intentionally misleading statistic our good professor is touting. Sample Gen Z and millennials and you’ll see what leftist indoctrination does to people. You get the utter stupidity of ‘progressives’ shilling for Hamas.
Great guest post. I thought one of the key parts of this entire post was the author pointing out that college campuses are overwhelmingly populated by people who vote Democratic or even farther left than Democratic. What that means is almost by definition if you are going to encounter people with problematic views on literally anything, it’s likely going to come from someone on the more left side of the spectrum given how unlikely it is you’re going to encounter anyone at all with right leaning views (seems especially true at elite schools). I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest the type of people who are more right wing on campuses are extremely unlikely to be the type to engage in protest or loud demonstrations about anything.
I actually think this related to my point about how much having major news publications based on NYC or DC skews coverage (and specifically coverage of these protests since October 7th). Reporters work in cities where overwhelmingly people with extreme views are more lefty. Hence an extraordinary coverage of randos protesting restaurants where if you look real closely, you can see just how few people are actually protesting.
Do you know many Fox News viewers. I've lived among them, this thread does not reflect anything like how a Fox News audience would respond.
This author presented an argument that anti-Semitism isn't much of a problem here in America. A number of commenters found his argument either inaccurate or inadequate. With maybe one exception I haven't seen anyone trot out the normal reactionary shibboleths that you would get from the audience you hypothesize. There are no claims of anti-Americanism, no claims that the author supports terrorism, no claim they've been either brainwashed or bought off. It's generally been a discussion and disagreement with the author's conclusions.
"...I view it as an imperative to stand with other “people of the book” — especially when they face persecution on the basis of their identity as Jews or Christians."
I assume the book in question is "One Billion Abrahamians"?
Incidentally, I have a hard time parsing what that statement means, particularly what it means for there to be an "imperative to stand with other "people of the book"". It's either chauvinist or meaningless, and neither is a great sign.
That’s a decent summary of biblical Judaism in a lot of ways - just one long overarching campaign and screed against paganism and all that that entails. Success = the world is if not monotheist at least not polytheist (the OT doesn’t really relate to atheism directly.) Combine that with God’s promises to Abraham in particular to have tons of offspring who influence the world etc. and yeah I’d say “the book in question” could be nicknamed One Billion Abrahamians.
I think this this all basically directionally correct. The left populist/critical theory crowd come to their antipathy for the Israeli state along a different path from classical antisemitism. The problem is that the Venn diagram of the functional reality of "left oppressed/oppressor analysis of the Israeli state" and "Jewish space lasers" is basically a circle. It's not actually that important how you reach your conspiratorial beliefs about an elite cabal of zionists manipulating global affairs. Especially when they seemingly exist thoroughly intermingled within the same political coalition.
I'm not a particularly big fan of Israel. Religious Ethno-states are bad, but Israel is probably the least bad religious ethno-state out there, including all of their neighbors, let alone what Hamas wants to replace it with. Being especially preoccupied with the misdeeds of Israel is a bit of a tell. To the extent they are the "oppressors" it's because they're the only shitty religious ethno-state in the region that actually tries not to be terrible and they're the most successful crab in that bucket as a result.
I think you're overlooking a big reason why we might be especially preoccupied with the misdeeds of Isreal.
Republican party candidates in previous elections have repeatedly said that "there must be no daylight between Israel's policies and ours" mean that I care much more about Israel's policies as a result, because they can affect our own so strongly.
What policies exactly do they effect so strongly? Like, I tend to think the whole strategic significance of the region is pretty overblown, but I'm also at a bit of a loss as to what anyone thinks we might be doing differently if decided to let Israel off the leash.
Practice: We provide a fair amount of monetary support (~3.8 billion a year nowadays) to them. That's not a lot for our budget but it also was a sticking point when trying to get money for Ukraine - plenty of Republicans wanted additional funding for Israel as a condition. So it has an outsized influence on our policies.
I would also say, why it's the most sympathetic country to me in the area, our near-unconditional support has warped our dealings with other countries in the area.
Also, Netanyahu in particular has exercised a lot of influence in our presidential elections, IIRC he really tried to swing things towards Trump with his support (probably related to Republican rhetoric).
My personal perception of our policy towards Israel is that we basically throw them symbolic votes in the UN and enough aid/security guarantees to avoid them feeling the need to take more... escalatory measures to secure their borders. At least in my lifetime, we've done a lot more to protect Israel's neighbors from war with them than the other way around.
Not really. Israel won its early wars without help from us, built its own nukes, and developed the Iron Dome technology on its own (we later invested, largely because we wanted the tech). Our aid is much less than people imagine - about 1% of Israel's GDP, which they're required to spend on US arms manufacturers. They're happy to take it, but they don't really need it.
Your last paragraph reminded me of one of my favorite pieces of short fiction (oddly enough , published in Reason Magazine, which generally doesn't print fiction) called, "The Tale of Many Jerusalems" by Charles Paul Freund: https://reason.com/2002/11/01/the-tale-of-many-jerusalems-2/printer/
First, like others, I think one analytical problem with this article is that it spends almost no time thinking about what antisemitism is and how it works at the conceptual level. But you need to do that to validate the metrics you're using.
Second, while explicit antisemitic attitudes of the sort this article looks at may not represent widespread views, they can still be sufficiently visible and threatening to matter a lot. It's not irrational for Jews to worry about the views of a minority of people when those views often result in harassment and violence.
I think the most pertinent part of this piece is various theories of victimhood becoming currency among the educated and upwardly mobile classes. Beyond the irony of it is the distortion in perception it creates about the world people are living in. Essentially if you are an American expressing these kinds of views you can probably rest assured that you are among the safest and most well off people in history, i.e. the exact opposite of what the ideology says.
Becoming currency, and specifically becoming currency that purchases legitimation among the educated and upwardly mobile for the views of the uneducated and bigoted who can nonetheless tick the right identity boxes. The prototype for non-Republican antisemitism in the USA is Louis Farrakhan.
Yes it does. The ideology informs us that wealthy BIPOC and LGBTQIA2S+ Americans are still victims of systemic racism, sexism, etc. Just look at the reactions to Claudine Gay leaving Harvard. She's unquestionably an elite, yet many people are claiming that her removal is because of racism.
' “kids these days.” However, those narratives are demonstrably incorrect.'
Well...at UMass Amherst...I don't call it 'anti-semitism', I call it what it is: Jew Hatred. There is an immense amount of it, our son who is a student there, has experienced it from his first day there.
[As well as in 4 schools in Massachusetts (ie grammar school, middle school, and 2 high schools)]
I've gone, as backup, to some of the demonstrations there, and hearing the calls of death to Jews, and 'oppressors / colonisers / settlers'...to say that this isn't going on — that's blindness.
Not to mention the Cox Communications heir in Western Mass who is funding all kinds of not just anti-Israel demonstrations, but targeting Jewish owned businesses.
To write this off as yet another moral panic that another professor of sociology can patronize me about — it puts all of your work, all of your credentials, and also, our host's credentials and work (hi Matt) — into serious question. Why don't we go together to an SJP meeting, and I'll show you what it is to be a JEW, I'll show you the 'demonstrable correctness'. And also, since you'll be standing with me, I'll also show you how to fend off physical violence. .
1.8 billion Muslims in the world, 3.5 billion Christians; % of humans who are bigoted; vs 15 million Jews. How's your math?
How many windows of Jewish owned shops have been busted in Amherst? How does this compare to the number and proportion of Asian owned shops gutted during the 2020 riots? Why are you so eager to be a victim? Jewish Americans are one of the richest and most educated minorities in human history. They are subject to rates of violent crime similar to those in Western Europe or Canada. Stop competing in the intersectionality olympics, because you’re gonna lose.
You miss my point. I'm not in competition, I've annihilated any impediments to me personally and to my family. As I learned from my Shoah surviving teachers.
And also, in my mid 60s, originally a New Yorker, there has never been a time where there hasn't been some serious anti-semitism. I work in the building trades, mostly in NYC, and it's all over. But sure, it's almost equal opportunity bigotry, only a slight uptick for Jews. In a close 2nd place, wells all you have to do is look at the Wikipedia entries for 'ethnic slurs'. I've heard most of them regularly, from every social and financial strata.
With regard to your comment about broken windows: not in Amherst, and not broken windows, but alls you have to do is a little following of the 'story' about the Cox kid, and you will find some targeted Jewish stores. Busted windows is too weak a metric; there's far more crummy ways to intimidate peoples, and it's happening. Though the Cox heir moved to the middle east just recently, though his organization continues here.
I hold the idiosyncratic opinion that boycotts are bad precisely because they are an escalation in the direction of violence, but it sounds like you're stealing valor here. I *think* you're talking about James Chambers: what exactly are you accusing him of? What acts?
Al-Gharbi's piece doesn't use the words "moral panic" anywhere. It claims that even though there is an intense shift towards anti-semitism/Jew-Hatred/⟨insert your favorite term here⟩ in some places, that intense shift has not made *most* university campuses anti-semitic, nor the *modal place in America* anti-semitic. It's unfortunate that you and your son happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but that doesn't make your terrible experience *typical*.
There's something profoundly concerning and bizarre in writing a ~4,000 word article explaining to Jews why they are overreacting to antisemitism that does not mention the massive post-October 7 surge in hate crimes against Jews. The closest you get is talking about "the rise in antisemitic bias incidents since October 7". This is paired with more active language with you stating that there are "increased attacks and harassment directed towards Muslims."
I don't disagree with Al-Gharbi that most Americans are not anti-Semitic. Yet even Al-Gharbi does admit that "Critically, there has been a slight uptick in actual antisemitic beliefs among young people in recent years."
I do think there is increasing anti-Semitism. But if you look at averages, most Americans are not anti-Semitic. When averages shift even slightly, however, you often get large changes in the extremes. Matt has described the phenomenon many times in many different contexts based on how bell curves work. I think this is what we are seeing. Yes, the average American/liberal/college student is not anti-Semitic (and many are actively philo-Semitic). So if you look at averages, like Al-Gharbi does in his analyses, you're not going to recognize the problem. The focus on averages glosses over the fact that anti-Semitic incidents and the level of violence of such incidents are at the same time on the rise, because these things happen at the extreme ends of the bell curve.
(And I do think that even non-anti-Semitic Americans often have grave misconceptions about Jews/Judaism as well as Israel/Palestine, even if not coming from a place of animus, but that's a different story altogether).
Also I think in the pro-Palestinian movement in the US, there has been a radicalization that mirrors the radicalization that has occurred in the West Bank and Gaza (not to the same extreme, but in the same direction). I remember when I was in college, there was the Students for Justice in Palestine. And I remember not finding what they supported offensive at all because I also believe in bringing awareness to Palestininan issues. They used to have "Palestinian Awareness Week" (which I thought was great--let's bring awareness to Palestinian issues). A few years ago it became "Israel Apartheid Week". And now, at the same university, the SJP is chanting "intifada" in front of the student center and blocking Jewish students from getting to class. And now open support of Hamas among people on the far left and attempts to justify terror against Israelis is way more noticible than it has ever been (again even if these views don't reflect the average position of someone identifying as "liberal" or even of someone "pro-Palestinian").
It’s a country of 330 million people. Even a change of less than 1% is a lot of people.
Not to mention it's WAY worse at our "elite" institutions
I'd guess this has more to do with there being a war in the region than a bell curve shift (or at least, the war is the cause of both, not some ambient level of anti-semitism.)
I'm not also convinced that bell curve mechanics for social beliefs (which are generally not, actually, bell curves) mirror those for more randomly-distributed events (e.g. weather, test scores, whatever.)
Regardless of whether it's properly a normal distribution bell curve effect or not, my point is that the effects we are seeing are at the extremes and may not appear as large percentages of the population showing anti-Jewish animus. I do think that many of the effects preceded the war--the war is just making them more visible.
EDIT: And to add, I'm afraid we're seeing a shift in the Overton window on quite extremist views about Jews, Israelis, and Israel. And it's scary.
Nah it's a curve shift. SJP at my undergrad 15 years ago was banging on about apartheid and intifada -- but we were considered a very lefty campus.
Some of the increase in antisemitism may be attributable to immigration: people are coming from countries where antisemitism is more prevalent. You see this in Europe, particularly France, where a larger Muslim population is (not surprisingly) more hostile to Jews.
Yup. Well said.
But this is what I'm getting at. The analysis from Al-Gharbi didn't analyze the frequency of extreme incidents.
The main weakness - and it’s a huge, glaring weakness - of this story is Al-Gharbi’s failure to grapple with the definition of anti-Semitism. There are very good reasons why the definition often includes what he wants to call “criticism of Zionism”. For a thorough introduction, I believe Yair Rosenberg has written about this at length.
So yes, if you say “Israel is uniquely the most evil country in the world, but I don’t hate Jewish people, just Zionists”, you’re an antisemite, your attempt to launder your antisemitism notwithstanding. And given that fact, quite a large chunk of Al-Gharbi’s story falls apart.
This is a very delicate point.
Obviously criticism of Israel is not inherently anti-Semitism. I think everyone agrees on that. However, judging Jews/Israel based on double standards can definitely motivated by anti-Semitism (for example, defining "genocide" differently for Israel than for other countries, I would say, is anti-Semitic, especially when Jews are themselves one of the greatest victims of genocide). And while there may be something defensible about judging your allies differently than your foes, I think that disproportionate approbrium for the Jewish state on the world state is anti-Semitic.
I think there are ways to be anti-Zionist without being anti-Semitic. Perhaps, you have a principled opposition to any kind of nationalism. Or perhaps you just believe that a single binational state solution is the most likely to bring about a positive outcome (something I personally disagree with, but I can accept that some people believe this). However, if you're an Arab/Palestinian nationalist that's simply just against Jewish nationalism because they're Jews, or if you deny the Jewish history of the land, or if your vision includes a very non-democratic aims like "sending Jews back to where they came from" (not uncommonly heard among Palestinian nationalists) or re-establishing them as a dhimmi class (something that some Islamists support), then yes, your opposition to Zionism is probably anti-Semitic.
> I think everyone agrees on that.
The amount of arguments that have essentially start with 'anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism' lately has been very irritating, but it's not just a post 10/7 thing either.
https://twitter.com/bungarsargon/status/1395406180135153665
Israel exists, so either anti-Zionism is a dead letter and meaningless, or it means that Israel (and presumably it's people) should be removed somehow.
I leave the somehow up to the observer.
That seems a little silly to me. To a first approximation, no one in the normie community would even be able to parse your first sentence. It assumes all this knowledge about people and events and the meaning of "Zionism" as a historical, political, and theoretical construct that I can tell you with absolute certainty that even many American Jews simply do not possess.
I base this belief on having taught a Modern Middle East undergraduate survey; it was an elective that kids took explicitly because they had an interest in the subject, and I was genuinely surprised by what they didn't know. And I'm talking kids who were very interested in their own Jewish identity, had taken trips to Israel, etc.--even most of those kids knew next to nothing about Zionism and definitely would not be able to meaningfully parse your first sentence.
People not knowing stuff is often frustrating, but it's a mistake to read meaning where it doesn't exist because it clouds--and darkens--your ability to analyze motive and intent.
Zionism is easily defined as a political movement that believes in a State for the Jewish people. I think normies totally understand this. The rest is very elementary logic.
What do you think a person on the street understands Zionism to mean? Clearly people (even and especially college students) think they understand enough to chant "From the River to the Sea". The next, very obvious question is "so what happens to the Jews who currently reside between the River and the Sea?"
The framing and references in this comment are really the same as in my first one, they lead to the same question. So no, I don't think it's silly to expect people to answer questions about their plainly stated political goals.
I get that this all seems very straightforward to you, and I get that it seems logical to you, and I get that it seems like not much to know to you. I get all that.
What I'm saying to you is that when I taught actual undergraduates with an actual stated interest in the Middle East, many of whom were self-described Jews with a stated interest in Israel, specifically--I'm telling you that even THOSE people would not have been able to reply, "Zionism is a political movement that believes in a State for the Jewish people."
Look: you can think that I'm lying, or you can think that I just was teaching at a school (today it is Jefferson University, but that's post two changes of leadership) where the undergrads were unusually stupid.
But if you accept that I'm telling the truth, and if you accept that I'm fairly describing my experience and that undergrads at my school were not unusually ignorant, then that's kind of a huge problem for your claim. That is what I am saying. And you can't get around that by saying, "I think normies totally understand this," because I am telling you that in my actual experience, they do not. Most of them literally did not know what "Zionism" was. Like, the word had no real meaning to them beyond, "isn't that something about Israel" if they were Jews and "isn't that something from the Bible" if they were Christians or vaguely American agnostic suburb kids.
So that's what I think "a person on the street" knows about Zionism: functionally nothing.
And I think this is true of a lot of this stuff, honestly. Real talk: I think if you grabbed a representative sample of kids at a protest chanting about the river and the sea and asked them to name the river in question and the sea in question that many of them would not be able to get both answers correct. I am fairly certain that a majority would not be able to locate the geographical features on an unlabeled map or to describe what the "Gaza Strip" or the "West Bank" actually are.
And this shouldn't surprise you; people endorse dumb slogans and stuff they don't understand all the time--here I will refer you back to "keep the government out of my Medicare," but only because it's hilarious. You could find a dozen examples in US politics of the last two decades without even trying. It's often the subject of this very newsletter.
All of that is a problem. It's partly a problem, in my opinion, because people vote for folks and support political movements without understanding what they are endorsing. It's also a problem in non-political areas of life--my book on radiation therapy partly chases how a bunch of people killed themselves and their patients with similar errors in thinking. The errors were genuine. So were the deaths. But I came to believe in the research and argue in the book that human cognitive processes are just kind of prone to certain kinds of errors because we make tradeoffs in order to more easily understand and move through the fearsomely, insanely complex system that is "reality."
The combination that is cognitive errors around cause-and-effect salted with ignorance is frustrating, has bad results, and makes people look dumb. But it is usually not malicious and is often even well-meaning, and if you fail to understand that, you fail to understand people's motivations, which then causes you to make a bunch of other downstream analytical errors. It is what it is (which is frustrating).
You're assuming a careful definition of what Zionism means which is generally used by neither its proponents nor its detractors in popular discourse. I find this fact deeply annoying and confusing, but it's the truth. I think it's disingenuous to make gotcha quips that rely on pretending otherwise.
I think it's disingenuous to say "AntiZionist" or "Defund the Police" and then act like *I'm* the one who's out of line for saying "There are problems with your plan".
My comment isn't a gotcha, it's a very honest, straightforward response to the actual words being spoken. If people mean something totally different from the plain reading if what they say, it's on them to clarify. I'm not a mind reader. I can only respond to the words that are put out there.
I don't think it's "careful" to define Zionism that way. I think it's a very unacademic, everyday way to define the movement that is very accurate and broadly useful. What is your idea of a better, more useful definition?
I completely agree. This is the standard definition. I have no idea what the alternative would be.
This is just the standard definition of Zionism, dude. It’s the one used by everyone in Israel and the mainstream Jewish community in the US. It means support for Jewish statehood. That’s what it’s always meant.
I think his point is that there are a lot of [redacted] out there, and the standard definition might elude them.
This is fair but also utterly baffling. What the actual f do these people think Zionism is? I’m not expecting anyone to give me a great answer but geez is it frustrating for all this debate about “whether antizionism is antisemitism” to occur when half the putative antizionism think it’s just “criticism of Israel”.
I mean if you want the honest answer, they think it just means Bibi-fan, or like, anti-Palestinian autonomy or rights. Like most terms that get abusively redefined, you'll have different people who motte and bailey this, ofc.
I mean, Zionism is the idea that there should be a Jewish state/homeland in the land of Israel. It doesn't mean you support any particular Israeli government policy. There are many anti-Zionist voices that try to change the definition of Zionism from the one I gave above, but anti-Zionists don't get to define what Zionism is--Zionists do.
This state was created in 1948 (before, as Matthew Yglesias has pointed out, most countries in the world were created), admitted to the UN, and has been recognized by most countries. So people who think that "anti-Zionism" is "anti-Semitism" I think are mostly just saying--hey it's done. Israel is here, and denying its right to exist is anti-Semitic. Perhaps debating Zionism 75 years ago was a legitimate question, but it's now a fact.
Now, I explained two types of anti-Zionism that I don't think are inherently anti-Semitic (principled opposition to all nationalism/ advocacy for a binational state). There are probably others. But frankly, these principled anti-Zionist positions are not the majority of anti-Zionist voices that Jews are facing these days. (Support for a binational state, for example, may be popular among Western leftists, but is pretty unpopular in the West Bank, Gaza, or Israel for that matter).
This is my main issue with the definition.
Post 1948, Israel is a recognized state. The Zionist project is now the perpetuation of the state of Israel, meaning the leaders of Israel are now the leaders of the Zionist project. How exactly can Israel's policies around it's border, especially pertaining the territory Israel owns, be disconnected from the Zionist project?
I think criticizing Israel on that ground is anti-Zionism and it is not anti-Semitic, but of course, the insistence is that Zionism is *just* the anodyne mission of a Jewish National project.
But the vast majority of Israeli Jews identify Zionists, and they criticize their own government all the time. Probably more vociferously than most people. I bet you that Netanyahu is more popular in America than he is in Israel right now. These anti-Netanyahu Israelis (right now about 75% of the Israeli population) are not anti-Zionists.
Zionism is simply the idea that there should be a Jewish homeland/state in the land of Israel. Alternatively, you could define it as supporting the self-determination of the Jewish people to have a state.
There are many types of Zionism: Labor Zionism, Revisionist Zionism, Religious Zionism, Progressive Zionism etc. Each kind of Zionism will have different views of what policies regarding borders and the territory it controls, and even within each type, people will disagree on various policies.
Just like criticism of Congress and the President is not anti-American, even though they are the leaders of the American project.
Anti-Zionists are those who are against there being a state to serve as a Jewish homeland in the land of Israel. So it's not just criticism of Israeli leaders and policy, but criticism of the very existence of a state with any kind of Jewish national character. Perhaps they want a single binational state (as I said). Perhaps they want a single Islamist state. Perhaps they want a big pan-Arab state. Perhaps they want a single secular Arab state. But they don't want a state with a Jewish character located anywhere in historical Israel/Palestine.
> identify Zionists, and they criticize their own government all the time
That's because they are Zionists, whose prescription of Zionism isn't in power. If those people were in power, I wouldn't be an anti-Zionist!
> Just like criticism of Congress and the President is not anti-American
It's never been my position that criticism of Israel per se is anti-Zionism, my position is that criticism of how it conducts the construct of Israel is anti-Zionist!
No, because by that logic 100% of Israeli citizens would be anti-Zionists, who criticize their government and its policies constantly. And they would tell you they are strong Zionists.
The Zionist project is objectively all but complete. The state is really not going anywhere.
And anyway criticizing the methods of achieving those goals would not make you an anti-Zionist - because again, that ropes in quite a few explicitly Zionist leaders and intellectuals into anti-Zionism.
I'd be willing to say "maybe sometimes antizionism isn't antisemitic" if not for the fact that the functional content of antizionism is 75 years of unrelenting war against the existence of the State of Israel. If a Taiwanese-American says, "the PRC is evil and should not exist, fucking commie scum", it is understood that there is no meaningful translation of that opinion into intention and action. With regards to antizionism, it is instead understood that while the actual likelihood of abolishing Israel remains low, there is a real movement killing Israelis to make it happen.
You ought to check out my exchange, above, with Lapsed Pacifist. I think your phrase "it is understood" is totally wrong. You are way, way, way overestimating what ordinary people understand and underestimating their capacity to hold nonfunctional beliefs bereft of genuine understanding of the causes, potential consequences, or historical context of those beliefs. I'm not saying that's great, but I'm pretty sure it is true.
Maybe but I'd be genuinely surprised to find out that most Americans are unable to tell an active war-zone from a matter of diplomatic tension, which is really the only distinction I was trying to make.
“Anti-Zionism” is not “criticism of Israel”. If you’d like me to elaborate I’m happy to, but I’m assuming that you just misread.
Thankfully, Matt Yglesias had the courage to let a Muslim lecture us Jews about what is and isn't antisemitism. What a brave independent thinker he is.
Judging from the early returns, I'd say you're right: it does appear to have taken a certain amount of courage on the part of Matt Yglesias.
I’m trying to maintain the good spirit of the comment section and more broadly assume good intent on Matt’s part. But it does bother me that he’s ready to be totally chill about antisemitism (unless it comes from Trumpists!) while playing up his Jewishness, even as he and his family can simply blend into the background of the American ethnic landscape should he ever feel like it. Many of us do not have that option.
I don’t typically wear a kippa in public. Recently on my way out of a wedding in Williamsburg, I happened to be wearing one and immediately got heckled by some idiot going on about how Zionists are the devil and have no souls. Should I be comforted that this fellow laundered his antisemitism in the language of anti-Zionism?
>But it does bother me that he’s ready to be totally chill about antisemitism (unless it comes from Trumpists!)<
Where are you getting this? A) Matt isn't the author of this piece; B) It seems to me the author is seeking to shed light on the phenomenon of antisemitism. Antisemitism has been in the news a lot of late. It's a serious problem. But like any problem, in order to address it we need to *understand* it. And the author lays out the case that said phenomenon is much worse and more dangerous on the right than on the left. Obviously readers are free to dispute his findings, but they seems a far cry from suggesting people need "to chill."
Why does it specifically matter that al-Gharbi is Muslim? He's a sociologist; this is his field of study. You can disagree with his conclusions without making ad hominem attacks on his religion.
To be fair, the author brought it up early (his sixth sentence) in his essay, so he seems to have thought it important.
I don't think it's an ad hominem attack. The idea is now widespread that discussions of problems facing a certain group are more legitimate if they're made by members of that group. One can disagree with that idea—I do—but it doesn't mean that "white people shouldn't be writing about the Black experience" is an ad hominem attack against white people.
You should refrain from actually insulting people
I'm Jewish and I thought his essay was just fine. Knowledge, analysis, and explanation can come from anyone. Some of the greatest experts on the Muslim world and its history were Jewish academics.
You'd be better off responding to his substance than playing the identitarian game.
As I was reading this article, I was thinking it’s exactly the usual sort of Yglesias thing - taking some mainstream trope of the New York Times liberals and showing that it is way overplayed. But then I realized that this one was defending the left rather than punching left, and predicted it was going to get a lot of pushback from the readers.
Same.
I like that Matt is being consistent even when the issue hits closer to home.
A lot of moderate jews (of which I am one) decried this kind of identitarian thinking when it was BLM, Asian and trans issues, but somehow embraced it when the discussion turned to anti-semitism. Kind of the mirror image of the charge against campus progressives.
I realize you were being ironic, but I think your words are literally true.
Honestly if he were to pick a Jew to write it he’d be equally as stuck in his academic bubble, so never mind.
😂
It's been shocking to see so many people say things like "I don't hate Jewish people, just Zionists" who then turn around and call literally every Jewish person they can find a Zionist.
Right. And Zionism can simply mean "believes Israel has a right to exist".
I mean what's weird about the anti-Zionism group is that they are often the ones that say "no human is illegal" or "no one is illegal on stolen land", and then complain about the legal migration of Jews in 19th century Ottoman Palestine/20th century Mandatory Palestine, or the illegal immigration of Jewish refugees escaping literal genocide 80 years ago to a British colony.
"They should immigrate legally, and I want to limit legal immigration."
Is a perfectly logical and reasonable preference, though with obvious economic consequences.
All that + don't enforce labor laws and punish people who hire them, however, isn't really logical.
Well, I suspect if you asked most conservatives what their stance is 'cleanly', they'd say something along those lines.
The 'they should come here legally' rhetoric is mostly a response to liberals constantly trying to conflate opposition to illegal immigration with opposition to all immigration.
The other common approach on the more ardently pro-all-immigration faction is to just say 'well make what they are doing legal and there is no problem'.
It's unfortunate, but the combination of liberal dominance of the media, and the brain drain among conservatives, means that this bad framing is ubiquitous.
Anti-semitism doesn't need to be explained. It's "hostility to or prejudice against Jewish people." The author was right to assume we all understand that definition or can look it up.
"Zionism" is the word that means different things to different people (or at least, is misunderstood by a lot of people), but that's not what his article is about.
In the spirit of maintain a good attitude and assuming good intent in the comments section, I’m going to assume that you failed to read my comment since I addressed this already.
I read it, and just reread. I’m not sure what you’re objecting to. I’m certainly disagreeing with your comment, but if I’m misinterpreting it I’m open to correction.
>>>So yes, if you say “Israel is uniquely the most evil country in the world, but I don’t hate Jewish people, just Zionists”, you’re an antisemite<<<
I think we all know there is zero doubt plenty of antisemites engage in unhinged Israel-bashing. Likewise many attempt to cloak their antisemitsm in thinly veiled swipes at the Jewish homeland. Still, those who have even a modicum of influence are generally sophisticated enough to refrain from saying things like "Israel is uniquely the most evil country in the world."
I guess what I'm saying is hyperbole doesn't strengthen your case.
This article correctly points out that not too many people are running around yelling “I hate Jews!” This, along with some old tropes, seems to be the working definition of “antisemitism.”
Let me highlight a distinct concern that I believe is closer to what most Jews are concerned about: reflexive progressive allyship with antisemites who are higher on the “oppression stack” than Jews. This leads to a complete double-standard in many of our most culturally relevant institutions.
1. If an antisemitic activist tells progressives to yell “glory to the martyrs” at a vigil for those killed on October 7th, they’ll do it. A college administration is happy to permit this, whereas they’d never allow anyone to yell “George Floyd wasn’t murdered” out of fear of “harm.”
2. It becomes ok to harass Israeli business owners in America. Of course, yelling things at Chinese people about Covid is still unacceptable.
3. Antisemites like Mohammed el-Kurd will celebrate October 7th and talk about the unquenchable “Zionist” thirst for Palestinian blood. He can be invited to MIT’s campus, but of course anyone who complains about affirmative action is beyond the pale.
4. Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza, naturally. We should destroy Israel! (Don’t worry about the fact that probably 95% of Arabs killed in war are killed by other Arabs, those other countries are totally fine and should definitely continue to exist.)
Note that even Jewish progressives can get sucked into this behavior. The fact that the progressive ideology is strong enough to brainwash young Jews in this way makes things more worrying, not less.
All of this, however, has to be cloaked in the language of progressivism. You have to say “we only hate Israel, Jews suffer discrimination from evil whites, etc.”
I don’t want to exaggerate the significance of this problem. But the fact that progressives in culturally significant institutions will defer to claims made by antisemites is worrying. And Jews have no way to defend themselves, since they are lower in the hierarchy.
You realize though that the solution to this is to support getting progressive politics out of the identitarian mire, or at least the really weird reductionist forms of it prevalent on elite campuses and in other progressive institutions. It isn't like it wasn't completely obvious that this approach to politics, taken to its natural conclusion, would lead to exactly these kinds of intra coalition conflicts. It's only worked at elite levels to the degree it has because people that are part of them are so free of any material deprivation or oppression of any kind as to allow the worldview to operate as an abstraction, right up until the day it doesn't.
I completely agree! This is why I don’t want to paint myself as a victim. I’m completely happy to live in a world where lunatics can run around Harvard saying Israel is the devil as long as other similarly insane discourse is tolerated.
What I’m not happy with is a world in which only one type of lunacy is tolerated by intellectual and cultural institutions. Since these institutions squash expression in other ways, one can reasonably infer that they tacitly endorse apologia for jihadist maniacs.
Agree completely.
I do not know a single Jew who wants anything else than to get progressive politics out of the identitarian mire. Will we settle for getting the same “special treatment” as every other nominally oppressed group? Yeah sure, in the absence of a better solution, we at least don’t want the system weaponized against us. But literally 100% of Jews I know just want that shit to stop. And I know a lot of Jews.
I don’t think it’s plausible.
You’d need to change all the things pushing people to think that way, from the need to establish a personal identity online to colleges using “talk about your struggles” as a way to get around affirmative action bans.
Your point number 4 has a few fallacies going on. The second sentence ("we should destroy Israel") being unreasonable doesn't bear on whether the first ("Israel is committing genocide") is true; neither does the sentence about Arabs killed by other Arabs, which seems like a tu quoque. And I don't think "[the Assad regime in] Syria is fine and should continue to exist" is an uncontroversial sentiment, including among Arabs in the US.
The point was to parody how progressives think about the issue and highlight the double standard.
The first step is to use a ludicrously expansive definition of genocide. Then, once Israel is deemed guilty under this expansive definition, use its guilt as a justification to cheer for massacres and advocate for Israel not to exist as a state (I have no other way of making sense of the term "anti-Zionism.")
The point of including the fact about other Arab wars was that no progressive ever cries about genocide in any of those cases -- an entirely different (and more reasonable) definition of genocide is applied. Then, given that progressives don't deem other Arab countries to be guilty of the highest crimes, they don't call for the actual destruction of Syria (e.g., allowing the Kurds to rule it or something -- not sure what the equivalent would be).
I view toppling the Assad regime as a different sentiment from anti-Zionism. I guess I see it as more analogous to calling for the expulsion of Likud from Israeli politics. This seems far less outrageous to me.
At the height of discourse around Russia's invasion of Ukraine their actions were frequently called "genocide" despite probably not fitting the exact definition of the term. Most people viewed this for what it was: rhetorical hyperbole. They did not accuse the people making such claims of being deeply bigoted against Slavic people.
"whereas they’d never allow anyone to yell “George Floyd wasn’t murdered” out of fear of “harm.”"
Citation needed. Has anyone ever actually been expelled from a University for saying such a thing?
"It becomes ok to harass Israeli business owners in America."
I take it you're talking about the restaurant owner in Philadelphia? That was in fact roundly condemned by much of the media and even the white house.
"He can be invited to MIT’s campus, but of course anyone who complains about affirmative action is beyond the pale."
There have in fact been quite a few critics of affirmative action who have been invited to and employed in universities.
"Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza, naturally. We should destroy Israel!"
This... doesn't even appear to be citing a double standard, it's just throwing out a strawman point you disagree with.
You seem to be conflating actual university speech policies with views that may inform how popular one is with their peers on campus. This is largely unavoidable, holding views that others dislike tends to have consequences, conservatives have been whining about this for years.
Wasn’t a global warming expert disinvited from giving a talk at Berkeley because he had previously expressed disagreement with affirmative action? And at UCLA a would-be spousal hire was not hired following a petition calling attention to comments he made criticizing mandatory DEI statements. So it seems attitudes like these *are* beyond the pale in some sectors of academia.
> Wasn’t a global warming expert disinvited from giving a talk at Berkeley because he had previously expressed disagreement with affirmative action?
MIT. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/20/us/dorian-abbot-mit.html
I stand corrected! Thanks.
“We were actually doing him a favor by disinviting him”? Weak, dude, very weak. On the off-chance you’re sincerely confused about what “beyond the pale” means, it means considered unacceptable. Abbot’s criticism of affirmative action caused MIT (not Berkeley as I wrongly said earlier) to change its mind about having him speak on an unrelated topic; clearly, his views were beyond the pale for them. That other people were rightly appalled by this approach to academic discourse and made a stink about it in no way affects whether or not MIT judged his statements to be beyond the pale. (Incidentally, since you brought up the scope of the problem…could we agree that advancing knowledge of global warming is an effort that shouldn’t be given up lightly?)
I also notice you didn’t address the example I gave with major material consequences. Maybe that NYU law student who got her job offer rescinded should be grateful for the free publicity too?
And yet the festival happened.
FWIW, that sounds really bad, and I am against it. Also, the festival happened *before* 10/7 as far as I can tell, making the pushback even less explicable:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/25/business/palestine-writes-literature-festival-what-happened/index.html
I think you're wrong to extrapolate that to the congressional hearings though. If that's all it was, I don't think any of what came next would have happened.
This just reads to me like the usual progression: 1) it's not really happening. 2) it's happening, but it's not a big deal. 3) it's a good thing, actually. 4) people freaking out about it are the real problem.
You are on step 2. To avoid progressing to step 3, do you agree it's bad for a speaker to be disinvited over anodyne views on a completely unrelated subject?
If you weren't trying to say he was done a favor, what is the relevance of him being made into a cause celebre? All that proves is that something that is not beyond the pale in the broader discourse *is* beyond the pale in an academic context.
This also fits the familiar pattern where skeptics of campus censoriousness ask for examples, but then dismiss the examples because the subjects became prominent. Obviously the most familiar examples are going to be the ones that were most prominent!
The set of "faculty members in the US" is not the one to measure against to determine whether these attitudes are beyond the pale in academia. The relevant set is faculty members who have expressed these attitudes: are there examples of faculty members publicly expressing opposition to affirmative action but being able to go on delivering talks, etc., as before? That is what would be necessary to show that there is not a censoriousness problem, especially since one aspect of the problem would be faculty members avoiding expressing these attitudes for fear of professional consequences.
Finally, maybe I was too oblique before: what is your opinion of the case of Yoel Inbar, who stood to receive an offer as a spousal hire before graduate students organized a petition demanding he not be hired because of his previous criticisms of DEI statements?
This is a very good essay. It does a great job of explaining the nuances in this debate using data. I especially liked the analogy to Kang's "lonliest Americans" concept w.r.t. Asian-Americans, which I found very helpful in explaining how Jewish people feel about this topic. Thanks to Prof. al-Gharbi for writing.
The large majority of students and faculty are not protesting or speaking out on either side of the issue. It's the loud minority that gets media attention.
Obviously most people don't attend protests. Most Trump voters also didn't rush the capitol. But way more supported the action.. and even if that is still a minority should we ignore political/ethnic calls to violence if it's only from a small group?
What I am telling you, because I know my classmates, is that in this case, way more did not support the action. The vast majority of students are focused on their classes and social lives, not Israel-Palestine.
Yea but that's obvious, for literally anything. And as I stated in my analogy, that's irrelevant.
I don't think anyone is arguing there is a concern about anti semitism on college campuses specifically because the majority of students participate in it. You obviously don't need a majority or even a plurality. Even tepid support by faculty is massive (look at the effect of trump on the crazies)
It is in fact quite relevant as popular discourse vastly overstates the size of the group in question. What al-Gharbi does is point out how small this group actually is, using data, which should inform how people weigh this issue and the appropriate response.
This point can be made about every bad thing in America.
So it’s this kind of thinking : “The point you trying to land against my peeps may have some truth to it but it’s a small minority of people and therefore should not be worrisome. But my concerns about your sides small minority of trouble makers is valid and should be taken very, very seriously.”
Rod, I have a much better sense than you do of what things are and are not true when it comes to campus controversy in the Ivy League.
You should think carefully about whether you would support applying the same “silence is violence” standard to other controversies. Sometimes people simply don’t have much to contribute to a debate and would rather sit it out.
This talk of moral duty is the same argument used to pressure people to make statements supporting BLM or opposing Trump, by saying that if you don't publicly express one view, you're tacitly supporting the other. That argument was stupid when it came to BLM and Trump and it is stupid here, too. Faculty electing not to endorse a particular side does not mean they automatically support the opposite side. They may simply feel that they don't have anything useful or novel to contribute to the debate, or they may prefer to stay away from a sensitive subject. Again, think very carefully about whether you want to set a norm of faculty being pushed to accept "their duty of moral leadership" when it comes to contentious debates. The reason tenure exists is to free faculty from these kinds of pressures.
Maybe the prime example of the aphorism "the plural of anecdote is not data."
Also, this comment to me is a prime example of how smart phones are creating a gigantic "Streisand effect" on almost everything. Please go look at these protests more closely and see just how few people are protesting at lot of these things. Will not defend the uglier incidents of protestors harassing random Jewish passersby. But making a claim that this represents some common sentiment among college students at large is literally refuted by the data presented by the author and lived experiences of colleges students, like you know, Milan.
You are aware that this comments section is paywalled and private and read by precisely one other person I know from school and only because she works here?
The number of people in this country who think college students who scared to death to express non super left thoughts out loud is wild.
Yes, actually, because—and I cannot stress this enough—I actually know my classmates. They're real, normal people, not the media caricature of wild-eyed leftist students. I also know how the Internet works and I would bet a large sum that none of my classmates are conducting opposition research on me.
I agree that we should all calm down about a lot of stuff.
As Mohammad famously said “Just chill bro, here, paint a cool picture of me, no one will be offended by that”
brilliant!
I strongly want to avoid “spaces wherein victimhood serves as a form of social currency.” It is much better to attract envy than compassion, better to be strong than weak and better to be rich than poor. Sympathy is a poor consolation prize. Kids these days should ween themselves off of it.
I want to emphasize: literally 100% of Jews I know - on campus, off campus, liberal, conservative, religious, atheist, etc. - wants exactly that. Just get this dumb ideology out. We don’t want it.
In the *absence* of an actual solution? Sure we’ll take the same protection that every nominally oppressed group gets, just so that the system isn’t weaponized against us. But I have not met a single Jew that wants to keep this broken ideology-cum-lawsuit protection strategy around. And I know a lot of Jews.
I am generally sympathetic towards the weak and poor. I am befuddled why upper middle class liberals are so eager for sympathy. Maybe it’s a cheap form of egalitarianism. Maybe if one checks enough victim boxes, you don’t need to feel so bad about your trust fund/fancy degree/closet full of nice clothes.
I feel sympathy for Palestinians because most of their lives suck. I do not want to play the natural lottery in Gaza, precisely because most Gazans’ lives suck. If I get sick, I would like sympathy and compassion. I would much rather not get sick. If I go bankrupt, I would like sympathy and compassion, but much better to avoid that too.
This is not difficult.
The Palestinians can't invest in education, governance systems and engage in liberal democratic norms?
Peaceful victimhood is debilitating. Weaponized victimhood is deadly.
pfffft
Plus fifty points for extensive documentation - not just graphs, but links, and tons of them. Super important when making empirical statements, unexpected for me (not that SB is particularly bad or anything, just it's hardly the norm in general), you love to see it. Most serious and polished guest post by far.
Minus twenty five for, I think, not laying a strong enough definitional foundation. It's odd for a piece about misunderstanding antisemitism to not...actually define what antisemitism means, exactly. Can't clearly define a thing only by stating what it's not. Nor do I feel comfortable going by the ADL's particular goalposts, for the same reason I distrust other legacy bastions one would have looked to in the past for such guidance (SPLC, ACLU, etc). At this point the entire framework of "hate crime/hate speech" feels like just another unwinnable skirmish between Team Metis and Team Episteme.
Even taking those assumptions at face value though - I dunno, man, maybe that really is true in terms of the macro picture. But it's still weird and uncomfortable and, yeah, kinda scary to encounter Hamas apologia from otherwise-sane atheist liberal friends and acquaintances. The same people I usually expect to bet on The Right Side of History and all that, who seem to be making a weird exception to the usual rule of not supporting anachronistic sabre-rattling theocracies. Kills me a little inside every time I see a "Queers For Palestine" sticker or somesuch. As you note, such lonely fears do tend to get dismissed, and that's not helpful. Compassion isn't a zero-sum resource, we should have an abundance agenda for that too...
I don’t think I’ve seen anyone point this out: Al-Gharbi says “the more college Americans get, the more positive views they have on Israel” and includes a chart showing that adults with more education have more positive views of Israel. But this includes people who went to college as far back as the 60’s! Anti-Israel campus protests are most associated with the Second Intifada and following, and sure enough, Al-Gharbi’s chart shows that younger people today have more negative views of Israel. Are younger college students *today* graduating with significantly better views of Israel than their non-college peers?
Exactly, this is an intentionally misleading statistic our good professor is touting. Sample Gen Z and millennials and you’ll see what leftist indoctrination does to people. You get the utter stupidity of ‘progressives’ shilling for Hamas.
Great guest post. I thought one of the key parts of this entire post was the author pointing out that college campuses are overwhelmingly populated by people who vote Democratic or even farther left than Democratic. What that means is almost by definition if you are going to encounter people with problematic views on literally anything, it’s likely going to come from someone on the more left side of the spectrum given how unlikely it is you’re going to encounter anyone at all with right leaning views (seems especially true at elite schools). I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest the type of people who are more right wing on campuses are extremely unlikely to be the type to engage in protest or loud demonstrations about anything.
I actually think this related to my point about how much having major news publications based on NYC or DC skews coverage (and specifically coverage of these protests since October 7th). Reporters work in cities where overwhelmingly people with extreme views are more lefty. Hence an extraordinary coverage of randos protesting restaurants where if you look real closely, you can see just how few people are actually protesting.
This is the best guest piece in a long time because it brings data and research Matt didn’t have the time to do.
You mean data and research that Ben and Maya didn’t have time to do
Do you know many Fox News viewers. I've lived among them, this thread does not reflect anything like how a Fox News audience would respond.
This author presented an argument that anti-Semitism isn't much of a problem here in America. A number of commenters found his argument either inaccurate or inadequate. With maybe one exception I haven't seen anyone trot out the normal reactionary shibboleths that you would get from the audience you hypothesize. There are no claims of anti-Americanism, no claims that the author supports terrorism, no claim they've been either brainwashed or bought off. It's generally been a discussion and disagreement with the author's conclusions.
I’ve watched it for ethnographic reasons.
"...I view it as an imperative to stand with other “people of the book” — especially when they face persecution on the basis of their identity as Jews or Christians."
I assume the book in question is "One Billion Abrahamians"?
Incidentally, I have a hard time parsing what that statement means, particularly what it means for there to be an "imperative to stand with other "people of the book"". It's either chauvinist or meaningless, and neither is a great sign.
That’s a decent summary of biblical Judaism in a lot of ways - just one long overarching campaign and screed against paganism and all that that entails. Success = the world is if not monotheist at least not polytheist (the OT doesn’t really relate to atheism directly.) Combine that with God’s promises to Abraham in particular to have tons of offspring who influence the world etc. and yeah I’d say “the book in question” could be nicknamed One Billion Abrahamians.
I think this this all basically directionally correct. The left populist/critical theory crowd come to their antipathy for the Israeli state along a different path from classical antisemitism. The problem is that the Venn diagram of the functional reality of "left oppressed/oppressor analysis of the Israeli state" and "Jewish space lasers" is basically a circle. It's not actually that important how you reach your conspiratorial beliefs about an elite cabal of zionists manipulating global affairs. Especially when they seemingly exist thoroughly intermingled within the same political coalition.
I'm not a particularly big fan of Israel. Religious Ethno-states are bad, but Israel is probably the least bad religious ethno-state out there, including all of their neighbors, let alone what Hamas wants to replace it with. Being especially preoccupied with the misdeeds of Israel is a bit of a tell. To the extent they are the "oppressors" it's because they're the only shitty religious ethno-state in the region that actually tries not to be terrible and they're the most successful crab in that bucket as a result.
I think you're overlooking a big reason why we might be especially preoccupied with the misdeeds of Isreal.
Republican party candidates in previous elections have repeatedly said that "there must be no daylight between Israel's policies and ours" mean that I care much more about Israel's policies as a result, because they can affect our own so strongly.
What policies exactly do they effect so strongly? Like, I tend to think the whole strategic significance of the region is pretty overblown, but I'm also at a bit of a loss as to what anyone thinks we might be doing differently if decided to let Israel off the leash.
Fair question.
The rhetoric may be more than the practice.
Practice: We provide a fair amount of monetary support (~3.8 billion a year nowadays) to them. That's not a lot for our budget but it also was a sticking point when trying to get money for Ukraine - plenty of Republicans wanted additional funding for Israel as a condition. So it has an outsized influence on our policies.
I would also say, why it's the most sympathetic country to me in the area, our near-unconditional support has warped our dealings with other countries in the area.
Also, Netanyahu in particular has exercised a lot of influence in our presidential elections, IIRC he really tried to swing things towards Trump with his support (probably related to Republican rhetoric).
My personal perception of our policy towards Israel is that we basically throw them symbolic votes in the UN and enough aid/security guarantees to avoid them feeling the need to take more... escalatory measures to secure their borders. At least in my lifetime, we've done a lot more to protect Israel's neighbors from war with them than the other way around.
I don't know if I agree that's correct but I agree it's definitely possible.
Not really. Israel won its early wars without help from us, built its own nukes, and developed the Iron Dome technology on its own (we later invested, largely because we wanted the tech). Our aid is much less than people imagine - about 1% of Israel's GDP, which they're required to spend on US arms manufacturers. They're happy to take it, but they don't really need it.
Your last paragraph reminded me of one of my favorite pieces of short fiction (oddly enough , published in Reason Magazine, which generally doesn't print fiction) called, "The Tale of Many Jerusalems" by Charles Paul Freund: https://reason.com/2002/11/01/the-tale-of-many-jerusalems-2/printer/
Couple thoughts.
First, like others, I think one analytical problem with this article is that it spends almost no time thinking about what antisemitism is and how it works at the conceptual level. But you need to do that to validate the metrics you're using.
Second, while explicit antisemitic attitudes of the sort this article looks at may not represent widespread views, they can still be sufficiently visible and threatening to matter a lot. It's not irrational for Jews to worry about the views of a minority of people when those views often result in harassment and violence.
I think the most pertinent part of this piece is various theories of victimhood becoming currency among the educated and upwardly mobile classes. Beyond the irony of it is the distortion in perception it creates about the world people are living in. Essentially if you are an American expressing these kinds of views you can probably rest assured that you are among the safest and most well off people in history, i.e. the exact opposite of what the ideology says.
Becoming currency, and specifically becoming currency that purchases legitimation among the educated and upwardly mobile for the views of the uneducated and bigoted who can nonetheless tick the right identity boxes. The prototype for non-Republican antisemitism in the USA is Louis Farrakhan.
Yes it does. The ideology informs us that wealthy BIPOC and LGBTQIA2S+ Americans are still victims of systemic racism, sexism, etc. Just look at the reactions to Claudine Gay leaving Harvard. She's unquestionably an elite, yet many people are claiming that her removal is because of racism.
They wield it all the time, most often to gain a credibility that’s difficult to get otherwise.
Heh yea sure, that's totally what's happening.
' “kids these days.” However, those narratives are demonstrably incorrect.'
Well...at UMass Amherst...I don't call it 'anti-semitism', I call it what it is: Jew Hatred. There is an immense amount of it, our son who is a student there, has experienced it from his first day there.
[As well as in 4 schools in Massachusetts (ie grammar school, middle school, and 2 high schools)]
I've gone, as backup, to some of the demonstrations there, and hearing the calls of death to Jews, and 'oppressors / colonisers / settlers'...to say that this isn't going on — that's blindness.
Not to mention the Cox Communications heir in Western Mass who is funding all kinds of not just anti-Israel demonstrations, but targeting Jewish owned businesses.
To write this off as yet another moral panic that another professor of sociology can patronize me about — it puts all of your work, all of your credentials, and also, our host's credentials and work (hi Matt) — into serious question. Why don't we go together to an SJP meeting, and I'll show you what it is to be a JEW, I'll show you the 'demonstrable correctness'. And also, since you'll be standing with me, I'll also show you how to fend off physical violence. .
1.8 billion Muslims in the world, 3.5 billion Christians; % of humans who are bigoted; vs 15 million Jews. How's your math?
How many windows of Jewish owned shops have been busted in Amherst? How does this compare to the number and proportion of Asian owned shops gutted during the 2020 riots? Why are you so eager to be a victim? Jewish Americans are one of the richest and most educated minorities in human history. They are subject to rates of violent crime similar to those in Western Europe or Canada. Stop competing in the intersectionality olympics, because you’re gonna lose.
You miss my point. I'm not in competition, I've annihilated any impediments to me personally and to my family. As I learned from my Shoah surviving teachers.
And also, in my mid 60s, originally a New Yorker, there has never been a time where there hasn't been some serious anti-semitism. I work in the building trades, mostly in NYC, and it's all over. But sure, it's almost equal opportunity bigotry, only a slight uptick for Jews. In a close 2nd place, wells all you have to do is look at the Wikipedia entries for 'ethnic slurs'. I've heard most of them regularly, from every social and financial strata.
With regard to your comment about broken windows: not in Amherst, and not broken windows, but alls you have to do is a little following of the 'story' about the Cox kid, and you will find some targeted Jewish stores. Busted windows is too weak a metric; there's far more crummy ways to intimidate peoples, and it's happening. Though the Cox heir moved to the middle east just recently, though his organization continues here.
I hold the idiosyncratic opinion that boycotts are bad precisely because they are an escalation in the direction of violence, but it sounds like you're stealing valor here. I *think* you're talking about James Chambers: what exactly are you accusing him of? What acts?
I dont see a provision in substack for DMs but i haven't dug that deep; if there is one, ping me, and let's talk.
>How many windows of Jewish owned shops have been busted in Amherst?
Guy, neo-Nazis were graffitying crap about the Protocols on the walls of shops in Amherst in 2010.
"To write this off as yet another moral panic"
Al-Gharbi's piece doesn't use the words "moral panic" anywhere. It claims that even though there is an intense shift towards anti-semitism/Jew-Hatred/⟨insert your favorite term here⟩ in some places, that intense shift has not made *most* university campuses anti-semitic, nor the *modal place in America* anti-semitic. It's unfortunate that you and your son happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but that doesn't make your terrible experience *typical*.
There's something profoundly concerning and bizarre in writing a ~4,000 word article explaining to Jews why they are overreacting to antisemitism that does not mention the massive post-October 7 surge in hate crimes against Jews. The closest you get is talking about "the rise in antisemitic bias incidents since October 7". This is paired with more active language with you stating that there are "increased attacks and harassment directed towards Muslims."
I read Matt Yglesias because he is an unconventionally original and thought-provoking writer, but sometimes he is simply wrong
This piece wasn't written by Matt though.
I'm perfectly aware of that, however it reflects Matt's view on the topic.