New Life of Old Antisemitism

Israeli and American Jews are occasionally referred to as “colonizers”: the Israelis “colonize” Palestinian Arabs; American Jews as whites “colonize” various American minorities.

Despite the most progressive aspirations and “progressive” thinking of Jews of the left wing of the U.S. Democratic Party, even the most left-wing Jews of both countries are inevitably categorized as the most reactionary strata.

Left-wing African-Americans accuse Israelis of racism toward Palestinian Arabs, while American Jews are white to them, with all the accusations of racism and colonialism that come with that affiliation.

The massacre of hundreds of Israeli civilians in Israel by Palestinian terrorists, Islamic extremists on October 7 and the Israeli military response to the massacre was seen by many people and groups in the U.S., in Europe, in Australia and in South Africa as an uprising of the “oppressed” against the “oppressors,” as a struggle against racism and apartheid. The protests against Israel’s self-defense war in Gaza have been characterized in many parts of the world as a just struggle of the “oppressed” Palestinians against the Western, white Jewish “oppressors.”

The ideology of fighting the “decomposing” influence of the West was developed not in the East, but in the West, in the Frankfurt School of Sociology.

In the early 1930s, music critic Theodor Adorno, psychologist Erich Fromm, sociologist and psychologist Wilhelm Reich, philosopher, literary critic and writer Walter Benjamin joined the Frankfurt School, which was founded by philosophers György Lukács and Max Horkheimer. They were later joined by the philosopher Herbert Marcuse.

They developed the so-called “critical theory” or “critical sociology.” Its main position was to criticize all elements of Western culture without exception, including capitalism, family authority, loyalty to tradition, sexual restrictions, patriotism, nationalism and conservatism. The Frankfurt School was the only philosophical school in history whose members were exclusively Jewish.  They contributed greatly to the creation of a new leftist movement in Europe and in America. The anti-Western nihilism of the Frankfurt School, which took hold of the consciousness of European youth, was transformed into extremism: the triumph of “critical sociology” led to the formation of a critical mass of destroyers who wanted to break Western democracy and Western civilization. At the behest of Frankfurt thinkers, society began to nominate economically backward and poorly educated people from minority groups into elites who were supposed to bring about “progressive” change.

Neo-Marxists, whose teachings were born within the walls of the Frankfurt School, fled Nazism to the United States. Escaping the Nazis and finding work in the United States did not prevent one of the Frankfurt School leaders, Marcuse, from calling this country fascist.

The philosophy of the Frankfurt School won over American universities and became the leading doctrine of the left wing of the Democratic Party. It was American university campuses that became a powerful source of anti-Semitism in the wake of events in Israel and Gaza: the massacre of Israeli citizens was presented as a response to the “oppression” of Palestinians.

Back in January 2019, Sen. Bernie Sanders declared, “We will stand up for our Muslim brothers and sisters.”

When a Jew announces his willingness to “stand for Muslim brothers,” he shows that he does not understand the meaning of the term “Muslim brothers.” Muslims cannot have brothers outside of Islam; members of other religions are naturally considered inferior by them.

Hamas is the Muslim brothers.

The policies of the Israeli government prevent Sanders, who belongs to the Jewish people, from feeling comfortable and “progressive.”

Back in 2016, in a debate in Brooklyn, he said, “I believe that the U.S. and the rest of the world should work together to help the Palestinian people.” Where did the belief in the exceptionalism of the “Palestinian people” come from? Why did the Palestinian problem become an important value for Jewish liberals and how did the “Palestinian people” become their chosen people? The transformation of the Palestinian problem into a sacred relic of Jewish liberals is due not to love but to dislike of the “unseemly,” “disproportionate” struggle of the Israelis against their enemies, the Islamic extremists. For liberals, the anti-Western and “anti-colonial” struggle of Palestinian Arabs is sacred, even if it threatens the security of Jews in Israel.

In American universities, the massacre of Jews on Oct. 7, 2023 is often described in terms of contrasting the “resistance” and “national liberation struggle” movement of the Palestinian Arabs (actually Islamic terrorists) with the “colonial” movement of the Zionists. Whatever crimes Hamas terrorists commit, in leftist academic circles in the U.S., the conflict between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs is presented as a struggle between the forces of “evil,” white Israeli “colonialists,” and the forces of “good,” non-white “oppressed Palestinians.” This binary value system precludes any doubt that the forces of “good” have committed crimes against humanity, making them forces of evil.

But where were America’s intellectual, liberal Jews during the Holocaust? Did they avidly, anxiously and anxiously catch news of the plight of their persecuted Jewish brothers and sisters in Nazi-ruled Europe? They were indifferent to the fate of their “brothers and sisters.” 

Saul Bellow, an American writer of Jewish origin and Nobel Prize winner for Literature, wrote about this with bitterness: “We have to deal more fully, more deeply with the Holocaust. No one in America took it seriously, and only a few Jews somewhere (like Primo Levi) were capable of understanding it. All parties were responsible then, and every honest person feels ashamed of it.”

American Jews largly did nothing to ensure that Jews fleeing Europe, Jews in distress, received entry visas and escaped to the United States. Irving Howe, a Jewish-American democratic socialist, later called this neglect of the Holocaust in the U.S. “a serious moral failure on our part.”

However, a new outburst of anti-Semitism united the fates of Israeli and American Jews, no longer able to remain “above the fray” but also objects of condemnation.

The history of American Jewish intellectuals’ attitudes toward the danger of the Holocaust and the significance of revitalizing the Jewish state is described in the essay “The Moral Failure of American Jewish Intellectuals” in the book Jews Against Themselves (2015) by Professor Edward Alexander.

The author writes about the silence of “American Jewish intellectuals” and their “deafness” to the danger of the Holocaust and to Israel. He explores the contributions of medieval Jewish renegades to anti-Semitism, such as Pablo Christiani, who played a major role in the anti-Jewish disputation with Nachmanides in Barcelona in 1263.

He draws an analogy between them and contemporary Jewish apostates, such as American intellectuals Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein, who are willing to sacrifice the Jewish state for the sake of “progress” and “justice.” Alexander uses the term “Jewish suicide.” In the essay “Why Jews Should Behave Better Than Others,” Alexander explores the “false moral symmetry and double standards” that are usually applied to Israel but “not to other nations, at least not to all Arab states.”

He writes: “Turning their eyes away from the destruction of European Jews, Jewish intellectuals of the ‘first rank,’ do not look at one of the most impressive manifestations of the will to live of a martyred people” [the people of Israel].

In a recent interview, Alexander said: “Most of the world turns its eyes away from the Iranian theocracy’s intentions and abilities to commit genocide; anti-Semitism, which earned a bad name as a result of the Holocaust, reappears as a failure of ideology in Europe, which could become judenrein, a continent without Jews, within ten years; the angelic sociology of liberals, including Jewish ones, ‘explains away’ the phenomenon of suicide bombers as the inevitable result of Israeli ‘oppression’.”

Alexander focuses on “new forms of Jewish apostasy, where Jewish existence is threatened in the most dire and immediate danger since the Nazi war against the Jews.” He extends his definition of “Jews against themselves” to Israel: “Israelis against themselves.” In his view, some Israeli Jews are “joining the agenda of Jews going back to the Middle Ages, to those Jews ‘who slandered, abandoned and harmed their own people’.”

Norman Podhoretz, former editor-in-chief of Commentary magazine, notes that liberal Jews explain their commitment to this ideology with compassion: we were slaves in Egypt and must defend the poor, the downtrodden, the refugees.

He writes that liberalism has become the religion of American Jews and is contrary to the conditions for the preservation of the Jewish people and that the liberals’ choice is to sacrifice Jewish interests “in the name of [U]topias of progress and justice.”

Leftist American Jews are intoxicated by the religion of liberalism.

But the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre in southern Israel, whose victims included both liberals and conservatives, and the Israeli military response to it in Gaza, showed the commonality of the fates of “progressive” and non-“progressive” Jews in the new life of the old anti-Semitism.

French philosopher Pierre-André Taguieff argues that the first wave of “la nouvelle judéophobie” emerged in the Arab-Muslim world and the Soviet sphere following the 1967 Six-Day War. The Oct. 7, 2023 massacre triggered a second wave of “new judeophobia.”

However, anti-Semitism is never new. It only changes its forms of manifestation.  The slogans of Oct. 7, 2023, such as “Gas for the Jews,” “Hitler was right,” “From the river to the sea Palestine will be free,” mean genocide and “the final solution to the Jewish question.”

Image: Quinn Dombrowski, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED