The Progressive Left not only ignores Jew-Hatred. In many cases it denies, dismisses, and even promotes Jew-Hatred. It has corrupted the meaning of both intersectionality and Settler-Colonialism to use against Israel, and by extension against Jews in the diaspora, in the process turning the word Zionist into an epithet. In this denial, and dismissal of antisemitism/Jew-Hate, the Progressive Left has ceded the space to call out this hate to the Far Right, allowing the insidious Representative Elise Stefanik and even the much maligned Speaker Mike Johnson to score political points at our expense.
When they call out Jew-Hatred and we don’t, the Far Right uses it to conflate Palestinians with Hamas, while calling for the continued bombing of Gaza. The Jew-Hatred tolerated or ignored by the Progressive Left puts Jews on the defensive. This in turn puts Progressive House seats at risk as the AIPAC pours money into campaigns, invoking the existential fear stoked by hate crimes and slurs against Jews, tempting Jewish constituents to vote for the candidate who supports the right of Israel to exist. It won’t matter whether or not that AIPAC candidate makes the undeliverable promise to destroy Hamas, and Gaza with it, as long is the candidate uses language that assures Jews that America will not turn into 1932 Germany. The Progressive Left’s blind eye and implicit support of Jew-Hatred increases polarization and emboldens the Far Right to normalize the catastrophe in Gaza, which in turn creates more hatred of Jews and more Right Wing justification of continuing the war. When the Left not only bends over backwards to avoid calling out Jew-Hatred but actually engages in it as well -- Including leaving Jews out of DEI -- it creates a lose-lose-lose-lose-lose proposition.
I will cover each of these points below.
Wednesday night, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson opportunistically spoke at Columbia University. He said, in part:
“They place a target on the backs of Jewish students in the United States and here on this campus. A growing number of students have chanted in support of terrorists. They have chased down Jewish students. They have mocked them and reviled them. They have shouted racial epithets. They have screamed at those who bear the Star of David. They have told students who wear the Star of David to leave the country.”
When he was shouted down, he added, “Enjoy your free speech.”
Do you realize how difficult it is for Mike Johnson to appear as a sympathetic character? Seriously. Yet, in that moment, parsing just that part of his speech, as he was shouted down while denouncing the facts on the ground of Jewish-Hatred on that campus and others, one could almost feel for him. That is a bad look for everyone.
Johnson said a lot more than that, of course, most of it vile and destestable. But everything what he said about the Jewish experience on many campuses, including Columbia and Harvard, is true.
While Columbia is in the news, I will shift to Yale and then Harvard, about the disturbing shift of Zionist and Zionism into epithets.
Rabbi Jason Rubinstein, Yale's Jewish Chaplain, spoke on a Zoom call with Yale alumni just a few days ago, on April 25th. He spoke about a conversation he had with a Jewish student who does not self-identify as a Zionist, whom the Rabbi calls a "Very Progressive Junior." He asked the Rabbi not to focus on violence in this talk with alumni, or the fear of violence on campus, even though a Jewish student was recently stabbed in the eye with a Palestinian flag. "He said we should be talking about the pervasive shunning of Zionists among social circles at Yale." The Rabbi gave some examples:
A student had their Senior Society "tap" rescinded, because it was alleged, and then confirmed, that the student is a Zionist. Or actually, it wasn't really confirmed that they were a Zionist - it was confirmed that they were connected to and sympathetic to Israel and that was sufficient.
Guilt by association.
The Rabbi mentioned that when a Jewish student was running for an elected position, anonymous social media posts argued that Yale couldn't have a Zionist in that position. This student never claimed to be a Zionist but had posted publicly in the past about going to Israel. He continued:
I heard an account from a Yale employee who was counseling a student who said she had been in a kind of bad breakup situation and she said 'I'm really worried this person who can be quite vindictive will spead highly damaging rumors about me that I'm a Zionist.'
Rabbi Rubinstein said "I don't need to tell you that this is terrible," and that this is not unique to Yale.
The Rabbi mentioned Alan Garber, the interim President of Harvard.
[In] his first interview with the [Harvard] Crimson about these matters, he said the problem we are facing is the shunning of Zionists. The exact same diagnosis.
Author Dara Horn wrote back in February what it was like before Garber's tenure. At Harvard, as Dara Horn heard and saw and catalogued this in an article in The Atlantic in February, Why the Most Educated People in America Fall For Anti-Semitic Lies:
The problem was not that Jewish students on American university campuses didn’t want free speech, or that they didn’t want to hear criticism of Israel. Instead, they didn’t want people vandalizing Jewish student organizations’ buildings, or breaking or urinating on the buildings’ windows. They didn’t want people tearing their mezuzahs down from their dorm-room doors. They didn’t want their college instructors spouting anti-Semitic lies and humiliating them in class. They didn’t want their posters defaced with Hitler caricatures, or their dorm windows plastered with fuck jews. They didn’t want people punching them in the face, or beating them with a stick, or threatening them with death for being Jewish. At world-class American colleges and universities, all of this happened and more.
I was not merely an observer of this spectacle. I’d been serving on now–former Harvard President Claudine Gay’s anti-Semitism advisory committee, convened after the October 7 Hamas massacre in Israel and amid student responses to it. I was asked to participate because I am a Harvard alumna who wrote a book about anti-Semitism called People Love Dead Jews. As soon as my participation became public, I was inundated with messages from Jewish students seeking help. They approached me with their stories after having already tried many other avenues—bewildered not only by what they’d experienced, but also by how many people dismissed or denied those experiences. [emphasis mine]
When we dismiss and deny these experiences, we give the Far Right the opportunity to claim that we are antisemitic and they are not.
It doesn’t matter if we tell people that many protesters and supporting organizations are Jewish. A Jewish Voice For Peace (JVP), for example, asked by the IRS on their 990 tax return (Public information, courtesy of Pro-Publica) to briefly describe their "most significant activities," they write: "ADVOCACY AND PUBLIC EDUCATION FOR PALESTINIAN HUMAN RIGHTS." That is laudable. JVP, while supporting the protests against the carnage in Gaza, also supports the BDS Movement, which calls for the destruction of the Nation of Israel and condemns those who disagree as colaborators, JVP is anti-Zionist, which is their right. They have been conspicuous in its silence regarding the harrassment of Jews on campuses, and off-campus, Zionist or not.
When we turn Zionist and Zionism into epithets, though, we are not only engaging in witch-hunt like behavior, similar to liberals having to take an oath that they were communists back in the 1950s.
Or, more recently, Arabs being forced to try to convince people that they are not terrorists simply because they prayed to Allah.
When we Demonize the Other, when we push people who are otherwise sympathetic to your cause away, where do they go?
I have a news app on my phone that gives me “News from All Sides.” For the most part, I only hear of attacks on Jews from the likes of the Daily Caller, the Free Beacon, The New York Post, and other right wing outlets whose agenda is to support Netanyahu and crush Gaza. The Left on the App — from the most Radical, which reports breathlessly on university encampments and calls for BDS, and goes to great lengths to deny and refute instances of Jew-Hatred, to the moderate NY Times, are all virtually silent on these attacks.
When the Left is silent on antisemitism, silent on attacks and discrimination against Jews who are Zionist or not, we concede that moral high ground to the Far Right, which wants to scare Jews already concerned by the rise in Hatred of Jews worldwide, to vote against the existential threat that they very deeply feel as they recall the not so distant past before 1948, in favor of those who promise to protect them.
When the Radical Right reports what the Left will not, they will use truth of the incidents that they report to try to convince their readers that their agenda is also true. The result is more claims that Demonize Palestinians, more claims to conflate Palestinians to Hamas, more calls to replace Progressive House members with Israel Hawks, and more calls to bomb Gaza.
When the Progressive Left Ignores, dismisses and denies antisemitism/Jew-Hate, perhaps because it is inconvenient to the general agenda, they -- we -- shoot ourselves in the foot.
The Left does ignore crimes against Jews, and sometimes even applauds the most horrific of them. Helen Lewis wrote an article, The Progressives Who Flunked the Hamas Test, less than a week after October 7th, before an Israeli soldier stepped foot in Gaza or any bombs killed or maimed any Gazans:
The terror attack on Israel by Hamas has been a divisive—if clarifying—moment for the left. The test that it presented was simple: Can you condemn the slaughter of civilians, in massacres that now appear to have been calculatedly sadistic and outrageous, without equivocation or whataboutism? Can you lay down, for a moment, your legitimate criticisms of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, West Bank settlements, and the conditions in Gaza, and express horror at the mass murder of civilians?
In corners of academia and social-justice activism where the identity of the oppressor and the oppressed are never in doubt, many people failed that test.
Lewis in her article gives multiple examples, , including how th Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) immediately held a celebration in Times Square, weeks before the first bomb dropped on Gaza.
Horn adds:
Shortly after the attacks, a Cornell professor publicly proclaimed the barbarity “exhilarating” and “energizing,” while a Columbia professor called it “awesome” and an “achievement.” Comparable praise percolated through America’s top universities, coming from students and faculty alike. On campuses around the country, students began gathering regularly to chant “There is only one solution: intifada revolution!”—a reference to a suicide-bombing campaign in Israel a generation ago that maimed and murdered well over 1,000 Jews. (If there is only one solution, perhaps one could call it the Final Solution.)
Students took these rallies inside libraries and other campus buildings. They vandalized university property with such slogans as “Zionism = Genocide,” “New Intifada,” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”—referring to a geographic area that encompasses the entirety of the state of Israel, where half the world’s Jews live. (At Harvard, some students opted for chanting an Arabic version: “From water to water, Palestine is Arab.”) On some campuses, the exhilaration escalated into death threats and physical assaults against Jewish students. When a Jewish Tulane University student tried to stop an anti-Israel protester near campus from burning an Israeli flag, protesters attacked him and other Jewish students, breaking one student’s nose.
It wasn’t just universities. Crowds cheering for “intifada” gathered in cities around the country, shutting down and disrupting train stations and airport access roads. Lest their support for Hamas be mistaken for support for Palestinians in general, or for peace, U.S. rally organizers named their efforts “floods” (“Flood Seattle for Palestine,” “Flood Manhattan for Gaza”) after “Operation Al Aqsa Flood,” Hamas’s name for its October 7 butchery. The enthusiasm was hard to contain. Some people tore down or vandalized posters of Israeli hostages. Others targeted synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses, spray-painting them with swastikas and slogans like “Israel’s only religion is capitalism.” In New York City, a Jewish teacher’s online photo holding a sign that said i stand with israel was enough to prompt a schoolwide protest that devolved into a riot during which students destroyed school property; the teacher had to be moved to another part of the building to avoid the teenage mob screaming “Free Palestine!” In Los Angeles, a man invaded a Jewish family’s home before dawn with a knife, breaking into the parents’ bedroom while their four children slept, screaming “Kill Jewish people.” When police arrested him, he shouted, “Free Palestine!”
That was before anyone was killed in Gaza.
As a bookend, last week. Michael A. Cohen wrote a piece titled, The Rape Denialists. He asks: Why has it proved so hard for so many on the left to acknowledge what happened on October 7th?"
Even the harshest opponents of Israel’s subsequent military campaign in Gaza acknowledge, albeit often half-heartedly, that Hamas acted with brutality on October 7 in killing innocents. But many of those same critics refuse to acknowledge the widespread sexual assaults against Israeli women that day.
Since allegations of sexual violence first appeared in the fall, a contingent of anti-Israel activists have sought to disprove them. “Believe women” and “Silence is violence” have been rallying cries of progressive feminist organizations for decades. But the same empathy and support have not been shown for Israeli victims.
Many prominent feminist and human-rights groups—including Amnesty International and the National Organization for Women—said little about the sexual-violence allegations. International organizations tasked with protecting women in wartime kept their powder dry. UN Women waited until December 1, nearly two months after the Hamas attack, to issue a perfunctory statement of condemnation.
Israel’s critics have insisted that a lack of firsthand accounts from rape survivors or forensic evidence undercut Israel’s accusations—and have dismissed claims that systematic sexual violence occurred as “unsubstantiated.” Others have accused the Israeli government of “weaponizing” accusations of rape to justify Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza, as an open letter from dozens of feminist activists put it in February. The letter has since been signed by more than 1,000 others.
News outlets that reported on the violence were fiercely attacked. For example, in late December, The New York Times published an investigation that thoroughly detailed the evidence of mass, systematic sexual violence. The story drew an immediate response from Hamas, in language echoing that used by Western activists. “We categorically deny such allegations,” Basem Naim, a Hamas leader, said in a statement, “and consider it as part of the Israeli attempt to demonize and dehumanize the Palestinian people and resistance, and to justify the Israeli army war crimes and crimes of genocide against the Palestinian people.”
Stridently anti-Israel independent journalists and activists immediately tried to pick apart the Times story, which culminated in late February with the publication of a more-than-6,000-word exposé by the left-wing outlet The Intercept that accused the Times of flawed reporting. The left-wing magazine The Nation accused the Times of “the biggest failure of journalism” since the paper’s reporting in the run-up to the Iraq War; the leftist YES! magazine claimed, “There is no evidence mass rape occurred.”
Again: Why has it proved so hard for so many on the left to acknowledge what happened on October 7th?"
Horn has an answer. Horn mentions David Nirenberg's 2013 book Anti-Judaism, which covers 23 centuries of documentation of the title.
Nirenberg is a diligent historian who resists generalizations and avoids connecting the past to contemporary events. But when one reads through his carefully assembled record of 23 centuries’ worth of intellectual leaders articulating their societies’ ideals by loudly rejecting whatever they consider “Jewish,” this deep neural groove in Western thought becomes difficult to dismiss, its patterns unmistakable. If piety was a given society’s ideal, Jews were impious blasphemers; if secularism was the ideal, Jews were backward pietists. If capitalism was evil, Jews were capitalists; if communism was evil, Jews were communists. If nationalism was glorified, Jews were rootless cosmopolitans; if nationalism was vilified, Jews were chauvinistic nationalists. “Anti-Judaism” thus becomes a righteous fight to promote justice. [emphasis added]
She adds:
This dynamic forces Jews into the defensive mode of constantly proving they are not evil, and even simply that they have a right to exist.
This is why the Left must deny the rapes. This is why the Left has been silent on anti-Jew Hate. It is how the Far Right cynically uses our silence to promote their agenda. It is because Anti-Judaism becomes embedded in the "righteous fight to promote justice."
Conflating justice with Anti-Judiasm goes so far as to exclude Jews from Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in the work place and the world.
Horn again:
DEI efforts are designed to combat the effects of social prejudice by insisting on equity: Some people in our society have too much power and too much privilege, and are overrepresented, so justice requires leveling the playing field. But anti-Semitism isn’t primarily a social prejudice. It is a conspiracy theory: the big lie that Jews are supervillains manipulating others. The righteous fight for justice therefore does not require protecting Jews as a vulnerable minority. Instead it requires taking Jews down.
This idea is tacitly endorsed by Jews’ bizarre exclusion from discussion in many DEI trainings and even policies, despite their high ranking in American hate-crime statistics. The premise, for instance, that Jews don’t experience bigotry because they are “white,” itself a fraught idea, would suggest that white LGBTQ people don’t experience bigotry either—a premise that no DEI policy would endorse (not to mention the fact that many Jews are not white). The contention that Jews are immune to bigotry because they are “rich,” an idea even more fraught and also often false (about 20 percent of Jews in New York City, for instance, live in poverty or near-poverty), is equally nonsensical. No one claims that gay men or Indian Americans never experience bigotry because of those groups’ statistically higher incomes. The idea that money erases bigotry apparently applies only to Jews. Again and again, the ostensible reasons for not addressing anti-Semitism in DEI initiatives quickly reveal themselves to be founded on ancient, rarely examined assumptions about Jews as invulnerable villains.
The Far Right has raised money using the specter of DEI before any of this, and this plays right into the hands of those behind AIPAC, into Stafanik’s zealous attacks on College Presidents, puts the Congressional Seats of The Squad and others at risk The more the Progressive Left denies and dismisses the Hatred of Jews, on campus and around the world, the more justification we inadvertently give Netanyahu’s regime to inflict more carnage and famine on Gaza, creating more of what the Progressive Left protests against.
Parodoxically, by creating the vacuum, this silence on Jew-Hate, and the denial of Jew-Hate, The Left has put Gaza in more danger.
Why is only the Right is addressing antisemitism? The answer is because the Left is antisemitic. So is the Right, of course, but at least Jews on the Right are doing something about it other than dismissing and denying it.
Zero-sum games in the Middle East have as much chance of being won as games of 3 Card Monte.
There are alternatives. There are organizations on the ground in Israel, which reject that game, and call for something radically different, which includes regime change in Gaza, the Palestinian Authority, and in Israel itself, to create something different. These group recognize that there are 7 million Jews and 7 million Israelis both living "between the river and the sea," and neither is going anywhere.
One organization is called
Standing Together ST)
, a democratic, egalitarian Coalition of Jewish and Palestinian Israelis working together to create something entirely different. Right now, their focus is on an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and releasing all hostages. They are very critical of the Netanyahu regime, of Hamas and of the PA.
On a recent webinar, Sally Abed, a Palestinian leader of ST and a recent elected City Council member of Haifa, had this to say to supporters of a Free Palestine:
"If you are Pro-Palestinian, and you are fighting for my people and our people's liberty, first of all, thank you. The world is finally hearing us after many years of delegitimization and marginalization of our voice and our shouting out.
But please, please understand that we have the responsibility, now that we have the platform, that we have the popular demand, we also have the responsibility for Radical Empathy.
We have the responsibility to acknowledge the humanity of the Israeli people, and I'm not saying that very lightly. I'm not saying that very lightly. It's an extremely hard task to do. It's extremely hard for Palestinian to acknowledge the humanity of the Israeli Jewish person right now, but it is absolutely necessary in order for us to really move forward and really build not the 2 sides, but 2 people on one side, fighting for a shared future and a shared fate. And we need to start doing that with our liberation movement. We need to start also acknowledging efforts like our people within the Israeli society, both Palestinian and Jewish, who are trying to build the reality for us for all of us. And we really, really, really want to do that. We are determined, we are relentless, we are chronically optimistic. We are chronically optimistic and we will not let this go."
Radical Empathy. Rehumanization of the Other.
It is so easy to join a campus organization already established or a become involved with plug'n play movement like
BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction), where you can step into an ongoing struugle and feel morally superior to those who have not.
But the BDS Movementdoes not negotiate. They know that their mission is to destroy Israel, and those who dare to listen and discuss alternatives are called "colaborators." In fact, BDS which already is so threatened by Standing Together and the concept
Radical Empathy that they have
condemned Standing Together, because
If you read carefully between the lines of the BDS Movement Manifesto, you will see that their goal is for Israel to be replaced by a majority Arab/Palestinian state, and Standing Together is in their way. the "Palestinian Civil Society" could not outright state this goal when put out the call for BDS back in 2005, because it would never have received traction. They are now getting bolder.
Maybe you are a member of the Progressive Left, and you support BDS. Maybe you do not support a Jewish State of Israel. Maybe you are a Jewish anti-Zionist, or oppose the right of Israel to exist. Maybe you want all Jews to be removed from Israel. That is your choice, whether I agree with you or not.
BUT --
- When Zionist and Zionism are epithets, and even guilt by association gets one ostracized;
- When the Progressive Left denies, dismisses and minimizes anti-Jew hatred because, consciously or not, you believe the BIG LIE that antisemitism is a righteous fight for justice, forcing Jews into the defensive mode of constantly proving they are not evil, and even simply that they have a right to exist;
- In short, when you do NOT call out Jew-Hatred with the same passion and consistency that you call out and condemn other bigotry and racism;
- But the Far Right does to promote their own cynical agenda;
- THEN if nothing else, you give support and embolden the very forces on the Far Right that want to continue to bomb Gaza into every member of Hamas is killed, an idea as murderous and misguided as it is futile.
The Progressive Left, by ignoring Jew-Hate, is succeeding in creating exactly what it is fighting so hard to oppose, and more of it.
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UPDATE: Monday, Apr 29, 2024 · 5:45:14 AM +00:00 · David B
I don't know if it is too little or too late, but I'm glad she said this.Rep. Ilan Omar,At Columbia, said:
“I think it is really unfortunate that people don’t care about the fact that all Jewish kids should be kept safe and that we should not have to tolerate anti-Semitism or bigotry for all Jewish students, whether they are pro-genocide or anti-genocide.”
CNN's:Dana Bush asked Senator Bernie Sanders whether he was comfortable with saying some Jewish students were 'Pro-genocide.'
"Well, I don’t know exactly — Look. What I think the essential point that Ilhan made, is that we do not want to see anti-Semitism in this country. And I think the word “genocide” is something that is being determined by the International Court of Justice,” Sanders said, continuing:
But, this is what I will say: I don’t think there’s any doubt that what Netanyahu is doing now, displacing 80% of the population in Gaza, is ethnic cleansing. That’s what it is. Pushing out huge numbers of people, and now we’re looking at the possibility of an attack on Rafah, where people have gone for, so-called, is a safety zone. So, what’s going on there, again, to my mind, is outrageous. And as you’ve indicated, I strongly oppose us funding for Netanyahu’s war machine.
I agree with Bernie. Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide are not the same thing, but they are cousins. It is unfortunate that Omar accused students of being in favor of genocide. She's playing a zero-sum game. It is,however, very helpful to have her condemn anti-Semitism unconditionally,
And, yo be clear, a ceasefire and release of the hostages must be negotiated immediately.