David Schraub at The Debate Link posted a cou­ple of days ago about a con­fer­ence the Iran­ian gov­ern­ment has said it is going to hold on the Holo­caust, prob­a­bly as a way of try­ing to legit­imize the com­ments Pres­i­dent Ahmadine­jad has been mak­ing about the Holo­caust being a myth dreamed up by the Euro­peans as a way of get­ting the Jews out of Europe. In that post, which I com­mented on here but which has con­tin­ued to nig­gle at me (hence the post you are read­ing now), David took on in a very pas­sion­ate and mov­ing way the ques­tion of why there is so lit­tle sys­temic analy­sis of global anti-Semitism the way there is of racism or sex­ism or of class issues.

Like with racism, our soci­ety is both per­va­sively and struc­turally anti-Semitic. 60 years after the Holo­caust, one would think this wouldn’t need to be estab­lished. But yet, there is almost no lit­er­a­ture ana­lyz­ing anti-Semitism as a struc­tural phe­nom­ena, as opposed to a par­tic­u­larly long-running aber­ra­tion or a mere “me too” exam­ple to go along with other forms of eth­nic hatred. What it means to be “anti-Semitic” [in] a social or ide­o­log­i­cal sense is severely under-examined, mean­ing that anti-Semitism gets defined only as its most extreme man­i­fes­ta­tions, rabid hate and/or violence.

There is a lot of truth in this. Indeed, you could take the absence of analy­sis that Schraub points out as a sign of the truth of his state­ment. Books like Anti-Semitism in Amer­ica by Leonard Din­ner­stein tend to be the excep­tions that prove the rule. One rea­son there is such a scarcity of the kind of analy­sis Schraub talks about might be that, as Din­ner­stein asserts in his con­clu­sion, and as many oth­ers have said as well, rel­a­tively speak­ing, Jews are safer now, espe­cially in the United States, then per­haps at any other time in our his­tory. This doesn’t mean it doesn’t behoove us to be care­ful. To fail to learn from his­tory, after all, is to doom our­selves to repeat it. Indeed, one of the more telling points Schraub makes, though he makes it more by impli­ca­tion than explicit assertion, is that anti-Semitism is more often than not treated as an ahis­tor­i­cal phe­nom­e­non, and he sug­gests one way that the phe­nom­e­non of Jew-hatred in the con­tem­po­rary world might be historicized:

Why, for exam­ple, only the Jew­ish national state is seen as prima facia ille­git­i­mate, when no such claims are made of the French state, or the Russ­ian state, or (God for­bid) the Pales­tin­ian state could very eas­ily be exam­ined through such anti-Semitic con­structs like “the Mark of Cain”, by which Jews were for­ever con­signed to live in mis­er­able exile for their col­lec­tive national sins.

His point, that it is worth ask­ing whether there is a con­nec­tion between “anti-Semitic con­structs like ‘the Mark of Cain,’” which was a canard the medieval Church used to brand Jews as eter­nal out­siders, and the world­wide obses­sion with the ques­tion of Israel’s legit­i­macy as a Jew­ish State that you find through­out the world – to the exclu­sion of ask­ing sim­i­lar ques­tions about other states that were formed as a result of occu­pa­tion by exter­nal forces and all that goes with it – is an impor­tant method­olog­i­cal one. The answer might be no, but ask­ing the ques­tion hon­estly would very likely reveal some inter­est­ing things about the under­ly­ing cul­tural and ide­o­log­i­cal assump­tions of those who cri­tique Israel on these grounds.

Schraub then goes on to say that he understands

the frus­tra­tion of left­ist schol­ars who believe they have legit­i­mate (if not morally imper­a­tive) cri­tiques of Israel who feel like even a whis­per will expose them to reflex­ive attacks of “anti-Semitism.” And maybe in some cases it [does]. [… Charges of a]nti-semitism [are] going to be heard often with regards to anti-Israel crit­ics [however] because in the cur­rent global schema of anti-Semitism, Israel is the cen­tral point of rev­e­la­tion.

This is also true. You rarely hear charges these days about Jew­ish money the way you once did, but you do hear all kinds of things about the Jews and Israel, and about Israel and Jew­ish­ness, but then Schraub says some­thing that is troubling:

With regards to Israel, anti-Semitism is alleged because anti-Semitism is the cen­tral issue in the Israel/Palestine debate. Anti-Israel speak­ers know, on the deep­est (per­haps sub-conscious) level, that this is the case, which is why they bat­tle so fero­ciously to keep it out of the discussion.

The way this is writ­ten seems to me enor­mously self-centered. For whom is anti-Semitism “the cen­tral issue in the Israel/Palestine debate?” Not the Pales­tini­ans, I can assure you. It’s the Jews, and while I do not want to min­i­mize the real­ity of anti-Semitism in many of the (usu­ally left-wing) cri­tiques of Israel that are out there, or the poten­tial harm they do, to sug­gest that this anti-Semitism is the cen­tral issue in the con­flict is to deny almost entirely any legit­i­macy to what is cen­tral for the Pales­tini­ans. There are, in other words, at least two cen­ters in this con­flict, and Schraub’s for­mu­la­tion would seem to ren­der one of them entirely invis­i­ble. Anti-Semitism is a real­ity; it is a per­va­sive real­ity; but to claim it as the cen­tral issue in the Palestinian-Israeli con­flict is also to ren­der it an essen­tial and defin­ing char­ac­ter­is­tic of Jew­ish iden­tity, and that is fright­en­ing to me, because it defines Jew­ish iden­tity not in terms of what it means to be Jew­ish in an affir­ma­tive sense, but rather in terms of some­one else’s desire to negate that iden­tity entirely. It is one thing to point out that talk about Israel is where, in today’s world, anti-Semitism makes itself felt; it is quite some­thing else to con­clude that anti-Semitism is there­fore the cen­ter of what that talk about Israel is really about.