Tomorrow (well, I suppose later today -- Nov. 2, at any rate) at 11:30 AM (Pacific), I'll be presenting "White Jews: An Intersectional Approach" before the Alliance Against Antisemitism -- Cologne. I believe I'm just one of two English-language speakers on their event list this season, so this is quite an honor.
A link to the livestream is here. It'll be in English, of course, so feel free to tune in!
I wish them well in every respect, but I want them to feel that they are Jews.The quote is used to illustrate the paradox of 19th century European elite views towards Jews -- simultaneously expressing (sometimes) warm feelings towards Jews in the abstract, while nonetheless continuing to harbor openly antisemitic attitudes.
Silly Jews think vandalizing synagogues is antiSem MT @zefrog Sounds too much like you cant criticise Israel because it's anti-Semitic(2/2)— David Schraub (@schraubd) August 30, 2014
Many would view the stream of vitriol, sent to German Jewry’s central communal organization between 2002 and 2012, as little more than raw sewage. But Monika Schwarz-Friesel, a professor of linguistics at the Technical University of Berlin, saw it as raw data. Together with Jehuda Reinharz, the American historian and former president of Brandeis University, Schwarz-Friesel has recently published a study of these letters. And their findings reaffirm one of the enduring, if still surprising truths about anti-Semitism in Germany and elsewhere.First, I would love to see this research replicated in the United States. I'd be curious to know if the distribution here was similar or not.
More than 60% of the hate mail came from well-educated Germans, including university professors, according to their study, “The Language of Hostility Towards Jews in the 21st Century,” released earlier this year. Only 3% came from right-wing extremists.
The researchers know this partly from analyzing the language of the letter writers — but also because many of the authors of the emails in their sample gave their names, addresses and professions. “We checked some of them, [and] the information [was] valid,” said Schwarz-Friesel in an email to the Forward. She and her research partner were amazed that the writers were so brazen. “I don’t think they would have identified themselves 20 or 30 years ago,” said Reinharz.
“We found that there is hardly any difference in the semantics of highly educated anti-Semites and vulgar extremists and neo-Nazis,” said Schwarz-Friezel. “The difference lies only in style and formal rhetoric, but the concepts are the same.”
One of the research pair’s other main findings was that hatred for Israel has become the main vehicle for German anti-Semitism. More than 80% of the 14,000 emails focused on Israel as their central theme.
Schwarz-Friesel and Reinharz say they strove hard to distinguish emails that were critical of Israel — even those that expressed anger toward it — from those that were anti-Semitic.
“Only those letters were classified as anti-Semitic that clearly [saw] German Jews as non-Germans and collectively abused German Jews to be responsible for crimes in Israel!” she explained.
[I]ntention is not a necessary component to creating this effect, nor does lack of intention necessarily absolve moral culpability. I believe criticism of a state can be detached from criticism of that state’s citizens; I am less optimistic that criticism of a state can be detached from that state’s supporters. Placed, willingly or nor, in a morally salient relationship with supporters (particularly Jewish supporters) of Israel, the critics have an obligation to be mindful of the known and predictable effects. When they are reckless with the lives affected by their speech, they bear some measure of responsibility for the consequences.I characterized this as a duty to mitigate, not refrain, and that is an important qualification: particular ideas cannot be off-limits only because uncontrolled third parties with terrible views claim status from them. But it is fair to impose an obligation to be mindful of these effects and work to mitigate them, in part because doing so sharpens and clarifies the actual content of the critique, but in part becuase it is generally good that people operating in fraught moral terrain be obligated to think constantly and critically about how their views relate to and are impacted by important moral questions. After all, if we can't figure out how (or can't motivate ourselves) to draw clear conceptual distinctions between our own views and those we purportedly condemn, then maybe the views themselves need reassessing.
Again, there may be no intention to “green light” anti-Semitic violence. But because the perpetrators have already received the message that they are engaged in a morally righteous struggle, the muted reaction against their behavior — and the unabated continuance of the messages which led them to believe that their acts were heroic to begin with — is easily interpreted as consent or support. Focusing nearly exclusively on defending their words, policies, and procedures from the possibility that they are anti-Semitic, or might produce, ratify, legitimate, or sustain it, the purveyors of criticism as moral hatred unintentionally but dramatically weaken the ability for committed anti-racists to break the connection between criticism of Israel and anti-Semitic activity. Focusing on intent, they are blind to effects. And by refusing to allow even the barest interrogation into the connections between what they are saying and doing, and the historical and current manifestations of anti-Semitism worldwide, it is impossible to create a competitive counternarrative based on principles of justice, fairness, or progressivism; as these terms are all monopolized by the very actors who are unwittingly undermining them. In this world, the only space for a counterstory is on the right, and that is a world I refuse to accede to.
This is one of the many reasons why I am so fervent in speaking up on behalf of those who in good faith speak out against anti-Semitism on the left. Until it is affirmed that interrogating the potential anti-Semitism (in intent and in effect) of progressive speakers (on Israel and on other topics) is a fundamentally legitimate activity for progressives to engage in, it will be impossible to battle against the wave of anti-Semitic violence which seeks status through a perverted pursuit of justice.
Anti-Semites weren't - aren't - just people who think they're better than Jews. They're people who think they're being oppressed by Jews.This is part of the reason why anti-Semitism so easily finds footing among certain branches of the far-left. To be sure, it's also why anti-Semitism finds footing among the far-right -- the right certainly has no trouble imagining untrustworthy aliens who threaten Our Way of Life. But the left's rhetoric of opposing "oppression" and "hierarchy" can easily incorporate anti-Semitic prejudices insofar as they buy into popular narratives of Jews and the quintessential oppressing class.
A group of left anti-Semites on Sunday has violently prevented the showing of a film about Israel. During the blockade of the cinema insults such as “Jewish swine” were to be heard. A Hamburg association of the Left Party published a justification of the action, saying a “Zionist propaganda film” was prevented from being shown.
The film to be shown was the 1972 movie “Why Israel,” by the French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, who is best known for his nine-hour documentary “Shoah.” According to the cinema in the district of St. Pauli, and the organizer of the planned demonstration which had about 15 people from an anti-imperialist group, the Center internationalist B5, access to the cinema was blocked and the incoming visitors were filmed and photographed.
The blockaders were wearing gloves and wielding a bike lock and a belt prepared for a violent action. In fact, there had been a scuffle, and some visitors were injured by blows to the face. The demonstration was called because of the boycott campaign.
The chairman of the Jewish community Pinneberg, Wolfgang Seibert, condemned the action and called it “the actions of the petit bourgeois running wild” who understood themselves however as on the left, but “in their approach can certainly be described as followers and stooges of neo-Nazis.” With insults like “Jewish pig” and “sissy,” the blockaders have discredited themselves: “Those who use such anti-Semitic and homophobic words, have lost every right to call themselves ‘internationalists’.” That it is determined by force “what is allowed to be seen and what not,” is completely unacceptable, said Seibert: “We are fed up with this kind of censorship.”
The question of how Jews would fit in when cultural and linguistic identity became the basis of citizenship, and the Volksgeist was embodied in a Volksstaat, could be answered in only one of two ways. Either the Jews had to surrender their Jewishness and become good Germans or there would be no place for them. At the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, a liberal assimilationist perspective was ascendant in German thought, but beneath it lurked a deep intolerance of the Jew who remained distinctive. In 1793, the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who professed to be advocating that Jews be given "human rights," put the choice before them in starkly brutal terms: "As for giving them [the Jews] civil rights, I see no remedy [*72] but that their heads should be cut off in one night and replaced with others not containing a single Jewish idea."
El-Masri, a car salesman and a father of four, says his ordeal began on New Year's Eve 2003 when he was pulled off a bus after it crossed the Serbian border into Macedonia. His passport was taken, and he was questioned for days by agents who said he was a terrorist. They refused his request to contact German authorities.
After 23 days, he was blindfolded, taken to the airport and turned over to U.S. authorities. In an interview in 2005 with the Los Angeles Times in Berlin, he described what had happened then:
"I was led into a room. The door closed behind me and I was beaten from all sides for about one minute. They bent my arms to my back and cut off my clothes. . . . I saw seven to eight men all dressed in black and wearing masks. . . . They put me in diapers and a dark blue sweatsuit with the legs and sleeves cut out."
His appeal to the court says he was then put in a plane, "chained spread-eagle to the floor," injected with drugs and flown to Baghdad and then on to Kabul, Afghanistan. He spent the next four months in a CIA-run prison, the appeal says.
In late May 2004, U.S. officials had apparently concluded they had the wrong man. El-Masri was loaded onto a plane, blindfolded, put into the back of truck and dropped off on a hillside in what turned out to be Albania. From there, he made it back to Germany, where an investigation was launched.
The case tests the outer reaches of the so-called state- secrets privilege, a rule established during the Cold War to block a lawsuit after the crash of a B-29 bomber. Three widows of crewmen sued and sought the official accident reports. The Air Force said the reports could not be revealed because the bomber was on a top-secret mission to test new equipment.
The Supreme Court ruled for the government in the 1953 case, U.S. vs. Reynolds, saying the reports must be suppressed because they could reveal military secrets.
(When the accident reports were declassified in 2000, they revealed only that the aircraft was in poor condition, evidence that might have helped the widows win their suit.)
