Amnesty International’s recent report accusing Israel of practising apartheid has – arguably for good reason – provoked a furious reaction from the Jewish state’s supporters. For Israel’s defenders, this and recent similar reports are guilty of turning a complex situation into a simplistic black and white binary. Israelis are cast as representing evil while Palestinians are portrayed as representing goodness. Shades of grey are strictly forbidden in this narrative.
Less well recognised is the parallel trend to portray diaspora Jews in similar black and white terms.
The increasingly influential “woke” worldview has taken to dividing the world between beneficiaries of white privilege and people of colour. Jews, predictably, are generally viewed as white in this schema. As a result, much of the left now sees Jews as complicit in a discriminatory system that oppresses non-whites.
Indeed, because Jews have generally prospered in America, it is easy to portray them as at the pinnacle of a racial hierarchy of power. From this perspective their success is not a cause for celebration but, on the contrary, evidence that they have benefited at the expense of the downtrodden. Old tropes about Jewish power are rehabilitated in a new form.
Of course, older versions of anti-Semitism still exist in all their hideous brutality. The recent hostage-taking at the Beth Israel synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, by a British national of Pakistani origin is only the latest high-profile example. But this new form of anti-Semitism adds to pre-existing fears related to far-right activity and Islamism.
Read the article by Daniel Ben-Ami in The Australian which is supplemented by a piece by Elizabeth Colman herewith:
Anti-Semitism – but make it fashion
The insightfully termed “woke anti-Semitism” that Daniel Ben-Ami writes about recalls the “fashionable” anti-Semitism of history, a chapter taught to drowsy high school students in the late 20th century (back when such things were taught). Most Australians growing up in the West back then probably struggled to understand how there could ever have been anything fashionable about anti-Semitism – not after it had been exposed so definitively as an evil movement and mindset when taken to its only logical conclusion, the culmination of centuries of insidious and, alternatively, enthusiastic cultivation.
But of course anti-Semitism was for a time the very height of fashion in the salons of Europe, from revolutionaries to artists and authors. It was de rigueur among the fashionable set in the lead-up to World War I – later catching on among the working and middle classes – to blame, abhor, scorn, ridicule and despise those not only of the Jewish faith but also of Jewish blood.
Are we headed there once more? It seems so, although the path is never straightforward.
This week, Whoopi Goldberg, a panellist on the long-running and huge-rating US daytime TV talk show The View, declared the Holocaust wasn’t “about race”.
The discussion had been prompted by a smaller item in the news; a decision by a Tennessee county school board to ban Maus, the Pulitzer prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, because it was, well, too graphic. Whoopi used her seat on the panel to reframe the Holocaust to The View’s audience of millions as an act of inhumanity between “two groups of white people”.
Read both articles by Daniel Ben-Am and Elizabeth Colman in The Australian.