MAGA fuels techno-antisemitism

Unpopular Front from John Ganz can be pretty highbrow, immersed in the intellectual history of European fascism as much as his more local topic, the American variant of the same. He wants to know where our barbarism comes from. I like his writing.. 

Here he issues a warning about American antisemitism under Trump, when our rulers' loud protestations of combating anti-Jewish bigotry serve as cover for illegal censorship and power grabs in media and academia.

click to enlarge

... When Jews are thus singled out for protection by the state and otherwise seem to be doing economically well in America, and when Israel’s special relationship with the United States grows increasingly difficult to justify, this will only provide fuel for antisemitic demagogues. The shrill castigation of any criticism of Israel as “antisemitic” will only increase curiosity in an uneducated public justly outraged by Israel’s conduct about what’s in the rest of the antisemitic program.

... The Internet’s wholesale destruction of the role of literate cultural mediation threatens all those intellectual professions that Jews have historically held in high esteem and sought out. In this structural sense, one could even say that the Internet itself is antisemitic. Perhaps the mechanism—or more likely its creators in whose image it is created— “recognized” Jews as its competitors in the role of general informational factotum and stood for an older institutional regime, contributing to the “spontaneous” turn of AI to antisemitism. Even if one does not buy this admittedly speculative theory, the decay of national citizenship and the rule of law in favor of the regime of privileges and the manipulated enthusiasms of mobs creates the ideal conditions for the growth of antisemitism.

When the manifest failure of the project of Trumpism becomes clear, one clear course for what’s left of MAGA is to take its populism in a more manifestly antisemitic direction and blame hidden Epstein and Israel supporters for manipulating and hijacking the movement. There will also be a temptation to use antisemitism to distance itself from its contaminating Jewish element. Whether this would lead to its marginalization or its extension of mass support is anybody’s guess. 

We shouldn't be hostage to having to guess -- but here we are, swimming upstream against bigotries. 

It's the week of Passover too

It's the week of Passover too ... to which I have to say ... DUH! 

The Christian story of Jesus' repudiation of and triumph over empire is embedded in the Jewish observance of the people's escape from slavery by the agency of God -- the Passover. 

My friend Emily Simon needed a good old-fashioned Seder meal and gathering this Passover season. She shared a reflection on Facebook which I reproduce here -- this speaks to where many of us are.

These are very hard and painful times in which to be any kind of human, but I have struggled even more than usual with what it means to be a Jew.

It’s Passover, America is being dismantled, and our supposed Holy Land of milk and honey is being run by a monstrous totalitarian right-wing autocrat whose regime gleefully murders other people’s babies in the name of our defense, and we must oppose him with our full chests while standing firm that Palestinians have the right to live freely in peace. Thousands of Israelis routinely take to the streets to say the same thing.

But if you’re Jewish in radical leftist spaces right now and you take to the streets in America, there is a strong chance that the person next to you will open their face like the sun and say “oh I’m so glad you’re one of us, and you accept Khazar theory and agree that Israel should not exist and that the Jews are diabolical white colonizers who have historically and repeatedly brought all violence upon themselves, and really the only way to end all of this is for you guys stop trying to be Jewish while living anywhere at all!”

And then you have to rearrange YOUR face and come up with a plausible excuse to go home.

Meanwhile OUR monstrous wanna-be totalitarian right-wing autocrat claims to be fighting antisemitism, which is a repulsive transparent joke. None of these guys are on the side of our safety and liberation, ever.

Project Esther is an insult to Esther, to any Judaism I’ve ever known, and anything any worship-worthy God could possibly want. It casts most modern Jews as “enemies of the Jews”, which just helps us all keep having to run from country to country and getting killed anyway.

And, also…antisemitism is ancient and violent and virulent and flaring and spreading, and most people who harbor it would absolute swear they don’t WHILE saying antisemitic things to your face, that’s how embedded and insidious this prejudice is, and when Jews talk to each other we often talk about how terrifying this moment is for us, and how that terror complicates the necessary work of getting us all free.

This year I found myself yearning to be at a good old-fashioned radical leftist social-justice-focused Passover seder, so I could stand in the tradition of Jewishness that I honor and treasure. Tikkun Olam. Until we are all free, we are none of us free.

No one was inviting me to one, so I threw it myself.

Twenty of Nathan’s and Milo’s and my wonderful goyishe Minnesota sober lefty friends packed my little Saint Paul house (to be clear, 25 people do NOT fit in my house for a sit-down dinner) and I ran them through a 10-minute Haggadah I wrote, stealing from a bunch of sources I’ve been reading to help me find my way.

I asked my spiritual family to show up, and they did.

We celebrated our shared values and commitment, and we ate chopped liver and gefilte fish and matzoh ball soup and a gorgeous brisket one of my friends made. I got to use my mother’s and grandmother’s china and silver, lovingly sent to me last spring by my beautiful cousin.

Why was this night different from all other nights?

Because I did not feel ambivalent and compromised and complicit. I didn’t feel hopeless and discouraged and despairing. I felt firm in my own soul and strengthened by the community of my fellows, full in heart and mind and belly. I was so grateful for every single bit of it, and so freshly determined not to waste the privilege of my own freedom, however it looks, however long it lasts.

I’m putting this here to remind myself that I have a huge, living network of strong-hearted like-minded hard-working fellows, across the world and from all eras of my life, and that so many of you are here right now in this weird digital place.

Next year, who knows where.

In the meantime, thank you.

I hope we keep coming together, in the kitchens and the streets.

The link in Emily's text is my addition -- I didn't have to know what sits behind it. Now I must. The picture is also my addition.

"These are non-Jews trying to intimidate a Jew ..."

Timothy Snyder is the preeminent English-language historian of what he has labeled the Eastern Europe Bloodlands. Modern Ukraine, the western frontiers of what is now Russia, Belarus, Poland, the Baltic states were all places and peoples engulfed in human barbarism throughout the 20th century. These lands were where Nazi Germans attempted their "final solution," aimed to erase living Jews from Europe. 

Snyder's reaction to the Trump/Vance ambush of Ukainian president Zelens'kyi is long, heartfelt, and deep. Here's a taste; click on the title to read it all.

Anti-semitism in the Oval office
A confrontation seen with a historian's eye  

... The encounter in the White House was antisemitic. I am an historian of the Holocaust. I was trained by a survivor. Jerzy Jedlicki was nine years old when the Germans invaded, and fourteen when he emerged from hiding in Warsaw, and a prominent Polish historian by the time we met. ...

... Some forms of what [Jerzy] defined as antisemitism had to do with his memories of occupation. Jews had to show deference. Germans mocked the ways Jews dressed. That was before they were sent to the ghetto and murdered. Jews were scapegoated, made responsible for what the Germans wished to do anyway.

Some characteristics of antisemitism as he described it were more abstract. Jewish achievement was portrayed as illegitimate. Jews only gained success, antisemites say, by lying and propaganda. If a Jew was prominent, that only proved the existence of a Jewish conspiracy, and thereby the illegitimacy of the institution where the success was achieved. A prominent Jew was always, went the antisemitic assumption, motivated by money. 

Some of what Jerzy said had to do with his experience after the war. Non-Jews will deny the courage and suffering of Jews. They will claim all heroism and martyrdom as their own. ... there was after the war a Soviet antisemitism, with a broader and longer heritage, that claimed that Jews had somehow all remained at the rear while others fought and died. The facts were no defense.

... all of this should help us to see antisemitism in real life. Some cases are so overwhelming in scale that we find them difficult to confront and name. As Orwell noted, it can be hard to see what is right in front of your face.

Much has been said about the evils of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Its antisemitic element, however, has been underestimated. Russia's major war aim was fascist regime change, the overturning of a democratically-elected president in favor of some sort of collaborator. The premise is absurd: that Ukrainians do not really exist as a nation, and in fact would prefer a Russian.

But it was also antisemitic: that it is unnatural that a Jew could hold an important office. Volodymyr Zelens'kyi, the Ukrainian president, is of Jewish origin. Members of his family fought in the Red Army against the Germans. Others were murdered in the Holocaust. Although his Jewishness is not very relevant in Ukrainian politics, it is highly salient to Russian (and other) antisemites.

Ukraine, says Putin, does not really exist. But another theme of the propaganda is that Zelens'kyi is not actually the president of Ukraine. These two bizarre ideas work together: Ukraine is artificial and can exist thanks to the Jewish international conspiracy. The fact that a Jew leads the country confirms — for Russian fascists — both the unreality of Ukraine and the reality of a conspiracy. This Russian regime perspective is implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) antisemitic. Russian propaganda treats Zelens'kyi as obsessed with money and as subhuman. ...

• • •

Last Friday I happened to start watching the discussion at the White House between Zelens'kyi, Donald Trump, JD Vance and Brian Glenn towards the end, when Vance was already yelling at the Ukrainian president: "you're wrong!" I took in the tone and the body language, and my first, reflexive reactions was: these are non-Jews trying to intimidate a Jew. Three against one. A roomful against one. An antisemitic scene.

And the more I listened to the words, the more that reaction was confirmed. I won't speak for how Zelens'kyi regards himself. Ukrainian, of course. Beyond that I don't know. These things are complex, and personal.

But not for the antisemite.

It was all there, in the Oval Office, in the shouting and in the interruptions, in the noises and in the silences. A courageous man seen as Jewish had to be brought down. When he said things that were simply true he was shouted down and called a propagandist. 

• • •

... I had a strong personal reaction to that scene in the Oval Office, and I checked it for a week with friends and colleagues, who confessed that they had had the same reaction. I reconsidered what I had learned as a historian. I looked at the scholarly definitions. Everything, sadly, lines up. ...

In writing about antisemitism here I am obviously making a moral point. I am asking us, Americans, to think seriously about what we are doing, about Russia's criminal war against Ukraine, in which we are now becoming complicit. That Russia's war is antisemitic is one of its many evils; taking Russia’s side in that war is wrong for many reasons, including that one. ...

... In the world of the antisemite, all is known in advance: the Jew is just a deceiver, concerned only with money, subject to exclusion, intimidated by force. As soon as he is humiliated and eliminated, everything else will fall into its proper place. Consider the smirks in the Oval Office last Friday: the antisemite thinks that he has understood everything.

But in the actual world in which we actually live, Jews are humans, perilous and beautiful like the rest of us. The United States has never elected a Jewish president, and perhaps never will. But Ukraine has; and that president represents his people, facing challenges that those who mock him will never understand.  ...

... About one thing I am certain. Our eyes have to be open to what we do not wish to see.

Yes. Too much, sadly, lines up as we watch the Donald betray friends and attack our best hopes and aspirations.

This is not a Christian nation

If it were, neither of these tidbits from mainstream media would have been considered necessary explanation by their editors. I trust my many Christian readers will find these as horrifying, yet also humorous, as I did.

A bipartisan push in Congress to enact a law cracking down on antisemitic speech on college campuses has prompted a backlash from far-right lawmakers and activists, who argue it could outlaw Christian biblical teachings. ...

... in trying to use the issue as a political cudgel against the left, Republicans also called attention to a rift on the right. Some G.O.P. members said they firmly believe that Jews killed Jesus Christ, and argued that the bill — which includes such claims in its definition of antisemitism — would outlaw parts of the Bible. 

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, said she opposed the bill because it “could convict Christians of antisemitism for believing the Gospel that says Jesus was handed over to Herod to be crucified by the Jews.” -- New York Times

This one is even more reflective of our times; TPM readers are -- correctly I think -- assumed to need cultural education to understand why many Christians might indulge in antisemitism. Hence these explanatory paragraphs:

Christ, who Christians revere as the son of God, was a Jewish religious figure who lived in the ancient Roman province of Judaea, which was largely located in what is currently Israel and the Palestinian territories. His teachings and growing following caused tensions with the established Roman and Jewish religious leaders in the province. Christ was ultimately crucified in the first century by the province’s Roman governor, Pontius Pilate.

While some Jewish religious leaders and people in the province urged on the crucifixion, it was ordered by the Roman leader. The Christian Bible also describes many Jews who were distressed by Christ’s execution. -- Talking Points Memo

This country has come a long way toward genuine pluralism. We Christians are some among many. It's on that basis that I can like this country. Antisemitic loosely Bible-derived beliefs are dangerous to humanity. It's part of our job to combat the wackadoodles in our own tribe.

Many Israelis are not European-origin white people.

And too much of American discourse about the present horrific phase of the long Israeli/Palestinian war tries to shove the conflict into a framework derived from U.S. racial history, a Black/White binary.

Insisting that this terrible conflict is different than U.S. experience and carries its own complications in no way justifies Israel's current brutal effort to simply eradicate or expel the people of Gaza and the West Bank. Nor does it justify hostage taking and vengeance raids. I'm tempted to say there aren't any good guys, though the work of the Jewish and Palestinian group Standing Together may point to better possibilities.

Standing Together on the Gaza border: marching for LIFE, PEACE, FREEDOM & SAFETY FOR ALL. "We need to end the war. We need to end the occupation. We need to end this cycle of violence and killing. We need a real, just peace that gives everyone a future here - Palestinians and Israelis." via Xitter

But it isn't adequate to think of the hell of the two clashing nations as indigenous dark Palestinians rising up against white Jewish intruders. Both justice and compassion require a more nuanced view.

John Ganz [@lionel_trolling], historian and Xitter pundit extraordinaire, has attempted to recomplicate the agony of Israel/Palestine in simplified form. I've excerpted some of this here, but urge those concerned to Read the Whole Thing.

... as many others have pointed out, the more than half of Israeli Jews—between 50% or 55%—are Mizrahim or Sephardim, rather than Ashkenazim.

... The fact that most of the Israeli population is of non-European descent—including a sizable population of Ethiopian Jews—somewhat complicates the picture given by some Western activists of Israel as a white supremacist settler-colonial state lording it over darker peoples. The Mizrahi population tends to be more religious, more conservative, less educated, less prosperous, and to vote for right-wing parties, like Likud, Shas and the Judeo-Fascist Otzma Yehudit, headed by the national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, himself of Mizrahi descent. ...

... Mizrahi and other non-European Jews are also more likely to be IDF combat troops involved in the most dangerous and violent missions in the occupied territories and Gaza: They do a lot of the grunt work of repression. ...

 ... “Living in Israel is for us, coming from Arab countries, the continuation of our Jewish identity. Whereas the programme presented by the left is cosmopolitan - in which nationalism is overcome - we, Mizrahi Jews, do not relate at all to this discourse, in which human and civil rights come before our Jewish identity,” as one Likud activist told Middle East Eye.

... To understand why the Mizrahim became so right wing and nationalist, we have to look to the process by which they became integrated into Israeli society and politics. In the wake of the U.N. Partition vote of 1947 and the 1948 Israeli-Arab war, some 900,000 Jews from the Middle East fled their homes. Around two thirds of these would end up in Israel. When they arrived, the Israeli state was dominated by the largely Ashkenazi founding generation, figures you will have heard of like David Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weizmann, and Golda Meir. The Ashkenazi elite had a paternalistic and prejudiced attitude towards their newly arrived cousins, who were often extremely poor and uneducated. ...

... It would be a mistake, however, to put too much weight on the Ashkenazi-Mizrahi distinction as the sole explanatory factor in Israeli politics. The ethnic issue is often a proxy for other things. A recent study shows that as educational attainment rises, voting behavior starts to look the same. Some argue that increasing rate of mixed marriages is reducing the saliency of ethnic politics. Not all class differences map easily onto these ethnic differences: for instance, Iraqi Jews are often part of the elite. One should also not map Mizrahi onto “Settler” or Religious Zionist: Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich is the head of the more Ashkenazi National Religious Party. ...

Click to get a look at Smotrich

Would it matter if we learned a more nuanced view of the agony we watch and seek to impede from here? Perhaps not. But more truth still seems better to me  ...

An intimate view of a genocide

I find myself, once again, trying to fill in some understanding of the eastern reaches of Europe. My generation of Americans simply didn't get it that there was a swath of territory, roughly the nations and peoples between the Baltic Sea and the Black and Adriatic Seas, which were obliterated from our consciousness by the Soviet empire. Once this had been the heart of Europe; before 1990 for many of us, it barely existed. It is thirty years since the Iron Curtain evaporated, but I'm certain I'm not the only one who is catching up. To that end, I want to recommend a difficult history.

Historian Omer Bartov, an Israeli academic who teaches the Holocaust at Brown University, brings alive life and death in one small place in western Ukraine, before and after the Nazi slaughter. Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz took two decades to write, collecting witness accounts, survivor stories, and old pictures. And, amazingly, it is readable and accessible.

Bertov explains his explication of local genocide this way:

By letting those who lived that history lend their own words to the telling of it and providing accompanying photos, this book attempts to reconstruct the life of Buczacz in all its complexity and depict how the Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish inhabitants of the town lived side by side for several centuries -- weaving their separate tales of the past, articulating their distinctive understanding of the present, and making widely diverging plans for the future.

Life in towns such as Buczacz was premised on constant interaction between different religious and ethnic communities. The Jews did not live segregated from the Christian population; the entire notion of a shtetl existing in some sort of splendid (or sordid) isolation is merely a figment of the Jewish literary and folkloristic imagination. That integration was what made the genocide there, when it occurred, a communal event both cruel and intimate, filled with gratuitous violence and betrayal as well as flashes of altruism and kindness.

Buczacz had been part of the thousand year Hapsburg empire which died conclusively in 1918 with what we call the First World War. During the subsequent period, until 1939, the town was both a battleground and a haven for the nationalisms of the day, ruled, badly by Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian-oriented Soviet partisans.

The three decades that followed the destruction and erasure of pre-1914 ... society belonged to the nationalists and ideologues, fanatics and zealots of a new breed, more willing to shed blood than to seek compromise, more determined to assert their hegemony than to preserve coexistence: impatient men with guns and bombs, often led by the half educated and thirsting for a fight. ... Jews were cast in the role of a minority whose status could never be truly acceptable to either of the warring parties. Jews could be ignored, tolerated, or expelled, but by the nationalism that had evolved in this region, could neither be recognized as a separate indigenous national group or assimilated as ethnically kindred ... both Poles and Ukrainians increasingly felt that the Jews were their enemy's friends ...

In 1939, Hitler and Stalin cut a deal to dismember Poland and seize the lands between the two powers. Russia overran Buczacz and brought in NKVD (Secret Police) to rule with the support of Ukrainian nationalists. Bertov reports the opinions of Jadwiga Janika, the wife of a Polish Army captain, about this period. 

"At the the moment of of the Red Army's invasion," she testified, "an indescribable depression dominated the Polish population. Conversely, there was lively enthusiasm among the Jews and the Ukrainians." ... The early wave of fraternal killings [Ukrainians of Poles] evoked questions about the meaning and reality of interethnic relations, friendships, and communities, certainly among Poles and Ukrainians, who frequently intermarried, but also among Jews, who recalled many gentile friends and acquaintances. People repeatedly asked, Why did our neighbors, classmates, teachers, colleagues, friends, even family members turn their backs on us, betray us to the perpetrators, or join in the killings?"

Many Poles were shipped off to Soviet Kazakhstan; to Ukrainian nationalists, the Poles were interlopers, "colonists." Some locals hope the joint hatred felt by Poles and Ukrainians for the Jews might serve as "an agenda for Polish-Ukrainian reconciliation."

Hitler's German forces overran Buczacz in 1941. The exploitation and eventual extermination of the Jews became a central item on the occupiers' agenda. First came the Gestapo - the Einsatzgruppen -- charged with eliminating "political and racial foes." After the first bloody wave, came the Wehrmacht, the regular German Army. Finally the occupation, and the final solution, was left to Security Police, often men who had held a similar job in peacetime Germany. They believed Germany had achieved permanent conquest; they brought their wives and children along.

The new order established by the Security Police ... was almost exclusively dedicated to the exploitation and murder of the Jews. ... Beyond the extraordinary bloodletting this undertaking entailed, perhaps its most scandalous aspect was the astonishing ease with which it was accomplished and the extent to which the killers, along with their spouses and children, lovers and colleagues, friends and parents, appear to have enjoyed their brief murderous sojourn in the region. For many of them, this was clearly the best time of their lives: they had almost unlimited access to food, liquor, tobacco, and sex, and most important, they became supreme masters over life and death.

And when they were done, they packed up and left, often returning to their previous occupations as if nothing had happened ...

[N]ormalization of murder, the removal of the Jews as part of a day's work, as background noise to drinking bouts or amorous relationships, along with puzzlement at the Jew's conduct mixed with anger at them for making it so easy to kill them -- these were part and parcel of the German experience of genocide ... Jewish slave labor was taken for granted ... Many of the German personnel used Jewish dentists ...

Jews were rounded up in groups of several hundred, marched to the surrounding forests, and shot. Over and over again. In total some 10,000 Jews from the Buczacz area were killed; only 2000 of those were transported to a death camp. The others were eliminated personally by gun shots. 

A (very) few Jews survived:

Jewish accounts of the German occupation in the Buczacz district are invariably about rescue and betrayal by local gentiles. This is why testimonies are filled with mixed emotions of rage and vengeance, on the one hand, and gratitude and guilt on the other ... The most instructive feature to emerge from these accounts is the ambivalence of goodness: even those who took in Jews could at any point instruct them to leave or summon the authorities ... Evil was less ambivalent: most of the perpetrators killed thoughtlessly and displayed no pangs of conscience ... But occasionally, out of impulse, the pleasure of displaying their absolute power over life and death, or even a momentary recognition of the victim's humanity, individual perpetrators could spare lives in capricious acts of goodness in the midst of slaughter. For those spared, such haphazard decisions were a momentous event that determined the rest of their lives and were never forgotten, even if for the perpetrators they could be nothing more than a blur in an ocean of blood and horror.

Bertov can't let go the conundrum -- what made the difference between the vicious criminality of so many of the Germans and the occasional acts of kindness or decency? Why did a few Jews live while others died? Accidents mattered. He reports the terrible saga of one Jewish teenager which captures the contingency of life and death:

Alicja Jurman faced the whole range of attitudes under German rule. Having already lost one brother to Soviet brutality, she lost another to Nazi forced labor, a third to local denunciation, and the youngest to a Ukrainian policeman. Her father was murdered early on in the [Jewish] registration action; her mother, denounced by a Polish neighbor, was shot in front of her eyes just before the end. Alicja herself was handed over to the Gestapo by her best friend's father, who joined the Ukrainian police; she was hidden for a lengthy period by an eccentric elderly Polish nobleman living on the edge of the village, a "splendid, beautiful man" who defied all threats from the local Ukrainians; she was denounced by a local peasant after escaping mass execution, but the soldier who spotted her told her to run, saying "you are an innocent girl, after all."

Both her survival and the murder of many family members, then, were largely the result of choices made by neighbors and strangers.

This is not something that can be made much moral sense of. This is a book of "fraught and traumatized memories [that] contain as much forgetting as remembering."

And then, in 1944, the Russians drove out the Nazis. More people were killed in Buczacz, whether for aiding the occupation or to settle scores. The whole area was given new national borders by fiat of the victors and "harmonized" by transfer of peoples -- there weren't many Jews left to come out of hiding. Poles were forcibly moved north to contemporary Poland, while Ukrainians who had lived north of the new border were moved into Soviet Ukraine. 

All three ethnic groups living in Buczacz and its district underwent extreme suffering although their agony peaked at different times and often at the hands of different perpetrators ... And yet, at the time and long after, each group sought to present itself as the main victim, both of the occupying powers and of its neighbors. Poles and Ukrainians were particularly keen on highlighting these martyrdom, in part out of fear that the Nazi genocide of the Jews would overshadow their own victimhood ...

Buczacz is today a Ukrainian backwater, going by the name of Buchach. 

• • •

Very relevant to the present day, one of the things I learned from Timothy Snyder's free Yale course on the making of modern Ukraine is that, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the governments of free and independent Poland and Ukraine agreed not to reopen the (legitimate) grievances of the parts of their populations who had been forced to move. This, and the desire to be part of European Union culture and society, is probably an essential part of how a Ukrainian Jew, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, can today be the elected leader of a (mostly) new kind Ukrainian nationalism.

Bertov's history also supports one of the pillar's of Snyder's Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. The Holocaust reached its most horrific thoroughness where state authority, both before the war and under Nazi occupation, was least intact. Buczacz makes a terrible example of a long term war of all against all, interspersed with grudging co-existence over several centuries.

On antisemitic Zionism

John Ganz, scholar of populisms and other social diseases, deconstructs this unholy convergence. 

... Israel may seem to stir up antisemitism through its aggression and bellicosity. But in some cases it actually neutralizes antisemitism: It puts the Jews in an acceptable context.

Many on the Christian Right don’t particularly care for the Jews, but in so far as Israel is part of their idea of a divine plan, they have a conditional acceptance of the Jews. They “like” Jews because Jews = Israel. This doesn’t always have a religious underpinning, or rather, something else often lurks beneath the religious veil.

Many on the far right may not like Jews in so far as they are liberals, “rootless cosmopolitans,” and so forth, but love Zionism. They say, in effect, “Heck, I may I don’t like Jews, but I love all these soldiers, tanks, bombs, checkpoints, and settlements.” In so far as Jews act as intrepid settlers on the far edge of “Western civilization,” and are appropriately aggressive and brutal with the lesser races, they can even celebrate the Jews. They don’t tolerate a certain degree of settler-colonialism because its being done by Jews who deserve their own homeland after so many years of persecution and ultimately genocide, as liberal Zionists do, but they tolerate Jews only in so far as they are settler-colonists.

They might not state it openly, but the “apartheid” stuff is not so much a pejorative label in their minds as a positive condition for their support. For such people, Zionism “naturalizes” the Jews, it literally and metaphorically gives them a place: rather than being a disturbing alien entity in the midst of a larger society, it makes them a people or even a race like any other. It also transforms Jews, to use a term from apartheid South Africa, into “honorary whites”—even if Israel has a majority Sephardic and Mizrahi population now.

Apartheid South Africa, founded on the basis of a deeply antisemitic ideology, came to cooperate with Israel not just out of realism and mutual self-interest, but because Zionism made Jews recognizable to them: these Jews they could deal with. Just look at how the apartheid government understood Israel: "Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples."

Zionism also lets antisemites imagine a world without Jews: “Well, they can eventually just go to Israel, I suppose.” Their “Jewish problem,” as it were, is thereby solved.

... Just as some will only extend solidarity to Jews in so far as they are vocally anti-Zionist, there are also those who will only extend solidarity to the Jews in so far as they are Zionists. These are both forms of antisemitism: they treat Jews as not really be full members of the societies they belong to, but as props in their own ideological or racial struggles.

Just say no to making anyone political props!

Advice from history

Willamette University historian Seth Cotlar shared this fascinating artifact of another era when people in the United States had to struggle to combat anti-Semitism. Published in 1943 by the American Jewish Committee,  "What to Do When the Rabble-Rouser Comes to Town" was distributed to Jewish communities to warn people against doing and saying things which stirred up controversy with anti-Semitics [sic]..." 

In today's hyper-polarized world, we might not take the same tack with our homegrown fascists and nativist thugs. We cannot simply deny them a microphone; that's no longer possible. But we can still expose them. And we can sure recognize the type: the crooked fat cat with his lawyers and his army of muscle men.

Let's send him slinking away once again.

My experience of Holocaust education

Dara Horn's critique Is Holocaust Education Making Anti-Semitism Worse? got me wondering: how did I learn about the Holocaust? (Previous summary post here.)

And I realized that I actually had encountered Holocaust education in high school in 1963. This, among many other influences, probably helped set my trajectory for the rest of my life. The powers-that-be brought in a woman who was billed, accurately, as "a local author" to speak to a small group -- probably "the current events club." (We had such a thing. Odd to remember.)

This was Gerda Weissmann (later Klein) who lived in Buffalo. Her memoir, All But My Life, is the saga of how she landed in upstate New York.

Gerda Weissmann (later Klein) was born in Bielsko, Poland, on May 8, 1924. Growing up into a middle-class Jewish family, Gerda Weissmann’s life was shattered when she was 15 years old in September 1939. German forces invaded Poland and within a month her brother Artur was taken away by the Nazis never to return. Gerda and her parents were forced into the basement of their family home as it was stripped. Then along with other Jewish residents, they were imprisoned in the Bielsko Ghetto, and some were sent into slave labor. Gerda was eventually separated from her parents, who later died in the concentration camps, while she was sent into a series of slave labor camps at Marzdorf, Landshut and Gruenberg. After barely surviving these, Gerda was forced onto a Death March ending in Volary, Czechoslovakia on May 7, 1945. (Jewish Buffalo History Center)

Ms. Klein had married Kurt Klein, an American soldier who helped liberate this contingent of slave laborers. She committed her life to educating young people about her experience of Nazi genocide and much more, writing nine books "on themes of courage, friendship and love."

Ms. Klein's talk gifted me with a burning desire to know more about the inhumanity we are capable of visiting on each other. I borrowed her book from the local library -- and followed up with additional Holocaust reading, as well as another genre much available at the time, accounts of Stalin's gulag and even the Holodomor in Ukraine. (Note, somehow neither the story of European settlers' genocidal war on native Americans nor the story of American slavery were so available in the public library.) I was a curious young person.

Holocaust education had a profound effect on me. But I need to grant that Horn's article points to conditions that made Holocaust education viable for me. I had great advantages. Jewish people were part of my world.

• Unlike so many US kids now subjected to these course units, there were Jews in my daily life. There had been Jewish kids in my classes since 5th grade. There were a significant number of Jewish kids in my private high school.

• My mother had close Jewish women friends, people she'd worked with on community projects including during World War II.

• The adults I was exposed to were Holocaust-aware, both Jews and also my Protestant co-religionists.

However I should not leave the impression that this environment was devoid of anti-Semitism. In fact, it reeked of socially accepted prejudice against Jews.

• By the time I escaped high school, I had come to recognize that the institution was probably operating with a Jewish quota: there were Jewish students ... but not too many.

• While I was in high school, the large Reform synagogue nearby suffered anti-Semitic vandalism. The attack felt incomprehensible. Classmates felt threatened. I had been taken to tour that building along with classmates, a tour very like the one we sponsored of our Episcopal church. The two didn't feel that different: both were buildings used for slightly exotic purposes that advertised the comfortable class status of their adherents.

• And that goes to the nub of how I encountered Jews in that place and time: most all the families in that school, Christian and Jewish (there was nobody more exotic that I knew of), were performing culturally what was expected from the post-WWII professional American upper middle class. For example, I don't remember anyone being raised by a single mom. The Jewish kids seemed not to want to be seen as "too Jewish." I didn't meet Jews who willingly advertised difference from Christian Americans until I got out of there. The conformist Fifties persisted well into the Sixties in Buffalo.

If overcoming Christian solipsism and anti-Semitism were that challenging for me -- with all those corrective influences -- no wonder Holocaust education is as problematic as Dara Horn portrays it.

Gerda Klein's All But My Life remains available. I'm going to re-read it and may post an update.

Holocaust history as modern American morality play

Dara Horn's rambling essay in the current Atlantic magazine, Is Holocaust Education Making Anti-Semitism Worse? seems to be getting some plaudits and some pushback. That's not surprising; a lot of very earnest people teach in this field, doing their best. And Jewish people and Jewish institutions want and need some force that runs against our current eruptions of Jew-hatred. We all do; very few of us want the Nazis among us to run about unchecked.

When we don't know what else to do, a humane, classically liberal, society defaults to attempting education ... but does it work?

I want to summarize some of Horn's points in this post and follow up with another post about what I can remember about how I learned about the Holocaust many moons ago. That was long before there was such a thing as a formal curricular field, and yet the vaguely Christian institution where I went to high school did offer a chance to learn something about the then-recent Nazi genocide.

Horn introduces her article with a clear assertion:

... The bedrock assumption that has endured for nearly half a century is that learning about the Holocaust inoculates people against anti-Semitism. But it doesn’t. ... I have come to the disturbing conclusion that Holocaust education is incapable of addressing contemporary anti-Semitism.

The article is a kind of travelogue through this apparently burgeoning elementary and high school academic field. Her picture of the endeavor brought me up short:

... Benjamin Vollmer ... has spent years building his school’s Holocaust-education program. He teaches eighth-grade English in Venus, Texas, a rural community with 5,700 residents; his school is majority Hispanic, and most students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. ...Vollmer is not Jewish—and, as is common for Holocaust educators, he has never had a Jewish student. (Jews are 2.4 percent of the U.S. adult population, according to a 2020 Pew survey.)

My surprise shows my Christian obliviousness. I live now and always have lived in places where Jews are visible citizens. Before recent hyper-affluent times, San Francisco meant frontier opportunity and welcome to misfits who don't quite fit in with mid-America. In 2011, six percent of San Francisco's population was Jewish, likely mostly imports like the rest of us weirdos. In my line of work, I've long noted that well-curated political voter lists attempt to identify who is Jewish; somehow they know Erudite Partner is Jewish, despite her Scots last name. The world notices where the Jews are. And, mostly under wraps, there's plenty of Jew-hating in oh-so-sophisticated Northern California.

San Francisco anti-Semitic graffiti spotted in 2015

Horn explores what might be buoying Holocaust education in mid-American venues where there are no Jews. The answer she gets from teachers is obvious, if you think for a minute: the victims of the Shoah are conveniently dead on another continent some distance in the past.

Why not focus on something more relevant to his students, I asked Vollmer, like the history of immigration or the civil-rights movement? I hadn’t yet appreciated that the absence of Jews was precisely the appeal.“Some topics have been so politicized that it’s too hard to teach them,” he told me. “Making it more historical takes away some of the barriers to talking about it.”

Where there are no living, breathing Jews, a focus on the Holocaust serves as a safe morality play.

The point was to teach morality in a secular society. “Everyone in education, regardless of ethnicity, could agree that Nazism was evil and that the Jews were innocent victims,” [education historian Thomas D.] Fallace wrote, explaining the topic’s appeal. “Thus, teachers used the Holocaust to activate the moral reasoning of their students”—to teach them to be good people.

Horn concludes:

... One problem with using the Holocaust as a morality play is exactly its appeal: It flatters everyone. We can all congratulate ourselves for not committing mass murder. This approach excuses current anti-Semitism by defining anti-Semitism as genocide in the past.

Horn makes a solid case that if we want a society that rejects Jew-hating, we have to start by helping students with some prior questions before we get to anti-Semitism: Who are the Jews? Where did Jews come from? What cultures have Jews lived in? What cultures have Jews created? Only after exploring those questions can educators usefully approach why are Jews objects of hatred? and why have both Christian and secular modern cultures generated anti-Semitism?

She quotes J. E. Wolfson of the Texas Holocaust, Genocide, and Antisemitism Advisory Commission:

... [he] told the teachers that it was important that “anti-Semitism should not be your students’ first introduction to Jews and Judaism.” ... “If you’re teaching about anti-Semitism before you teach about the content of Jewish identity, you’re doing it wrong.”

That seems right to me -- and a lot more politically and culturally demanding than teaching the Holocaust as a distant morality play whose enormity reinforces contemporary innocence.

Horn's essay prompted me to try to recall how I was taught and learned about the Holocaust as a young person of the 1950s and 60s. To be continued ...

It's very pink ... and got my attention

 

This mobile billboard was not something I expected to encounter while trotting around in damp Golden Gate Park.

 

The sponsoring organization is something called Jewbelong. The organization bills itself as a gentle, benign resource for Jewish people who feel disconnected from Jewish religion and culture. In their words:

Most Jews know that Judaism can be a little intimidating, which for some people is a good enough reason to run for the door. Or maybe you gave Judaism a try, but you didn’t get enough out if it to keep you coming back. The fact is that Judaism sometimes gets a bad rap and that’s led to too many people missing out on the good stuff. JewBelong is out to change all that.

I'm sure they've got a constituency, though this doesn't describe most of my Jewish friends who have found other, more traditional, ways of investigating a culture that the secular US can conceal and obscure. (The same secular forces also erase nuanced Christian belief and practice; instead we get evangelical megachurches, with a a dash of Christian nationalism.)

Exploring the Jewbelong website, there seems a bit of a lean toward US commentators I think of as part of the performative American Right, like Bari Weiss.

But hey -- anti-Semitism is real and apparently increasing. As is willingness to discount the humanity of Palestinians in conflict with the Israeli state which claims to represent the height of Jewish culture. There's plenty to concern humane people of all religious traditions. 

It may be significant to see whether the arrival of this pink themed campaign is a harbinger of an enduring effort -- or just another scream for notice passing through the fertile terrain for justice demands that is the Bay.

Antisemitism: thriving where the far right seeks power

John Ganz  writes what he calls Unpopular Front-the junk box of history. I find his musings and diatribes thought provoking. The other day he offered this in an essay prompted by narcissistic zillionaire Elon Musk's escapades:

Antisemitism is both symptom and cause of broader social decline: it is the most pornographic and salacious part of reactionary propaganda, the sign of the abandonment of democracy in favor of demagogues and the mob, and it reveals the utter cynicism and vulgarity of the ruling class, its willingness to indulge in any irresponsibility that will perpetuate its dominance.

Donald Trump is an unabashed anti-Semite. That's not news. He is spewing bile for his MAGA mob and undoubtedly provoking the sort of vile reaction he intends.

Sarah Posner explores Trump's transactional expectation that U.S. support for rightwing Israeli zionism put "the Jews" in his debt. Trump likely learned enough from palling with right-wing evangelical Christian pastors to know how to tickle their fantasies.

One interpretation is theological, a topic on which Trump is notoriously illiterate, although he’s likely spent enough time around evangelicals to know they believe they have an imperative to convert Jews to Christianity. They seek converts now, because you never know when Jesus is actually coming back, and you want to be saved already when it happens. The evangelicals who await Jesus’s return at the battle of Armageddon envision it as an event during which Jews will be forced to accept Christ, or perish in a lake of brimstone. “Before it is too late!” has a very particular meaning here. 

Another interpretation is purely political. Trump demands loyalty, and he gets it from an overwhelming majority of white evangelicals, but only a tiny minority of Jews. In this interpretation, Trump is angry not to see Jews at bended knee. Jews’ supposed failure to “appreciate what they have in Israel” is actually a failure to appreciate that Trump has done heroic things for Israel. ...

It's always about Donald Trump for Donald Trump

• • •

And here in Reno, Washoe County is afflicted by its own real estate-speculating, tech millionaire Republican nut job who has decided this a great place to spread viciousness. 

From The Nevada Independent:

In the days after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, Robert Beadles logged onto a video-streaming platform and blamed former President Donald Trump’s electoral defeat on an international Jewish conspiracy. 

The chaotic events of the day, he said, were choreographed by outside forces, not Trump supporters. Beadles pointed to the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” — a long-debunked antisemitic pamphlet claiming that Jews are conspiring to take over the world. 

“Just like the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’ when you infiltrate every single layer of civilization of a society, they put their people in these prominent positions to keep the information from leaking out or to keep their narrative in place,” Beadles said. “And we’re seeing that.” 

... he has made a name for himself as an election denier, far-right provocateur and prominent GOP donor who has given more than $1 million over the past two years to Republican candidates up and down the ballot. He charged into Nevada Republican Party politics, using his power and influence to win a seat on the Washoe GOP executive committee and push the party’s agenda to more extreme positions. ...

This too is what we struggle against, here in the UniteHERE Reno campaign. Join us.

Ukraine just wasn't there ...

As Ukraine has moved to the center of U.S. political concern over the last few years, I've noticed repeatedly that this huge country resided in a remote, dark, cloudy space in my consciousness, out there somewhere, but invisible. I suspect I am not alone about this among people in the U.S. of my generation who notice a wider world at all: unless we had eastern European roots, Soviet Russia and its satellites were a blank. Many of us learned a good deal about places where the U.S. went to war and sought active hegemony -- southeast Asia and Latin America. Africa escaped from colonialisms and was exciting. What we call the "Middle East" and also central Asia were other zones of imperial activity -- ours. And we may have learned a little. But eastern Europe, not so much so.

There are histories that admirably fill some of the blanks. I always recommend Bloodlands and Postwar.

But as Putin's invasion proceeds and I've doom scrolled about the internet, I still felt this blankness about who these people are who are so bravely facing the onslaught. The piece I read which somehow seemed to reach a bit into the blank was journalist Franklin Foer's It’s Not ‘The’ Ukraine in The Atlantic. His family's history -- the history of a small branch from a huge Jewish clan that implausibly survived Ukrainian anti-Semitism and Hitler's Holocaust -- made Ukraine come alive for him. Not surprisingly ...

When I first visited Ukraine, in 2002, I couldn’t see past its Soviet-era dinge or shake off the admittedly overwrought—if historically informed—suspicion that every person I met might wish me dead.

Much later, in 2010, he visited the tiny towns, now obliterated, where most of his forebears had been murdered. His grandmother survived the German killing pit by walking east, all the way to Kazakhstan, in 1942. His grandfather's survival may have been even more unlikely: he was hidden by Ukrainian neighbors in a hay barn throughout the occupation and war.

Foer writes:

History, which I had considered dead and buried, suddenly reached out of the grave and wrapped its arm around me. 

One Ukrainian had threatened to kill my grandmother; another had saved my grandfather in an act of heroism that never aspired to more than neighborly kindness. As we ate lunch, I realized that my existence owed itself, in a sense, to the big-heartedness of Ukrainians. History is as variegated as the woods where we went to recite a prayer at our family’s mass grave.

Foer's mother, Esther Safran Foer, tells the story of her quest for more truth about this family history in I Want You to Know We're Still Here: A Post-Holocaust Memoir. This is a wonderful little book. Finidng Ukrainians who remembered the lost world of the ancestral shtetl required years of persistence and negotiating the fraught terrain of evil memories which many wanted to repress. But eventually she found what could be found -- and people who brought her connections to that world alive. She writes:

... the connections we made on that trip continue to be part of our lives. I often wonder what my grandfather would make of Lesia Lishcuk, the great-granddaughter of his rescuer, Davyd, sleeping in the guest room of our house [in Washington, DC]. ... She still signs some of her emails "from your Ukrainian family," and I reciprocate by ending mine "from your American family."...

Putin's Ukrainian hell is going to be a long horror in a land that has seen too much horror, I fear. I try to bring to consciousness the people in the way ...