As Jews were protested for trying to talk about anti-Semitism
Disagreement, dissent, protest – how do we do it, how do we do it fairly and reasonably, can we avoid doing it unfairly and unreasonably? Batya Ungar-Sargon writes about being protested at Bard College for being a Jew:
When I was asked to speak at last week’s conference on racism and anti-Semitism at Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center, I think my heart actually skipped a beat.
Arendt, the German-born political philosopher who fled the Nazis in the 1930s and eventually settled in New York, is the thinker who has most deeply influenced me, and racism and anti-Semitism are two topics I think about constantly, the most pressing issues of our time. It was the perfect combination of topic and venue, and the list of confirmed speakers included luminaries whose work I had read, whose writing and thinking I deeply admired.
…
I was invited to host a breakout session of my choosing, and I proposed a workshop on navigating other people’s opinions in the age of Trump – a topic of deep importance to my work as Opinion Editor of The Forward, where we insist on representing the full gamut of legitimate opinion. Ten days before the conference started on Thursday, I found out I would also be one of three people on a panel called “Racism and Zionism: Black-Jewish relations,” and moderator of another session, with Ruth Wisse, a Harvard professor of Yiddish literature and scholar of Jewish history and culture, and Shany Mor, an Israeli thinker who is affiliated with the Hannah Arendt Center.
She read up, she formulated questions, she made big plans. It was mostly wasted effort.
When the conference began Thursday morning, I was warned that protesters from the Bard chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine planned to interrupt my panel with Wisse and Mor. I was surprised they were not targeting the one on Zionism, but the one on anti-Semitism, the only panel of about 20 over the course of the two-day program where three Jews would be discussing the topic.
“But we’re not even talking about Israel,” I said to the conference organizers. “How does that make sense?”
It makes sense only if it makes sense to think all Jews, Jews as such, are implicated in what Israel does. That seems to make about as much sense as thinking all black people are implicated in what Robert Mugabe did, which is to say, zero sense.
“The conversation about anti-Semitism is already inherently about Israel,” one of the students archly explained, repeating a deeply anti-Semitic trope that has been voiced across the spectrum from David Duke to Louis Farrakhan to Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters. Right-wing anti-Semites see any accusation of anti-Semitism as a Jewish conspiracy to take away the rights of whites, while left-wing anti-Semites sees the same accusation as an attempt to silence Palestinians.
It’s Trump-level “thinking.”
When the protesters proceeded to interrupt Wisse, they were applauded by several of our fellow conference speakers in the audience. These vaunted intellectuals, flown in from across the country to discuss racism, were commending a display of racism against Jews.
This was much more horrifying than the students’ chanting and leafletting, which failed to stop the indomitable Wisse from having her say, defining anti-Semitism as any political organizing against Jews (I have been told since that two students were removed, something I didn’t see from the stage, but the rest stayed). Not one of our fellow conference speakers got up and exercised their free speech rights to call the protest what it was. Not one came over to us after to express shock and horror that three Jews would be denounced for Israel’s actions while attempting to discuss anti-Semitism in America.
She threw out her preparations for the next day and made new ones.
So when I was introduced the next morning, I pulled out a new set of remarks. I directly addressed these academics and writers and intellectuals who were brought to Bard to speak about how to fight racism and anti-Semitism. I told them I was appalled that not one of them had called out this blatantly racist act, the way they surely would have if it had been three Muslims on the dais, or three black speakers — or at least, the way I would have in that scenario.
“I’m horrified by your cowardice. By your self-justifications,” I read from the new set of remarks I had written the night before. “You, who I called luminaries! Whose books I’ve read! There’s nothing more I want to say to you or hear from you.
“The next time someone says, ‘What have you done to help Jews as anti-Semitism has spiked across the nation, as Jews have been murdered at their place of worship and Orthodox Jews get beaten to a pulp day after day in Brooklyn,’ you can say, ‘I sat idly by as Jews were protested for trying to talk about anti-Semitism. I allowed a Jewish woman to be held accountable — because of her ethnicity — for the actions of a country halfway around the world where she can’t even vote. I egged the protest on, in fact. And then I went to a party.’”
There is no debate possible when people think that your very humanity is up for debate, something my fellow conference goers no doubt accept as obviously true when it comes to anti-Black racism or anti-Muslim racism. And yet somehow, when it comes to anti-Jewish racism — holding one Jew accountable for the actions of another simply because they are Jewish — no one bats an eye.
It occurs to me that Jews have a special status in lefty thinking that’s quite similar to that of women. Both of us turn out to be dispensable, problematic, “privileged,” spoiled, not really all that oppressed after all. Both of us turn out to be the ones who can be tossed overboard when the water rises. Both of us turn out to be implicated in whatever any of us do “wrong” when that doesn’t apply to the truly oppressed. Both of us turn out to be just pretending to be an oppressed group who were actually the oppressors all along.
How did we get here?
The banality of evil, innit?
There’s a lot of weirdness around anti-Semitism from both left and right-wing politics. Criticize Israel and many will accuse you of anti-Semitism, as though all Jews are de facto Israeli citizens. Then turn around and attack Jews for the policies of Israel towards the Palestinians, again as though all Jews were de facto Israeli citizens.
It’s almost as if nobody gives a shit about the real problem of anti-Semitism and will flip the script depending on their intended audience.
You can be thoroughly down with BDS and still recognize that most of American Jews aren’t represented by AIPAC…
This is “solidarity with ISOC” level thinking (or non-thinking)
Holy shit, that’s absolutely true. How did we get here? Fascinating question.
I’m trying to come up with an answer. I’m wondering what kind of thinking the left has been doing that led to this. What do these two groups, women and Jews, have in common?
I can’t really identify much similarity in the current issues around feminism and antisemitism, except that both of them are presently — and wrongly — garbled up in issues surrounding other oppressed groups; namely, trans-identifying males and Palestinians.
But we’re not seeing the same kind of garbling of, say, Muslim rights with homophobia and misogyny — the left isn’t ignoring anti-Muslim bigotry even though Islam produces heaps of homophobia and misogyny, the way the left ignores anti-Jewish bigotry because Israel oppresses Palestinians.
Is it just that trans and Palestine are especially hot topics on the left right now? Is it just that it’s more fashionable, more virtue-point-scoring, more hip-and-with-it to be interested in their oppression than that of homosexuals, or women, or Jews?
Maybe. But I sense there’s something deeper going on here. Antisemitism and misogyny have deep roots, and the present-day left isn’t very good at thinking too deeply about their own ideas.
I am often called anti Semitic when I crticise Israel, the Israeli government, and the ongoing repression of Palestinians. I anm alwmays careful to use the words Israel and Israeli, and avoid using the word Jew. Nbut apaarently, I am still anti Semitic. Go figure.
No, I don’t have Jewish friends I even let use my bathroom, but I find it easy to distinguish between a diverse group of people (Jews) and the actions of a government with policy informed by a strict Judaism.
More power to Baty’s arm and pen.
Re #4
The left does seem to ignore a lot of Islamic homophobia and misogyny while decrying anti-Muslim bigotry, though.
Indeed.
And I know some people deny that there’s been a spike in antisemitism on the Left, but hoo boy it’s there and it’s real. Someone very close to me went to school in the UK and subsequently came out as bi and joined all the lefty-activist circles and organized events hosted by Peter Tatchell and took part in miscellaneous protests, etc. And when she came back to Canada she was suddenly a scathing antisemite who made it explicitly clear that she viewed all Jews as rich, entitled, self-interested leeches who had no legitimate claim to being discriminated against. (She also said all Americans — every single one — were the same: rich, entitled, self-interested leeches, and Colonialist warmongers to boot. Oh? African-Americans too, I thought? How ridiculous.) It took some time for that attitude to wear off. Thankfully she’s recovered and she regrets what she had been led to say and believe by the student activist organizations she was steeped in. (But she’s still insufferably woke and I can’t be around her for more than a few minutes on a good day).
Social Justice circles in the UK are much more focused on Islamophobia (not my favourite word, but whatever) than ones in Canada or the US are, due to the large Indian and Pakistani population there. I wonder if that’s connected to the increased amount of antisemitism in UK Social Justice circles. The fuck-America, fuck-the-Jews attitude does sound an awful lot like Islamist rhetoric (death to America; death to the Jews), and I believe social justice activism, particularly in the UK, is being influenced by Islamists posing as Muslim rights advocates. (Remember all those sex-segregated events UK Student Societies kept endorsing?)
Come to think of it, social justice activism everywhere is also being influenced by misogynists posing as trans rights advocates.
Maybe that’s the connection between the two groups, women and Jews: they both have hostile factions working under cover of social justice activism to undermine them for their own gains.
I’m not sure thinking is the word to describe it. It seems like they put their thinking on hold, and simply respond viscerally whenever someone is (or claims to be) oppressed.
Many of my friends on the left also have a knee jerk reaction to cultures in general. If it is “eastern” (by which they mean anything from Asia, Africa, or South America, because apparently they are also geography challenged), then it must by definition be good and right. If it is “west” (which includes not only the United States but any portion of the industrialized world that is in the east, such as Japan, and a number of European countries that lie at least in part on the eastern side of the Prime Meridian), it is by definition bad. I get crap if I suggest that my ex treated me badly in the marriage or the divorce (he did – he was a real shit in the divorce) because he is gay. So he’s a gay Newt Gingerich, walking out on me while I was in the hospital with a potentially life-threatening disease. My left-wing friends will get all huffy if I should suggest that he was a greedy, grasping individual who tried to grab 90% of my income while shedding me. Or if I point out that he was a lousy father who essentially abandoned his teenage son.
It’s simpler, easier, and more satisfying to have such an uncomplicated view of the world. They don’t have to work at nuance. And for some odd reason, we seem to insist that “good” people be all good in every way, and that “bad” people be all bad, with no good qualities, and without any loving family or friends (Ebenezer Scrooge vs Tiny Tim).
@3,,
But even BDS raises problematic questions Why this special focus on Israel? Why is there no BDS movement against Russia, or China, or Saudi Arabia, or myriad other countries? And this is not recent; the left has been signaling out Israel for as long as I can remember (I.e., since the late seventies).
I don’t defend Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians, I just wonder why they get this special treatment.
Fuck the trendy, shallow portion of the left. Since when has it ever been reasonable to assume that a person is secretly loyal to a nation predominantly of the same ethnicity as them?? This is the same thinking – exactly the same, mind – that led to the rejection of wave after wave of war refugees, inluding boatloads of jews fleeing Europe. It’s also the same thinking that led to Japanese people being rounded up in concentration camps during the second world war. It’s xenophobia.
Social media, and especially twitter, have a role here. The likes and views went primarily to those people taking part in the first wave of commentary, and so promoted and even gave special place to people’s bite-sized instant reactions. The longer and more thoughtful takes on a given event missed that first wave thanks to their slower production time, and were frequently skipped thanks to their length.
Twitter “activism” was trained into people, especially that grew up on it. I don’t want to get all luddite here, but technology is habit-forming.
#9
The same took place with South Africa iirc.
Here is the reason why BDS is anti Semitic. If the BDS people had a set of criteria to determine oppression, measuring intensity, duration and numbers involved, and they wanted to evaluate Israel along with every other country in the world, then we could have a discussion and debate. But when you choose only one country in the world, and you ignore Saudi Arabia, and China and Iran, and that one country is the only Jewish country, then you have your proof.
I think it’s not quite that simple. Some of it surely has to do with the fact that Israel is an ally, and in many ways a kind of sibling. There are feelings of responsibility that don’t apply to China or Saudi Arabia (although the role of oil makes the latter tricky).
And the toadying of Trump has made it even trickier.
Joseph, that is not proof.
I’m quite capable of holding several thoughts and views in my head at once:
Israel has a right to exist.
Jews have a right to safety and security.
Palestinians have a right to a homeland and compensation for land appropriated.
Palestinians have human rights.
(Add many more thoughts and views on human rights and politics, many only obliquely related to the middle east)
I can choose, and am quite entitled to choose to care more about one cause than another and to choose to support multiple overlapping causes in an ad hoc manner. I’m also entitled to care about multiple things at the same time and to acknowledge that some things are wrong, but that I will not take practical measures to address them. People have real lives and limited time, attention, energy and money.
I am quite capable of having friends who are Israeli, without supporting the policies of the current Israeli Government. I’m quite capable of buying trade aid cous cous made in Gaza without supporting rockets being fired into Israel.
Applying your simplistic reasoning you would objectively rank all the things from best to worst, then care about nothing except the worst thing until that was dealt with, then move on to the next. That’s not real life.
#12 Joseph
Why? Why can a group not identify and act to rectify a single nation’s wrong policies? Why must they take on every nation’s wrong policies? This demand is insurmountable, and I suspect deliberately as I doubt you place this demand on other groups.
But perhaps you can prove me wrong. Take another social ill, let’s say… militarisation of police forces. Can a group campaign against this one social ill, or must they take on every social ill or be accused of singling out police unfairly?
For that matter, can a person campaign against racism and only racism, or will they be faulted for ignoring the various other social ills? Etc etc.
Holms – if the group is feminists, then, yes, they must campaign against every social ill. Then, when they are done with every other social ill, and they are all solved, they can begin to consider the issues of women…maybe.