Antisemitism has been confusing for 2,500 years
It's not just you. It's the imbrication of multiple threads of identity.
Right now is a very confusing time to be Jewish, Jewish-adjacent, or opposed to the war in Gaza but trying not to say anything antisemitic. And, in my humble rabbinic opinion, a lot of the loudest voices on this issue are really not helping.
The good news is, if you are confused, you’re not alone – and the confusion dates back roughly 2,500 years.
In the ancient Near East around the end of the Iron Age, the distinctions between religion, nation, and ethnicity were quite different from today. Very generally speaking, different nations each had their own deities who fought with them in wars, and who demanded loyalty and sacrifices in exchange for sustenance and support. This is why, in 1 Samuel 5:4, the Philistine idol Dagon was found, according to Biblical legend, dismembered and bowing down before the Ark of the Covenant. Our army beat their army, and our god beat their god. (Sound familiar?)
National-religious-tribal identities had numerous intermingled factors: language, ancestry (mythic and real), deities, religious practices, culture, and geography, to name a few. These boundaries were often quite porous: archeological evidence shows that the same household might have statues of household protector gods as well as statues of Yahweh, which were forbidden by priestly elites. You might go to one sacred place to venerate one god, and another to venerate another, even if the priests of each said you shouldn’t. But in general, nation, religion, tribe, and land were all imbricated together.
One of the great innovations of Christianity was in de-coupling “religion” from nationality. “There is neither Jew nor Gentile… for you are all one in Christ, Jesus” wrote Paul in Galatians 3:28. Everyone could be Christian; it was a matter of faith, not tribe; salvation, not nationality. This has had its downside: since the Christian God is the God of the entire world, the entire world must accept him or suffer the consequences, leading to centuries of proselytization, missionizing, and violence. But it also created a Christian identity across national and ethnic boundaries, and demarcated separate zones for religion and politics – thus eventually creating the ‘secular.’ “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s,” says Matthew 22:21 – advice that Christian Nationalists today would be wise to ponder.
But Jews never quite fit this new model.
Are we a religion? A nation? What, exactly? Jews are not one ethnicity: there are Jewish people of every ‘color’ and ‘race,’ though we are sometimes racialized by dominant groups, from American WASPs to German Nazis. We are kind of a nation, though many Jews are quick to insist that we are still loyal Americans, or British subjects, or whatever – though the persecutors of Alfred Dreyfus, Leo Frank, and several million German and Polish Jews would beg to differ. And of course, Judaism is kind of a religion, though it still carries with it many aspects of nationality, or to use a relatively recent term, “peoplehood.” Am Yisrael Chai, many Jews have sung, posted, and shouted for thousands of years: the Jewish nation lives.
Jewish identity, like those of other Ancient Near Eastern groups, is also somewhat tied to geography: to the Land of Israel, the Promised Land, given, according to Biblical myths, to the twelve tribes of Israel (well, nine anyway, as three settled east of the Jordan river) by God. There is, contrary to some absurd recent propaganda, abundant archeological evidence of Israelite/Jewish civilization in parts of what is now the State of Israel. But after the destruction of the Temple in the year 70, and the failure of the Bar Kochba revolt in the year 135, there was no Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel until 1948. Still, three times a day, religious Jews prayed for its restoration, and small populations of Jews lived there throughout the centuries.
Okay, that was fun (for me), but what does it have to do with today?
Paralleling the multifaceted nature of Jewishness, antisemitism takes many forms. Until the nineteenth century, it was predominantly religious: Jews were blamed for killing Christ, accused of killing Christian babies, and berated for our religious blindness. Then, under the influence of nineteenth century race ‘science,’ it became racialized – the term “anti-Semitism” was invented to distinguish this new, supposedly scientific belief from old religious ones. (Scholars generally omit the hyphen, to be clear that this is nonsense.) Meanwhile, Jews are usually stereotyped as having certain negative traits (greed, dishonesty) and many positive-but-turn-out-to-be-negative ones (good with money, good with power, strong self-interest).
Nowadays, antisemitism mostly appears as a giant conspiracy theory, with powerful Jewish elites controlling politics, finance, Hollywood, and whatever. Indeed, scratch any conspiracy theory long enough, and eventually you’ll find that Jews are the bad guys. Notice how, here too, Jews are otherized because we’re not quite like everyone else: we’re outsiders within, with our own national and communal bonds, our dual loyalties.
So what about anti-Zionism?
There are some clear cases where criticism of Israel becomes antisemitic. For example, when someone blames a group of Jews for the actions of the Israeli state, that is antisemitic, even though Jewish religion and nationality may be intertwined. A synagogue, a menorah installation, a Jewish fraternity – these are not legitimate targets for harassment, graffiti, or even protest.
To take another example, when someone uses antisemitic imagery or language to criticize Israel, that, too, is antisemitic. The war in Gaza may be unjust, the occupation may be unjust, but talk of a Zionist Occupied Government, or of Jews being animals – antisemitic. Likewise when some shadowy conspiracy is alleged; as Dave Chapelle memorably put it, “There are two words you should never say together. Those words are...’the’ and ‘Jews.’ Never heard someone do good after they said that.”
But there are a lot more unclear cases.
Almost everyone agrees that criticism of Israeli policies is not antisemitic, but there is disagreement about when it spills over into bias. In the last few years, the Anti-Defamation League and others have promoted the view that the line is about “Three D’s”: Demonization, Double Standard, and Delegitimization. When Israel isn’t just criticized but is “demonized” (whatever that means), that’s a sign of antisemitism. Likewise, if every nation in the world deserves a country except the Jewish one, that’s antisemitism too.
For twenty fruitless years, I and many others have strongly disagreed with this alliterative proposition. For example, many anti-Zionists “delegitimize” Israel not because Jews don’t deserve a state, but that this particular ethno-state is built on the ruins of another population and legally elevates one group over others. That, they say, is what is illegitimate. And is it a “double standard” to hold the largest recipient of US foreign aid to a different standard than China or Sudan? I have argued it’s an appropriately different standard.
It’s also the case that Israel, itself, plays with these lines all the time. Israel is the Jewish State, but don’t hold Jews responsible for it; indeed, Israeli leaders often tell American Jews to mind our own business and butt out. Or conversely, Israel is just doing what every sovereign nation does – but you can’t compare it to other nations because it is surrounded by enemies and founded on the ashes of the Holocaust. The water is muddy in part because Israel has muddied it.
That said, I would agree that the Three D’s are helpful as a ‘Caution’ sign. I have seen, over the last two months, an intensity of fury against Israel that feels as though it has crossed over into hatred. There was a lot of shocking silence after the massacres, rapes, and violence of October 7, together with some outrageous defenses of the murderers and rapists. That was painful enough. And then came the explosion of clear antisemitism, accompanied by this extremely incendiary (and often demonstrably false) rhetoric, which, if it isn’t exactly antisemitic, was so brutal, one-sided, and extreme as to raise a lot of red flags. Calling for the elimination of the state of Israel by any means necessary, for example, means calling for millions of Jews to die. Using Nazi imagery or obviously inapplicable language like 'genocide' to describe the Gaza military operations is likewise so distant from reality as, at the very least, to make one wonder how such a leap could be taken. I’ve seen this kind of rhetoric on large scales and among my own friends.
And yet, to state what should be obvious, the war in Gaza is brutal, and on a scale no American ally (let alone the leading recipient of American foreign aid) has undertaken since the Vietnam War. Many people of good faith are calling for a ceasefire, and whether one agrees with that position or not, it is clearly not grounded in antisemitism. And when Israel’s apologists claim that it is, that’s a kind of weaponization and politicization of antisemitism, and only weakens the fight against it.
Of course, virulent criticism of Israeli actions may make some Jews uncomfortable, because we are tied to Israel by bonds of family, nation, experience, and religion. But discomfort is not an objective indicator of bias.
In the end, it’s impossible to disentangle the ‘religious,’ quasi-ethnic, quasi-geographical, and national/peoplehood strands of Jewish identity. As the previous sentence shows, it’s impossible even to articulate them in Western terms. There are many Jews who are not religious, many religious Jews who are anti-Zionist, and Jewish ethnicity is mostly a construction of bigots that erases Jews of Color and Sephardi/Mizrachi Jews, while racializing Ashkenazi ones. Jews simply do not fit the categories placed upon us.
And that makes all this very confusing.
Oh, did I forget to say Happy Chanukah to all those celebrating? I did. Happy Chanukah.
I did write a viral article this week, after promising myself not to: a (partial) defense of the university presidents at that congressional hearing, and a questioning of whether the present moral panic is good for the Jews (it is not).
Meanwhile, my book is out! Thanks to all who have purchased, written a review on Amazon, joined the launch event, and generally sent good vibes. You can buy a copy right here.
Also, in a couple of weeks, I’ll be co-leading a five-day, Buddhist-Jewish silent meditation retreat in Connecticut. Here’s a nice graphic about it that you can click to register:
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