Even the Smartest Brains Can Become Infected with Antisemitism
Yes, Anti-Zionism is Antisemitism and One Doesn't Need to Be Brilliant to Understand Why
This post is the eleventh in an ongoing series on antisemitism and culture. See the previous installments here:
What It Means When the Leader of the Republican Party Dines With THREE Antisemites
When & Why Conspiracy Theorists Sometimes Stumble Onto the Truth
The JFK Conspiracy Theory Which Makes the Most Sense & Why It Matters Today
An Open Letter to Elon Musk Thanking Him for the Correct Decision Shutting Down Neo-Nazi Kanye West
4 Stupid Reasons People Don't Take Antisemitism as Seriously as They Should
Obsessing Over 'the Left' Sabotages the Fight Against Antisemitism
Elon Musk Brings Onboard 'How to Fight Anti-Semitism' Author Bari Weiss to Twitter 2.0
These writings are part of my ongoing effort to overcome my PTSD by forcing myself to try to write and publish something every day commenting on and analyzing current cultural affairs and their impacts on politics, faith, and, well, everything. “Politics is downstream from culture,” the late Andrew Breitbart popularized among conservative bloggers while he was alive. I’d go a step further: Everything is downstream from culture. The cultures you embrace determine who you are and who you become. You become what you worship.
So it’s been just over a week since the last entry in this series and the reason for that is pretty straight forward and something hinted at in a previous entry: I haven’t had the time and focus to write about antisemitism here because I’ve been busy writing about it elsewhere. Check out my article “Professor reveals pervasive antisemitism at University of Toronto Medical School” published December 14 at the Jewish News Syndicate, my first for them. Here are the first few paragraphs:
One Canadian medical school is certainly not immune to the current epidemic of rising antisemitism, Dr. Ayelet Kuper has revealed.
Kuper, an associate professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Toronto, last week published her findings from a year spent investigating antisemitism experienced by students and faculty.
From June 2021 to June 2022, the professor served as senior advisor on antisemitism for the Temerty Faculty of Medicine (TFOM), a position created in response to increasing antisemitism on campus.
On Dec. 5, her findings were published in the Canadian Medical Education Journal. In her article, Kuper describes antisemitic statements and viewpoints she experienced herself, and notes her family’s need to conceal their Jewish heritage when not in Jewish settings.
She writes, “My husband and I, as well as our three Jewish school-aged children, are white-passing in appearance; I increasingly use that privilege to hide our Jewish identities under professional and personal circumstances when we are outside the Jewish community, including on or near the U of T campus.”
Click here to read the rest. I’ve also been contributing shorter pieces to their news briefs section on a variety of Jewish and antisemitism-related subjects. I’ve got more articles in development too which I’ll share here after they’re published.
The piece’s subject, antisemitism on college campuses, is something I’ve grown very familiar with covering over the last decade. All around the country and the world so much of the most virulent anti-Israel voices emerge on campus and regularly their rhetoric bleeds over into traditional antisemitic tropes or merges with old fashioned conspiracy theories of “Jewish power.” Dr. Kuper’s article documents this very well, in often chilling specifics of what she and others in Toronto have experienced.
It’s worth clarifying something important here, though: I do regard being “anti-Israel” or “anti-Zionist” as the same thing as being antisemitic. A lot of brilliant intellectuals and culture creators like to dispute this, of course. They want to insist that the modern State of Israel and the world’s 14.8 million Jewish people are obviously two different things. Surely one can oppose the continued existence of the world’s one Jewish state and its allegedly intolerable policies toward the Palestinians while not hating all Jewish people. These are two different concepts, aren’t they?
In theory they are, but when actually applied in the real world they are not. Here are two reasons why.
First, the state of Israel is “the Jew among nations.” It is the one state in the world explicitly founded on Jewish values and with a majority Jewish population. Currently it has a population of 9,506,100 people, with 73.9% - 7,021,000 - identifying as Jewish. That’s nearly half of the global Jewish population of 15.3 million. And so what does one see in how Israel is covered by the global media and treated by global institutions like the UN? The Jewish state is so often treated the same way as the Jewish person on the street. In particular they are held to a different standard than everyone else. So often Israel is cast as an intolerable abuser of Palestinian human rights. But where is the comparable outrage for the far more deplorable human rights conditions in Palestinian society and in states operating under sharia law like Iran and Saudi Arabia? How many people who loudly proclaim the illegitimacy of Israel as a state will take the same position regarding any other country around the world? Why do they ignore seeing the gay pride parades in Tel Aviv as they ignore gay people hanging from cranes in Iran?
And just to be perfectly clear: criticizing a particular Israeli action or government policy is not “anti-Israel” or antisemitic. Proclaiming that Israel should not exist and supporting the Islamist enemies trying to destroy it is. Which brings us to our next point.
Second, what does the application of one’s “anti-Zionist” beliefs and ideology look like when applied to the real world? Once it’s no longer just a college dorm debate and instead policy on the ground? People who are anti-Zionist believe that the state of Israel should not exist, that it has no moral standing to continue as a nation-state, and that therefore the military efforts to annihilate it by Hamas, Hezbollah, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and other terrorists are understandable and justifiable. So being anti-Zionist so often means explicitly allying with and supporting the efforts of groups which are overtly antisemitic and murderous. These are groups which believe it is their religious duty to launch rockets onto civilian Israeli families with their children. These are groups which indoctrinate their own children to become “martyrs,” giving up their lives in order to kill more Jews:
I could continue ranting about this subject but others have laid it out with greater depth and skill than me. Check out a JNS op/ed published the same day as my article, “Ten reasons why anti-Zionists are antisemites” by Jarrod Tanny. Here’s one of my favorite points from the list, a counter to the fact that sometimes the most vocal anti-Israel voices are themselves Jewish:
(8) The Jewish people are the only ethno-national community that boasts a significant number of activist members who are working to undo the community’s right to self-determination. They do so because non-Jewish activists have vilified Zionism as imperialist, racist and genocidal. Thus, non-Jews continue their millennia-old tradition of claiming the right to define what is acceptable and what is unacceptable Jewish behavior. Jewish “social justice” advocates have accepted this, even though they have granted every other minority the right to define its own oppression and shape its own destiny.
Read the whole thing, and keep an eye on JNS’s opinion section, they have a bunch of talented writers regularly digging in deep on these themes and many others.