[Hac-announce] Why So Many People Still Don’t Understand Anti-Semitism by Yair Rosenberg in The Atlantic

Manny Sholem Ratafia manny at ratafias.com
Sun Jan 23 18:14:26 EST 2022


I think everyone should read this piece by Yair Rosenberg, including 
people who think they understand anti-Semitism. Too many Americans on 
the political right and left, and people throughout the world *_truly_* 
believe that Jews run the planet. As stated in this article "This 
ignorant status quo has proved deadly for Jews, and that alone should be 
enough for our society to take it seriously. But it has disastrous 
consequences for non-Jews as well."

Please forward this article to people and lists who may benefit from it.

Manny

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/texas-synagogue-anti-semitism-conspiracy-theory/621286/


  Why So Many People Still Don’t Understand Anti-Semitism

Unlike many other bigotries, anti-Semitism is not merely a social 
prejudice; it is a conspiracy theory about how the world operates.

By Yair Rosenberg <https://www.theatlantic.com/author/yair-rosenberg/>

Most people do not realize that Jews make up just 2 percent of the U.S. 
population and 0.2 percent of the world’s population. This means simply 
finding them takes a lot of effort. But every year in Western countries, 
including America, Jews are the No. 1 target 
<https://www.fbi.gov/services/cjis/ucr/publications#Hate-Crime%20Statistics> 
of anti-religious hate crimes. Anti-Semites are many things, but they 
aren’t lazy. They’re animated by one of the most durable and deadly 
conspiracy theories in human history.

This past Saturday in Texas, another one found his mark. According to 
the latest news reports, Malik Faisal Akram traversed an ocean to 
accomplish his task, flying from the United Kingdom to America in late 
December. On January 15, he took Colleyville’s Congregation Beth Israel 
hostage for more than 11 hours. When it was all over, Akram was dead and 
his captives were not. The hostages escaped after their rabbi engineered 
<https://www.reuters.com/world/us/rabbi-threw-chair-texas-synagogue-hostage-taker-before-escaping-2022-01-17/> 
a distraction, drawing 
<https://www.wpsdlocal6.com/news/how-rabbi-charlie-cytron-walkers-training-helped-fellow-hostages-survive-the-texas-synagogue-attack/article_5def7146-77d6-11ec-9da1-5343c8d4cdca.html> 
on security training he had received from the Anti-Defamation League and 
other communal organizations. Something else most people don’t realize 
is that many rabbis need and receive 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/17/us/texas-synagogue-hostages-escape.html> 
security training.

Speaking about Jews as symbols is always uncomfortable, and that’s 
especially the case when bullet holes are still fresh in the sanctuary. 
But the sad fact is, that’s why the Texas congregants were attacked in 
the first place: because Jews play a sinister symbolic role in the 
imagination of so many that bears no resemblance to their lived existence.

After Akram pulled a gun on the congregation, he demanded to speak to 
the rabbi of New York’s Central Synagogue, who he claimed could 
authorize the release of Aafia Siddiqui 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/nyregion/04siddiqui.html>, a 
Pakistani woman serving an attempted murder sentence in a Fort Worth 
facility near Beth Israel.

Obviously, this is not how the prison system works. “This was somebody 
who literally thought that Jews control the world,” Beth Israel Rabbi 
Charlie Cytron-Walker told 
<https://forward.com/news/480928/beth-israel-hostage-standoff-charlie-cytron-walker/> 
/The Forward/. “He thought he could come into a synagogue, and we could 
get on the phone with the ‘Chief Rabbi of America’ and he would get what 
he needed.”

Gary Rosenblatt: Is it still safe to be a Jew in America? 
<https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/anti-semitism-new-normal-america/608017/>

I happen to know Angela Buchdahl, the rabbi of that New York synagogue, 
and I think she would make an excellent chief rabbi of America. But no 
such position exists. Jews are a famously fractious lot who can rarely 
agree on anything, let alone their religious leadership. We do not spend 
our days huddled in smoke-filled rooms plotting world domination while 
Jared Kushner plays dreidel in the back with Noam Chomsky and George 
Soros sneaks the last latke.

The notion that such a minuscule and unmanageable minority secretly 
controls the world is comical, which may be why so many responsible 
people still do not take the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory seriously, 
or even understand how it works. In the moments after the Texas crisis, 
the FBI made <https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-60013686> an 
official statement declaring that the assailant was “particularly 
focused on one issue, and it was not specifically related to the Jewish 
community.” Of course, the gunman did not travel thousands of miles to 
terrorize some Mormons. He sought out a synagogue and took it hostage 
over his grievances, believing that Jews alone could resolve them. 
That’s targeting Jews, and there’s a word for that.

The FBI later corrected 
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/01/17/texas-synagogue-malik-faisal-akram-investigation/#:~:text=terrorism-related%20matter%2C%20in%20which%20the%20jewish%20community%20was%20targeted.> 
its misstep, but the episode reflects the general ignorance about 
anti-Semitism even among people of goodwill. Unlike many other 
bigotries, anti-Semitism is not merely a social prejudice; it is a 
conspiracy theory about how the world operates. This addled outlook is 
what united the Texas gunman, a Muslim, with the 2018 shooter at 
Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, a white supremacist who sought 
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/oct/27/pittsburgh-shooting-suspect-antisemitism#:~:text=the%20robert%20bowers%20account%20reposted%20another%20user%20who%20wrote> 
to stanch the flow of Muslims into America. It is a worldview shared by 
Louis Farrakhan 
<https://www.adl.org/education/resources/reports/nation-of-islam-farrakhan-in-his-own-words>, 
the Black hate preacher, and David Duke 
<https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/assets/pdf/combating-hate/David-Duke.pdf>, 
the former KKK grand wizard. And it is a political orientation that has 
been expressed by the self-styled Christian conservative leader of 
Hungary, Viktor Orb 
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-speech-hungarys-orban-attacks-enemy-who-speculates-with-money/>á 
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-speech-hungarys-orban-attacks-enemy-who-speculates-with-money/>n 
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-speech-hungarys-orban-attacks-enemy-who-speculates-with-money/>, 
and Ali Khamenei 
<https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/irans-supreme-leader-posts-anti-semitic-cartoon-on-facebook>, 
the supreme leader of Iran’s Islamic theocracy.

The fevered fantasy of Jewish domination is incredibly malleable, which 
makes it incredibly attractive. If Jews are responsible for every 
perceived problem, then people with entirely opposite ideals 
<https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/deep-shtetl/61897999d581bf0020f74c32/why-rep-marjorie-taylor-greene-just-championed-louis-farrakhan/> 
can adopt it. And thanks to centuries of material blaming the world’s 
ills on the world’s Jews, conspiracy theorists seeking a scapegoat for 
their sorrows inevitably discover 
<https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/taylor-greene-conspiracy-theories> 
that the invisible hand of their oppressor belongs to an invisible Jew.

At the same time, because this expression of anti-Jewish prejudice is so 
different from other forms of bigotry, many people don’t recognize it. 
As in Texas, law-enforcement officials overlook it. Social-media 
companies ignore 
<https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/deep-shtetl/6191452bd581bf0020f7b9bc/what-wont-get-you-banned-from-twitter/> 
it. Anti-racism activists—who understand racism as prejudice wielded by 
the powerful—cannot grasp it, because anti-Semitism constructs its 
Jewish targets as the privileged and powerful. And political partisans, 
more concerned with pinning the problem on their opponents, spend their 
time parsing the identity of anti-Semitic individuals, rather than 
countering the ideas that animate them.

In short, although many people say they are against anti-Semitism today, 
they don’t understand the nature of what they oppose. And that’s part of 
why anti-Semitism abides.

This ignorant status quo has proved deadly for Jews, and that alone 
should be enough for our society to take it seriously. But it has 
disastrous consequences for non-Jews as well. This is because people who 
embrace conspiracy theories to explain their problems lose the ability 
to rationally solve them. As Bard College’s Walter Russell Mead has put 
it <https://www.the-american-interest.com/2012/05/13/the-bbc-and-the-jews/>:

    People who think “the Jews” run the banks lose the ability to
    understand, much less to operate financial systems. People who think
    “the Jews” dominate business through hidden structures can’t build
    or long maintain a successful modern economy. People who think “the
    Jews” dominate politics lose their ability to interpret political
    events, to diagnose social evils and to organize effectively for
    positive change.

For an example, just look at what happened in Texas. An anti-Semitic 
gunman took a synagogue hostage in the false hope that its parishioners 
could somehow free a federal prisoner. That prisoner herself was 
sentenced to 86 years in jail after she tried to fire 
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/24/aafia-siddiqui-al-qaida> 
her Jewish lawyers at trial, demanded 
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/feb/04/pakistan-scientist-aafia-siddiqui> 
that Jews be excluded from the jury, and declared 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/nyregion/04siddiqui.html> that her 
guilty verdict came “from Israel and not from America.” One hateful 
person after another was destroyed by their own delusions. And such 
debilitating delusions can reverberate outward.

“Anti-Semitism has real impact beyond just hate crimes,” the 
civil-rights activist Eric Ward 
<https://www.splcenter.org/about/staff/eric-k-ward> once told me 
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRZWZPDYj5k&list=PL-DNOnmKkUaZh8yjn7Bhps_aEn_yCd71H&index=6>. 
“It distorts our understanding of how the actual world works. It 
isolates us. It alienates us from our communities, from our neighbors, 
and from participating in governance. It kills, but it also kills our 
society.”

Yair Rosenberg: Removing a hyphen won’t stop anti-Semitism 
<https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/anti-semitism-new-york-times-style/620966/>

Neither Mead nor Ward is Jewish. The former is a noted white historian 
and the son of a southern priest; the latter is a Black activist who 
fights white nationalism. Yet despite coming from different places, both 
have devoted much of their work to combatting anti-Jewish prejudice, and 
for the same reason: It threatens democracy itself.

“Anti-Semitism isn’t just bigotry toward the Jewish community,” Ward 
explains. “It is actually utilizing bigotry toward the Jewish community 
in order to deconstruct democratic practices, and it does so by framing 
democracy as a conspiracy rather than a tool of empowerment or a 
functional tool of governance.” In other words, the more people buy into 
anti-Semitism and its understanding of the world, the more they lose 
faith in democracy.

Numerous historical case studies attest 
<https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23785/w23785.pdf> to 
anti-Semitism undermining its adherents at a large scale, from the 
defeat of the Nazis, who spurned 
<https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-2-pro-nazi-nobelists-attacked-einstein-s-jewish-science-excerpt1/> 
scientific advances simply because they were discovered by Jews, to 
European countries that hobbled 
<https://econ-papers.upf.edu/papers/1274.pdf> themselves 
<https://www.nber.org/papers/w28766> for centuries by expelling their 
Jewish populations.

“The rise of anti-Semitism is a sign of widespread social and cultural 
failure,” Mead writes 
<https://www.the-american-interest.com/2012/05/13/the-bbc-and-the-jews/>. 
“It is a leading indicator of a loss of faith in liberal values and of a 
diminished capacity to understand the modern world and to thrive in it.”

Seen in this light, one attack on one synagogue is not just a hate-crime 
statistic. It is also a warning. The mindset of a madman in Texas might 
seem alien to us today. But if we do not find a way to confront the 
conspiratorial currents that threaten to overtake our society, we may 
find ourselves hostage to the very ideas that animated him.

Yair Rosenberg <https://www.theatlantic.com/author/yair-rosenberg/> is a 
contributing writer at /The Atlantic/ and the author of its newsletter 
Deep Shtetl <https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/deep-shtetl/>.


-- 

"Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you."
― Ruth Bader Ginsburg

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