Anti-Semitism: Getting Beyond the Hate

In his fabulous, must read book, “I’m Not a Racist, But…”: The Moral Quandary of Race, author Lawrence Blum establishes early on that he thinks the word “racist” is being asked to do too much. Is it just the most extreme cases of rabid hate and/or violence? Many people seem to think so, yet this doesn’t seem to catch the entire experience of racially subordinated groups — the various manners and mechanisms in which it is impressed upon them that they are “less than”, vulnerable, or alien. There are many axes upon which one can wrong someone on account of race, yet all are collapsed upon a single word: “racism”. The problem, though, is that we don’t really have another term upon which we can fob some of these other events off onto — at least, not one that carries with it the moral opprobrium attached to “racism”.

Anti-Semitism, I think, may suffer from the same problem. Once again, we’re dealing with a concept that could encompass a lot. But there isn’t really another term that can allieviate the burden. So we go with what we have.

While, thankfully, I haven’t directly experienced much outright anti-Semitic hatred or expression, the knowledge that outright anti-Semitic hatred and violence is present in the world is a constant source of threat; I know that if certain groups gained even a little more power in the world than they do right now, my body very well may be forfeit. But when I think about the majority of the negative aspects of my experience as a Jew, I do not think they would not properly be characterized as Jew-hating.

One can oppress a group without hating them. America’s racial history is replete with slaveowners who considered themselves friends of Blacks; men who would profess only the most positive feelings towards women while rejecting the bare necessities of equal standing. This is not to say that hate is not present in these situation — indeed, I suspect that all relationships of inequality are perpetuated by the implied threat of violence. But the individual actors themselves often would not consider themselves, and might not even outwardly act, in a way that would seem to warrant the title “hate”.

Consider inferiorization. Much of slavery and Jim Crow was justified on the grounds that Black people had inferior capabilities compared to Whites — arguing that they were a “child race” that needed to be under White “guardianship” for their own protection (Black writers, observing the horrifying savagery of White racism, wryly observed that the same questions could be asked about White people¹ ). Many of the persons making this argument genuinely believed it to be true. That doesn’t make it any more forgivable, but does that make it not “racist”, given that it was not motivated by “hate”? I think it’s a semantic argument, and I think we would do well to call it racist in the absence of another word that can adequately express the outrage this ideology deserves.

Jews, too, have faced plenty of inferiorization in their time. Richard could give more examples than I could of the historical manifestations of Jewish inferiority. One facet I’ve observed in the modern day is the idea of Jews as a morally stunted people. It is said with overtones of great sympathy and pity: Jews have seen so much violence that they no longer can control themselves; they are akin to the abused child who becomes a violent abuser in adulthood. Jewish morality is seen as a function of communal psychosis; incapable of seeing beyond our own history of discrimination (long since past!). Again, the proponents of this view do not state these claims with snarls or twisted lips. They seem genuinely saddened. They don’t hate Jews; they feel sorry for them. Yet, (even beyond the essentialism) obviously viewing Jews in this way severely problematic. We are not moral children. And I think this is part of anti-Semitism — at least in absence of a better word that can adequately express the outrage.

Marginalization and erasure, too, do not have to come attached to hate. I have been erased very politely. At Carleton, I was a staffer on The Carleton Progressive, a left-of-center political magazine whose editor-in-chief was a close friend of mine. This person did not hate Jews. I know this because we were friends for four years and he never once tried to stab me, and I know this because he once drunkenly draped himself over me at a party and told me he wasn’t anti-Semitic.

The reason he felt compelled to affirm that, though, was that a few weeks earlier he (without consulting any of the editorial staff, myself included) published an article reprinted from Electronic Intifada which claimed, among other things, that Hezbollah’s 2006 attack on Israel would be more justified if it secured the release of Samir Kuntar. Kuntar was at the time serving four life sentences after he attempted to kidnap an Israeli family from their Nahariya home. He shot and killed a policeman, then entered an apartment building and abducted a father his four-year old daughter. He then took them to the beach, shot the father before his daughter’s eyes, then dashed her brains out with a rifle butt. Meanwhile, the mother, who had hidden with the family’s two year old son in a crawl space, found that she had accidently suffocated him to death to prevent him from crying out and revealing themselves. I was stunned that we would publish something that considered it a positive good to “liberate” an unrepentant murderer of children, and expressed my ire to that effect. My friend told me that he would be happy to affirm that killing children is wrong — but only in the context of condemning Israel’s actions in the Lebanon war.

As I said, this person is a friend of mine. I do not consider him “hateful”. But I can scarcely think of a time at Carleton where I was more upset, and felt more marginal as a Jewish speaker. I was upset that he not only didn’t find the article problematic on his own read, but actually made the affirmative decision to pluck it out and republish it. And I was upset that he didn’t seem to understand why I was upset, or why the sentiments expressed in the article seemed, to me, to be actively celebrating the death of Jews. This was not an example of hate so much as indifference. But when somebody you care about, whom you have a relationship with, responds to your cry of distress with a resounding “shrug” and dismissal, that can hurt just as much as hate.

Of course, one could broaden “hate” to include all of these things, perhaps by defining hate to include any disregarding of another person’s equal human standing. But regardless of whether that’s a legitimate move, I suspect it won’t accomplish much. The speakers won’t view themselves as haters, so when they ask “what’s anti-Semitic” about what they just did, telling them it is an enactment of hatred towards Jews won’t be all that compelling. And insofar as Jews are told that anti-Semitism only is “real” where it is accompanied by hate, they will be rendered mute in the many situations where they are feeling otherized or alienated on account of their Jewishness, but in a way that they don’t themselves identify as stemming from “hate”.

As a concept, I submit that Anti-Semitism has to be broadened so that it is no longer solely the province of bad people — the stereotypical evil wizards cackling in the tower. Regular people of good will, who think of themselves as having naught but positive thoughts towards all persons (including Jews) can still act to perpetuate Jewish inequality; can still treat Jews as less than a full, equal human beings. Until there is a consensus that anti-Semitism is a meaningful concept applied to these sorts of cases, anti-Semitism won’t speak to a large chunk of how Jews would characterize their own experience.

1. See William J. Wilson, What Shall We Do With The White People, in Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White 58-66 (David Roediger, ed., 1998) [↩]