Antisemitism & Anti-Antisemitism Explored

It takes perhaps a retired Reform rabbi to see beyond the agonized Talmudic pilpul, that is, the fine distinction-making between antisemitism and anti-Zionism

Yet a major take-away for retired Yale Jewish Chaplain Rabbi Jim Ponet from the two-day conference at Yale this week on ​“Antisemitism and the Crisis of Liberalism” was precisely that.

Namely that the chief crisis that should be facing American Jews today should not be inward-looking definitions but rather to realize Israel’s extreme right-wing government at this moment is on the verge of annexing the West Bank, occupying Gaza, and deporting its people, and that dangerous and imminent — and decidedly illiberal — development gets far less of the urgent attention than it deserves, Ponet said.

He was one of about 250 people in person and via Zoom, largely academics and students, who gathered at the Humanities Quadrangle building on upper York Street to participate in the conference organized by the Yale Program for the study of Antisemitism.

Its director, Maurice Samuels, said the conference, a year in the making, was the largest and most significant in-person gathering organized by the program since Covid.

“We wanted to explore the place of antisemitism in the new political landscape and how traditional liberalism has been distorted on both sides,” he said.

While many of the sub-themes of the five panels over Wednesday and Thursday were fascinating, albeit academic — ​“Theories of Liberalism and the ​‘Jewish Question’” — the gathering also featured some heavy-hitter public intellectuals and columnists including the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnick and New York Times’ opinion columnists Michelle Goldberg and M. Gessen.

Here are a few highlighted exchanges –largely polite but also passionate – culled mainly from the last two summarizing round-table discussions whose participants included professors Noah Feldman (Harvard); Susie Linfield (NYU); Joshua Leifer (Yale), along with Gessen, Goldberg, Gopnick, and Zack Beauchamp, a journalist from Vox.

On "Cognitive Dissonance"

On the ​“cognitive dissonance” experienced by those American liberals, largely of an older generation, who support/love Israel and who almost unconsciously have absorbed that Zionism and liberalism are one in the same….. how to even conceptualize/reconcile/respond to Israel’s current decidedly illiberal current policies:

Feldman: ​“Today for progressive American Jews, the key thought move has been to replace any theological content with allegiance to the State of Israel. This means that the centrality of Israel makes it extremely difficult to walk away from Zionism … as Jewishness is equal to progressive values… So discussions frequently end in depression, cognitive dissonance, or existential crisis.”

Leifer: ​“Even though the early settlers were not liberals but rather Marxists, socialists, Zionism and liberalism were compatible before 1948. Since then, when support of Israel means support of a colonialist state, there’s tension between Zionism’s meanings … The tragedy in the 1980s was when, for example, Yitzhak Rabin and a genuine liberalism emerged, with territorial concessions, it was not welcomed in the U.S. where American liberalism had declined.”

Linfield: ​“Yes, liberalism is in fast retreat here and in Israel. However, Israel is not a settler colonialist or racist state. While the West Bank is a colonial occupation, that and democracy are compatible [as were the colonial adventures of, for example, England and France]. But its colony is right next door rather than being oceans away, and therefore this is an intimate and gnarly relationship.”

On "Anti-Antisemitism"

On the new (or Trump version of) ​“anti-antisemitism,” that is, using a coming-to-the-defense of the Jews strategy as cover to pursue illiberalism.

Goldberg: ​“This administration is saturated with stereotypes about Jews … and while we can’t disentangle antisemitism and anti-Zionism, we have a universe where they are in effect synonymous. The most antisemitic administration of my lifetime is trying to crush institutions where liberal Jews thrive in the name of antisemitism. It’s a level of perversity never seen before.”

Gessen: ​“This is not new. In Russia [in the era of Stalin] there was a Jewish autonomous region [that is, a gulag where Jews were sent] ​‘for their own protection.’ So any leader who proclaims to know how to protect a population is usually suspect.” 

Gopnick: ​“Jews depend on pluralism and liberal states to survive. That’s why Trump’s ideology doesn’t value pluralism, so it’s no true support of Jews. Only liberal states preserve rights. When American Jews embrace some form of Trumpism, they fail to know where their safety is, and they’re bound to be destroyed.”

On Protests & Leaders

On behavior of the protesting students and gaps between Jews and their leaders and alleged spokespersons, and are Jews moving to the right?

Beauchamp: ​“The polls and predictions of Jews’ move to the right just hasn’t happened. The liberal Jewish alliance is still there.”

Goldberg; ​“Most Jews hate this administration and have a pretty good understanding of where their interest lies. The problem is the leaders of too many Jewish institutions.”

Gessen: ​“Don’t be so quick to dismiss rightward drift as a problem of leadership. It’s institutions.”

Gopnick: ​“It’s our job as thinkers to explore claims and to make the case, to dissolve the false connection between institutional bent and genuine popular allegiance.”

Beauchamp: Yes, anti-Zionism can be a cover or recruiter for antisemitism … for example, it’s a monumentally disastrous act [to advocate for a] one-state solution. [On the other hand] people who see Zionism as the force that blew up their home, that doesn’t make them antisemitic.”

Gessen: ​“We are at peril to conflate the two, conflating any criticism of the state [of Israel] with antisemitism. That’s the hat trick that Jonathan Greenblat at ADL [Anti-Defamation League] pulls off. If we continue to create an exception for one state and make it morally unacceptable to criticize one state, what we are actually doing is creating antisemitism.”

This reporter’s family — uncles, aunts, teenagers just discovering the world — used to sit around on Sunday afternoons over coffee and cake to discuss politics. This conference put me in mind of those days.

After several hours, all would rise, and then someone always conclude, with warm irony: ​“Well, we solved the world’s problems again, didn’t we?”

Texts or summaries of the papers, said Samuels, will be on the Yale Program for the study of Antisemtism website in the coming days. Click here to read more.