Today I Need to Say Something About (the Stupidity of) Antisemitism

Two stories erupted in the last twenty-four hours that have to do with antisemitism. One is deeply positive. It's a letter signed by 132 Jewish faculty and staff at UCLA rejecting the Trump Administration's definition of antisemitism while pointing out what's dangerous about this right-wing definition of antisemitism: it's an attack on free speech and legitimate opposition to the policies of the Israeli government. They might have added that it's an attack by the same administration that has been making nice with actual Nazis and open antisemites, which is how we know that this pretense to defend Jews is in bad faith.

It's trying to use Jews to advance a right-wing agenda. And in so doing it harms Jews by pretending that to oppose the Israeli government and/or its policies is antisemitic, which spreads the calumny that somehow all Jews are aligned with this government and its policies. Which is extremely not true. There are outspoken Jewish voices inside and outside Israel against the attacks on the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and more broadly against the Netanyahu regime. Prominent Jewish voices in the USA, including Judith Butler, Masha Gessen, former NYC comptroller and current congressional candidate Brad Landers, and Senator Bernie Sanders have spoken up about it.

Yet all across the political spectrum, some pretend that all Jews support the Israeli government. If you are a right-winger who wants to defend the Israeli government, this means you can conveniently pretend all opposition is antisemitism. Despite protests by specifically Jewish groups, such as Jewish Voice for Peace, even protests by rabbis. Alas, too many left-wingers likewise get on board with the obviously untrue notion that all Jews support the Israeli government which then becomes a justification for turning hatred of that government into hatred of or blaming of Jews (and since the October 7 attack, too many antisemites have latched onto the Palestinian cause to recruit the gullible to their worldview). I cannot count the number of times I've read or been told that all sixteen million Jews on earth are basically of one mind. Which is astonishingly stupid. (There's an old saying that if you put two Jews in a room you get three opinions.)

Meanwhile the very smart people at UCLA point out that while they have a wide array of opinions overall, they share the rejection of one definition of antisemitism weaponized by the Trump Administration:

Although we hold varying views about Gaza, Israel, Zionism, and pro-Palestinian protests at UCLA—matters that have deeply divided the Jewish community—we are absolutely united in our vehement opposition to this ill-conceived lawsuit. The DOJ’s claim that Jews as a group face a hostile work environment at UCLA because of our religion or ethnicity is false. The DOJ takes advantage of Jewish concerns about antisemitism to attack free speech and academic freedom. The resulting lawsuit, which cynically invokes Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, will do absolutely nothing to protect Jews at UCLA. What it will do is inflict yet more damage to the culture of free expression and inquiry that is the beating heart of the university. ... The complaint paints a picture of our campus that we do not recognize. Many UCLA students, including Jewish students, are critical of Israel and its war in Gaza and have protested against it. The complaint relies on insinuation and misdirection to recast these students as antisemitic. ...Ironically, the DOJ cannot even recognize antisemitism when it occurs through a white nationalist attack on Jews, Muslims and students of color, because the DOJ is so obsessed with conflating pro-Palestinian and antisemitic speech.

[You can read the whole thing and see the signatories here.]

I mentioned two stories in the last twenty-four hours. The second is the resignation of far-right antisemite Joe Kent from his position as director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Discord in MAGA-world and resignations from this administration are indeed good. But Kent's letter blames Israel in a she-made-him-do-it way: "It's clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby." He also does a thing that Republicans do all the time, which is to pretend that Trump is a both a brilliant leader who should not be questioned and a blameless innocent manipulated by nefarious others. What Trump does, when they don't like it, is always someone else's fault. Kent writes: "high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran."

Then Kent gets into his full crazy: "This was a lie and the same tactics the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war...." Nope, George W. Bush and his administration (and UK prime minister Tony Blair) own that war fair and square. But it gets worse when he claims he lost his "beloved wife Shannon in a war manufactured by Israel," by which he seems to mean the Syrian civil war, which was a revolt of oppressed Syrians against the Assad regime, begun during the 2011 Arab Spring, ended only with Assad's fall in December 2024. His wife was blown up in 2019 by a suicide bomber who was apparently allied with ISIS, which is pretty far from "Israel did it." This morning's news made me look around to know a bit about who Kent is. There's plenty on him, including extensive criticism of his hiring.

Today the Associated Press offered some background: "His reference to Israel and claims about Jewish Americans’ political influence highlight Kent’s previous ties to antisemitism and right-wing extremism. It’s an antisemitic trope to suggest Jewish Americans have disproportionate control of media narratives. During his Senate confirmation hearings, Kent acknowledged that during one of his two failed congressional campaigns a political consultant set up a call joined by Nick Fuentes," who is himself an extreme antisemite. Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer put it well about the Kent situation: "My own take on Joe Kent is that he's a despicable Nazi who reached the right conclusion on Iran but did so partly because of his vile antisemitism, yet it's still a good development because it shows how Trump's base is further fracturing, which could hasten Trump's downfall."

What's striking about almost every form of hatred of a group is that it has to justify itself by pretending first that all members of the group are essentially the same so the haters can make all members of that group responsible for the crimes of any of them and then go for collective punishment of the group. That's been applied to Jews since the massacres in medieval Europe; lately it's been applied to Somalis in Minneapolis and immigrants/refugees in general by the Trump Administration, which is forever highlighting a crime by one or a few to try to justify collective punishment of the whole group. It's recently been the justification for attacks on trans women in the UK, whereby any act of sexual abuse by any one of them is used to demonize and criminalize the entire population and suggest they have no right to exist and are inherently threatening. There is no category of people, no sexual identity or orientation, no race or religion, in which every member is flawless, but there are only some categories in which, in the eyes of the haters, the sins of any one somehow become the responsibility and the guilt of all. After 9/11 George W. Bush and Co. weaponized anti-Muslim sentiment and the stupidity behind it to get too many Americans to back a war on Iraq, which had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11 and Al Qaeda, and to tolerate persecution of Muslims and people with Arab or middle-eastern backgrounds inside this country.

In 2016, my collaborators and I produced a New York City atlas, and one of the maps in it that was my idea is titled What Is a Jew: From Emma Goldman to Goldman Sachs, because a decade ago I was trying to make that same point: that Jews are not homogenous.

I mean Bugsy Seigel, Barbra Streisand, Bob Dylan, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and the Beastie Boys are not indistinguishable, or shouldn't be.

Here's a striking piece of the stupid: people say Israel as shorthand for the Israeli government, and then they pretend that all Israelis are Jews (only about 75% are), and that all Israelis support or are just indistinguishable from their government (which lots of protests and some peace movements make clear they are not). For people in the USA who are confident they are not one and the same as the Trump Administration, this should not be hard. But it apparently is. Some stupid goes so far as to blur the distinction between Israelis and Jews and we land back in the refusal to make distinctions. That's what's always striking to me about discrimination: it's indiscriminate.

p.s. I have so many things I want to write for you, longer things, more hopeful things, but I've been really busy with book tour and promotion business. Thanks for bearing with me and I promise: there's more to come.