I'm an elderly Jewish-American. A point mentioned (but not emphasized) in your essay is the decline in antisemitism in the US. When my father was a kid, quotas were routine, Jews were simply excluded from some professions, and there were towns where it was understood that Jews would not be permitted after dark. Progress happens.
Definitely I think the period from 1930-2010 saw a clear decline of antisemitism. Growing up in the 1990s/2000s, I did not encounter anti-Semitism in the same way my grandparents did.
The question is if the period 2010-2024 saw a bit of a reversal of this trend. And that's a separate quesiton.
Yes, a somewhat different question, but contemporary pundits sometimes disregard massive long-term trend lines to focus on short-term changes. This can lead to unwarranted catstrophism.
Spot on. As this article so well explains, anti-semitism is just hard to measure. And I feel like part of the debate over this past year has just been really personalized to the individual.
Saying that, as a Jewish person, I’ve really just never experienced personal anti-semitism in my life. Although, I recognize that over the past year that’s changed for a lot of people.
I have not experienced any serious or egregious anti-Semitism, aside from a handful of stupid comments that people have made to me and some negative interactions online.
With that being said, I don't walk around with a kippah or tzitzit or other outward indicators of my Jewishness or level of religiosity. I also don't have a Hebrew accent when I speak. So I also understand that other Jews may encounter antisemitism or experience it differently than I do.
I've had the same experience of a secular Jew. While I really haven't experienced any serious anti-semitism the following sentence resonated with me: "Many Americans hold warm feelings towards Jews while simultaneously holding antisemitic beliefs about Jewish power." Even some of my closest friends who were in my wedding believe things like "Jews control Hollywood" and conspiracies about George Soros. I genuinely don't think they're antisemitic but they also spouting off well known anti-semitic tropes.
Are conspiracies about George Soros really antisemitic? It seems that extremely wealthy individuals who get involved in politics attract conspiracy theories. Cheney and Koch also attract weird theories.
Those tropes have totally been heard in my lifetime, from the mouths of people of all colors, a little more from people who are not strictly white than white, but yeah. And there is *something* to many stereotypes. I heard Solomon "Solly" Perel, the real-life protagonist of the film, "Europa, Europa" who was a Jewish boy in WWII Poland who portrayed himself falsely on capture as an ethnic German orphan and spent time in the Hitler Youth, speak at the Hillel Center on my Campus when I was in college. He said that even his internalized youthful Nazi resurfaces at times when he sees the credits on trashy, violent or exploitive film or TV and he sees Jewish names, with his internal dialogue being "a-ha, I knew it would be Jewish Director, Producer".
One of the bolder lines from Warren Beatty's late 90s agitprop comedy film, Bulworth, had the character, who acted as a mouthpiece for Beatty's real-life political opinions, mention "Jewish paranoia". I thought he would get some noticeable crap for that in the media. But none that I ever saw or heard. Probably because Jewish people of certain generations just adored that guy. The women wanting to be with him and the men wanting to be him.
I think it's when you know a specific Jewish person, it's obvious that they aren't going to meetings to conspire against you. But it's easy to hold a separate, unrelated belief that doesn't track with the first.
I dated a working class guy from Connecticut, and he was antisemitic (by the time he figured out I was Jewish, and I figured out that he cared, we were already serious). His family was casually racist towards a lot of groups. I once played Scrabble with the family and one player put down the n-word.
I feel like (again) this related to the point I keep making about recent crime rise (and importantly its apparent recent fall). Crime rise circa 2017-2022 was very real. It also remains true that crime was historically low even in 2022. And the reason I make that point is the great phrase you used “unwarranted catastrophism”. Because making an issue like crime rise worse than it is can lead stuff like people saying we need to turn back bail reform (when the evidence linking bail reform to crime rise is dubious at best) or people like Tom Cotton advocating bringing back 80s style drug wars. Or the big one, convincing people that maybe we need fake tough guy Trump to “crack some heads”.
Many crucial measures of human welfare have improved dramatically in the past 200 years. We need to keep this in mind when addressing contemporary problems.
Both halves of your perspective ring true for me from hearing my (non-practicing) 80+ year old father's experiences with high school and college life and biased military evaluations from the 50s and 60s. He was neither Jewish practicing, nor looking, nor sounding, nor "acting", but it had impacts I noticed by keeping count how Jewish-correlated his social/friendship ties were. And it tracks with own childhood K-12 experience mainly in the 80s, as a semi-Semite (Protestant mom), school, friendship circles hardly Jewish correlated, mostly benign references to Judaism and Jewishness when it came up, but with the occasional, "why do they/you think they're so special/chosen" kind of negative/questioning undertone coming up every once in a long while, especially in reference to very loud or unassimilated assertions of Jewish identity. Plus, there was occasional news hype (completely unaffecting me personally, but once or twice reported via anecdote from relatives, about Jewish-black tensions, that seemed related to mutually dashed expectations since the 60s)
And I guess boychick Ben Krauss, a generation younger me, who's felt a softball experience, is on the other side of progress/insulation, young enough to be your grandson or my son.
Maybe it's just a consequence of my own not-really-traumatized childhood, but I was left with a residual sense of antisemitic danger, and a strong feeling that the best way to avoid the danger is to be forgiving, and to avoid making a big deal of things that aren't. Not meaning to "blame the victim," but IMHO minorities will potentially be at the mercy of the majority, and accordingly it seems unwise to insult the majority, except in gentle terms in extreme circumstances.
Two anecdata points. My father was in the Air Force in wwll, recalled whooping and hollering celebrating “that Jew Rosenfeld”’s death because they figured we’d pull out of the the war, my mom’s older cousin was rejected at Radcliffe in ~1950 was told during the admissions interview that her academic record was too strong, and because there was a Jewish quota Jewish students from closer to the middle of the distribution would get admitted so they didn’t monopolize all the awards. Oh, and my grandfather started his own law firm with two other recent grads in 1922 because the fancy firms in nyc didn't take any/many Jews
For most Jewish Americans in 2024, these are weird stories from antiquity, but yeah. We need to appreciate how far our society has progressed toward "liberty and justice for all" in the past century.
Throughout this debate about whether we're witnessing elevated levels of antisemitism in the US, I've found that my answer is... I don't actually care.
"Antisemitism" is too amorphous a term that leaves us arguing over the definition all day long. We lump together distinct attitudes held by people on different points of the political spectrum. There are even some definitions that would include attitudes held by a large number of young Jews!
I can describe what's upsetting me without making any reference to antisemitism. There's a war going on between the armies of radical Islam and the Jewish state. Where I live, the Islamists' supporters consist mostly of (1) hard-line Arab nationalists and (2) leftists (some of whom are Jewish themselves).
(1) will occasionally taunt or intimidate Jews, and they know exactly what they're doing. Example 1: Chanting "from the river to the sea" at a vigil for those killed on October 7th at a school where I was teaching (translation in Arabic: "From the water to the water, Palestine is Arab/Muslim"). Example 2: Physically preventing Jewish students from getting to class (without interference by the administration) at MIT...
(2) will simply do whatever seems aligned with the interests of (1). The college students mostly don't know what's going on. Less so for the media/NGOs/etc. See, for instance, Amnesty International's recent sad post about the "Palestinian writer" (actually a terrorist with blood on his hands) who died in an Israeli prison last week.
I don't know if any of these behaviors are antisemitic. I don't need to know in order to understand that these people are my enemies. Moreover, in this moment, I have no idea why anyone would care if somewhere far, far away there are some right-wingers who hold highly offensive but unrelated attitudes about the relationship between Jews and immigration.
This post searching for a definition of antisemitism reminded me of a joke by the comedian Shane Gillis on racism. He says something like "racism isn't a binary, it's not you have it or you don't. It's more like being hungry. You could be not hungry all day and then a cheeseburger cuts you off on the highway, and suddenly you're hungry".
So I think I agree with what you're saying, but I'd add my. own spin to it which is that surveys attempting to tease out subconscious biases from random poll respondents who might barely think about Jews at all doesn't seem very important to me. The more important studies are probably on "who are these people taking antisemitic actions right now?"
"...subconscious biases from random poll respondents who might barely think about Jews at all doesn't seem very important to me."
Right. I think people in the PMC underrate the extent to which many people have no opinions on Jewish people (or Judaism) at all. My family was firmly blue-collar, but before I reached the age of ten I lived on both coasts and the south, and I don't think I knew of one stereotype, either positive or negative, about Jewish people before I was like 11 or 12, and I wasn't, like a sheltered child. I observed racism for sure, but it was always across color lines....when I finally met someone who was actually anti-semitic, it was a wild concept to me.
As someone firmly ensconced in that ivory tower, the idea that I ought to have thoughts about Jewish people one way or the other has never not been wild to me. It's like asking me my opinion about the color green or the number five (I hope these colors and numbers have not been quietly appropriated by rightist weirdos).
I disagree. Jews both as a race and as a religion are interesting. They manage to consistently raise high performing offspring. Racially, they have (on average) markedly high IQ. And as a religion, they seem markedly less inclined to blindly follow dogma and more inclined to engage in internal debate about what the “Big Guy” might actually want.
Certainly, Judaism is the heritage of a disproportionate share of out loud and proud atheists and secular humanists in western civ, rather than more passive atheists or agnostics who figure why talk about things they don't believe in, or are not sure about.
I have no idea what you are trying to say here: That secular people of jewish descent tend to be a certain flavor of atheist??? If so, this seems to be largely to orthogonal to the entirety of my post....
like Hawaiian shirts, or the thumb-forefinger "OK" sign?
But then that one provocateur (a black guy) tried to goad a white truck driver into making that OK sign, and got him fired from white supremacist symbology?
I had a pretty similar experience growing up in a rural area but with a funny twist: I grew up not realizing that Mel Brooks, et al were doing Jewish comedy specifically. So I had a lot of yiddish in my vocabulary which would one day lead to someone very annoyed at me because they thought I was Jewish. These were, to me, just among the many words I'd learned from mass media.
Ha, this reminds me of a King of the Hill episode where the kid (Bobby?) meets a retired couple living in Arizona, but the way they talk is the way Jews from NY would talk. He took on their way of speech and would say "That's so Arizona." when he heard someone make a similar comment. For some reason, this whole thing struck my family as really funny, and my kids would say "That's so Arizona," for quite a while.
I had kind of a funny experience like this growing up.
I went to a high school with a relatively large proportion of Jewish students, perhaps 15% of the student body. I noticed that several of my Jewish classmates occasionally wore t-shirts that said "J Crew" on them. I had no idea that J Crew was a clothing brand, I assumed they had gotten these shirts at religious events and the "J" was short for "Jew" or "Jewish."
As an American, I'm allowed and encouraged to use loan-words from anywhere. It's part of being a mercantile and assimilative culture. Just like French has the finest vocabulary for cookery so I borrow those words when cooking, Yiddish has the finest vocabulary for insults so I borrow those words when it's time to insult someone.
As a kid, the kind of socially forward but socially awkward thing you get out of Mel Brooks and, especially, Larry David really struck a chord with me as someone who is both very good in social situations but also in a full scale panic about them just minutes before.
When I was growing up Seattle had a very small Jewish population. I was also pretty unaware of who in pop culture was Jewish until I was in my teens in part because I had so little exposure to Jewish culture that I didn't understand the the references to make the connection. I rewatched goonies a few years ago and realize that Chunk is as obviously a Jewish character as anyone in Fiddler on the Roof complete with davens – in Hebrew (“Baruch ata …”) and forced confession that he took his Uncle Max’s toupee and glued it on his face when he played Moses in his Hebrew school play. But as a kid, I didn't register that Chuck was Jewish at all.
Seattle now how a much larger Jewish population and my daughter has lots of Jewish friends and neighbors. We have visited their temple regularly to see bat mitzvah readings, concerts, and Purim parties. My daughter knows not only a decent amount of Yiddish but enough Hebrew that she was the one who taught one of her best friends the prayers to sing at Chanukah each night when she decided she wanted to start exploring her Jewish roots and her non-practicing dad couldn't remember the words. She 100% recognized explicitly Jewish humor and views it as a cultural asset that Jewish people have added to the American cultural mix.
It has made me realize how much of my understanding of Jewishness when I was a kid was basically holocaust sympathy that focused on Jews simply as objects of persecution and not as a fully living dynamic cultural group in the way that I understood my Chinese American or Black neighbors to be. As a result, I think my understanding of antisemitism at the time was pretty much limited to "people shouldn't want to kill or hurt Jews" which is obviously true but a lot less robust that my view of anti-racism which would have included that my Chinese and Black neighbors should be explicitly welcomed and included as equals in our community and that includes not only recognition of past persecution but celebration and understanding of their cultural contributions and resiliency and what that adds to our community.
I am glad that my daughter at age 9 could be dressing up for a friend's Purim party and make comments like "What do you think Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are dressing as for Purim this year? You are suppose to dress as what you are not they ought to go as an actual Feminist and an actual mensch." I would have utterly lacked the cultural context to make that joke at that age and I was the worse for it.
Interesting anecdote. Is there any data to support the claim that Seattle has gotten more Jewish over your lifetime?
My experience growing up in Seattle (born in mid 1980s) was very Jewish. I attended Jewish schools from pre-K through 12th grade, although I am aware that most Jewish students in Seattle didn't attend such schools. Certainly, the "Jewish experience" was there for families that wanted it. Tuition at Seattle Jewish private schools has always been heavily subsidized by wealthy, local Jewish donors. Seattle Hebrew Academy was founded in 1947.
I was born in the mid-1970s and have lived in Seattle my whole life. My parents had friends who were ethnically Jewish but very few if any were practicing and most were married to non-Jewish spouses. My sense that Seattle has become more Jewish in my lifetime was pretty experiencial. But your question got me wondering how true that impression was. Found this article from 2015 in the Tablet indicating that Seattle's population had grown by 70% from 2000-2015. Didn't seen anything more recent but that actually lines up pretty well with the time that I would have said that I noticed the most growth. I don't think that there is any reason to suspect that the trends would be different.
The most recent census data indicates that the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue Metro area is still only 1.6% even after all this growth with is less that the percentage of the US population overall and significantly lower that most other cities our size. With a population percentage that small people are going to definitely have different levels of exposure depending on where they live, go to school, and work. But It is also large enough that if you were in Jewish schools and observant, I am sure it would feel much larger.
I actually grew up in an area near Northgate's mosque and about 25% of the neighbors on my block were Muslim, mostly Pakistani. My daughter goes to a school with a large percentage of East African immigrants and a significant percentage of the school is Muslim and she has several friends who were hijabs to school. So neither of us have grown up with a lived reality that matches up with the reality that Seattle is less than 1% Muslim.
In sixth grade, I met my "first Jew" when a girl in our upper-middle SoCal suburb joined our little clique. Somehow I picked up that she was a bit culturally different and was fascinated. Since then I've been tracing the Jewish threads of European culture and thought. After the Spaniards kicked out the Muslims, Jewish culture was the only major contrast to Christian culture in Europe. This of course has lead to unthinkable tragedy, but at the same time it's hard to imagine our current lives without it.
This was absolutely true of me as a kid. If you're raised in a Christian milieu the concept doesn't make a lot of intuitive sense, so you just treat the category "Jewish" as "someone who practices Judaism." The Jewish kids in class were the ones who celebrated Hanukkah, that was it.
That's a very good point. I recall Yglesias wrote about how understanding prejudice as a more temperamental thing has gone out of fashion with discussing social inequalities. Social inequalities are of enormous interest in a prosperous multiethnic middle class society. But while not everyone is a policymaker, and most policies cannot immediately shift inequalities within the framework of small-l liberalism, everyone does face a temptation to prejudice or race arrogance. Discussing those terms might actually help us focus in on what we worry about the most.
I basically agree with this. The article does an admirable job detailing how antisemitism is a varied and bipartisan thing. The phenomena that is newer and growing seems to be the young/leftist embrace of Palestinian nationalism. It seems absolutely deranged to me, but it's as much a phenomena of bizarro world cross-sectional identity politics as it is antisemitic. It's definitely bad, the Palestinian nationalist project is clearly much darker than the Israeli one, even if I'm happy to handwring over both of them being inherently somewhat illiberal and bad.
"The phenomena that is newer and growing seems to be the young/leftist embrace of Palestinian nationalism. It seems absolutely deranged to me, but it's as much a phenomena of bizarro world cross-sectional identity politics as it is antisemitic. It's definitely bad, the Palestinian nationalist project is clearly much darker than the Israeli one,"
Embrace of Palestinian nationalism is scarcely more deranged than any other variety of "underdog-ism". That's what it is, another form of underdogism. Perhaps reflexive, perhaps mindless, perhaps well-considered, or perhaps personally informed.
Left-leaning American youth who embrace Palestinian nationalism know they and their families are paying taxes that support Israeli violence and repression against Palestinians, and they don't like it, and are taking a stand against it. That the violence, and certainly the hatred, is not just a one-way street from Israelis to Palestinians, and that Israelis may have some excuses, or even justifications of varying validity for their violent and repressive actions matters much less to them than it does to you, that's all. They believe in the Stan Lee/Spiderman doctrine, "With great power comes great responsibility", so when they identify the more powerful actor, they hold them responsible for pretty much everything, and when they identify the much less powerful actor, the underdog, they let quite a lot slide.
Palestinian nationalism and Palestinian patriotism isn't entirely dark. There's a historic tradition of Arabic speakers and local Christians and Muslims going back centuries, and it has coalesced into a national identity specific to the Palestine Mandate's borders, with overflow to Jordan, since the end of the Ottoman Empire, becoming real thing by the late 20th century and 21st century even if Arab Christian/Muslim identity as Palestinian and only Palestinian may not have mattered any more than religious, Ottoman, Arab, or Greater Syrian identities beforehand. You can never disprove a nationalism, or patriotism, by calling it too young, too old, too discontinuous, or historically unjustified. I say this for the same reasons I say "Israel is real" as a retort to complaints about Israel's synthetic, artificial, or "externally-imposed" origins. Palestinians can be proud they've kept a national communal identity, in Israel even while holding Israeli citizenship, in the occupied territories as stateless subjects, and as stateless refugees, migrants or foreign citizens abroad. They've been under the rule of a government that treats them separately and unequally, not just political rights, but personal property rights and safety often taking second place to preferences of Jewish Israeli citizens and state agents. It's only a dark (not physically) minority of the Israeli/Zionist project that has looked genocide or mass expulsion in the face in times of comparative peace and security (or "normalcy") and said, "yeah, let's do that", but some do that and get appointed to high office. And some multiple of that have long wished Palestinians would emigrate of their own accord and those abroad would forget ties to the land. But the Palestinians can be proud they haven't given in to the pressure. Can Palestinians be proud of everything done in their name? No. But that they take a licking and haven't passively folded into inert subjects or exiles without a homeland? Absolutely, they can be proud they stood up to that agenda to get pushed down or out.
I think there's always a strain of illiberalism in leftists, especially young ones. The Palestine Liberation project was also embraced by the Black Panthers. The underlying attraction to violence and oppression (just with the pyramid flipped) always repelled me, and predisposed me to be more sympathetic to Israel before I knew that much about the conflict.
"Moreover, in this moment, I have no idea why anyone would care if somewhere far, far away there are some right-wingers who hold highly offensive but unrelated attitudes about the relationship between Jews and immigration."
They're not as far away as you seem to think. They're a substantial portion of the population and hold SUBSTANTIALLY more electoral power in this country than the tiny population of Arabs and people who identify as "far left."
This argument is only ever made by people seeking to deflect attention from the Islamists’ sympathizers. (This group incidentally has quite a bit of intellectual and cultural power that the right sorely lacks, and Biden certainly seems to believe that mollifying the Arab street is key to his electoral fortunes.) I’ve never met a Jew who responded to this moment by saying “forget about Hamas, now is the time to think about Nazis in Montana who hold more Congressional seats.”
It’s ok to have more than one enemy. One’s enemies may even differ vastly in their strength. Right now we’re dealing with the jihadists (be they men or women, old or young, rich or poor). When the Nazis come, we’ll deal with them too.
As a Montana citizen, I feel it incumbent upon me to note that there aren't any Nazis in Montana who hold any congressional seats. As far as Nazis, are a couple of yutzes up in Whitefish who occasionally get some press, and miscellaneous scattered morons. Our congressional delegation is a couple of bog-standard republican backbenchers in the House, one republican in the Senate of no particular consequence, and one Democrat who could go places if Dem leadership and Dem primary voters weren't beholden to The Groups.
“The jihadists” is the unfair catch-all I apply to the coalition described in my original post, when I’m feeling grumpy. (Likewise, “the Nazis” is my unfair catch-all for right-wing bigots.)
“Mollifying the Arab street” refers to the Biden team’s belief that the election hinges crucially on making statements that will please the “uncommitted” contingent in Dearborn. Hence the strategy of parroting Hamas’ statistics in the state of the union while simultaneously selling more arms to Israel.
“More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of whom are not Hamas. Thousands and thousands are innocent women and children.”
This may be right or wrong — I don’t know. But the attitude towards Gaza health ministry statistics in the administration has shifted, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the ministry’s credibility. (See John Kirby’s previous statements.)
As detailed by Wharton’s Abraham Wyner, the breakdown of casualties appears to be complete nonsense. Even the Gaza health ministry partially walked back its casualty count recently!
"This argument is only ever made by people seeking to deflect attention from the Islamists’ sympathizers. (This group incidentally has quite a bit of intellectual and cultural power that the right sorely lacks, and Biden certainly seems to believe that mollifying the Arab street is key to his electoral fortunes.)"
Your perception of reality seems hashish-induced-----only way less relaxed.
Would smoking some hashish deflect my attention from the absence of Montana Nazis among those blocking traffic at the Holland Tunnel or the Golden Gate Bridge? Should I have a few tokes before I go to a dinner party hosted by a Jewish law professor at Berkeley?
Paranoids sometimes have real enemies -- and are even right, sometimes, in identifying them.
Unlike the OP, I didn't mention Biden here. I was merely pointing out that right-wing antisemitism is often invoked to deflect attention from antisemitism (and other malfeasances) among pro-Palestine elements. My comment stands on its own.
This argument is only ever made by people seeking to deflect attention from the Islamists’ sympathizers. (This group incidentally has quite a bit of intellectual and cultural power that the right sorely lacks, and Biden certainly seems to believe that mollifying the Arab street is key to his electoral fortunes.)"
Your perception of reality seems hashish-induced-----only way less relaxed.
They are a substantial portion of the electorate only if you count a lot of people who know barely have any opinion on Jews at all. Saying you like a conspiracy theory is not the same as believing every logical consequence of it. The very many people who believe that the moon landings didn't happen or JFK was killed by the CIA aren't out there taking action against NASA or the CIA.
It’s also the case that many Evangelicals, who are mostly on the right, hold Jews in Israel in high regard because they view them as stewards of the Holy Land.
Are you conflating between far right and right? Does the average conservative have more power than the average liberal? Yes, there are more people who report being conservative than liberal. But in terms of antisemitism are there more far right than far left? Among young people who are reporting increases, I would expect there to be more far left than far right
Great point. Sometimes we can over-obsess on the motive. It really can be more important to focus more on the action, and on the impact. The motive can be something for the perp to ruminate on or think over, or not. Society needs to contain, deter, punish the action, and prevent, mitigate, repair the action at least as much as it needs to intuit and inquire on motives.
Focusing on motives in hate crimes does the service of highlighting and shaming or exiling hate from polite society, but at the same time, it can politicize, and from there polarize, and among those not bought into the victim/shamer's perspective, *elevate* acts of simple and straightforward crime into loftier statements, symbols, "struggles", "battles".
Sometimes, there can be broader, more unified, less hair-splitting consensus against actual crimes, jerkishness, or asshattery if you just abstract the actions from the "who?whom?" and identity questions. Don't just change the names to protect the innocent (or the guilty), change the names *and* "flip the script", multiple times, to identify the guilty and the crime.
I do think JA has real enemies. Arab nationalists are in fact largely against a Jewish presence in historic Palestine, and are definitely against Jews having political power in historic Palestine. They are also against Jewish political power in the US. To the extent that leftists think they can make common cause with them, that is only true up until the time that leftist political goals conflict with Arab nationalist goals. Arab nationalists, by and large, don't believe in democracy or liberal values. They historically believed in secularism (which is why many of the leaders were Christian), but secular Arab nationalism is viewed to have failed when it has been tried, so a much more religious, anti-Jewish strain is now dominant. To the extent that people support Palestinian nationalism who don't have ethnic or religious ties to the region, it's helpful to realize that the average progressive has very little in common with the dominant strains of Palestinian political thought.
The terms Arab nationalists want, and clearly feel they deserve "against a Jewish presence in historic Palestine, and are definitely against Jews having political power in historic Palestine." are obviously harsh, cruel, unacceptable from a Jewish or Jewish Israeli perspective, if you ever allow yourself to step in those shoes. They would be harsh, cruel, unacceptable, to any identity group, no matter who they were, or what members of their group had done (even criminal things) in the name of the ethnoreligious collective.
They are the kinds of terms that one only imposes after an unconditional surrender (WWII) or a dictated peace (WWI) after you have won through overwhelming forces. Yet it is the weaker side that feels it deserves and wants this!
And, to be fair - even to Hamas, and the atrociousness of its assault on October 7th and other times does not even changes this, Hamas has suggested it would be prepared to 'suspend' its genocide/ethnic cleansing/destruction of Israel goal for a truce based on certain concrete, negotiable terms, at various points over the last fifteen years. Lengths of the truce period Hamas has publicly contemplated, and I have only read this one or two places, have been truces of 10, 25, 50, or 100 years. I am not sure about that last one. But once you get to 50 or 100 years, you are starting to get to the practical equivalent of a peace treaty, and the group discussing a hypothetical "truce" of that length really seems to be going through an exercise of making a peace treaty without contradicting its ideological denial of the concept of peace and coexistence head-on. Effective multi-decade truces would give some people the "lived experience" of peace, matching or exceeding the human average. To sum it up, Hamas has discussed stopping or 'suspending' attacks, and accepting obligations to not do violence to Israelis, in return for a set of significant reciprocal concessions [I do not recall the full extent], while rejecting the idea of at all repudiating that fighting to destroy Israel to the death, as a moral concept, is wrong moral thing to do at all. I might not kill you in practice for x amount of time, as long as you don't make me say that, in principle, it's beyond my G-d given rights to kill you someday, has been the most flexible Hamas position.
The "phased plan" of conquering Israel, with a peace agreement as an intermediate step, has long been debated openly (in Arabic) among Palestinian factions.
(There have been factions that truly see peaceful coexistence as the end goal, but probably they have never had majority support).
Hamas's problem at the moment is that they can't receive much Iranian weaponry while under Israeli embargo. A "peace deal" means lifting the embargo, a change in physical reality on the ground. In return, the Israelis get some sort of flimsy promise that the conflict is "settled" for Palestinians. Israelis tend not to be so trusting these days.
What the Palestinians need to do is reach a consensus internally about making peace. This is obvious to anyone viewing the circumstances clearly. If they became less violent towards Israel, including a significant element of policing their own radical elements, circumstances would organically improve. Israel would rather not spend the resources and bare the criticism for occupation/embargo, if Palestinians ceased to be such a threat.
Statehood is a red herring. The Pal administrations in Gaza/WB are already basically states. The issue is occupation/embargo. This is easily attainable by stopping attacks on Israel. Attacks that all major Palestinian factions today support.
OK - I understand this argument, and it's very deep relevance to Israel, Israelis, and Israel's international supporters and sympathizers and supporters of any religion.
However, to people with no special attachment or ties or motives causing them to privilege *insurance* for Israel against contingencies above other everyday realities, like as G. Sahani was discussing with me elsewhere in the thread, most Zoomers, Millennials, and Leftists or Antiracism Firsters do not, Palestinians with genocidal intentions or "phased plans" to destroy Israel, that they simply *cannot achieve* in the here and now, nor in a foreseeable realistic future, simply "Don't count". These Palestinian intentions and wishes "don't count" precisely because the power imbalance means they can't be achieved, are not possible, nor an urgent threat or risk. From the Zoomer/Millennial/Leftist perspective, all the pro-Israeli justification side has for justifying war that kills civilians as opposed to combatants at high ratios of civilians, and occupation with an Apartheid system is a realm of hypothetical and speculative enemy threats the Israelis are shadowboxing against, not an imminent threat. Everyday realities and facts, Israeli forces are killing Palestinian civilians daily trying to destroy every last Hamas member, and preventing means of subsistence from getting through to noncombatants so it can't get to combatants, and it has added up to around 30,000 Palestinians.
From neutral and anti-Israeli perspectives, whatever justifications Israel has in the land of hypotheticals and phased plans are trumped by lopsided and death tolls on the Palestinian side in the land of the real bombings and blockade and military shooting. Palestinian intentions and proclamations that are in the range of unrealistic to impossible are a red herring from this point of view.
There's no denying the violence that Hamas & co were doing to Israelis civilians on Oct. 7 and 8th was real. The holding of hostages since has been violent and evil. And Israeli troops in Gaza (rather than remote drone warriors operating from computer keyboards in Tel Aviv) are exposed to deadly risk of violent loss of life and limb daily. And, Israeli border communities face hazards and displacement from rocket threats. But in terms of damage, Hamas gave the Israelis a really bad 48 hours killing under 2,000 people. The Israelis have given the Gazans a really bad five months killing 30,000 people.
To people uncommitted to Israel, that appears to be disproportionate violence by the Israelis.
It's easy for neutral, distant people, or people with affinities to those on the receiving end, to care about proportionality.
It's hard for somebody (the Israelis) dealing with a relentless, hateful, murderous opponent, stubborn opponent, who started the latest round of conflict, to care about proportionality, even if that opponent is much weaker. When anybody (the US, Turkey, Russia, whomever) is faced with similar brazen attacks, they will generally counterattack with all means at their disposal, fair or foul, proportionate or not. If the victim doesn't go disproportionate (Belgium years ago), it is probably only for lack of means to respond disproportionately.
The temptation, from an Israeli point of view, and from American point of view post-9/11, or from the point of view of any group subject to terrorist attack or atrocity, is to think, "in principle civilians shouldn't be killed, but civilians from the group championed by the terrorist group, who believe the terrorist's groups' actions are correct and cheerlead them, can be killed in good conscience-even if they are not direct participants right now." People rarely admit this, but they feel it. Millennials, Zoomers, Leftists are just more committed to the value that governments can't kill civilians, no matter what those civilians think or say.
Also, the Israeli government and elected politics does have some people in it noted for their own Jewish supremacist, anti-Palestinian "phased plans" of transfers/ie ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to beyond borders of Israel and current occupied territories. So, open discussion of genocide of Palestinian communities such as they remain in the historic mandate of Palestine (via ethnic cleansing) is a thing among Israeli Jews.
When you said this:
"A "peace deal" means lifting the embargo, a change in physical reality on the ground. In return, the Israelis get some sort of flimsy promise that the conflict is "settled" for Palestinians. Israelis tend not to be so trusting these days."
This is nevertheless true. In protracted conflicts of this nature, nobody gets something for nothing. Anybody who promises something for nothing to their people, and in effect, Bibi has done this for the Israelis and the Hamas Charter has done this for Palestinians, is not a leader, nor even an adult, but a mere child. But proud peoples may prefer man-children cosplaying as leaders these days to real leaders who make hard decisions.
"From neutral and anti-Israeli perspectives, whatever justifications Israel has in the land of hypotheticals and phased plans are trumped by lopsided and death tolls on the Palestinian side in the land of the real bombings and blockade and military shooting. Palestinian intentions and proclamations that are in the range of unrealistic to impossible are a red herring from this point of view."
I don't think neutral parties analyze wars (started by Hamas in this case) by comparing death tolls. Winning wars means not having as many die on your side. Anyways, my point about the phased plans was an explanation for why making peace deals is not so obvious to Israelis. I don't think that the current war in Gaza is existential for Israel, though I don't think that is the only legitimate threshold. I am concerned about claims that Israel's targeting is too indiscriminate, and that they are not allowing food/water/medicine aid into Gaza, but I don't know what's really true in this fog of war.
I agree. "Antisemitism" is the wrong level of discourse like (I hope no one is offended by the conceptual comparison) "industrial policy." One can conditionally support (or not) the Israeli government's war against Hamas without regard to whether one of the positions is "anti semitic." Actually, maybe a better analogy would be inflation which aggregates movements up and down of many prices.
This article kind of misses the point, in my opinion. Among immigrants and students from Islamic countries, extreme antisemitism is as common as it has been throughout history. They have not undergone the process of reducing antisemitism that the European person has gone through following the Holocaust. On the contrary, the Israeli-Arab conflict has only intensified their antisemitism.
The main issue with white people holding leftist views is not their antisemitism per se, but their absolute loyalty to their allies, the immigrants from Islamic countries. Is there a big difference between being an extreme antisemite yourself and showing absolute loyalty to your allies who are extreme antisemites? Not really.
It's important to distinguish. If we're talking about Muslim populations still living in the Middle East, then, unfortunately, there is a rate of anti-Semitism at 80-90%, (and by the way, homophobia is not far from this). Among Muslims who have undergone Western socialization, the rates are much lower but still significant. In the survey I mentioned later, which was recently conducted by Pew, 37% of Muslims in the USA express a favorable opinion of Hamas.
Pretty shocking that among US adults overall, 8% have a favorable view of Hamas, according to the Pew poll.
I think it's plausible that a decent chunk of this 8% have this view because of their sense of ally-ship with pro-Palestinian Arab and/or Islamist activists, or their willingness to defer to them. I could be totally mistaken and that they all arrived to this conclusion on their own and not out of a sense of solidarity with their perceived political allies.
I don't think that the entire population (or even most of it) have to be anti-semitic or extremists for such a phenomenon to be occurring.
There are segments of the left who have decided that they should de-center themselves and instead defer to Arab/Muslim activist voices, some (but not all) of which are aligned with extreme Islamist and anti-semitic positions.
It’s hyper-Americanized in some weird ways (rap music, dying their hair blonde, Christianity) and in certain cultural niches (skateboard culture), and still deeply traditional in other ways (Confucianism).
This idea doesn’t really ring true to me if we’re talking about the American political situation. Muslims are only like 1% of the population here, and American Muslims report attitudes only slightly more antisemitic than Americans on average, and still have positive views of Jews on average.
I do believe that support for a terrorist group whose primary mission is to expel or kill most Jews from their country and whose primary tactic for doing that is violent attacks on Jews is a decent proxy for some level of anti-Jewish animus.
Again the point is that very few people with a positive view of Hamas in the Pew survey actually read the charter, and imputing that they must therefore support everything in the charter is sloppy analysis
Is Hamas famous for something besides killing Jews? I don't think you need to read the fine print in their charter to conclude that Hamas is an antisemitic organization.
People can do antisemitic things or support antisemitic things or take antisemitic positions or advocate on behalf of antisemitic organizations or identify with antisemitic causes out of ignorance just as much as out of malice.
Surely depends on how you're defining "worse" -- if you're an American, living in the United States, then the Republican party is very plausibly far more of a threat to your wellbeing than Hamas is.
I wouldn’t read too much into that number. I can guarantee you that more than 37% of US Muslims have not read the charter of Hamas. Roughly that same percentage of US Muslims don’t even know who the current Prime Minister of Israel is, per the same Pew survey you’re citing. Roughly that same percentage doesn’t know Hamas was responsible for October 7.
Americans are surprisingly ignorant of everything happening outside America.
Even an ignorant person knows enough to understand what Hamas is. I'm not buying the apologetics.
Regarding the example of fetuses as human beings, it's not the main issue of the Republican party, but there is certainly a large group of Trump supporters who have lost trust in democratic institutions, as that indeed what support for him means, and it is very depressing.
Agreed. Most people don't sit around reading Slow Boring or even the front page of the NYT. A huge chunk of people don't even realize that New Mexico is part of the US, so why would they know what Hamas is?
There's also a difference between being an anti-Semite and saying things/espousing ideas that are anti-Semitic. Also, some people can support anti-Semitic things out of ignorance and not out of malice.
Yeah the leftist alliance between woke westerners and islamist extremists is always funny to observe when the latter group accidentally says something about lgbtq+ issues.
A pox on both their houses. I don’t like Gazans being murdered and starved because I don’t like human beings to be murdered and starved. However, the false prophet Mohammed was a blood soaked warlord who reveled in pogroms, married a nine year old and traded slaves. I have zero respect for Islamic culture and laugh whenever people claim Islam is a religion of peace.
Those who claim Islam is a religion of peace are indeed clearly absurd because they over-generalizing, but you are also overgeneralizing. Religious traditions are complex and internally-diverse. They are represented and manifested in many different ways, some of which may be peaceful and some which may not be.
All cultures/religious traditions that have been around for a long time will have a tension regarding present day values and the content of their tradition and the key figures within it. That's true of Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, etc. Islam is not alone in that. (That doesn't mean everything is equal among these traditions either). However, problematic material is present in lots of ancient traditions.
Religions often teach ways of reading these specific parts, or eliding them, or balancing them with other parts etc. Some do this more than others, while some are extremists/fundamentalists who do this less.
"laugh whenever people claim Islam is a religion of peace."
Don't.
Leave people an out, away from the negative, if that works from their cultural or religious context and gives you choice quotes to work with. Challenge them to live up to their assertion. Don't ridicule them for point scoring reasons. What prize do you think you'll win for being "right" anyway? It's a religion, like Christianity and others, that will still be here on earth, no matter what, long after we're all dead. Let the thing reinvent itself if it can, will, or might.
"Those who claim Islam is a religion of peace are indeed clearly absurd because they over-generalizing,"
The generalization is what is absurd. Any belief system is what its human users make of it. That's why I suggested an alternative to Mr. Abbott's way of reacting to it.
Yes. I live within easy walking distance of six synagogues from hippy-only-nominally-follow-rules-and-traditions Reform to extreme Orthodox where within half a second you perceive the members as Jewish. (nothing like a tall fuzzy hat in summer to make you stand out). As I was reading this, I was thinking about all this while I was wondering about some of the tropes.
Also, 32% of women in Yemen married before their 18th birthday, and there are 59 million child brides in Africa, mostly in Muslim countries like Nigeria and Chad.
(Ofc none of this shows that slavery and child marriage are characteristic of the Muslim world writ large, as opposed to simply the most impoverished parts of it. Wealth eradicates a great many sins.)
Some definitely are. Most are not. However, anyone with a taste for modern decency would cancel Mohammed. He is worse than Epstein and makes Trump look like a hippie.
Is there a difference between murdering someone and giving your friend a lift to go 'talk it out' with the guy cuckolding him? Even if you're an idiot for believing he was just bringing the gun along for self-defense -- you're still just a gullible idiot not a murderer.
Obviously, there is a difference between personally feeling animosity towards a racial group and failing to appreciate/stop your allies from doing so. Depends on the context you may or may not care about the difference in intent but it's there and we judge people differently based on whether they intended a harm or failed to stop it.
One challenge for the third kind of study is the actual success of Jews in America. We really are overrepresented in finance/politics/media/journalism/academia! And so you have to ask about the reasons for that to get at the conspiracy theories (in contrast to similar questions about say Black Americans, who are underrepresented).
The far right and the far left overlap in thinking that anyone successful, rich or influential must have achieved such status due to unfairness in the system. For the far right, it is the Rothschilds, secretly controlling the global financial system. For the left, it is the application of bog standard oppressor-oppressed thinking to Jews (and Israel, in many respects).
Connected to this, I've commented here and elsewhere that I think there really is a form of "Socialism/Communism-to-anti-Semitism" pipeline in that, for a tremendous amount of "vulgar" socialist and communist thought, you could almost literally do a find-and-replace of "the rich" with "the Jews" and then hand it back out as anti-Semitic literature without anyone blinking.
Probably not -- I don't think that most or even many people who are otherwise interested in socialism/communism fall into that pipeline, but even if it's just 1 to 5 percent, that's still a lot of people.
Don't forget, morons whose father had some sort of emerald mine concern routinely are involved in starting and running multiple innovative billion dollar companies. It's all about that ol' emerald mine.
You see the same in reverse with statistics about crime. There are statistics about rates of homicide or armed robbery or whatever that are literally true but we all know the people who focus on them a lot are just run of the mill racists
There isn't a great reason to fixate on these or to use them to further a "black people are inherently violent" narrative. But knowing them does counter popular narratives on the left regarding race and criminal justice. I'd happily erase crime stats from my brain if I never had to hear something about police hunting black people for sport or another Summer of 2020 meltdown.
Easy: Jewish culture (like that of Asians and recent immigrants from e.g. Egypt and Nigeria) places the highest priority on academic achievement. Other cultures do not. It really is that simple.
Obviously there are a bunch of reasons for this, including the one you mention. But because it's true the statement "there are lots of Jews in Hollywood and the banks" is both the sort of thing that indicates antisemitism and also a factually true statement.
Yes, there's a great documentary from the 1990s about the history of early Hollywood called, "Hollywoodism," which is a 100% positive take on the role of immigrant and first-generation Jewish-Americans in the film industry, but there's literally no way to talk about the information in it that doesn't sound like an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.
Third world people from Asia and Africa (and the Middle East) - often model minorities in the West, especially in North America. In their home countries, the well to do are all corrupt and the not well off are the volatile, angry "street". Why the difference? Discuss.
Why is 1 - 5 part Muslim per 95 the most benign seeming ratio [my Muslim doctor, engineer, dentist, restauranter, handyman, software guy, etc.]. Why seeming immiseration and dissatisfaction with mass concentration? Discuss.
I would also trace that back to a higher emphasis on literacy and textual interpretation, which provided a good cultural backdrop for strong performance in an academic setting.
(Not Jewish myself, but that's the impression I get.)
This was a thorny issue that I ran into while talking a few guys I knew in the Middle East out of believing anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. (With the related challenge of explaining the difference between AIPAC and a hypothetical conspiracy to people who grew up in countries without democratic political participation, civil society, and lobbying as Americans citizens oils understand it.)
The opposite problem occurs with surveys about Black Americans. It is factually true, for example, that Black people are disproportionately likely to be criminals.
Looking at the ADL's list of 11 statements that "indicate classic anti-Jewish conspiratorial beliefs" they range from clearly anti-semitic and also rarely endorsed ("Jews don't care what happens to anyone but their own kind", 7.7% of Americans say this is "mostly true") to borderline innocuous and more widely adopted ("Jews stick together more than other Americans," 20.8% "mostly true"). Like isn't it true for most ethnic and religious groups that they "stick together" more than "other Americans"? At least one way to interpret this statement is just that two randomly selected American Jews are more likely to associate with each other than two randomly selected Americans. That's almost certainly true, and probably true for almost any ethnic or religious subgroup in America. Part of my family is Jewish but it wouldn't really concern me at all if other Americans thought this statement was true about Jews. Whereas I would be concerned if most of the country thought Jews "don't care about anyone but their own kind" or "are more loyal to Israel than America" or "do not share my values," which are other items on the ADL list.
I don’t think that many American Jews are “more loyal to America than Israel” but quite a few are willing to complicate American foreign policy to help Israel. America is strongly enough that it can probably carry water without disaster. Still, it’s insane to claim that being Jewish does not correlate with wanting to bend America. foreign policy to protect Israel from invasion.
Honestly for all the retail evil and cruelty from Hamas, and all the talkie-talk rhetoric and theatrics from Islamic "shoots to miss" Republic, Israel is still existentially safer than it was fifty years ago. America was the direct backstop against invasion and existential damage for Israeli mainly during the Yom Kippur War and the Brezhnev-Andropov era of the USSR (especially before the peace treaty with Egypt) when the prospect of substantial Arab states armies and Soviet expeditionary or nuclear forces doing Israel in was a real thing. So many elements of that opposing anti-Israeli coalition are not in place these days, even though networked political criminals can give Israel some really black days like the US hasn't seen (recognizing proportionately Oct. 7 was more than a 9/11)
I don't think you're reading that second question right. It's "Jews stick together more than other Americans" as in "Jews stick to their own kind moreso than other ethnic groups in America." If you believe all groups do this than you're disagreeing with the question.
I think it's incorrect to say "you are reading that second question wrong" when we're talking about a polling question, and a lot of the point is "how do people read this"
I literally read it the same way David did, and would answer "true" for the same reason.
If you replaced the question with: "Gays stick together more than other Americans" I would ALSO answer true, and I'm both gay and don't think it's an anti-gay stereotype/trope.
If you want to ask: "Jews stick to their own kind moreso than other minority ethnic groups in America" then ask THAT, don't ask something that's open to interpretation and then _assume_ the antisemitic answer.
I wonder if there are any studies tracking exposure to anti semitic discourse or actions?
Something I've experienced since 10/7 is that I will be casually browsing social media, run into content by or about a Jewish person, and as soon as I read the comments I see a ton of antisemitic ones. For example, on Instagram I ran into a clip of orthodox Jews walking on NYC's streets in the 60s and many comments were Gifs of someone using a flamethrower.
I'm not Jewish and find this upsetting. I can only imagine if you are. It's fairly prevalent all over the Internet.
Something that may impact this is that people are now exposed to opinions from all over the world, and the rest of the world has a different dynamic than in the US. It may explain why studies show that antisemitism is down in the US but Jewish people report feeling worse about it.
This certainly seems plausible to me -- there's really no argument that (1) anti-Semitism is vastly more prevalent/acceptable in a number of countries outside the "Anglosphere" and Western Europe in recent decades and (2) both internet access and English-language fluency in those same countries has also become much widespread. (This is similar to the way you are vastly more likely to run across pro-Hindu nationalist content on-line today than you were 25 years ago primarily because Hindu nationalists are now much more likely to use social media and communicate in English.)
as far as I can tell the seedier side of the internet (think 4chan etc.) has a ton of antisemitism on it now, antisemitic memes are one of the dominant themes. pre 2010 i don't think it was like this. not all of it is sincere, a lot is just trolling but then like Sartre pointed out, that's always the M.O. of the antisemite. it spreads out to the rest of the internet.
these people are small in number but they just spend all day posting so you see a ton of it.
That's entirely possible, and we shouldn't discount that now white racist Americans also have a wider platform to make their views heard more as well.
But my observation was more about "normie" social media like Instagram, Tiktok and X since those have a wider reach. There's a lot of Jewish people that are exposed to a lot more antisemitic discourse than before, and we shouldn't dismiss it just because it's not reflected in broad population surveys.
As a woman, it has also been pretty shocking to see the misogynistic and often violent comments that feminist content or even just female participants experience online. It is hard to know whether these attitudes are increasing, this is all coming from an incredibly small minority, or this is what people really think and are now able to express safely with the benefit of being anonymous. I think Jewish people are seeing this same thing.
It is a real head scrambler. Whenever you are in a marginalized group that is subject to discrimination and potential violence you are forced to walk through the world a little differently. Part of that is parsing out what negative behavior or circumstances are related to discrimination against your status or might signal danger and what are just everyday assholes behaving toward you the same way that they would anyone else. Assume it all about your status and you become paranoid, isolated, and unnecessary angry and anxious. Assume it all the later and you risk gaslighting yourself into accepting mistreatment and remaining in dangerous situation. The only way to stay sane and safe is to try to calibrate close to reality but that can feel hard to do when people IRL so infrequently admit to prejudice and bad behavior, the stats on the ground so that this is 100% happening, and folks who are given the freedom to say what they want without consequence online make it look omnipresent.
I know this is a crowd that is probably feels like terms like "triggered" or "emotionally unsafe" are mostly BS. But I can say with all honesty that since the beginning of Trump's first campaign and the seeming flood of folks expressing hateful things online, I have experienced way more of that. Brett Kavanaugh hearings and the vitral against Ford and minimizing was a high point of this. As someone who had experienced a violent attempted sexual assault in my teens from a fellow student and had not reported it because of fears about how I would be treated, walking that go down on the nightly news literally retriggered a lot of that trauma and left me feeling much more unsafe and unsupported than I had in many, many years. That was the case even though those sentiments were not what was being shared in my real life.
I think most minority groups have had similar moments over the last 8 years. It is easy to say that we should just turn off the news and go offline and ignore that stuff. But if you have been in danger in that way the memory of that lives in your body and when you start to see sign of that danger again, your body experiences that fear again and it does color how experience the here and now. That is how brains work. And it has been a tough and exhausting 8 years for many of us.
I am fairly confident that American Democracy can handle another 4 years of Trump as President although not 100 percent sure. I am dreading the psychological pain and exhaustion of how that would feel for me personally and for many people that I love.
probably not instagram but this specific crowd definitely spends a decent amount of time on X and TikTok and I would guess account for a lot of the thing you describe, where a post by a Jewish person or related to Judaism randomly gets swamped with vile memes.
The Comments sections of the Washington Post under any article about Gaza or about the Hamas-adjacent protests in the United States have become a veritable anti-Semitic playpen.
The general thrust of this article I think is quite good. Figuring out just how prevalent anti-Semitic people are can be quite difficult as stuff like slight changes in word choice can skew answers. In addition, defining what is anti-Semitic is blurry as well.
But a few criticisms. First, the authors actually sort of unintentionally demonstrate the problems with using surveys when they cite the ADL survey showing 85% of Americans believe in an anti-Semitic trope. Immediately my “this doesn’t pass the smell test” radar went up. So I checked the survey and one question is doing a lot of work here; “Jews stick together more than other Americans”. I’m sorry, I’m guessing you’re getting similar answers for literally religious sect or ethnicity. What this is describing is very basic patterns of immigration and history of how immigrant communities were and are formed. It’s interesting because the whole post is I think correctly trying to note that measuring antisemitism is hard because subtle word choices in question can skew answers. And then the authors sort of unintentionally prove that point, while trying to make another point all together.
Second, why oh why do the authors have to start their post with the laziest “both sides” framing and lead up. It’s infuriating especially because the writer of this substack provided pretty good evidence that antisemitism is higher on the right than left. And what’s weirder is the authors seems to acknowledge this at the end of their post. So what the heck is the point of opening your post with “both sides” framing.
What do you mean when you say "all the brown people"? Maybe it's completely tongue-and-cheek and I shouldn't take it seriously, but I have a hard time mapping it to something meaningful in the context of today's comments.
"why oh why do the authors have to start their post with the laziest 'both sides' framing and lead up. It’s infuriating especially because the writer of this substack provided pretty good evidence that antisemitism is higher on the right than left."
While I'm perfectly willing to stipulate that anti-Semitism is more common on the right than left in the US, I would be very curious to see how it is distributed within the "right" vs. the "left" in terms of income, educational accomplishments, etc. I.e., are "left" anti-Semites more likely to be people in culturally, economically, politically, etc. influential positions than "right" anti-Semites? If they are, then both-sides-ing the issue seems appropriate in terms of weighting what the actual threat is.
From someone we know "The epicenter of antisemitic attitudes in the United States, in other words, is the conservative Black and Hispanic population that has often voted Democratic in the past due to identity politics but has trended toward the GOP in recent cycles. Liberal African-Americans are slightly less antisemitic than white conservatives, and Black and Hispanic conservatives are substantially more antisemitic than white conservatives."
So sort of oddly enough, it appears that Trump's flirtation with anti-semiticism may actually be (depressingly) one of the reasons he's been able to make inroads with traditionally Democratic voters.
I also bring up the orange man because even if we limit our analysis to elite circles, I'd say it matters who specifically we're talking about. Most academics these days kind of famously lean Democratic if not out right left wing. Given there are thousands of academics in America, by sheer numbers it's statistically likely at least a handful will have antisemitic views and therefore there are more left wing academics with antisemtic views than right wing. So there is sort of a composition effect with these numbers. But beyond that, I bring up Trump because in the duh statement of the century, he has way more impact on discourse and culture at large than any academic. It matters way more if he's hosting Nick Fuentes for dinner than History professor John Doe from Big State University. Beyond the orange man, it matters way more if Elon Musk is highlighting and promoting some extremely bigoted ideas. Honestly, I think you can make a strong case he has the second biggest influence on culture in America behind Trump*. Who's the closest equivalent? Taylor Swift? As popular as she is, she doesn't own a widely used social media platform.
*I'd going to crawl on broken glass to vote for Joe Biden. And he's on the merits been a better President that I expected. But I'd be hard pressed to say he has a particular large impact on the culture at large; certainly when compared to the orange man or his ex-boss.
I had the same thoughts about the survey and was planning to post it if someone else hadn't already. Many of the stereotypes listed are not ones we would normally associate with anti-semitism or at least, as you say, are not unique to it, e.g., "Jews do not share my values". Just as a statement of fact, I could easily see 1/3 answering affirmatively.
I thought about this one, but unlike the "stick together" one, this one _does_ read to me as antisemitic. I suppose it's possible people would say this about any minority ethnic group and maybe I'm just ignoring that fact because it's depressing.
If the statement read "gays do not share my values" I'd assume homophobia - because I'd have to think "what values exactly do you think gays like me have that you don't share?". (If you were very devoutly religious in a way such that you thought MANY Americans didn't share your values I'd understand)
Turn it around though - how many gay people would affirm the statement "Christians share my values"? Probably more than it used to be, but I would be very surprised if it cracks 50%.
If your most important value is that Jesus is the Son of God, would you say Jews share it? (It's a bit tricky though because Christians do *generally* have a special affinity for Jews as God's chosen people.)
I considered that the "Jesus is the son of God" question would come up but.... how much of that is a "value"? I don't know.
I guess that's fair if you didn't even ask gays but asked a bunch of progressives "Christians share my values" you probably wouldn't do all that well. However, I _would_ say that it reflects some bias against Christians. It should lower the salience of that _type_ of anti-semitism I suppose, but it doesn't mean it isn't anti-semitism(or anti-Christian)
It's also probably a matter of conflating religious Judaism with ethnic Judaism. That is, if the statement for Christians included me, who is culturally Christian/Methodist(by inertia) but not religious at all, vs people who actually attend church etc.
I think this is getting at exactly why it's not a great question, given that we can all think of different ways to answer it depending on how literally or culturally we interpret it.
Speaking as a Jew, I do find this mildly antisemitic, even though non-Jewish people here also believe it and present it as a positive. If you don't know any Jewish people, I don't see why you'd assume we stick together, nor do I think it's particularly true. For non-observant Jews, we don't necessarily have anything in common with each other.
I don't think Mormons or the Amish would give each other preferential treatment in, say, a professional situation, and I'm mildly offended that people would think this of me.
Does the statement imply preferential treatment? I don't think it does. I would probably ascribe a similar level of in-group affinity to most groups in America, however defined; for example, I really enjoy meeting other people from the midwest. But the real problem is that most of these statements are too ambiguous to be useful.
Do you think Koreans generally "stick together"? I agree it's an ambiguous statement, but I don't think you'd say you stick together with fellow Midwesterians.
Hmm...good question. Maybe? I know and have known many Korean Americans, many of whom go to Korean-language church services, for example. Does that count as "sticking together"?
I agree with you that taken in the worst possible light, the statement is obviously bad. I'm just saying that there are other ways to interpret it, and I have trouble believing 85% of respondents took it the same way as you.
I agree that it may be innocuous, but I also think lots of mild prejudice is innocuous. It also bothers me because most antisemitism includes a conspiratorial element. This isn't something we'd say for many minority groups (say, the Irish), and I think it's worth asking why it's different for Jews.
You mention Koreans as going to the same church, but nonobservant Jews don't go to temple. What is it that you think we're doing together?
I think a huge problem for all of this discourse--and one I'm not sure you can escape--is the influence of the state of Israel as a political actor and nation-state with its own strategic, economic, and internal interests. Like, I'm just totally unconvinced that leftist discourse takes the same shape absent the behavior of Israel as a nation-state vis-a-vis the Palestinian population, but it's also not like you can unwind that stuff. And, conversely, you can't have the US backing Israel in areas like the UN security council without providing fodder for antisemitic conspiracy theories EVEN IF those choices make sense on other geostrategic levels.
I don't see this as a particularly novel problem; you could just as easily apply it to sentiment about people of Chinese heritage. But I'm also not sure that it is a fixable problem. I think it really does just confound the data.
"accusations against diaspora Jews of being more loyal to Israel than to their own country"
I guess this may be a little off topic, but my impression is that Israel actively cultivates something like that sort of loyalty from Jewish Americans. I remember reading about a "birthright trip" that an America Sportswriter took:
"One tactic they used was to gather us all together and announce a choice:
If you feel like you’re more Jewish than American, you should walk over to one side of the room. If you feel like you’re more American than Jewish, you should walk over to the other side of the room.
Tempting as it was to claim an identity more exotic than “White American tricked into the ideological version of a timeshare,” I was the only person who trudged over to the U.S. side."
I'm not sure if Israel is uniquely bad about this or not. China and Russia are the only other countries I'm aware of that seem to be aggressive about hereditary loyalty, but there are probably more given that most of Europe, Asia and Africa have an ancestral or tribal vision of nationhood and citizenship that directly clashes with the Western Hemisphere's immigrant assimilationist mentality.
In re "dual loyalty," while I agree it's anti-Semitic to presume all Jewish people have some or even any particular loyalty to Israel, I very definitely agree that the Israeli state itself for many decades (i.e., this isn't just a Netanyahu problem) has de facto promoted that concept. (Not just through the birthright trips, but how the "Right of Return" has been applied to give Israeli citizenship to fugitives from the U.S. justice system, statements from various Israeli political leaders about how overseas Jewish populations should "come home" to Israel, etc.)
That story is crazy, and I wonder if more people would have chosen "American" in a secret ballot situation.
I do think that Israel places Jews worldwide in a pretty difficult position with regard to suspicions of loyalty. There's really not another country like it: a religious/ethnic state that encourages immigration based on ethnicity and religion. If the Vatican City included a large area of central Italy, had a population of several million, was a regional military power, and granted citizenship to Catholics worldwide who immigrated, I suspect we would see a lot of Catholics facing concerns of dual loyalty.
Wake up and smell the coffee. Catholics STILL face a lot of concerns of dual loyalty, and the people who express the most concerns seem to be gaining in influence.
It's an open secret amongst the American Jewish community that Birthright trips are explicit propaganda/marketing (hasbara). If you want an unvarnished view of the country (or countries, if you're brave enough to visit Palestine), you need to visit on your own dollar/time. Anybody who attended that trip (except the author, I guess?) attended because they already felt willing to play along with Israeli affiliation; it's a tremendously biased sample w.r.t. American Jewish opinion on nationality.
I feel like the end point of a lot of this debate becomes a really annoying meta discussion - if you talk about anti-semitism, you get people saying "yeah yeah whatever there are literally children starving to death in Gaza" (true), and if you talk about Gaza you get American Jews who bring up all of the anti-semitism going on here and the ways in which Palestinian activists are involved in it/ stoke it/ etc. (also true). These two aren't, like, opposed beliefs. I think what is going on in Gaza is absolutely deplorable and I also haven't ever felt the presence of anti-semitism quite as closely as I did in the weeks following 10/7.
Anyway, I would encourage anyone who's arguing in the comments on the meta point about what we're "not focusing on" or "not talking about" to consider that, in fact, we are talking about all of this quite a lot, and if you're not seeing it its probably down to your Twitter algo or TikTok FYP.
I am trying to not imagine the sorts of rip-out-your-fingernails-and-pour-boiling-vinegar-on-the-beds events that would transpire if HR suspected I even had an inkling of an applicant's religion.
I am not that surprised by that. There is a lot of evidence that people are drawn to applicants that they see "as like them" or "fitting the firm culture." If I saw a Jewish sounding name on a resume or participation in a Jewish organization like Jewish Family Services, I wouldn't see them as "not like me" even though I am not Jewish because my social circle includes lots of Jews who I have a lot in common with and that organization is a good match to my values. But I could easily see at least that large a percentage of Americans feeling that it would be a culture clash and hesitating. I think the percentage who would affirmatively say that they wouldn't promote a Jewish person even to themselves might be lower but if faced with two resumes that gave those clues and didn't require an explicit choice based on ethnicity, I can easily imagine 25% thinking that they like resonated with resume A more than B in the same way they do with resumes with typically Black names or female candidates.
I am a woman with a male name that is spelled they typically male name and nothing on my resume indicates that I am a woman. I have seen the utter shock that has passed over an interviewers face when I come into an interview and they see my actual gender. Some can't fix their faces fast enough not to show that they would have been less likely to interview me if they had known. One even said "your resume said you were a man" in an upset enough tone that I asked if he still wanted to interview me and he legit paused for a full minute or two before he said yes. He actually did give me the job but it was clear the whole time I worked there that he had hired me inspite of my gender and if I hadn't "tricked" him I wouldn't work there. My daughter has a boy's name too. Lesson learned.
I looked carefully at the double standard study, which was fascinating, and what it showed was that respondents treated Catholics and Jews similarly to each other, and differently from Indians. Which isn't a double standard between Jews and everyone else.
Indian-American are people who used to live in India and moved to the US, who could be of any religion. Whereas the relationship between Jews and Israel, and Catholics and The Vatican is of a group of Americans with a perceived affinity with the rest of their religious group. These are two very different relationships, so respondents treated them differently. Interestingly, in almost every category, respondents were the hardest on Catholics, as far as taking responsibility for the actions of The Vatican.
Can I just say that I find it depressingly ironic that in a post trying to tease out how prevalent antisemitism is, there are multiple comments that other commentators have flagged as Islamophobic or anti-Muslim (I think correctly). It says something and I’m not entirely sure what. But thought it worth pointing out.
It's very difficult to talk about large groups of people both effectively and inoffensively, especially if there is a protected class identity involved (gender, religion, ethnicity, etc..). You have to use a lot of tedious language like "disproportionately" or "tend to be" and it's especially useful, but time-consuming, to dig up statistics and numbers.
It's difficult enough that I tend to extend a lot of benefit of the doubt as long as its topical. Some of the commentators today may be out-of-touch or out-of-line but for the part they seem to be sincerely trying to explain that a disproportionate share of Muslim or Arab immigrants tend to be anti-semitic. I'm not sure how true that is but it's worth discussing and understanding whether it's true or not.
True. And I guess sort of my point. The comments in question I would not say are Trump-level grossness by any means. But they flirted into territory that I at least cringed at.
Which is why I said ironic, because that is sort of the point of this substack today; how do you determine if someone is expressing something anti-Semitic.
Criticism of Nazism is also problematic because it can be interpreted as anti-German. However, the ideology of Jihad is as evil as Nazism, and unfortunately, it has many adherents in the Muslim world
But is it? There is a lot of talk about Islamophobia but when comparable statements are made about Christian’s in America is there condemnation of Christianaphobia?
Spell check helped me with Islamophobia but no assistance with Christianaphobia?
So if your a liberal in America and want to say hateful things about other people than fire away on Whites and Christian’s and if your target is both then feel free to say the nastiest shit you can muster without issue because your tribe will protect you and hate against these groups is okay.
Just like saying nasty shit about pro-life people on Slow Boring is okay. Or Matt’s podcasts partner saying that Stephen Miller “gets off” on putting illegal immigrant children in cages. That’s a nasty, gross thing to say but then he wants to be a language cop with Trump? Are you kidding me? That guy?
Any Jewish American who contributes to AIPAC or supports American subsidies to Israel values Israel enough to undermine American material interests. America has no material interest in supporting Israel. Israel does not control rare natural resources or have a huge semiconductor industry. It does have many, many enemies, some of whom want to drive it into the sea. Supporting Israel vastly complicates American dealings with the Islamic world. It prevents normal relations with Iran. It turns our support for nuclear nonproliferation into a farce. Ethnic solidarity is a powerful drug and American Jews who support Israel have subordinated American patriotism to ethnic interests.
"Well, they aren’t starving and bombing Gazans" - they are stopping the Gazans from being able to escape. So no, they're not lighting the building on fire, but they are blocking the back exit and keeping Gazans trapped in a burning building. I'm not sure that gains them much moral high ground.
Meanwhile Egypt is a military dictatorship that routinely imprisons and tortures dissidents, suppresses pretty much all political opposition, and carries out the same actions in North Sinai that Israel does in the West Bank (restricts movement, destroys homes, razes farmland, etc.)
If you were forced to choose between living in Israel or Egypt, you would choose Israel immediately, as would 99.9% of everyone else in this comment section. Makes it hard for me to believe that Israel is worse than Egypt.
"Haven't engaged in serious ethnic cleansing since 1948"
Hmmm...really?? Then why here in Israel am I surrounded by many Egyptian Jews who were expelled (or their family was expelled) in the 1950s and 1960s with nothing but the clothes on their back?
How did the population of Jews in Egypt go from ~45,000 down to 20?
Well I'll tell you why. Because Egypt engaged in serious ethnic cleansing. In 1956, Egypt proclaimed all Jews to be Zionists and thus enemies of the state. A thousand Jews were arrested, and 25,000 Jews were expelled. Many were forced to sign away all their assets to the Egyptian state. In the 1960s, more Jews were either expelled and their property confiscated or arrested and tortured for years.
They also don't have a comparable security situation to the West Bank and Gaza?
I don't support Israel's settlers colonizing the West Bank, and I think Israel is going way overboard at this point with Gaza, but if the question were "What would Egypt Do" I don't actually know if they'd be better.
I also don't know to what extent that question matters.
Certainly I'm unhappier with the behavior "Israel is engaging in at this time" vs the behavior "Egypt is engaging in at this time"
I agree with your observations about the US relationship with Israel, but at this point surely it is evangelical Christians and their hold on one of our two major parties that are mostly responsible for this state of affairs. I suspect if America's Jewish community were really in the driver's seat with respect to US policy vis-a-vis Israel, there's be much stronger pressure out of Washington in favor of a Palestinian statehood. Maybe by now we'd even already have a two state deal. (American Jews support a two state solution in greater numbers than all Americans, for instance, and relatedly, are more likely than the general public to hold an unfavorable view of Netanyahu).
I agree that the American Jewish community at large has a much more moderate, 2-state centered vision for the conflict than the evangelical pro-Israel advocacy community.
However, this idea that we'd have a two state solution deal by now if American Jews were in charge is an absurd idea. The barrier to a two state solution has not been America's lack of comittment to it. The issue has been Palestinian rejectionism and unwillingness to counteroffer and negotiate in good faith during the peace process, rampant terrorism on behalf of the Palestinians, a lack on agreement on critical issues (like Jerusalem and the resolution to the "refugee" issue), as well as the Israeli hard turn to the right following the 2nd Intifada.
It's vanishingly unlikely that 57 years of Greater Israel expansionism haven't played a major role in empowering radicals in the Palestinian community. Relatedly, it's likely that firm US insistence on Israel's relinquishing its 1967 conquests would have undercut this expansionist project. (Or, maybe not; but in least in this case US hands would be clean).
It’s interesting to me that one of the ADL’s antisemitic tropes is “Jews stick together more than other Americans”. That’s generally a positive descriptor and Americans say the same things about small town life and whatever else they hold in high regard.
Agree. People can debate/argue their stance forever, yet at the end of the day it still comes down to people killing other people. Whose side does one take on that? The side with the most loss of life? The side of who was attacked first? My thought is, debate, but not so much as to risk losing focus on those who have died.
I'm an elderly Jewish-American. A point mentioned (but not emphasized) in your essay is the decline in antisemitism in the US. When my father was a kid, quotas were routine, Jews were simply excluded from some professions, and there were towns where it was understood that Jews would not be permitted after dark. Progress happens.
Definitely I think the period from 1930-2010 saw a clear decline of antisemitism. Growing up in the 1990s/2000s, I did not encounter anti-Semitism in the same way my grandparents did.
The question is if the period 2010-2024 saw a bit of a reversal of this trend. And that's a separate quesiton.
Yes, a somewhat different question, but contemporary pundits sometimes disregard massive long-term trend lines to focus on short-term changes. This can lead to unwarranted catstrophism.
Spot on. As this article so well explains, anti-semitism is just hard to measure. And I feel like part of the debate over this past year has just been really personalized to the individual.
Saying that, as a Jewish person, I’ve really just never experienced personal anti-semitism in my life. Although, I recognize that over the past year that’s changed for a lot of people.
I have not experienced any serious or egregious anti-Semitism, aside from a handful of stupid comments that people have made to me and some negative interactions online.
With that being said, I don't walk around with a kippah or tzitzit or other outward indicators of my Jewishness or level of religiosity. I also don't have a Hebrew accent when I speak. So I also understand that other Jews may encounter antisemitism or experience it differently than I do.
I've had the same experience of a secular Jew. While I really haven't experienced any serious anti-semitism the following sentence resonated with me: "Many Americans hold warm feelings towards Jews while simultaneously holding antisemitic beliefs about Jewish power." Even some of my closest friends who were in my wedding believe things like "Jews control Hollywood" and conspiracies about George Soros. I genuinely don't think they're antisemitic but they also spouting off well known anti-semitic tropes.
Are conspiracies about George Soros really antisemitic? It seems that extremely wealthy individuals who get involved in politics attract conspiracy theories. Cheney and Koch also attract weird theories.
Those tropes have totally been heard in my lifetime, from the mouths of people of all colors, a little more from people who are not strictly white than white, but yeah. And there is *something* to many stereotypes. I heard Solomon "Solly" Perel, the real-life protagonist of the film, "Europa, Europa" who was a Jewish boy in WWII Poland who portrayed himself falsely on capture as an ethnic German orphan and spent time in the Hitler Youth, speak at the Hillel Center on my Campus when I was in college. He said that even his internalized youthful Nazi resurfaces at times when he sees the credits on trashy, violent or exploitive film or TV and he sees Jewish names, with his internal dialogue being "a-ha, I knew it would be Jewish Director, Producer".
One of the bolder lines from Warren Beatty's late 90s agitprop comedy film, Bulworth, had the character, who acted as a mouthpiece for Beatty's real-life political opinions, mention "Jewish paranoia". I thought he would get some noticeable crap for that in the media. But none that I ever saw or heard. Probably because Jewish people of certain generations just adored that guy. The women wanting to be with him and the men wanting to be him.
I think it's when you know a specific Jewish person, it's obvious that they aren't going to meetings to conspire against you. But it's easy to hold a separate, unrelated belief that doesn't track with the first.
I dated a working class guy from Connecticut, and he was antisemitic (by the time he figured out I was Jewish, and I figured out that he cared, we were already serious). His family was casually racist towards a lot of groups. I once played Scrabble with the family and one player put down the n-word.
How old are you Brian?
mid-30s
Consider yourself lucky and not necessarily representative
I feel like (again) this related to the point I keep making about recent crime rise (and importantly its apparent recent fall). Crime rise circa 2017-2022 was very real. It also remains true that crime was historically low even in 2022. And the reason I make that point is the great phrase you used “unwarranted catastrophism”. Because making an issue like crime rise worse than it is can lead stuff like people saying we need to turn back bail reform (when the evidence linking bail reform to crime rise is dubious at best) or people like Tom Cotton advocating bringing back 80s style drug wars. Or the big one, convincing people that maybe we need fake tough guy Trump to “crack some heads”.
Many crucial measures of human welfare have improved dramatically in the past 200 years. We need to keep this in mind when addressing contemporary problems.
That’s the Internet age. So much changed after the Internet…
Both halves of your perspective ring true for me from hearing my (non-practicing) 80+ year old father's experiences with high school and college life and biased military evaluations from the 50s and 60s. He was neither Jewish practicing, nor looking, nor sounding, nor "acting", but it had impacts I noticed by keeping count how Jewish-correlated his social/friendship ties were. And it tracks with own childhood K-12 experience mainly in the 80s, as a semi-Semite (Protestant mom), school, friendship circles hardly Jewish correlated, mostly benign references to Judaism and Jewishness when it came up, but with the occasional, "why do they/you think they're so special/chosen" kind of negative/questioning undertone coming up every once in a long while, especially in reference to very loud or unassimilated assertions of Jewish identity. Plus, there was occasional news hype (completely unaffecting me personally, but once or twice reported via anecdote from relatives, about Jewish-black tensions, that seemed related to mutually dashed expectations since the 60s)
And I guess boychick Ben Krauss, a generation younger me, who's felt a softball experience, is on the other side of progress/insulation, young enough to be your grandson or my son.
Maybe it's just a consequence of my own not-really-traumatized childhood, but I was left with a residual sense of antisemitic danger, and a strong feeling that the best way to avoid the danger is to be forgiving, and to avoid making a big deal of things that aren't. Not meaning to "blame the victim," but IMHO minorities will potentially be at the mercy of the majority, and accordingly it seems unwise to insult the majority, except in gentle terms in extreme circumstances.
Two anecdata points. My father was in the Air Force in wwll, recalled whooping and hollering celebrating “that Jew Rosenfeld”’s death because they figured we’d pull out of the the war, my mom’s older cousin was rejected at Radcliffe in ~1950 was told during the admissions interview that her academic record was too strong, and because there was a Jewish quota Jewish students from closer to the middle of the distribution would get admitted so they didn’t monopolize all the awards. Oh, and my grandfather started his own law firm with two other recent grads in 1922 because the fancy firms in nyc didn't take any/many Jews
For most Jewish Americans in 2024, these are weird stories from antiquity, but yeah. We need to appreciate how far our society has progressed toward "liberty and justice for all" in the past century.
Throughout this debate about whether we're witnessing elevated levels of antisemitism in the US, I've found that my answer is... I don't actually care.
"Antisemitism" is too amorphous a term that leaves us arguing over the definition all day long. We lump together distinct attitudes held by people on different points of the political spectrum. There are even some definitions that would include attitudes held by a large number of young Jews!
I can describe what's upsetting me without making any reference to antisemitism. There's a war going on between the armies of radical Islam and the Jewish state. Where I live, the Islamists' supporters consist mostly of (1) hard-line Arab nationalists and (2) leftists (some of whom are Jewish themselves).
(1) will occasionally taunt or intimidate Jews, and they know exactly what they're doing. Example 1: Chanting "from the river to the sea" at a vigil for those killed on October 7th at a school where I was teaching (translation in Arabic: "From the water to the water, Palestine is Arab/Muslim"). Example 2: Physically preventing Jewish students from getting to class (without interference by the administration) at MIT...
(2) will simply do whatever seems aligned with the interests of (1). The college students mostly don't know what's going on. Less so for the media/NGOs/etc. See, for instance, Amnesty International's recent sad post about the "Palestinian writer" (actually a terrorist with blood on his hands) who died in an Israeli prison last week.
I don't know if any of these behaviors are antisemitic. I don't need to know in order to understand that these people are my enemies. Moreover, in this moment, I have no idea why anyone would care if somewhere far, far away there are some right-wingers who hold highly offensive but unrelated attitudes about the relationship between Jews and immigration.
This post searching for a definition of antisemitism reminded me of a joke by the comedian Shane Gillis on racism. He says something like "racism isn't a binary, it's not you have it or you don't. It's more like being hungry. You could be not hungry all day and then a cheeseburger cuts you off on the highway, and suddenly you're hungry".
So I think I agree with what you're saying, but I'd add my. own spin to it which is that surveys attempting to tease out subconscious biases from random poll respondents who might barely think about Jews at all doesn't seem very important to me. The more important studies are probably on "who are these people taking antisemitic actions right now?"
"...subconscious biases from random poll respondents who might barely think about Jews at all doesn't seem very important to me."
Right. I think people in the PMC underrate the extent to which many people have no opinions on Jewish people (or Judaism) at all. My family was firmly blue-collar, but before I reached the age of ten I lived on both coasts and the south, and I don't think I knew of one stereotype, either positive or negative, about Jewish people before I was like 11 or 12, and I wasn't, like a sheltered child. I observed racism for sure, but it was always across color lines....when I finally met someone who was actually anti-semitic, it was a wild concept to me.
As someone firmly ensconced in that ivory tower, the idea that I ought to have thoughts about Jewish people one way or the other has never not been wild to me. It's like asking me my opinion about the color green or the number five (I hope these colors and numbers have not been quietly appropriated by rightist weirdos).
I disagree. Jews both as a race and as a religion are interesting. They manage to consistently raise high performing offspring. Racially, they have (on average) markedly high IQ. And as a religion, they seem markedly less inclined to blindly follow dogma and more inclined to engage in internal debate about what the “Big Guy” might actually want.
Certainly, Judaism is the heritage of a disproportionate share of out loud and proud atheists and secular humanists in western civ, rather than more passive atheists or agnostics who figure why talk about things they don't believe in, or are not sure about.
I have no idea what you are trying to say here: That secular people of jewish descent tend to be a certain flavor of atheist??? If so, this seems to be largely to orthogonal to the entirety of my post....
like Hawaiian shirts, or the thumb-forefinger "OK" sign?
But then that one provocateur (a black guy) tried to goad a white truck driver into making that OK sign, and got him fired from white supremacist symbology?
Hah!
I had a pretty similar experience growing up in a rural area but with a funny twist: I grew up not realizing that Mel Brooks, et al were doing Jewish comedy specifically. So I had a lot of yiddish in my vocabulary which would one day lead to someone very annoyed at me because they thought I was Jewish. These were, to me, just among the many words I'd learned from mass media.
Ha, this reminds me of a King of the Hill episode where the kid (Bobby?) meets a retired couple living in Arizona, but the way they talk is the way Jews from NY would talk. He took on their way of speech and would say "That's so Arizona." when he heard someone make a similar comment. For some reason, this whole thing struck my family as really funny, and my kids would say "That's so Arizona," for quite a while.
I had kind of a funny experience like this growing up.
I went to a high school with a relatively large proportion of Jewish students, perhaps 15% of the student body. I noticed that several of my Jewish classmates occasionally wore t-shirts that said "J Crew" on them. I had no idea that J Crew was a clothing brand, I assumed they had gotten these shirts at religious events and the "J" was short for "Jew" or "Jewish."
I loved that episode!. It was Bobby. The most recurring line from the show was the Dad saying, "Now, Bobby...."
As an American, I'm allowed and encouraged to use loan-words from anywhere. It's part of being a mercantile and assimilative culture. Just like French has the finest vocabulary for cookery so I borrow those words when cooking, Yiddish has the finest vocabulary for insults so I borrow those words when it's time to insult someone.
100% my experience as well. Grew up idolizing Mel Brooks and his style of comedy, and didn't realize any of the background there.
As a kid, the kind of socially forward but socially awkward thing you get out of Mel Brooks and, especially, Larry David really struck a chord with me as someone who is both very good in social situations but also in a full scale panic about them just minutes before.
When I was growing up Seattle had a very small Jewish population. I was also pretty unaware of who in pop culture was Jewish until I was in my teens in part because I had so little exposure to Jewish culture that I didn't understand the the references to make the connection. I rewatched goonies a few years ago and realize that Chunk is as obviously a Jewish character as anyone in Fiddler on the Roof complete with davens – in Hebrew (“Baruch ata …”) and forced confession that he took his Uncle Max’s toupee and glued it on his face when he played Moses in his Hebrew school play. But as a kid, I didn't register that Chuck was Jewish at all.
Seattle now how a much larger Jewish population and my daughter has lots of Jewish friends and neighbors. We have visited their temple regularly to see bat mitzvah readings, concerts, and Purim parties. My daughter knows not only a decent amount of Yiddish but enough Hebrew that she was the one who taught one of her best friends the prayers to sing at Chanukah each night when she decided she wanted to start exploring her Jewish roots and her non-practicing dad couldn't remember the words. She 100% recognized explicitly Jewish humor and views it as a cultural asset that Jewish people have added to the American cultural mix.
It has made me realize how much of my understanding of Jewishness when I was a kid was basically holocaust sympathy that focused on Jews simply as objects of persecution and not as a fully living dynamic cultural group in the way that I understood my Chinese American or Black neighbors to be. As a result, I think my understanding of antisemitism at the time was pretty much limited to "people shouldn't want to kill or hurt Jews" which is obviously true but a lot less robust that my view of anti-racism which would have included that my Chinese and Black neighbors should be explicitly welcomed and included as equals in our community and that includes not only recognition of past persecution but celebration and understanding of their cultural contributions and resiliency and what that adds to our community.
I am glad that my daughter at age 9 could be dressing up for a friend's Purim party and make comments like "What do you think Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are dressing as for Purim this year? You are suppose to dress as what you are not they ought to go as an actual Feminist and an actual mensch." I would have utterly lacked the cultural context to make that joke at that age and I was the worse for it.
Interesting anecdote. Is there any data to support the claim that Seattle has gotten more Jewish over your lifetime?
My experience growing up in Seattle (born in mid 1980s) was very Jewish. I attended Jewish schools from pre-K through 12th grade, although I am aware that most Jewish students in Seattle didn't attend such schools. Certainly, the "Jewish experience" was there for families that wanted it. Tuition at Seattle Jewish private schools has always been heavily subsidized by wealthy, local Jewish donors. Seattle Hebrew Academy was founded in 1947.
I was born in the mid-1970s and have lived in Seattle my whole life. My parents had friends who were ethnically Jewish but very few if any were practicing and most were married to non-Jewish spouses. My sense that Seattle has become more Jewish in my lifetime was pretty experiencial. But your question got me wondering how true that impression was. Found this article from 2015 in the Tablet indicating that Seattle's population had grown by 70% from 2000-2015. Didn't seen anything more recent but that actually lines up pretty well with the time that I would have said that I noticed the most growth. I don't think that there is any reason to suspect that the trends would be different.
The most recent census data indicates that the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue Metro area is still only 1.6% even after all this growth with is less that the percentage of the US population overall and significantly lower that most other cities our size. With a population percentage that small people are going to definitely have different levels of exposure depending on where they live, go to school, and work. But It is also large enough that if you were in Jewish schools and observant, I am sure it would feel much larger.
I actually grew up in an area near Northgate's mosque and about 25% of the neighbors on my block were Muslim, mostly Pakistani. My daughter goes to a school with a large percentage of East African immigrants and a significant percentage of the school is Muslim and she has several friends who were hijabs to school. So neither of us have grown up with a lived reality that matches up with the reality that Seattle is less than 1% Muslim.
In sixth grade, I met my "first Jew" when a girl in our upper-middle SoCal suburb joined our little clique. Somehow I picked up that she was a bit culturally different and was fascinated. Since then I've been tracing the Jewish threads of European culture and thought. After the Spaniards kicked out the Muslims, Jewish culture was the only major contrast to Christian culture in Europe. This of course has lead to unthinkable tragedy, but at the same time it's hard to imagine our current lives without it.
This was absolutely true of me as a kid. If you're raised in a Christian milieu the concept doesn't make a lot of intuitive sense, so you just treat the category "Jewish" as "someone who practices Judaism." The Jewish kids in class were the ones who celebrated Hanukkah, that was it.
My wife's Jewish Israeli uncle defined an anti-Semite as "someone who hates Jews more than is absolutely necessary."
Kinda funny when a Jew says that. Of course, any non-Jew offering that pretty funny joke is obviously an anti-Semite.
That's a very good point. I recall Yglesias wrote about how understanding prejudice as a more temperamental thing has gone out of fashion with discussing social inequalities. Social inequalities are of enormous interest in a prosperous multiethnic middle class society. But while not everyone is a policymaker, and most policies cannot immediately shift inequalities within the framework of small-l liberalism, everyone does face a temptation to prejudice or race arrogance. Discussing those terms might actually help us focus in on what we worry about the most.
I basically agree with this. The article does an admirable job detailing how antisemitism is a varied and bipartisan thing. The phenomena that is newer and growing seems to be the young/leftist embrace of Palestinian nationalism. It seems absolutely deranged to me, but it's as much a phenomena of bizarro world cross-sectional identity politics as it is antisemitic. It's definitely bad, the Palestinian nationalist project is clearly much darker than the Israeli one, even if I'm happy to handwring over both of them being inherently somewhat illiberal and bad.
"The phenomena that is newer and growing seems to be the young/leftist embrace of Palestinian nationalism. It seems absolutely deranged to me, but it's as much a phenomena of bizarro world cross-sectional identity politics as it is antisemitic. It's definitely bad, the Palestinian nationalist project is clearly much darker than the Israeli one,"
Embrace of Palestinian nationalism is scarcely more deranged than any other variety of "underdog-ism". That's what it is, another form of underdogism. Perhaps reflexive, perhaps mindless, perhaps well-considered, or perhaps personally informed.
Left-leaning American youth who embrace Palestinian nationalism know they and their families are paying taxes that support Israeli violence and repression against Palestinians, and they don't like it, and are taking a stand against it. That the violence, and certainly the hatred, is not just a one-way street from Israelis to Palestinians, and that Israelis may have some excuses, or even justifications of varying validity for their violent and repressive actions matters much less to them than it does to you, that's all. They believe in the Stan Lee/Spiderman doctrine, "With great power comes great responsibility", so when they identify the more powerful actor, they hold them responsible for pretty much everything, and when they identify the much less powerful actor, the underdog, they let quite a lot slide.
Palestinian nationalism and Palestinian patriotism isn't entirely dark. There's a historic tradition of Arabic speakers and local Christians and Muslims going back centuries, and it has coalesced into a national identity specific to the Palestine Mandate's borders, with overflow to Jordan, since the end of the Ottoman Empire, becoming real thing by the late 20th century and 21st century even if Arab Christian/Muslim identity as Palestinian and only Palestinian may not have mattered any more than religious, Ottoman, Arab, or Greater Syrian identities beforehand. You can never disprove a nationalism, or patriotism, by calling it too young, too old, too discontinuous, or historically unjustified. I say this for the same reasons I say "Israel is real" as a retort to complaints about Israel's synthetic, artificial, or "externally-imposed" origins. Palestinians can be proud they've kept a national communal identity, in Israel even while holding Israeli citizenship, in the occupied territories as stateless subjects, and as stateless refugees, migrants or foreign citizens abroad. They've been under the rule of a government that treats them separately and unequally, not just political rights, but personal property rights and safety often taking second place to preferences of Jewish Israeli citizens and state agents. It's only a dark (not physically) minority of the Israeli/Zionist project that has looked genocide or mass expulsion in the face in times of comparative peace and security (or "normalcy") and said, "yeah, let's do that", but some do that and get appointed to high office. And some multiple of that have long wished Palestinians would emigrate of their own accord and those abroad would forget ties to the land. But the Palestinians can be proud they haven't given in to the pressure. Can Palestinians be proud of everything done in their name? No. But that they take a licking and haven't passively folded into inert subjects or exiles without a homeland? Absolutely, they can be proud they stood up to that agenda to get pushed down or out.
I think there's always a strain of illiberalism in leftists, especially young ones. The Palestine Liberation project was also embraced by the Black Panthers. The underlying attraction to violence and oppression (just with the pyramid flipped) always repelled me, and predisposed me to be more sympathetic to Israel before I knew that much about the conflict.
"Moreover, in this moment, I have no idea why anyone would care if somewhere far, far away there are some right-wingers who hold highly offensive but unrelated attitudes about the relationship between Jews and immigration."
They're not as far away as you seem to think. They're a substantial portion of the population and hold SUBSTANTIALLY more electoral power in this country than the tiny population of Arabs and people who identify as "far left."
This argument is only ever made by people seeking to deflect attention from the Islamists’ sympathizers. (This group incidentally has quite a bit of intellectual and cultural power that the right sorely lacks, and Biden certainly seems to believe that mollifying the Arab street is key to his electoral fortunes.) I’ve never met a Jew who responded to this moment by saying “forget about Hamas, now is the time to think about Nazis in Montana who hold more Congressional seats.”
It’s ok to have more than one enemy. One’s enemies may even differ vastly in their strength. Right now we’re dealing with the jihadists (be they men or women, old or young, rich or poor). When the Nazis come, we’ll deal with them too.
As a Montana citizen, I feel it incumbent upon me to note that there aren't any Nazis in Montana who hold any congressional seats. As far as Nazis, are a couple of yutzes up in Whitefish who occasionally get some press, and miscellaneous scattered morons. Our congressional delegation is a couple of bog-standard republican backbenchers in the House, one republican in the Senate of no particular consequence, and one Democrat who could go places if Dem leadership and Dem primary voters weren't beholden to The Groups.
What exactly do you mean by "mollifying the Arab street" and "the jihadists"?
“The jihadists” is the unfair catch-all I apply to the coalition described in my original post, when I’m feeling grumpy. (Likewise, “the Nazis” is my unfair catch-all for right-wing bigots.)
“Mollifying the Arab street” refers to the Biden team’s belief that the election hinges crucially on making statements that will please the “uncommitted” contingent in Dearborn. Hence the strategy of parroting Hamas’ statistics in the state of the union while simultaneously selling more arms to Israel.
Please point out the exact lines from the SOTU where Biden is "parroting Hamas' statistics"
“More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of whom are not Hamas. Thousands and thousands are innocent women and children.”
This may be right or wrong — I don’t know. But the attitude towards Gaza health ministry statistics in the administration has shifted, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the ministry’s credibility. (See John Kirby’s previous statements.)
As detailed by Wharton’s Abraham Wyner, the breakdown of casualties appears to be complete nonsense. Even the Gaza health ministry partially walked back its casualty count recently!
"This argument is only ever made by people seeking to deflect attention from the Islamists’ sympathizers. (This group incidentally has quite a bit of intellectual and cultural power that the right sorely lacks, and Biden certainly seems to believe that mollifying the Arab street is key to his electoral fortunes.)"
Your perception of reality seems hashish-induced-----only way less relaxed.
So maybe way overcaffeinated also?
Would smoking some hashish deflect my attention from the absence of Montana Nazis among those blocking traffic at the Holland Tunnel or the Golden Gate Bridge? Should I have a few tokes before I go to a dinner party hosted by a Jewish law professor at Berkeley?
Paranoids sometimes have real enemies -- and are even right, sometimes, in identifying them.
It distorts your viewpoint that the Biden administration is subservient to Hamas supporters in policy.
Unlike the OP, I didn't mention Biden here. I was merely pointing out that right-wing antisemitism is often invoked to deflect attention from antisemitism (and other malfeasances) among pro-Palestine elements. My comment stands on its own.
This argument is only ever made by people seeking to deflect attention from the Islamists’ sympathizers. (This group incidentally has quite a bit of intellectual and cultural power that the right sorely lacks, and Biden certainly seems to believe that mollifying the Arab street is key to his electoral fortunes.)"
Your perception of reality seems hashish-induced-----only way less relaxed.
So maybe way overcaffeinated also?
They are a substantial portion of the electorate only if you count a lot of people who know barely have any opinion on Jews at all. Saying you like a conspiracy theory is not the same as believing every logical consequence of it. The very many people who believe that the moon landings didn't happen or JFK was killed by the CIA aren't out there taking action against NASA or the CIA.
It’s also the case that many Evangelicals, who are mostly on the right, hold Jews in Israel in high regard because they view them as stewards of the Holy Land.
Or at least 144,000 of them.
Dunno what number is supposed to represent.
Reference to the Book of Revelations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/144,000
Yeah, this is why I laugh when anyone says "Real Jews shouldn't vote for Democrats!" Like buddy, I can walk and chew gum at the same time.
Electoral power is a very important kind, but not the only one.
Are you conflating between far right and right? Does the average conservative have more power than the average liberal? Yes, there are more people who report being conservative than liberal. But in terms of antisemitism are there more far right than far left? Among young people who are reporting increases, I would expect there to be more far left than far right
Great point. Sometimes we can over-obsess on the motive. It really can be more important to focus more on the action, and on the impact. The motive can be something for the perp to ruminate on or think over, or not. Society needs to contain, deter, punish the action, and prevent, mitigate, repair the action at least as much as it needs to intuit and inquire on motives.
Focusing on motives in hate crimes does the service of highlighting and shaming or exiling hate from polite society, but at the same time, it can politicize, and from there polarize, and among those not bought into the victim/shamer's perspective, *elevate* acts of simple and straightforward crime into loftier statements, symbols, "struggles", "battles".
Sometimes, there can be broader, more unified, less hair-splitting consensus against actual crimes, jerkishness, or asshattery if you just abstract the actions from the "who?whom?" and identity questions. Don't just change the names to protect the innocent (or the guilty), change the names *and* "flip the script", multiple times, to identify the guilty and the crime.
I do think JA has real enemies. Arab nationalists are in fact largely against a Jewish presence in historic Palestine, and are definitely against Jews having political power in historic Palestine. They are also against Jewish political power in the US. To the extent that leftists think they can make common cause with them, that is only true up until the time that leftist political goals conflict with Arab nationalist goals. Arab nationalists, by and large, don't believe in democracy or liberal values. They historically believed in secularism (which is why many of the leaders were Christian), but secular Arab nationalism is viewed to have failed when it has been tried, so a much more religious, anti-Jewish strain is now dominant. To the extent that people support Palestinian nationalism who don't have ethnic or religious ties to the region, it's helpful to realize that the average progressive has very little in common with the dominant strains of Palestinian political thought.
"JA" - Jewish-Americans? "Jewish America"?
Overall, your point stands completely.
The terms Arab nationalists want, and clearly feel they deserve "against a Jewish presence in historic Palestine, and are definitely against Jews having political power in historic Palestine." are obviously harsh, cruel, unacceptable from a Jewish or Jewish Israeli perspective, if you ever allow yourself to step in those shoes. They would be harsh, cruel, unacceptable, to any identity group, no matter who they were, or what members of their group had done (even criminal things) in the name of the ethnoreligious collective.
They are the kinds of terms that one only imposes after an unconditional surrender (WWII) or a dictated peace (WWI) after you have won through overwhelming forces. Yet it is the weaker side that feels it deserves and wants this!
And, to be fair - even to Hamas, and the atrociousness of its assault on October 7th and other times does not even changes this, Hamas has suggested it would be prepared to 'suspend' its genocide/ethnic cleansing/destruction of Israel goal for a truce based on certain concrete, negotiable terms, at various points over the last fifteen years. Lengths of the truce period Hamas has publicly contemplated, and I have only read this one or two places, have been truces of 10, 25, 50, or 100 years. I am not sure about that last one. But once you get to 50 or 100 years, you are starting to get to the practical equivalent of a peace treaty, and the group discussing a hypothetical "truce" of that length really seems to be going through an exercise of making a peace treaty without contradicting its ideological denial of the concept of peace and coexistence head-on. Effective multi-decade truces would give some people the "lived experience" of peace, matching or exceeding the human average. To sum it up, Hamas has discussed stopping or 'suspending' attacks, and accepting obligations to not do violence to Israelis, in return for a set of significant reciprocal concessions [I do not recall the full extent], while rejecting the idea of at all repudiating that fighting to destroy Israel to the death, as a moral concept, is wrong moral thing to do at all. I might not kill you in practice for x amount of time, as long as you don't make me say that, in principle, it's beyond my G-d given rights to kill you someday, has been the most flexible Hamas position.
The "phased plan" of conquering Israel, with a peace agreement as an intermediate step, has long been debated openly (in Arabic) among Palestinian factions.
(There have been factions that truly see peaceful coexistence as the end goal, but probably they have never had majority support).
Hamas's problem at the moment is that they can't receive much Iranian weaponry while under Israeli embargo. A "peace deal" means lifting the embargo, a change in physical reality on the ground. In return, the Israelis get some sort of flimsy promise that the conflict is "settled" for Palestinians. Israelis tend not to be so trusting these days.
What the Palestinians need to do is reach a consensus internally about making peace. This is obvious to anyone viewing the circumstances clearly. If they became less violent towards Israel, including a significant element of policing their own radical elements, circumstances would organically improve. Israel would rather not spend the resources and bare the criticism for occupation/embargo, if Palestinians ceased to be such a threat.
Statehood is a red herring. The Pal administrations in Gaza/WB are already basically states. The issue is occupation/embargo. This is easily attainable by stopping attacks on Israel. Attacks that all major Palestinian factions today support.
OK - I understand this argument, and it's very deep relevance to Israel, Israelis, and Israel's international supporters and sympathizers and supporters of any religion.
However, to people with no special attachment or ties or motives causing them to privilege *insurance* for Israel against contingencies above other everyday realities, like as G. Sahani was discussing with me elsewhere in the thread, most Zoomers, Millennials, and Leftists or Antiracism Firsters do not, Palestinians with genocidal intentions or "phased plans" to destroy Israel, that they simply *cannot achieve* in the here and now, nor in a foreseeable realistic future, simply "Don't count". These Palestinian intentions and wishes "don't count" precisely because the power imbalance means they can't be achieved, are not possible, nor an urgent threat or risk. From the Zoomer/Millennial/Leftist perspective, all the pro-Israeli justification side has for justifying war that kills civilians as opposed to combatants at high ratios of civilians, and occupation with an Apartheid system is a realm of hypothetical and speculative enemy threats the Israelis are shadowboxing against, not an imminent threat. Everyday realities and facts, Israeli forces are killing Palestinian civilians daily trying to destroy every last Hamas member, and preventing means of subsistence from getting through to noncombatants so it can't get to combatants, and it has added up to around 30,000 Palestinians.
From neutral and anti-Israeli perspectives, whatever justifications Israel has in the land of hypotheticals and phased plans are trumped by lopsided and death tolls on the Palestinian side in the land of the real bombings and blockade and military shooting. Palestinian intentions and proclamations that are in the range of unrealistic to impossible are a red herring from this point of view.
There's no denying the violence that Hamas & co were doing to Israelis civilians on Oct. 7 and 8th was real. The holding of hostages since has been violent and evil. And Israeli troops in Gaza (rather than remote drone warriors operating from computer keyboards in Tel Aviv) are exposed to deadly risk of violent loss of life and limb daily. And, Israeli border communities face hazards and displacement from rocket threats. But in terms of damage, Hamas gave the Israelis a really bad 48 hours killing under 2,000 people. The Israelis have given the Gazans a really bad five months killing 30,000 people.
To people uncommitted to Israel, that appears to be disproportionate violence by the Israelis.
It's easy for neutral, distant people, or people with affinities to those on the receiving end, to care about proportionality.
It's hard for somebody (the Israelis) dealing with a relentless, hateful, murderous opponent, stubborn opponent, who started the latest round of conflict, to care about proportionality, even if that opponent is much weaker. When anybody (the US, Turkey, Russia, whomever) is faced with similar brazen attacks, they will generally counterattack with all means at their disposal, fair or foul, proportionate or not. If the victim doesn't go disproportionate (Belgium years ago), it is probably only for lack of means to respond disproportionately.
The temptation, from an Israeli point of view, and from American point of view post-9/11, or from the point of view of any group subject to terrorist attack or atrocity, is to think, "in principle civilians shouldn't be killed, but civilians from the group championed by the terrorist group, who believe the terrorist's groups' actions are correct and cheerlead them, can be killed in good conscience-even if they are not direct participants right now." People rarely admit this, but they feel it. Millennials, Zoomers, Leftists are just more committed to the value that governments can't kill civilians, no matter what those civilians think or say.
Also, the Israeli government and elected politics does have some people in it noted for their own Jewish supremacist, anti-Palestinian "phased plans" of transfers/ie ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to beyond borders of Israel and current occupied territories. So, open discussion of genocide of Palestinian communities such as they remain in the historic mandate of Palestine (via ethnic cleansing) is a thing among Israeli Jews.
When you said this:
"A "peace deal" means lifting the embargo, a change in physical reality on the ground. In return, the Israelis get some sort of flimsy promise that the conflict is "settled" for Palestinians. Israelis tend not to be so trusting these days."
This is nevertheless true. In protracted conflicts of this nature, nobody gets something for nothing. Anybody who promises something for nothing to their people, and in effect, Bibi has done this for the Israelis and the Hamas Charter has done this for Palestinians, is not a leader, nor even an adult, but a mere child. But proud peoples may prefer man-children cosplaying as leaders these days to real leaders who make hard decisions.
"From neutral and anti-Israeli perspectives, whatever justifications Israel has in the land of hypotheticals and phased plans are trumped by lopsided and death tolls on the Palestinian side in the land of the real bombings and blockade and military shooting. Palestinian intentions and proclamations that are in the range of unrealistic to impossible are a red herring from this point of view."
I don't think neutral parties analyze wars (started by Hamas in this case) by comparing death tolls. Winning wars means not having as many die on your side. Anyways, my point about the phased plans was an explanation for why making peace deals is not so obvious to Israelis. I don't think that the current war in Gaza is existential for Israel, though I don't think that is the only legitimate threshold. I am concerned about claims that Israel's targeting is too indiscriminate, and that they are not allowing food/water/medicine aid into Gaza, but I don't know what's really true in this fog of war.
I agree. "Antisemitism" is the wrong level of discourse like (I hope no one is offended by the conceptual comparison) "industrial policy." One can conditionally support (or not) the Israeli government's war against Hamas without regard to whether one of the positions is "anti semitic." Actually, maybe a better analogy would be inflation which aggregates movements up and down of many prices.
This article kind of misses the point, in my opinion. Among immigrants and students from Islamic countries, extreme antisemitism is as common as it has been throughout history. They have not undergone the process of reducing antisemitism that the European person has gone through following the Holocaust. On the contrary, the Israeli-Arab conflict has only intensified their antisemitism.
The main issue with white people holding leftist views is not their antisemitism per se, but their absolute loyalty to their allies, the immigrants from Islamic countries. Is there a big difference between being an extreme antisemite yourself and showing absolute loyalty to your allies who are extreme antisemites? Not really.
This is an Islamophobic comment IMO. If you're going to label entire populations as extremists, provide some evidence.
It's important to distinguish. If we're talking about Muslim populations still living in the Middle East, then, unfortunately, there is a rate of anti-Semitism at 80-90%, (and by the way, homophobia is not far from this). Among Muslims who have undergone Western socialization, the rates are much lower but still significant. In the survey I mentioned later, which was recently conducted by Pew, 37% of Muslims in the USA express a favorable opinion of Hamas.
Pretty shocking that among US adults overall, 8% have a favorable view of Hamas, according to the Pew poll.
I think it's plausible that a decent chunk of this 8% have this view because of their sense of ally-ship with pro-Palestinian Arab and/or Islamist activists, or their willingness to defer to them. I could be totally mistaken and that they all arrived to this conclusion on their own and not out of a sense of solidarity with their perceived political allies.
In fairness, you can get 8% polling for a variety of insane and shocking positions.
Half of that is probably the "Lizardman's Constant"
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/
(Sadly, only half though)
I don't think that the entire population (or even most of it) have to be anti-semitic or extremists for such a phenomenon to be occurring.
There are segments of the left who have decided that they should de-center themselves and instead defer to Arab/Muslim activist voices, some (but not all) of which are aligned with extreme Islamist and anti-semitic positions.
If you were provided evidence would it matter? Would you be willing to modify your view? Most people don’t.
Koreans are all too often casual bigots.
It’s hyper-Americanized in some weird ways (rap music, dying their hair blonde, Christianity) and in certain cultural niches (skateboard culture), and still deeply traditional in other ways (Confucianism).
Is the anti-Semitism an example of it being Westernized or it being not Westernized. I can see the argument going both ways.
I was referring and responding to Tamritz’s comment not Allan’s.
Apologies. It originally showed up as a response to Allan. I'll delete.
This idea doesn’t really ring true to me if we’re talking about the American political situation. Muslims are only like 1% of the population here, and American Muslims report attitudes only slightly more antisemitic than Americans on average, and still have positive views of Jews on average.
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/13/5/441
37% of US Muslims have a positive view of Hamas. Now read the charter of Hamas
https://irp.fas.org/world/para/docs/880818a.htm
50% of Americans support the GOP. Now read the Republican platform. Clearly, 50% of Americans believe the 14th amendment applies to fetuses. QED.
I do believe that support for a terrorist group whose primary mission is to expel or kill most Jews from their country and whose primary tactic for doing that is violent attacks on Jews is a decent proxy for some level of anti-Jewish animus.
Again the point is that very few people with a positive view of Hamas in the Pew survey actually read the charter, and imputing that they must therefore support everything in the charter is sloppy analysis
Is Hamas famous for something besides killing Jews? I don't think you need to read the fine print in their charter to conclude that Hamas is an antisemitic organization.
People can do antisemitic things or support antisemitic things or take antisemitic positions or advocate on behalf of antisemitic organizations or identify with antisemitic causes out of ignorance just as much as out of malice.
Do you mind cooling it with this shit?
/s ?
I'm really getting tired of trying to tell with this one.
Surely depends on how you're defining "worse" -- if you're an American, living in the United States, then the Republican party is very plausibly far more of a threat to your wellbeing than Hamas is.
I wouldn’t read too much into that number. I can guarantee you that more than 37% of US Muslims have not read the charter of Hamas. Roughly that same percentage of US Muslims don’t even know who the current Prime Minister of Israel is, per the same Pew survey you’re citing. Roughly that same percentage doesn’t know Hamas was responsible for October 7.
Americans are surprisingly ignorant of everything happening outside America.
Even an ignorant person knows enough to understand what Hamas is. I'm not buying the apologetics.
Regarding the example of fetuses as human beings, it's not the main issue of the Republican party, but there is certainly a large group of Trump supporters who have lost trust in democratic institutions, as that indeed what support for him means, and it is very depressing.
I’m sorry but I just don’t think that’s the case.
A bunch of US news organizations ran articles in October with the headline, “What is Hamas?”
“what is hamas” was a top Google search in the US for 2023.
We really are that ignorant.
Frankly, if I made a list of "things I think Americans need to know more about", Hamas might not be on the first page.
Agreed. Most people don't sit around reading Slow Boring or even the front page of the NYT. A huge chunk of people don't even realize that New Mexico is part of the US, so why would they know what Hamas is?
It's a bad look that someone follows your line of thinking, and your response is like, "Well, that's nuanced but my thing is not."
The world is nuanced. People are, on average, poorly informed. When you can't see the world as it is, it hurts your analysis and makes you look bad.
There's also a difference between being an anti-Semite and saying things/espousing ideas that are anti-Semitic. Also, some people can support anti-Semitic things out of ignorance and not out of malice.
Yeah the leftist alliance between woke westerners and islamist extremists is always funny to observe when the latter group accidentally says something about lgbtq+ issues.
A pox on both their houses. I don’t like Gazans being murdered and starved because I don’t like human beings to be murdered and starved. However, the false prophet Mohammed was a blood soaked warlord who reveled in pogroms, married a nine year old and traded slaves. I have zero respect for Islamic culture and laugh whenever people claim Islam is a religion of peace.
Those who claim Islam is a religion of peace are indeed clearly absurd because they over-generalizing, but you are also overgeneralizing. Religious traditions are complex and internally-diverse. They are represented and manifested in many different ways, some of which may be peaceful and some which may not be.
All cultures/religious traditions that have been around for a long time will have a tension regarding present day values and the content of their tradition and the key figures within it. That's true of Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, etc. Islam is not alone in that. (That doesn't mean everything is equal among these traditions either). However, problematic material is present in lots of ancient traditions.
Religions often teach ways of reading these specific parts, or eliding them, or balancing them with other parts etc. Some do this more than others, while some are extremists/fundamentalists who do this less.
"laugh whenever people claim Islam is a religion of peace."
Don't.
Leave people an out, away from the negative, if that works from their cultural or religious context and gives you choice quotes to work with. Challenge them to live up to their assertion. Don't ridicule them for point scoring reasons. What prize do you think you'll win for being "right" anyway? It's a religion, like Christianity and others, that will still be here on earth, no matter what, long after we're all dead. Let the thing reinvent itself if it can, will, or might.
"Those who claim Islam is a religion of peace are indeed clearly absurd because they over-generalizing,"
The generalization is what is absurd. Any belief system is what its human users make of it. That's why I suggested an alternative to Mr. Abbott's way of reacting to it.
Yes. I live within easy walking distance of six synagogues from hippy-only-nominally-follow-rules-and-traditions Reform to extreme Orthodox where within half a second you perceive the members as Jewish. (nothing like a tall fuzzy hat in summer to make you stand out). As I was reading this, I was thinking about all this while I was wondering about some of the tropes.
David do you think that Muslims today are practicing slavery and child marriage?
Also, 32% of women in Yemen married before their 18th birthday, and there are 59 million child brides in Africa, mostly in Muslim countries like Nigeria and Chad.
https://data.unicef.org/resources/child-marriage-in-west-and-central-africa-a-statistical-overview-and-reflections-on-ending-the-practice/
Also, people claim that the Houthis have been reestablishing slavery in Yemen (https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/1810456/exclusive-houthis-restore-slavery-yemen).
(Ofc none of this shows that slavery and child marriage are characteristic of the Muslim world writ large, as opposed to simply the most impoverished parts of it. Wealth eradicates a great many sins.)
Some definitely are. Most are not. However, anyone with a taste for modern decency would cancel Mohammed. He is worse than Epstein and makes Trump look like a hippie.
Is there a difference between murdering someone and giving your friend a lift to go 'talk it out' with the guy cuckolding him? Even if you're an idiot for believing he was just bringing the gun along for self-defense -- you're still just a gullible idiot not a murderer.
Obviously, there is a difference between personally feeling animosity towards a racial group and failing to appreciate/stop your allies from doing so. Depends on the context you may or may not care about the difference in intent but it's there and we judge people differently based on whether they intended a harm or failed to stop it.
One challenge for the third kind of study is the actual success of Jews in America. We really are overrepresented in finance/politics/media/journalism/academia! And so you have to ask about the reasons for that to get at the conspiracy theories (in contrast to similar questions about say Black Americans, who are underrepresented).
The far right and the far left overlap in thinking that anyone successful, rich or influential must have achieved such status due to unfairness in the system. For the far right, it is the Rothschilds, secretly controlling the global financial system. For the left, it is the application of bog standard oppressor-oppressed thinking to Jews (and Israel, in many respects).
Connected to this, I've commented here and elsewhere that I think there really is a form of "Socialism/Communism-to-anti-Semitism" pipeline in that, for a tremendous amount of "vulgar" socialist and communist thought, you could almost literally do a find-and-replace of "the rich" with "the Jews" and then hand it back out as anti-Semitic literature without anyone blinking.
Maybe next time AOC's dress will say "Tax the Jews"?
Probably not -- I don't think that most or even many people who are otherwise interested in socialism/communism fall into that pipeline, but even if it's just 1 to 5 percent, that's still a lot of people.
I was just joking!
Sorry, wasn't sure!
AOC has actually caught a lot of flack from the “free Palestine” crowd for her support of Biden in light of his support for Israel, so no, not her.
Don't forget, morons whose father had some sort of emerald mine concern routinely are involved in starting and running multiple innovative billion dollar companies. It's all about that ol' emerald mine.
Another guy who started an innovative billion-dollar company has parents who let him sell books out of their garage. The horror!
If only others could have sold books out of their garages, they too could have dominated retail sales the world over.
#agarageagaragemykingdomforagarage
You see the same in reverse with statistics about crime. There are statistics about rates of homicide or armed robbery or whatever that are literally true but we all know the people who focus on them a lot are just run of the mill racists
There isn't a great reason to fixate on these or to use them to further a "black people are inherently violent" narrative. But knowing them does counter popular narratives on the left regarding race and criminal justice. I'd happily erase crime stats from my brain if I never had to hear something about police hunting black people for sport or another Summer of 2020 meltdown.
Easy: Jewish culture (like that of Asians and recent immigrants from e.g. Egypt and Nigeria) places the highest priority on academic achievement. Other cultures do not. It really is that simple.
Obviously there are a bunch of reasons for this, including the one you mention. But because it's true the statement "there are lots of Jews in Hollywood and the banks" is both the sort of thing that indicates antisemitism and also a factually true statement.
Yes, there's a great documentary from the 1990s about the history of early Hollywood called, "Hollywoodism," which is a 100% positive take on the role of immigrant and first-generation Jewish-Americans in the film industry, but there's literally no way to talk about the information in it that doesn't sound like an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.
Right, it’s all dependent on what follows. Like “they use it to push division of white christians” or “they push predatory loans on minorities”.
Third world people from Asia and Africa (and the Middle East) - often model minorities in the West, especially in North America. In their home countries, the well to do are all corrupt and the not well off are the volatile, angry "street". Why the difference? Discuss.
Why is 1 - 5 part Muslim per 95 the most benign seeming ratio [my Muslim doctor, engineer, dentist, restauranter, handyman, software guy, etc.]. Why seeming immiseration and dissatisfaction with mass concentration? Discuss.
I would also trace that back to a higher emphasis on literacy and textual interpretation, which provided a good cultural backdrop for strong performance in an academic setting.
(Not Jewish myself, but that's the impression I get.)
This was a thorny issue that I ran into while talking a few guys I knew in the Middle East out of believing anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. (With the related challenge of explaining the difference between AIPAC and a hypothetical conspiracy to people who grew up in countries without democratic political participation, civil society, and lobbying as Americans citizens oils understand it.)
What is it a Jewish person is 11,000% more likely to win a Nobel Prize than the average person.
I was tempted to make that point in reply to David Abbot’s comment that said Israel has no natural resources.
The opposite problem occurs with surveys about Black Americans. It is factually true, for example, that Black people are disproportionately likely to be criminals.
Looking at the ADL's list of 11 statements that "indicate classic anti-Jewish conspiratorial beliefs" they range from clearly anti-semitic and also rarely endorsed ("Jews don't care what happens to anyone but their own kind", 7.7% of Americans say this is "mostly true") to borderline innocuous and more widely adopted ("Jews stick together more than other Americans," 20.8% "mostly true"). Like isn't it true for most ethnic and religious groups that they "stick together" more than "other Americans"? At least one way to interpret this statement is just that two randomly selected American Jews are more likely to associate with each other than two randomly selected Americans. That's almost certainly true, and probably true for almost any ethnic or religious subgroup in America. Part of my family is Jewish but it wouldn't really concern me at all if other Americans thought this statement was true about Jews. Whereas I would be concerned if most of the country thought Jews "don't care about anyone but their own kind" or "are more loyal to Israel than America" or "do not share my values," which are other items on the ADL list.
I don’t think that many American Jews are “more loyal to America than Israel” but quite a few are willing to complicate American foreign policy to help Israel. America is strongly enough that it can probably carry water without disaster. Still, it’s insane to claim that being Jewish does not correlate with wanting to bend America. foreign policy to protect Israel from invasion.
I think your quote is inverted
Honestly for all the retail evil and cruelty from Hamas, and all the talkie-talk rhetoric and theatrics from Islamic "shoots to miss" Republic, Israel is still existentially safer than it was fifty years ago. America was the direct backstop against invasion and existential damage for Israeli mainly during the Yom Kippur War and the Brezhnev-Andropov era of the USSR (especially before the peace treaty with Egypt) when the prospect of substantial Arab states armies and Soviet expeditionary or nuclear forces doing Israel in was a real thing. So many elements of that opposing anti-Israeli coalition are not in place these days, even though networked political criminals can give Israel some really black days like the US hasn't seen (recognizing proportionately Oct. 7 was more than a 9/11)
I don't think you're reading that second question right. It's "Jews stick together more than other Americans" as in "Jews stick to their own kind moreso than other ethnic groups in America." If you believe all groups do this than you're disagreeing with the question.
I think it's incorrect to say "you are reading that second question wrong" when we're talking about a polling question, and a lot of the point is "how do people read this"
I literally read it the same way David did, and would answer "true" for the same reason.
If you replaced the question with: "Gays stick together more than other Americans" I would ALSO answer true, and I'm both gay and don't think it's an anti-gay stereotype/trope.
If you want to ask: "Jews stick to their own kind moreso than other minority ethnic groups in America" then ask THAT, don't ask something that's open to interpretation and then _assume_ the antisemitic answer.
...and how about Black people -- complete with code-switching (y'know what I'm sayin')?
I'm Jewish, and I don't think that's true at all. Finding out someone else is Jewish maybe warrants a fist bump. Nothing else.
It's clearly true and it's a critical part of the 'successful minority group playbook', so good for them.
Hold your group culturally apart - thereby avoid the weaknesses/pitfalls of the mainstream culture.
Have a sense of uniqueness and (ideally) superiority - assists in maintaining that cultural separation and not assimilating too much.
Make education and/or entrepreneurship a key part of your identity - ensures financial success, obviously.
I wonder if there are any studies tracking exposure to anti semitic discourse or actions?
Something I've experienced since 10/7 is that I will be casually browsing social media, run into content by or about a Jewish person, and as soon as I read the comments I see a ton of antisemitic ones. For example, on Instagram I ran into a clip of orthodox Jews walking on NYC's streets in the 60s and many comments were Gifs of someone using a flamethrower.
I'm not Jewish and find this upsetting. I can only imagine if you are. It's fairly prevalent all over the Internet.
Something that may impact this is that people are now exposed to opinions from all over the world, and the rest of the world has a different dynamic than in the US. It may explain why studies show that antisemitism is down in the US but Jewish people report feeling worse about it.
This certainly seems plausible to me -- there's really no argument that (1) anti-Semitism is vastly more prevalent/acceptable in a number of countries outside the "Anglosphere" and Western Europe in recent decades and (2) both internet access and English-language fluency in those same countries has also become much widespread. (This is similar to the way you are vastly more likely to run across pro-Hindu nationalist content on-line today than you were 25 years ago primarily because Hindu nationalists are now much more likely to use social media and communicate in English.)
as far as I can tell the seedier side of the internet (think 4chan etc.) has a ton of antisemitism on it now, antisemitic memes are one of the dominant themes. pre 2010 i don't think it was like this. not all of it is sincere, a lot is just trolling but then like Sartre pointed out, that's always the M.O. of the antisemite. it spreads out to the rest of the internet.
these people are small in number but they just spend all day posting so you see a ton of it.
my guess is they're mainly white Americans.
That's entirely possible, and we shouldn't discount that now white racist Americans also have a wider platform to make their views heard more as well.
But my observation was more about "normie" social media like Instagram, Tiktok and X since those have a wider reach. There's a lot of Jewish people that are exposed to a lot more antisemitic discourse than before, and we shouldn't dismiss it just because it's not reflected in broad population surveys.
As a woman, it has also been pretty shocking to see the misogynistic and often violent comments that feminist content or even just female participants experience online. It is hard to know whether these attitudes are increasing, this is all coming from an incredibly small minority, or this is what people really think and are now able to express safely with the benefit of being anonymous. I think Jewish people are seeing this same thing.
It is a real head scrambler. Whenever you are in a marginalized group that is subject to discrimination and potential violence you are forced to walk through the world a little differently. Part of that is parsing out what negative behavior or circumstances are related to discrimination against your status or might signal danger and what are just everyday assholes behaving toward you the same way that they would anyone else. Assume it all about your status and you become paranoid, isolated, and unnecessary angry and anxious. Assume it all the later and you risk gaslighting yourself into accepting mistreatment and remaining in dangerous situation. The only way to stay sane and safe is to try to calibrate close to reality but that can feel hard to do when people IRL so infrequently admit to prejudice and bad behavior, the stats on the ground so that this is 100% happening, and folks who are given the freedom to say what they want without consequence online make it look omnipresent.
I know this is a crowd that is probably feels like terms like "triggered" or "emotionally unsafe" are mostly BS. But I can say with all honesty that since the beginning of Trump's first campaign and the seeming flood of folks expressing hateful things online, I have experienced way more of that. Brett Kavanaugh hearings and the vitral against Ford and minimizing was a high point of this. As someone who had experienced a violent attempted sexual assault in my teens from a fellow student and had not reported it because of fears about how I would be treated, walking that go down on the nightly news literally retriggered a lot of that trauma and left me feeling much more unsafe and unsupported than I had in many, many years. That was the case even though those sentiments were not what was being shared in my real life.
I think most minority groups have had similar moments over the last 8 years. It is easy to say that we should just turn off the news and go offline and ignore that stuff. But if you have been in danger in that way the memory of that lives in your body and when you start to see sign of that danger again, your body experiences that fear again and it does color how experience the here and now. That is how brains work. And it has been a tough and exhausting 8 years for many of us.
I am fairly confident that American Democracy can handle another 4 years of Trump as President although not 100 percent sure. I am dreading the psychological pain and exhaustion of how that would feel for me personally and for many people that I love.
probably not instagram but this specific crowd definitely spends a decent amount of time on X and TikTok and I would guess account for a lot of the thing you describe, where a post by a Jewish person or related to Judaism randomly gets swamped with vile memes.
The Comments sections of the Washington Post under any article about Gaza or about the Hamas-adjacent protests in the United States have become a veritable anti-Semitic playpen.
The general thrust of this article I think is quite good. Figuring out just how prevalent anti-Semitic people are can be quite difficult as stuff like slight changes in word choice can skew answers. In addition, defining what is anti-Semitic is blurry as well.
But a few criticisms. First, the authors actually sort of unintentionally demonstrate the problems with using surveys when they cite the ADL survey showing 85% of Americans believe in an anti-Semitic trope. Immediately my “this doesn’t pass the smell test” radar went up. So I checked the survey and one question is doing a lot of work here; “Jews stick together more than other Americans”. I’m sorry, I’m guessing you’re getting similar answers for literally religious sect or ethnicity. What this is describing is very basic patterns of immigration and history of how immigrant communities were and are formed. It’s interesting because the whole post is I think correctly trying to note that measuring antisemitism is hard because subtle word choices in question can skew answers. And then the authors sort of unintentionally prove that point, while trying to make another point all together.
Second, why oh why do the authors have to start their post with the laziest “both sides” framing and lead up. It’s infuriating especially because the writer of this substack provided pretty good evidence that antisemitism is higher on the right than left. And what’s weirder is the authors seems to acknowledge this at the end of their post. So what the heck is the point of opening your post with “both sides” framing.
Well some people in the comments section are really bought into “all the brown people are antisemitic homophobes” so perhaps that’s a bone for them
What do you mean when you say "all the brown people"? Maybe it's completely tongue-and-cheek and I shouldn't take it seriously, but I have a hard time mapping it to something meaningful in the context of today's comments.
"why oh why do the authors have to start their post with the laziest 'both sides' framing and lead up. It’s infuriating especially because the writer of this substack provided pretty good evidence that antisemitism is higher on the right than left."
While I'm perfectly willing to stipulate that anti-Semitism is more common on the right than left in the US, I would be very curious to see how it is distributed within the "right" vs. the "left" in terms of income, educational accomplishments, etc. I.e., are "left" anti-Semites more likely to be people in culturally, economically, politically, etc. influential positions than "right" anti-Semites? If they are, then both-sides-ing the issue seems appropriate in terms of weighting what the actual threat is.
From someone we know "The epicenter of antisemitic attitudes in the United States, in other words, is the conservative Black and Hispanic population that has often voted Democratic in the past due to identity politics but has trended toward the GOP in recent cycles. Liberal African-Americans are slightly less antisemitic than white conservatives, and Black and Hispanic conservatives are substantially more antisemitic than white conservatives."
So sort of oddly enough, it appears that Trump's flirtation with anti-semiticism may actually be (depressingly) one of the reasons he's been able to make inroads with traditionally Democratic voters.
I also bring up the orange man because even if we limit our analysis to elite circles, I'd say it matters who specifically we're talking about. Most academics these days kind of famously lean Democratic if not out right left wing. Given there are thousands of academics in America, by sheer numbers it's statistically likely at least a handful will have antisemitic views and therefore there are more left wing academics with antisemtic views than right wing. So there is sort of a composition effect with these numbers. But beyond that, I bring up Trump because in the duh statement of the century, he has way more impact on discourse and culture at large than any academic. It matters way more if he's hosting Nick Fuentes for dinner than History professor John Doe from Big State University. Beyond the orange man, it matters way more if Elon Musk is highlighting and promoting some extremely bigoted ideas. Honestly, I think you can make a strong case he has the second biggest influence on culture in America behind Trump*. Who's the closest equivalent? Taylor Swift? As popular as she is, she doesn't own a widely used social media platform.
*I'd going to crawl on broken glass to vote for Joe Biden. And he's on the merits been a better President that I expected. But I'd be hard pressed to say he has a particular large impact on the culture at large; certainly when compared to the orange man or his ex-boss.
I had the same thoughts about the survey and was planning to post it if someone else hadn't already. Many of the stereotypes listed are not ones we would normally associate with anti-semitism or at least, as you say, are not unique to it, e.g., "Jews do not share my values". Just as a statement of fact, I could easily see 1/3 answering affirmatively.
https://www.adl.org/resources/report/antisemitic-attitudes-america-topline-findings
edit: I see david also picked up on it.
"Jews do not share my values"
I thought about this one, but unlike the "stick together" one, this one _does_ read to me as antisemitic. I suppose it's possible people would say this about any minority ethnic group and maybe I'm just ignoring that fact because it's depressing.
If the statement read "gays do not share my values" I'd assume homophobia - because I'd have to think "what values exactly do you think gays like me have that you don't share?". (If you were very devoutly religious in a way such that you thought MANY Americans didn't share your values I'd understand)
Turn it around though - how many gay people would affirm the statement "Christians share my values"? Probably more than it used to be, but I would be very surprised if it cracks 50%.
If your most important value is that Jesus is the Son of God, would you say Jews share it? (It's a bit tricky though because Christians do *generally* have a special affinity for Jews as God's chosen people.)
I considered that the "Jesus is the son of God" question would come up but.... how much of that is a "value"? I don't know.
I guess that's fair if you didn't even ask gays but asked a bunch of progressives "Christians share my values" you probably wouldn't do all that well. However, I _would_ say that it reflects some bias against Christians. It should lower the salience of that _type_ of anti-semitism I suppose, but it doesn't mean it isn't anti-semitism(or anti-Christian)
It's also probably a matter of conflating religious Judaism with ethnic Judaism. That is, if the statement for Christians included me, who is culturally Christian/Methodist(by inertia) but not religious at all, vs people who actually attend church etc.
I think this is getting at exactly why it's not a great question, given that we can all think of different ways to answer it depending on how literally or culturally we interpret it.
Speaking as a Jew, I do find this mildly antisemitic, even though non-Jewish people here also believe it and present it as a positive. If you don't know any Jewish people, I don't see why you'd assume we stick together, nor do I think it's particularly true. For non-observant Jews, we don't necessarily have anything in common with each other.
I don't think Mormons or the Amish would give each other preferential treatment in, say, a professional situation, and I'm mildly offended that people would think this of me.
Does the statement imply preferential treatment? I don't think it does. I would probably ascribe a similar level of in-group affinity to most groups in America, however defined; for example, I really enjoy meeting other people from the midwest. But the real problem is that most of these statements are too ambiguous to be useful.
Do you think Koreans generally "stick together"? I agree it's an ambiguous statement, but I don't think you'd say you stick together with fellow Midwesterians.
Hmm...good question. Maybe? I know and have known many Korean Americans, many of whom go to Korean-language church services, for example. Does that count as "sticking together"?
I agree with you that taken in the worst possible light, the statement is obviously bad. I'm just saying that there are other ways to interpret it, and I have trouble believing 85% of respondents took it the same way as you.
I agree that it may be innocuous, but I also think lots of mild prejudice is innocuous. It also bothers me because most antisemitism includes a conspiratorial element. This isn't something we'd say for many minority groups (say, the Irish), and I think it's worth asking why it's different for Jews.
You mention Koreans as going to the same church, but nonobservant Jews don't go to temple. What is it that you think we're doing together?
I think you're reading too much into what I'm saying, and I'm going to bow out before I offend anymore than I may already have.
To be fair, my thoughts are probably not very clear either, such that I'm not expressing myself well.
I think a huge problem for all of this discourse--and one I'm not sure you can escape--is the influence of the state of Israel as a political actor and nation-state with its own strategic, economic, and internal interests. Like, I'm just totally unconvinced that leftist discourse takes the same shape absent the behavior of Israel as a nation-state vis-a-vis the Palestinian population, but it's also not like you can unwind that stuff. And, conversely, you can't have the US backing Israel in areas like the UN security council without providing fodder for antisemitic conspiracy theories EVEN IF those choices make sense on other geostrategic levels.
I don't see this as a particularly novel problem; you could just as easily apply it to sentiment about people of Chinese heritage. But I'm also not sure that it is a fixable problem. I think it really does just confound the data.
"accusations against diaspora Jews of being more loyal to Israel than to their own country"
I guess this may be a little off topic, but my impression is that Israel actively cultivates something like that sort of loyalty from Jewish Americans. I remember reading about a "birthright trip" that an America Sportswriter took:
"One tactic they used was to gather us all together and announce a choice:
If you feel like you’re more Jewish than American, you should walk over to one side of the room. If you feel like you’re more American than Jewish, you should walk over to the other side of the room.
Tempting as it was to claim an identity more exotic than “White American tricked into the ideological version of a timeshare,” I was the only person who trudged over to the U.S. side."
https://www.houseofstrauss.com/p/no-offence-but-americans-arent-canadian
I'm not sure if Israel is uniquely bad about this or not. China and Russia are the only other countries I'm aware of that seem to be aggressive about hereditary loyalty, but there are probably more given that most of Europe, Asia and Africa have an ancestral or tribal vision of nationhood and citizenship that directly clashes with the Western Hemisphere's immigrant assimilationist mentality.
In re "dual loyalty," while I agree it's anti-Semitic to presume all Jewish people have some or even any particular loyalty to Israel, I very definitely agree that the Israeli state itself for many decades (i.e., this isn't just a Netanyahu problem) has de facto promoted that concept. (Not just through the birthright trips, but how the "Right of Return" has been applied to give Israeli citizenship to fugitives from the U.S. justice system, statements from various Israeli political leaders about how overseas Jewish populations should "come home" to Israel, etc.)
That story is crazy, and I wonder if more people would have chosen "American" in a secret ballot situation.
I do think that Israel places Jews worldwide in a pretty difficult position with regard to suspicions of loyalty. There's really not another country like it: a religious/ethnic state that encourages immigration based on ethnicity and religion. If the Vatican City included a large area of central Italy, had a population of several million, was a regional military power, and granted citizenship to Catholics worldwide who immigrated, I suspect we would see a lot of Catholics facing concerns of dual loyalty.
Wake up and smell the coffee. Catholics STILL face a lot of concerns of dual loyalty, and the people who express the most concerns seem to be gaining in influence.
Could you link to a source on this?
Growing up Catholic in the United States.
I grew up Catholic and never once felt this way. Maybe it was just me, but it was never even discussed.
It's an open secret amongst the American Jewish community that Birthright trips are explicit propaganda/marketing (hasbara). If you want an unvarnished view of the country (or countries, if you're brave enough to visit Palestine), you need to visit on your own dollar/time. Anybody who attended that trip (except the author, I guess?) attended because they already felt willing to play along with Israeli affiliation; it's a tremendously biased sample w.r.t. American Jewish opinion on nationality.
I feel like the end point of a lot of this debate becomes a really annoying meta discussion - if you talk about anti-semitism, you get people saying "yeah yeah whatever there are literally children starving to death in Gaza" (true), and if you talk about Gaza you get American Jews who bring up all of the anti-semitism going on here and the ways in which Palestinian activists are involved in it/ stoke it/ etc. (also true). These two aren't, like, opposed beliefs. I think what is going on in Gaza is absolutely deplorable and I also haven't ever felt the presence of anti-semitism quite as closely as I did in the weeks following 10/7.
Anyway, I would encourage anyone who's arguing in the comments on the meta point about what we're "not focusing on" or "not talking about" to consider that, in fact, we are talking about all of this quite a lot, and if you're not seeing it its probably down to your Twitter algo or TikTok FYP.
1 in 4 hiring managers being less likely to move forward with Jewish applicants is *nuts*.
I am trying to not imagine the sorts of rip-out-your-fingernails-and-pour-boiling-vinegar-on-the-beds events that would transpire if HR suspected I even had an inkling of an applicant's religion.
As you say, that number is *nuts*.
I am not that surprised by that. There is a lot of evidence that people are drawn to applicants that they see "as like them" or "fitting the firm culture." If I saw a Jewish sounding name on a resume or participation in a Jewish organization like Jewish Family Services, I wouldn't see them as "not like me" even though I am not Jewish because my social circle includes lots of Jews who I have a lot in common with and that organization is a good match to my values. But I could easily see at least that large a percentage of Americans feeling that it would be a culture clash and hesitating. I think the percentage who would affirmatively say that they wouldn't promote a Jewish person even to themselves might be lower but if faced with two resumes that gave those clues and didn't require an explicit choice based on ethnicity, I can easily imagine 25% thinking that they like resonated with resume A more than B in the same way they do with resumes with typically Black names or female candidates.
I am a woman with a male name that is spelled they typically male name and nothing on my resume indicates that I am a woman. I have seen the utter shock that has passed over an interviewers face when I come into an interview and they see my actual gender. Some can't fix their faces fast enough not to show that they would have been less likely to interview me if they had known. One even said "your resume said you were a man" in an upset enough tone that I asked if he still wanted to interview me and he legit paused for a full minute or two before he said yes. He actually did give me the job but it was clear the whole time I worked there that he had hired me inspite of my gender and if I hadn't "tricked" him I wouldn't work there. My daughter has a boy's name too. Lesson learned.
I looked carefully at the double standard study, which was fascinating, and what it showed was that respondents treated Catholics and Jews similarly to each other, and differently from Indians. Which isn't a double standard between Jews and everyone else.
Indian-American are people who used to live in India and moved to the US, who could be of any religion. Whereas the relationship between Jews and Israel, and Catholics and The Vatican is of a group of Americans with a perceived affinity with the rest of their religious group. These are two very different relationships, so respondents treated them differently. Interestingly, in almost every category, respondents were the hardest on Catholics, as far as taking responsibility for the actions of The Vatican.
Can I just say that I find it depressingly ironic that in a post trying to tease out how prevalent antisemitism is, there are multiple comments that other commentators have flagged as Islamophobic or anti-Muslim (I think correctly). It says something and I’m not entirely sure what. But thought it worth pointing out.
It's very difficult to talk about large groups of people both effectively and inoffensively, especially if there is a protected class identity involved (gender, religion, ethnicity, etc..). You have to use a lot of tedious language like "disproportionately" or "tend to be" and it's especially useful, but time-consuming, to dig up statistics and numbers.
It's difficult enough that I tend to extend a lot of benefit of the doubt as long as its topical. Some of the commentators today may be out-of-touch or out-of-line but for the part they seem to be sincerely trying to explain that a disproportionate share of Muslim or Arab immigrants tend to be anti-semitic. I'm not sure how true that is but it's worth discussing and understanding whether it's true or not.
One can critique and even criticize a culture without being prejudiced against the people in that culture.
https://www.humandignitytrust.org/lgbt-the-law/map-of-criminalisation/
True. And I guess sort of my point. The comments in question I would not say are Trump-level grossness by any means. But they flirted into territory that I at least cringed at.
Which is why I said ironic, because that is sort of the point of this substack today; how do you determine if someone is expressing something anti-Semitic.
It applies specifically to those who identify as "queer" (as a pointedly adversarial identity), and who rail against "assimilationism."
To the extent such a culture exists that encompases such a large and varied group, sure.
It says that a lot of people throwing the rocks are living in glass houses.
"...and occasional typos". lol
At least your typos are only occasional, I wish I could say the same.
Which guy is that?
Well I’m smarter than most Americans
It says some people don't object to prejudice so much as they object to prejudice against groups they favour.
Criticism of Nazism is also problematic because it can be interpreted as anti-German. However, the ideology of Jihad is as evil as Nazism, and unfortunately, it has many adherents in the Muslim world
This is completely incoherent. Your first sentence is totally absurd.
That few Germans take it that way, genuinely, not just for show, is a testament to their good training and education.
https://www.inss.org.il/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/SA20.1_Berman-Tausch.pdf
But is it? There is a lot of talk about Islamophobia but when comparable statements are made about Christian’s in America is there condemnation of Christianaphobia?
Spell check helped me with Islamophobia but no assistance with Christianaphobia?
So if your a liberal in America and want to say hateful things about other people than fire away on Whites and Christian’s and if your target is both then feel free to say the nastiest shit you can muster without issue because your tribe will protect you and hate against these groups is okay.
Just like saying nasty shit about pro-life people on Slow Boring is okay. Or Matt’s podcasts partner saying that Stephen Miller “gets off” on putting illegal immigrant children in cages. That’s a nasty, gross thing to say but then he wants to be a language cop with Trump? Are you kidding me? That guy?
And to think, I thought the “sandn-“ topic was being handled very delicately. \S
Any Jewish American who contributes to AIPAC or supports American subsidies to Israel values Israel enough to undermine American material interests. America has no material interest in supporting Israel. Israel does not control rare natural resources or have a huge semiconductor industry. It does have many, many enemies, some of whom want to drive it into the sea. Supporting Israel vastly complicates American dealings with the Islamic world. It prevents normal relations with Iran. It turns our support for nuclear nonproliferation into a farce. Ethnic solidarity is a powerful drug and American Jews who support Israel have subordinated American patriotism to ethnic interests.
I'm not Jewish but I generally support Israel because liberal democracy is better than authoritarian theocracy.
Do I always agree with Israel? No
Do I like Netanyahu? No
Do I like what's happening in the West Bank or in Gaza? No
Is Israel the least-worst country in the middle east? Obviously yes.
The UAE and Egypt and Jordan are far better than Israel.
Can you explain how Egypt is better than Israel?
Because upon after reading this comment you either know a lot more than I do or almost nothing at all about the country.
Well, they aren’t starving and bombing Gazans. They aren’t colonizing the west bank. They haven’t engaged in serious ethnic cleansing since 1948.
"Well, they aren’t starving and bombing Gazans" - they are stopping the Gazans from being able to escape. So no, they're not lighting the building on fire, but they are blocking the back exit and keeping Gazans trapped in a burning building. I'm not sure that gains them much moral high ground.
Meanwhile Egypt is a military dictatorship that routinely imprisons and tortures dissidents, suppresses pretty much all political opposition, and carries out the same actions in North Sinai that Israel does in the West Bank (restricts movement, destroys homes, razes farmland, etc.)
If you were forced to choose between living in Israel or Egypt, you would choose Israel immediately, as would 99.9% of everyone else in this comment section. Makes it hard for me to believe that Israel is worse than Egypt.
"Haven't engaged in serious ethnic cleansing since 1948"
Hmmm...really?? Then why here in Israel am I surrounded by many Egyptian Jews who were expelled (or their family was expelled) in the 1950s and 1960s with nothing but the clothes on their back?
How did the population of Jews in Egypt go from ~45,000 down to 20?
Well I'll tell you why. Because Egypt engaged in serious ethnic cleansing. In 1956, Egypt proclaimed all Jews to be Zionists and thus enemies of the state. A thousand Jews were arrested, and 25,000 Jews were expelled. Many were forced to sign away all their assets to the Egyptian state. In the 1960s, more Jews were either expelled and their property confiscated or arrested and tortured for years.
You don't think the Arab countries have engaged in serious ethnic cleansing since 1948? That's a laugh.
They also don't have a comparable security situation to the West Bank and Gaza?
I don't support Israel's settlers colonizing the West Bank, and I think Israel is going way overboard at this point with Gaza, but if the question were "What would Egypt Do" I don't actually know if they'd be better.
I also don't know to what extent that question matters.
Certainly I'm unhappier with the behavior "Israel is engaging in at this time" vs the behavior "Egypt is engaging in at this time"
Egypt also literally occupied Gaza from 1948-1967...
The UAE economy is built on slave labor!
I agree with your observations about the US relationship with Israel, but at this point surely it is evangelical Christians and their hold on one of our two major parties that are mostly responsible for this state of affairs. I suspect if America's Jewish community were really in the driver's seat with respect to US policy vis-a-vis Israel, there's be much stronger pressure out of Washington in favor of a Palestinian statehood. Maybe by now we'd even already have a two state deal. (American Jews support a two state solution in greater numbers than all Americans, for instance, and relatedly, are more likely than the general public to hold an unfavorable view of Netanyahu).
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/u-s-jews-connections-with-and-attitudes-toward-israel/
I agree that the American Jewish community at large has a much more moderate, 2-state centered vision for the conflict than the evangelical pro-Israel advocacy community.
However, this idea that we'd have a two state solution deal by now if American Jews were in charge is an absurd idea. The barrier to a two state solution has not been America's lack of comittment to it. The issue has been Palestinian rejectionism and unwillingness to counteroffer and negotiate in good faith during the peace process, rampant terrorism on behalf of the Palestinians, a lack on agreement on critical issues (like Jerusalem and the resolution to the "refugee" issue), as well as the Israeli hard turn to the right following the 2nd Intifada.
It's vanishingly unlikely that 57 years of Greater Israel expansionism haven't played a major role in empowering radicals in the Palestinian community. Relatedly, it's likely that firm US insistence on Israel's relinquishing its 1967 conquests would have undercut this expansionist project. (Or, maybe not; but in least in this case US hands would be clean).
It’s interesting to me that one of the ADL’s antisemitic tropes is “Jews stick together more than other Americans”. That’s generally a positive descriptor and Americans say the same things about small town life and whatever else they hold in high regard.
It’s one reason why I’d really like to see the baselines in bias tests, honestly.
Responsible adults should be able to delineate between a person, their culture, their time/place and their religion.
People, in my experience; are often greater than the sum of their parts. The further we zoom out the messier and meaner this all gets.
Agree. People can debate/argue their stance forever, yet at the end of the day it still comes down to people killing other people. Whose side does one take on that? The side with the most loss of life? The side of who was attacked first? My thought is, debate, but not so much as to risk losing focus on those who have died.
What? How does this follow from Bo's comment?