Why Are We Seeing a Rise in Antisemitism?
It is not just Gaza
The rise in antisemitism in the United States is real and it is distressing to me and to all my Jewish friends.
It is clear that some people who (justly) are upset with the State of Israel are directing their reaction at Jewish people in their communities. It is also clear that this uptick in antisemitism started before the current nightmare in Gaza began. There is something else happening.
In 2017 at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, the white supremacists with tiki torches chanted “Jews will not replace us!” Whoa. What? To anyone not paying attention, that might have seemed to come out the blue. Antisemitism has been on a slow simmer in extremist online spaces, but the election of Trump and other factors seemed to embolden these people and ideas to come out in the open.
The United States has a long history of discriminating against white people who don’t fit the WASP profile. There have been times when the public sentiment was Anti-Irish, Anti-Italian, Anti-Catholic, Anti-Polish, and even Anti-German. Over time, the oppression of each of those identities dissipated as they were subsumed into the “white Christian American” identity. So, why does antisemitism persist? And why do antisemitic incidents spike when the United States is under stress?
I think this has everything to do with how the owning class exploits working people. In order to grow the wealth of the owners, the workers are required to do more and more work for less and less real income.
As a farmer and teacher, I work hard growing food and teaching kids and yet I see less and less buying power and always higher expenses. I also look around and I see a bunch of city people driving their fancy cars and going on their prestige vacations who don’t seem to do any work at all with their hands. I might conclude that they must be living off the fat produced by people like me, while we workers are left with the gristle.
This is the story being peddled by Trump and many of his proxies. They ask working people to look at the college-educated liberals who voted for Harris as free-loaders. Those liberals want the taxes paid by working people to go to canceling student debt for people who got useless degrees and do useless jobs. The story is that there is a liberal “elite” that would like to control everyone’s lives. That elite would undermine Christian values and traditional gender roles if they ever were able to fully come to power.
When right-wing extremists talk about the so-called “Deep State” and the liberal elites or the “Hollywood” liberals, this is (at least partly) code for Jewish people. While Kamala Harris faced racism and sexism, she also faced antisemitism by proxy for having a Jewish husband. It might have cost her the election.
The ironic thing is that as the Right rails against the “liberal elites” and uses antisemitic dog whistles to appeal to the white working class, their candidates are all funded by billionaires and their tax and deregulation policies primarily benefit the owning class (at least in the short term). So their rhetoric is a smoke-screen. It is a misdirection. Blame the Jewish people.
Antisemitism is a connecting piece that allows all other oppressions to operate.
When rich, white, straight, Christian men want to become even richer, they need to manipulate the systems in society in order to get the masses to accept the constant redistribution of wealth to rich people.
We are in a time of record inequality of wealth, so it is consistent with history that we would see a rise in antisemitism.
How do you get the masses of working people to accept their lot in life?
You need two things:
- You need something or someone to fear. In the case of the United States, you need the threat of homelessness and lack of healthcare to keep people at jobs that pay poorly with low benefits. You also need to fear groups of people who would do that same job for less pay if you let them. That role is filled by immigrants and Black people.
- You need someone to blame. In the case of the United States, that role is filled by college-educated liberals (the “elite,” the “Deep State”) and specifically Jewish people.
Historically Jewish people have filled the scapegoat role in oppressive societies.
In Medieval Europe, at various times and places, there were prohibitions on Jewish people owning land or joining craft guilds. Jewish people were left to make a life on the margins, often as merchants. Because of the early Christian prohibitions on charging interest to other Christians, money lending was often outsourced to Jewish people in European communities. The wealthy Christians often placed Jewish people between them and the masses. That way, if they needed to extract more wealth from the people, it was the Jewish people who did the actual extraction.
If the masses ever became upset with their lot, the powerful people could point to the Jewish people who never worked the land but somehow had all the nice things. They were available to blame because they were “other.” If Jewish people had not existed, then the powers in Medieval Europe would probably have invented someone else to fill that role.
When the going gets tough, for centuries antisemitism has surged as a relief valve so the powerful do not feel the consequences of their actions.
Antisemitism is a gateway oppression. If Gentiles do not show up to fight for Jewish people, then it signals to the oppressors that other groups of people are fair game. They boldly shout that “Jews Will Not Replace Us!” and then watch to see if anyone shows up to defend the Jewish people.
We Gentiles need to show solidarity with Jewish people. We need to loudly interrupt and call out antisemitism.
Like a series of nesting dolls, antisemitism can operate at the global level, the national level, in small communities, and on the individual level. It is always about blaming Jewish people and deflecting attention from the true nature of the situation.
At the organizational level, Jewish people are often at the center of movement spaces. They show up because they know how interconnected all oppression is. They say “Never Again!” and they mean it. They are fighters and disruptors. They are willing to say the things that need to be said and be visible. They have not had immunity from persecution, so they know the need to fight the oppression.
Jewish people are often picked to be managers and leaders and they are often over-represented in leadership roles in movement spaces and organizations. This is a set-up for the repetition of the historical scapegoating pattern if and when an organization faces difficulties. Instead of fighting oppression and backing the leaders, these organizations can collapse as people undermine the leaders and blame the leaders for grasping for power.
This sort of set-up can be replicated on an individual level. For many Gentiles like me, we are drawn to spirit, joy, and connectedness of our Jewish friends. It is a set-up to put the onus for the relationship on the active partner and blame them if something happens. Yuck.
Jewish people are targeted partly because they defy the categories oppressors need to enforce in order to justify oppression.
In order to dominate people by race or sex or class or geographic origin, you need to categorize people and get them to accept their category and therefore the status the oppressor assigns to those people. Then you can manipulate the status of whole groups of people for the purposes of oppression.
Jewish people defy categories. They existed before the categories were made and they cross boundaries of race and class. In this sense, they are like trans folks. They may present a certain way, but they have “invisible” ways that they are not what they seem. This is one of the reasons they are targeted. They don’t fit into the boxes that the oppressors make, and by not fitting in, they call into question the legitimacy of all the boxes. This is why they are targeted and also why we see Jewish people everywhere leading the fight against oppression.
In order to make sense of the current situation, we Gentiles need to see Antisemitism as the connecting pin that keeps the oppressions in place.
We need to fight antisemitism as if our lives depended on it. We can’t take on climate change, capitalism, sexism, or racism without addressing Anti-Semitism.
At the National and International levels, we need to recognize the blurred lines between speaking and acting against the State of Israel and speaking and acting against Jewish people. Israel does not get a pass, but neither should people assume that all Jewish people condone the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza. We can’t boil everything down to “blame Jewish people.”
We need to be vocal and loud in our organizations and we need to show all the warmth and love that our Jewish friends regularly show. We can’t leave them alone! And we need to learn the basics about the Jewish holy days and give people time off on important days.
In our friendships, we need to risk being “too much.” We need to risk being too affectionate, too generous, too loud, too close. We need to de-center Christianity in our words and actions and not act like everyone is Christian.
Many people are wondering what will happen in the next period, as Trump and his people return to power. I am asking all of us to be vigilant in support and love for the Jewish people in our lives. We need to know the historical role of antisemitism and we need to call it out every time we see it. Our lives depend on it.
Note: By talking about antisemitism and how it affects Jewish people I never want to imply that Jewish people are a monolith or that there are traits and ways of being in the world that all Jewish people share. My point is the opposite of this. Antisemitism tries to lump people together and project stereotypes onto people who are as diverse as the United States, and it must be resisted — all of it.
Note: I cannot claim responsibility for all of the thinking I lay out in this essay. Until recently, I have been mostly unaware of the way antisemitism operates. The online resources of Reevaluation Counseling concerning antisemitism give a fuller picture of the understanding that I am still trying to wrap my head around.
Note on Sources: The original version of this essay contained an initial paragraph about the way that the Anti-Defamation League has been tracking antisemitic incidents and how they saw a distinct rise in 2017 after Trump was elected the first time, and then again in the last year. Commenters have pointed out that the ADL has partisan political leanings, which make them a problematic source for an essay that is essentially anticapitalist. Despite the source, antisemitic incidents have gone up in the USA, and it is useful to examine why. I removed that paragraph from the opening, but here is a reference to the ADL study.
