The Real Danger of Antisemitism
Deborah Lipstadt just concluded her stint as the State Department's special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism. She argues that we need to stop asking which is worse, left-wing or right-wing antisemitism. The problem, she writes, is that those on the left don’t call out antisemitism on college campuses and those on the right refuse to come clean about the overt antisemitism that infuses the rhetoric and violence of white nationalists. Reflecting on her two years in office, Lipstadt concludes that “it is clear to me that the intent is not to fight antisemitism but to use antisemitism as a cudgel against political opponents.”
In naming antisemitism as a political cudgel, Lipstadt follows Hannah Arendt who understood that antisemitism is a political ideology and is not the same as religious Jew hatred. While Lipstadt at one point confuses antisemitism with “Jew hatred,” her main point is that “Antisemitism is, first and foremost, a peril to Jews, their institutions and their communities. Whether the attack is on a synagogue in Australia, soccer fans in Amsterdam or women in Kibbutz Re’im and at the Nova music festival near the Israel-Gaza border, Jews are the target. And this alone would make it a legitimate matter for governments to address seriously. But antisemitism poses a threat beyond the threat to Jews.”
The threat antisemitism poses beyond to Jews is to the legal and political establishment. As Arendt writes, antisemitism always begins with “contempt for the narrowness of the nation-state.” Antisemitism, she continues, is an ideological movement infused by a mood “unequivocally hostile to all existing political bodies.” Modern antisemitism is “severed from all actual experience concerning the Jewish people, political, social, or economic, and followed only the peculiar logic of an ideology.” For Arendt, antisemitism was useful as a weapon of political propaganda, not primarily against the Jews, but against the powers that be.
Insofar as antisemitism is mobilized by the left against colonialism and neo-liberalism and by the right against liberal democracy, it is offers potent propaganda against liberal and lawful government. As Lipstadt writes:
Those who adhere to this conspiracy theory — who see power ceded, not to a legitimate government, but to a Jewish cabal — have lost faith in the rule of law and are looking for someone or some group of people to blame. They’re willing to believe that their votes do not help them, their leaders do not represent them and their institutions do not protect them. Their distorted worldview renders accountable, rules-based government an illusion.
We have repeatedly seen malign groups and governments using it as a means of deepening public division within societies and among countries. Russia has propagated antisemitic conspiracy myths to help justify its war against democratic Ukraine. Iran supports the terrorist groups Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis by helping them cultivate antisemitic ideologies to justify depraved violence throughout the region. Their primary goal may not be only to spread Jew hatred, but to use Jew hatred to sow societal divisions and make all of us doubt the political health and strength of the democratic world.
Anything that erodes the rule of law and undermines our national security must be confronted collectively. But when antisemitism is viewed through a left/right lens, we risk making it the subject of a partisan debate. In doing so, we obscure the global threat it poses."