The Politics of Antisemitism
Dear friends,
Last year a 14-year-old student told me how a video that he posted on social media went viral. The reason: he was wearing his Jewish star necklace. The video had nothing to do with Israel, nothing to do with being Jewish. He didn’t even notice he was wearing his necklace when he posted it. But it went viral with comments like “Free Palestine!” The fact that a teenager can’t wear a Jewish star without being thrown into a political firestorm tells us something about the state of antisemitism in this country, and the tremendous confusion around it.
Meanwhile, yesterday was “Yom Yerushalayim,” Jerusalem Day in Israel, when tens of thousands of flag-waving, kippa-wearing Jewish nationalists triumphantly marched through the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem singing such Hebrew rhyming couplets as: “A Jew is a soul, an Arab is a son of a whore,” and “May your village burn down.”
If you think those anecdotes are hard to integrate, try this sequence that happened this week.
On Tuesday, Elon Musk tweeted that George Soros “hates humanity,” and compared him to the arch-villain Magneto. The world’s richest man used a classic antisemitic trope against a Jewish Holocaust survivor. That evening, the Israeli Foreign Ministry criticized Musk, noting that his tweet reeked of antisemitism, and that the phrase “the Jews” shot up to the trending list on Twitter. “Musk’s tweet instantly brought a flood of antisemitic conspiracy theories,” the official Ministry Twitter post wrote.
Then, a rather unbelievable thing happened. On Wednesday, the Minister of Foreign Affairs himself, Eli Cohen, a member of Israel’s right-wing government, came out against his own office’s tweet. He accused his staff of protecting Soros and promised that it won’t happen again. And then, in a complete upside down, inside out moment, Israel’s Minister in Charge of Fighting Antisemitism tweeted that Israelis love Musk, and that “Criticism of Soros...is anything but anti-Semitism, quite the opposite!”
Criticism of Israel, on the other hand, is often characterized by the Israeli government as antisemitic.
On Sunday afternoon we are going to delve further into the question of anti-Jewish hatred as it relates to Israel/Palestine. We will be watching the film Boycott, which looks at state laws in the US that prohibit those working with the state from supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, known as BDS. The film takes no position on BDS. Instead, it shows how what appear as laws to protect Jews, are political manipulations that can have a very different effect. There is antisemitism, and then there are the politics of antisemitism.
We know that hatred of Jews is rampant. We heard it from Norman Lear on Friday, when he described stories of American Jew-haters in the Thirties and Forties. We heard it from Letty Cottin Pogrebin on Monday when she described stories from the Seventies and Eighties. I heard about the scary state of affairs now from Rachel Maddow last week on her podcast. The challenge is to understand how to work against it, even as we work through our own complicated feelings about Israel/Palestine. One thing I learned this week is that I can’t assume that those I would assume are protecting Jews are in fact doing that.
After the screening on Sunday, we will have a talkback with the film’s director, Julia Bacha. I hope this will provide an opportunity for healthy discussion to emerge among us, that will put us on track to fight fiercely and intelligently against the plague of antisemitism in our country, and the myriad of hatreds that come with it.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha