The Difference Between Left And Right Wing Anti-Semitism

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LEFT AND RIGHT WING ANTI-SEMITISM; AND WHY THE EXISTENCE (CHOSENESS) OF JEWS IS THREATENING TO TYRANTS, UTOPIANS, AND POLITICAL MOVEMENTS

‘The sincere denial of its existence is one of the key ways in which left-wing antisemitism differs from its right-wing variant. The alt-right Twitter troll, neo-Nazi militant, or xenophobic lunatic who shoots up a synagogue — all of these haters will enthusiastically admit their hatred of Jews. The right-wing antisemite is most often a racial or religious reactionary who extols the superiority of his tribe over all others.

The antisemite of the Left, on the other hand, will never confess to such dark impulses, at least not at first. His problem is never with Jews qua Jews but rather “Zionists’ (or the shrewder “Likudniks’), whose attachment to a “settler-colonialist’ state raises legitimate concerns about their national loyalty and basic humanity. He noisily advertises his belief in the equality of man, which is why the chauvinism of the Jews rankles him so much (though why only the Jews and not, say, the Chinese or the Pakistanis — nations not particularly known for their embrace of Enlightenment universalism — is left unsaid). David Duke attended an Iranian-sponsored Holocaust-denial conference in the belief that obfuscating the greatest crime of the 20th century lays the groundwork for a repeat performance in the 21st. Jeremy Corbyn, meanwhile, speaking on an Iranian regime–sponsored television network, alleged that he saw “the hand of Israel’ behind various dark maneuverings out of his steadfast commitment to progress and justice.

The intellectual underpinnings of left-wing antisemitism long predate the 19th-century philosopher credited with creating the modern Left. “What is the worldly religion of the Jew?’ Karl Marx notoriously asked in his 1843 pamphlet, On the Jewish Question. The German theorist, a grandson of rabbis on both sides of his family and a prototype of the self-loathing Jew, offered an answer: [see original for the quote]

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‘Marx´s crude depiction of the greedy Jew — which can be traced back to the 12th-century Catholic edict prohibiting usury among the faithful — would be flatly repudiated by his leading contemporary admirers and political heirs. Today´s socialists are adamant not only in their attestations to not being antisemites, but also take great umbrage at the suggestion that, even if they were antisemites, it would be on the basis of something so parochial and unsophisticated as a belief that “the Jews’ dominate global finance. That Jews are crafty money-grubbers is the sort of down-market superstition a reactionary, middle-class, provincial housewife who reads the Daily Mail would believe. Not a subscriber to the Guardian.

The roots of the tortured relationship between Jews and the anti-capitalist Left go back thousands of years, long before a dualistic political spectrum of “right’ and “left’ was even conceivable. It is the very nature of the Jews as a people apart that so rankles our modern-day utopians, just as it has rankled all of those malefactors who, whatever their political stripes, have wanted to impose their grand theories upon society.

As the Nazis and their collaborators were exterminating his European brethren, the playwright and Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht had a revelation. A street-smart son of Belarusian immigrants *** and a proud, secular Jew, Hecht had never given much thought to antisemitism because he claimed never to have experienced it. Nor did he have any interest in Judaism as a religion. But so disturbed was he by events overseas that Hecht attempted an answer to a question that had bedeviled wiser men: how something so irrational as antisemitism could also be so durable across time and place.

The reason, Hecht contended *** had to do with what he described as “the mission’ of the Jews. The notion of a “people’ embracing something so nebulous as a “mission’ can easily become a recipe for disaster, most horrifically in the case of the German volk. The mission Hecht had in mind, however, was not an exclusionary one, even if it concerned the biblical concept of chosenness.

By transferring their allegiance away from the emperors, monarchs, and warlords who had always ruled over man to an Almighty figure in the heavens, Hecht wrote, the Jews had accepted “the mission to think — to think as an individual in the teeth of all Kings and Causes.’ In so doing, the Jews not only liberated themselves from the whims of arbitrary authority but gave humanity itself a priceless gift: the insight that, because life is a godly creation, no man can rule over another. In this understanding lay a powerful argument against tyranny, particularly of the sort that would attempt anything like a societal reengineering. “It is the drive to separate the human from nature, to rear his ego above the perfection of the ants,’ Hecht wrote, in his description of the Jewish mission´s loftier aims. “Any nation intent on the perfection of the ants must automatically hate the Jews.’

The Jewish covenant with God stood and continues to stand as a permanent rebuke to every king, pharaoh, pope, and commissar who would try to make the Jews bend to their will. ***“During the eighteen centuries in which hate, humiliation, and massacre boil constantly around them, my kinsmen, the Jews, reveal a single, unwavering characteristic,’ Hecht marveled. “They are not impressed.’

***skepticism toward the promises of their fellow men is one of the most foundational Jewish instincts. *** one such expression of skepticism launched 2,000 years of unrelenting oppression: For their failure to be impressed by a man who claimed to be the son of God, the Jews would pay a terrible price, culminating in the Holocaust.

*** because their resistance to enthrallment makes no exceptions for secular theories of human perfectibility, the Jews also elicited venom from those who, due to their intelligence and open-mindedness, were conditioned to believe are the leastsusceptible to something so primitive as antisemitism.

*** another crucial, relevant difference between right-wing and left-wing antisemitism. *** right-wing antisemites, whose worldview is fundamentally racial and therefore permits no reprieve for would-be Jewish collaborators willing to denounce their people in order to save their own skin, left-wing antisemites not only allow for such converts to their burgeoning faith of “social justice,’ but indeed welcome them with open arms. And as the liberal values that Jews considered their secular dogma come under strain alongside the institutions that upheld them — from the New York Times to the American Civil Liberties Union; from the Democratic Party to the Ivy League — the temptation to succumb to this new dispensation may grow.

In this near-future scenario, marked by subtle pressures and implicit threats, Jews who seek full and equal participation in these institutions will be allowed to do so on sufferance, permitted to maintain their belief in things such as tikkun olam and perhaps some gauzy form of monotheism. But traditional notions of Jewish peoplehood — a form of “white supremacy’ since Jews are considered “white’ in contemporary hierarchies — will be verboten. And you can forget the State of Israel unless you´re supporting a bi-national one with the right of Palestinian (but not Jewish) return.

In an America where antisemitism is becoming normalized within respectable, liberal precincts, one can expect that many secular Jews will judge the costs of maintaining a Jewish identity too heavy a burden***. In addition to being less genteel, the chief difference between the new antisemitism and that of yesteryear is that, whereas once it was WASP bluebloods who limited Jewish entry into the Ivy League (to preserve room for their own offspring), soon it may be woke Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) administrators reinstating unofficial Jewish quotas.

Jews abandoning Judaism and Jewishness for the sake of acceptance by a progressive movement is hardly a new phenomenon, of course. ***As the Left´s emphasis on identity politics at the expense of its old mainstay of class consciousness intensifies, and *** as the “politics of position’ edges out “a politics of reason or persuasion,’ the prospect of “graduating’ from Jewishness to progressivism and adopting its “nobler’ precepts will become increasingly attractive.

One can quite easily become a traitor to his class; just look at***FDR. Many***millennial socialists come from upper-middle-class backgrounds; some even have trust funds. Much harder is it to be a convincing traitor to the uniquely ethno-religious identity that is Jewishness. Writing big checks to the correct #BlackLivesMatter groups and voting straight-ticket Democrat will no longer suffice.

Because the bar to prove oneself loyal to the leftist creed is so much higher for Jews than for everyone else (no black or Hispanic student activist is ever asked to disassociate from his community as the price of entry into the progressive fold), the proportion of self-loathing Jews has always been far larger than that of any corresponding minority group. ***

Fundamental to resisting these worrisome trends is first to acknowledge their existence. For far too long, the Jewish establishment has pretended that there was little to nothing wrong with the liberal institutions in which Jews thrived, institutions that Jews did much to strengthen. The next step for Jewish leaders — on the individual as well as the institutional level — is to move on, to “graduate’ from the psychologically abusive relationships these institutions have developed with their Jewish constituents, which might be approximated to battered-woman syndrome in the way so many Jews respond to ever further insults and harms with subscriptions, votes, and donations. Long term, like an exiled government, or a diasporic people yearning to reconstitute their ancient kingdom in the land of their ancestors, their goal must be to build new institutions that maintain the purported but abandoned values of the old. And all the while, the one thing the Jews must never lose is their capacity to be unimpressed.