Have I Ever Felt More Afraid To Be A Jew In The United States?
Right and Left Wing Anti-Semitism
For some time now I have wanted to watch Citizen Kane. I remember seeing it years ago with the anticipation that I was seeing what many called the best movie of all time. I also remember being heavily disappointed. Recently it started to make the rounds on Turner classic, and I arranged for my preprogramming for Shabbat to include the movie. Unfortunately, I hadn’t planned on falling asleep within two minutes of the start of the movie. I had the recording but never seemed to find the right time to watch.
This past week on a plane ride to Florida I noticed that it was offered as one of the movie options. I pounced on the opportunity to watch the movie with no distractions. Amazing how much more enjoyable a film is when you don’t fall asleep.
While the film contained much to discuss two things jumped out at me. Kane, the owner of a major newspaper ran for governor. After the election the paper prepared two headlines. The first talked about the major victory and the second was about how the election was stolen with widespread fraud. It would appear that Donald Trump watched the film as well.
The other scene that affected me was in the opening of the movie when we are shown a series of newsreel headlines about Kane’s passing. In one headline he is accused of being a Communist, in the other he is accused of being a Fascist. What was shocking to me was that this was the only time someone was accused of being both, that was not a Jew.
In pre-World War 2, Stalin’s Russia accused the Jews of being Fascists, while Hitler’s Germany accused the Jews of being Communists. I assume that the writer of the screenplay, Herman Mankiewicz was projecting.
This conflicting phenomenon is weirdly presenting itself today when the enemies of the Jewish people are now coming from the right and the left, and that is why I am more concerned for my safety then ever before.
Let’s begin with the more common anti-Semitism from the right. On August 12, 2017, a group of neo-Nazis and alt-right followers gathered for a “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Some of them have returned this week, not as protestors but as defendants in a civil case.
In a call to arms that was posted on the Daily Stormer before the rally, the organizers of the rally posted:
“We will eventually win this struggle and secure the existence of our people and future for white children. It is our destiny. Next stop: Charlottesville, Virginia, final stop: Auschwitz.”
Many marched past the synagogue wearing full body armor brandishing semiautomatic weapons, while the previous night they marched chanting, “Jews will not replace us.”
Here is a news flash!
The last thing we Jews want is to replace a bunch of loser Proud Boys and boys playing Nazis, but remember these “boys” managed to kill a black woman, running over her in the streets.
The then president of the synagogue, Allen Zimmerman, called it an eye opening experience. It changed the synagogue forever and the way the congregation now feels as Jews in America. The synagogue had no security to speak of before, now the synagogue locks its doors. Members are told not to let in people they don’t recognize and to follow a, “see something say something” policy.
We have a congresswoman, Marjorie Taylor Green who believes that Jews have lasers in outer space that shoot at California and cause forest fires there. Besides the absurd science is a weird reality that Jews are not real people, they are a concept, the embodiment of evil outsiders, who exist to cause damage to good old white Christians and therefore are to be expunged.
Greene believes in QAnon that teaches that there is a cabal of Democrats that traffic in humans and that practice pedophilia. In fact, they extract blood from abused children that supplies them with a life-extending chemical. If this sounds at all familiar the cabal is taken from the protocols of the Elders of Zion and the drinking of children’s blood is a blood libel that goes back to the Middle Ages where Jews were accused of using children’s blood to make Matzo for the Passover seder.
Hitler convinced his people that Jews were really rodents that needed to be exterminated. QAnon and others would have you believe such absurdities about Jews so that extermination is not that far away.
When I visited Poland in the 1980’s there was still anti-Semitism in a country that had virtually no Jews. It taught me that you don’t have to have Jews present to preach anti-Semitism, so how much worse is it if Jews are present and prominent.
The other anti-Semitism is also all around us, but it is a little more difficult to see. It is anti-Semitism from the left and it is growing at an alarming rate. Because it doesn’t have cuckoos like Greene it sometimes passes as just political disagreement, but do not fool yourself it is there, and it is dangerous.
The American Jewish Committee reported that Anti-Semitism caused 40% of American Jews to change their behavior over this past year. While 91% of American Jews say that the extreme political right poses a very serious anti-Semitic threat, 71% said the extreme political left posed a slight anti-Semitic threat, but that number is a jump by 10% in the last year. A lot of that is coming from college campuses. A newly published study from Hillel and the ADL found that a third of students on campus experienced anti-Semitism this past year. While 80% of Jewish students say they are proud to be Jewish, only 62% of them say they are comfortable telling people about that pride and much of this can be traced back to the way Israel is thought of on the left.
Many University professors informed by extreme left wing philosophies, see Israel as a colonial white power invading the aboriginal people of Palestine and then either displacing them or ethnically cleansing them. It does not seem to matter to them that both their race theory in general and the facts in particular do not support their argument. The Palestinian Arab is not the indigenous population.
Jews lived there 1500 years before there were any Arabs in Palestine. Arabs were an invading people in a long stream of invaders from Assyrians and Babylonians, to Greeks, Romans and Christian European Crusaders.
Today, the majority of the population in Israel is nonwhite. 20% of Israeli citizens are Arabs, and Israel is the only country in all the Arab Middle East that is a democracy. Israel is the only country in the Middle East that affords protection and recognition to the LGBTQ community. Israel is the only country in the world that affords the Jewish people the right to self-determination, but that right is denied by progressives only to Jews.
Israel is condemned on campus by professors who believe that Israel is the root of the worst offences against humanity, and that they alone need to be singled out for condemnation and accused of being colonialists.
Syria’s president killed millions of his citizens, and we hear nothing about that on campus. China is ethnically cleansing the Uyghur population and we see no rallies on campus or condemnation from human rights groups.
China violated its promises for independent government in Hong Kong and campus progressives were silent. Palestinian leadership three times refused a peace offer from Israel that gave them 94% of what they were asking for and yet Israel is intransigent.
Hamas, Islamic jihad and Hezbollah threaten Jewish extermination, and has there ever been a progressive march against them?
When only Israel is singled out for accusations while those doing the calling out, ignore everyone else, one can clearly see this as the Antisemitism that it is.
When a war in Israel against a Hamas controlled Gaza Strip is caused by many missiles fired at a civilian population, a war crime of the highest order, and only Israel is condemned that is anti-Semitism.
When Jews in America or Europe or England are attacked because of an event that took place in Israel, regardless of the event, that is a pure form of anti-Semitism.
The Sunrise DC Washington hub of the Sunrise Movement, an early proponent of the Green New Deal, announced it would pull out of an event advocating statehood for Washington DC because three participating Jewish organizations were pro Zionism. The National Council of Jewish Women, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, and the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. All three groups are liberal organizations but the fact that they are in favor of a two-state solution makes them persona non grata because in the eyes of the extreme left, the existence of a Jewish state in any borders and on any terms is the original sin and must be opposed by all left-wing groups. To deny Jews a state in any borders is extreme left-wing doctrine and is just another form of anti-Semitism.
When the organizing group of the Women’s march on Washington bans leading Jewish women from participating because they want to march with a Star of David banner, that is left wing anti-Semitism.
Susie Linfield recently published an article in the Atlantic about how facile and superficial and therefore inaccurate the left’s associating Zionism with racism, Black Lives Matter, and South African apartheid are. I recommend the article to you, and it is by no means a whitewash of Israel’s faults as enumerated by the left, but it is a balanced explanation of why BDS is so wrong.
She concludes by saying,” So no, Palestine isn’t Ferguson, Israel isn’t South Africa, and Zionism isn’t white supremacy. As Arendt wrote, the activity of thinking- the very basis of politics- begins with the knowledge that ‘A and B are not the same’”.
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