What We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) When We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) antisemitism and Israel — 1

Posted on by

Anti­semitism has been a tan­gi­ble and, to vary­ing degrees, vio­lent pres­ence in my life since at least third grade, which would have been in 1970 or so, when John W – it’s amaz­ing that I remem­ber his name – hav­ing learned the day before that I was Jew­ish, came up to me in the play­ground while we were choos­ing sides for dodge­ball and said, “My father told me I’m not allowed to play with Jews.” I can’t recall whether or not I was per­mit­ted to be part of the game that day, but I can see very clearly the one and only fist­fight I have ever had, which hap­pened later that year. I don’t know why John B and I ended up in the mid­dle of the school­yard cir­cle of boys push­ing us towards each other, try­ing to get one of us to throw the first punch, but I do know that John W was not the only voice I heard reas­sur­ing John that I was “only a Jew” and there­fore “weak and easy to take.” In the end, the first and only punch was mine. I landed one right on John’s chin and he started bleed­ing and the sight of his blood fright­ened us all into run­ning wher­ever it was that we ran to. I was scared because I thought I’d really hurt him, but I found out later I’d only bro­ken a scab on his face. For the next cou­ple of years at least, no one called me a “weak Jew” again.

Next came the pen­nies. Still in third grade, my class­mates started throw­ing pen­nies at me in the school­yard. At the time, I did not know the anti­se­mitic canard of the cheap Jew, and so I did not at first under­stand why they thought it was so funny when I picked the pen­nies up. Since I would often end up with as much as twenty cents – an amount that meant some­thing to a third grader back then – I laughed at them for being so stu­pid that they were giv­ing me free money; I wasn’t even curi­ous about why they were also laugh­ing at me. Even­tu­ally, some­one explained to me just what the pen­nies were sup­posed to sig­nify – I wish I could remem­ber who it was – but I con­tin­ued pick­ing them up any­way, since it still seemed to me that my class­mates were the ones mak­ing idiots of them­selves. Then, in fifth grade – which means peo­ple had been throw­ing pen­nies on and off for two years – some­one started one day to throw pen­nies at me in the class­room; some­one else actu­ally handed me an entire roll of pen­nies; and then a group started chant­ing “Jew! Jew! Jew! Jew!” My teacher stood by and did noth­ing, and even after he’d calmed the class down and got us all back in our seats, he did noth­ing to acknowl­edge the anti­se­mitic nature of what had just hap­pened. And I was one of his favorite students!

Then there was the music teacher, who made a point of embar­rass­ing me in front of the entire class for not know­ing a ref­er­ence in a Christ­mas song – “Don’t you Jews know anything?” – and who was mor­ti­fied when I asked if we could learn to sing a Chanuka song, and who once almost refused to let me go the fif­teen min­utes early I had per­mis­sion for so that I could get to my Hebrew School class on time because “Jews were always ask­ing for spe­cial favors,” and why should I get out of singing the Christ­mas songs that every­one ought to know? In sixth grade, in my grad­u­a­tion sig­na­ture book, Jim wrote on the very first page, “Rose are red, vio­lets are blue/I never met a nicer Jew.” Evan: “To the Jew, Have a penny good time in 7th grade.” Andy: “Of all the pushy Jews, you top them all.”

In sev­enth grade, I was accused of tru­ancy because I stayed home from school for the first two days of Suc­cot, the Fes­ti­val of Booths, a hol­i­day in the Jew­ish cal­en­dar that is as major as Passover – mean­ing that it is a hol­i­day you are not sup­posed to work or go to school on – but which very few Gen­tiles know about because it does not coin­cide with any Chris­t­ian hol­i­days and is not as eas­ily explain­able as Rosh HaShana, the New Year, or Yom Kip­pur, the Day of Atone­ment. When the atten­dance offi­cer called my house, she was sur­prised that I answered – I guess she fig­ured I would try not to be found – and when I explained to her about Suc­cot, she thought I was lying. “There are Jews at work here today,” she said. When I sug­gested to her that maybe they were not reli­gious (I was, at the time time, think­ing I might want to be a rabbi when I grew up), she told me to stop being so sneaky. “You’re all alike,” she said.

In eighth grade, I changed schools and started going to a yeshiva about twenty min­utes by car away from my house. I no longer had prob­lems with anti­semitism at school, and I can­not even begin to explain how relieved I felt not to have to explain myself all the time, but the prob­lems in my neigh­bor­hood con­tin­ued. From about ninth grade on, I was more or less con­stantly harassed in the street, called Jew, kike, heeb.I was threat­ened with being cooked in an oven, cru­ci­fied as revenge for the killing of Christ and being sac­ri­ficed to the devil because all Jews were going to hell any­way; I had beer bot­tles thrown at me, rocks the size of soft­balls. My home was robbed and my room was sin­gled out for par­tic­u­larly vicious attack. The thieves carved the word “Kike” into the door of my closet; they threw the books of Jew­ish learn­ing that I had on my shelves on the floor and walked all over them. There were entire years when I had to carry some­thing I could use as a weapon if I was going into cer­tain areas of my neigh­bor­hood, espe­cially if I was walk­ing alone, but even when I went with “friends,” because the anti­semites hung out in those areas and I had learned from expe­ri­ence that I could only rarely count on my friends to stand with me if I was assaulted or even just threat­ened with phys­i­cal assault.

These anti­semites wrote anti­se­mitic graf­fiti about me on the walls of the library. The cop who arrested the kid doing the spray paint­ing was very smart; he made sure to wait until the kid was done so that the anti­se­mitic nature of the graf­fiti was clear, and the kid could be charged with a more seri­ous crime. It took the town where I lived, how­ever, three years before they decided to try to clean the graf­fiti off the wall, and then they did such a bad job of it that, fif­teen years later, when I brought the woman who is now my wife to meet my mother for the first time, you could still read the words, “New­man is a penny Jew,” and make out the draw­ing of a penny that the artist had drawn, just in case you didn’t get the point. Six­teen more years later, actu­ally just one year ago, mak­ing it thirty one years after the graf­fiti had orig­i­nally been writ­ten, when I drove by one day with my son, I stopped to show him where I lived when I was grow­ing up, and you could still make the graf­fiti out, though I don’t know if you’d be able to read it if you didn’t already know what it said. The point is that the town never actu­ally both­ered to erase it; they waited for the ele­ments to do it.

In eleventh grade, my class went on a trip to some­where that included a tour of a ship of his­tor­i­cal impor­tance. (I don’t remem­ber which one.) We were stand­ing on the deck, when a group of much younger kids, prob­a­bly in ele­men­tary school, came on board. One of the girls asked one of the adults accom­pa­ny­ing them why the boys in my group were wear­ing those “funny hats.” The adult explained that they were called yarmulkes and it meant we were Jew­ish. “Oh,” the kid said, a tone of won­der com­pletely bereft of irony creep­ing into her voice. “Then where are their horns?” I did not hear the adult’s answer.

Finally, in twelfth grade Eng­lish class – I had switched from yeshiva back to pub­lic school – while dis­cussing Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mis­tress,” Mr. Giglio asked if any­one knew the bib­li­cal ref­er­ence in the poem’s clos­ing lines: “Thus, though we can­not make our sun/Stand still, yet we will make him run.” I raised my hand and said it referred to Joshua mak­ing the sun stand still at the bat­tle of Gibeon. Mr. Giglio looked at the rest of the class, “You should be ashamed of your­selves! This boy who doesn’t go to church knows the bible bet­ter than you; the Bat­tle of Gibeon was in the read­ing this past Sunday!”

That same year, Joan invited me to her house for din­ner. It was a big deal for me. I didn’t have many friends in my class, and it helped a lot that she was cute. As we sat around the table after the meal, I don’t remem­ber why, but the sub­ject of the Holo­caust came up. Joan’s father said some­thing to the effect that, well, maybe a cou­ple of thou­sand Jews at most had been killed in the con­cen­tra­tion camps, but the idea that 6 mil­lion had died was just pre­pos­ter­ous. More­over, he said, the fact that so much of the world believed it was 6 mil­lion the result of some very good pro­pa­gan­diz­ing on the part of the Jews and, par­tic­u­larly, Israel. He said this in the most friendly of ways, try­ing to edu­cate my mis­guided self. To her credit, Joan argued with me against him, but I sat there feel­ing like I was being punched in the stom­ach over and over again. I wanted to throw up. I had heard about Holo­caust deniers, but I had never actu­ally met one in the flesh, and hear­ing what he said made me phys­i­cally sick. I was not invited to Joan’s house again, and what had been the begin­nings of our friend­ship stopped grow­ing right there.

If I were to con­tinue this account­ing of anti­semitism in my life and tell you about things that hap­pened to me in col­lege, in the work­ing world, in my career as a col­lege pro­fes­sor, and in my mar­riage to an Iran­ian Mus­lim woman, the exam­ples would, in gen­eral, grow less and less fre­quent, more and more sub­tle and the overt vio­lence or threat of vio­lence would com­pletely dis­ap­pear. With the excep­tion of hav­ing been advised when I was a teenager not to bother apply­ing for a job at the coun­try club near my home, since it was well-known that they did not hire Jews, I have never been denied a job because I am Jew­ish; I have never had a hard time get­ting a loan, rent­ing or buy­ing an apart­ment, or in any of the other aspects of life that are made dif­fi­cult if not impos­si­ble for peo­ple who are struc­turally dis­crim­i­nated against in this coun­try. I live a rel­a­tively com­fort­able life. I am not afraid when I walk down the street that some­one, because of who I am, will decide to call me out in some way or attack me out­right — though it’s also impor­tant to acknowl­edge that I live in New York City, prob­a­bly one of the safest places to be Jew­ish in the US, and that there are places in this coun­try where it would be fool­ish of me not to feel that fear at least a lit­tle bit. (I also should point out that all of the exam­ples of anti­semitism I gave above took place in a town on Long Island just over the bor­der divid­ing Queens from Nas­sau County; for all intents and pur­poses, in other words, in New York City.)

So, on the one hand, anti­semitism was a cen­tral expe­ri­ence of my grow­ing up a Jew in the United States; on the other hand, as I have grown older, it has receded in promi­nence, par­tially because of where I live and par­tially because its struc­tural man­i­fes­ta­tions have been almost, if not entirely elim­i­nated – to the point where I can some­times pre­tend it does not exist.

Except when it comes time to dis­cuss the Israeli-Palestinian con­flict and Zionism.

I have never, not even among Jews, not even among Jews with whom I pretty much agree 100%, had a dis­cus­sion about that con­flict where the ques­tion of anti­semitism has not arisen. Either someone’s cri­tique of Israel is nakedly – or not so nakedly – anti­se­mitic, or some­one who is not Jew­ish feels it nec­es­sary to instruct me when I want to point out the anti­semitism in a cri­tique of Israel or Zion­ism that not all such cri­tiques are by def­i­n­i­tion anti­se­mitic, or some­one who is Jew­ish calls anti­semitism when it isn’t there, or, among Jews, we spend time ana­lyz­ing the anti­semitism in cri­tiques of Israel, or com­plain­ing about the anti­semitism in cri­tiques of Israel, and so on and so on and so on.

Indeed, it often feels these days that the Israeli-Palestinian con­flict is the only con­text in which a dis­cus­sion anti­semitism is taken seri­ously. It gives anti­semites an oppor­tu­nity to cloak their anti­semitism in an argu­ment that has a con­sid­er­able amount of moral high ground built into it, and to call foul when Jews and our allies say, “Wait a minute! We’re not going to let you get away with anti­semitism just because the poli­cies of the Israeli gov­ern­ment deserve crit­i­cism.” More impor­tantly, I think, for Jews and our allies, pre­cisely because anti­semitism is not taken seri­ously enough as a phe­nom­e­non in and of itself, a real­ity of Jew­ish lives inde­pen­dent of what goes on between Israel and the Pales­tini­ans, and pre­cisely because sec­u­lar Zion­ism and that State of Israel were founded largely in response to anti­semitism, dis­cus­sions of the Palestinian-Israeli con­flict become one of the few oppor­tu­ni­ties we have to talk about anti­semitism period, all of it, how it has worked and con­tin­ues to work all over the world. The result is that what should be a con­ver­sa­tion about Israel and Pales­tine and the peo­ple who are liv­ing and fight­ing and dying there ends up bear­ing the bur­den of, for exam­ple, not only every instance of anti­semitism I listed above, but the his­tory out of which that anti­semitism arises and that con­tin­ues to give it con­text. No sin­gle con­ver­sa­tion should have to bear that bur­den. Anti­semitism is thou­sands of years old; mil­lions upon mil­lions of Jews have suf­fered and died, and there are places where they con­tinue to suf­fer and die, world­wide because of it. Inevitably, then, try­ing to fold into a dis­cus­sion of the Palestinian-Israeli con­flict all of the dis­cus­sion that needs to hap­pen around the fact that anti­se­mitic val­ues are still very much alive in the world, includ­ing within the Palestinian-Israeli con­flict, is going to result in the invis­i­bil­ity of the extreme suf­fer­ing the Pales­tini­ans endure daily at the hands of the Israelis, of which the recent assault on Gaza is only an extreme example.

This is the point, though I am late in the game in terms of the time­li­ness of this post, at which I want to enter the frus­trat­ing, fas­ci­nat­ing, and, at times, infu­ri­at­ing dis­cus­sion gen­er­ated by David Schraub’s guest posts on Fem­i­niste titled, “We Can­not Live With­out Our Lives” Either: Jews, Priv­i­lege, and Anti-Subordination and Anti-Semitism and Sub­or­di­na­tion Part II: The Myth of Jew­ish Hyper-Power. I am not going to recap all of the ways in which David was cri­tiqued, accu­rately or not, nor am I – at least not at first – going to address head on the points where I dis­agree with him. Rather, I want to explore the ways in which I empathize with him, because even though I dis­agree with him now quite pro­foundly, there was a time when I would have agreed with him almost absolutely and the empa­thy that would have led to that agree­ment still remains.

Final note before I move on to Part 2: There have also been a num­ber of posts at Alas in response both to David’s posts and the dis­cus­sion they have gen­er­ated that I think are impor­tant to read: Talk­ing about anti-semitism now, by Maia and Posts About Anti-Semitism Often Hit Home For Me by Man­dolin. Julie has writ­ten Why I’ve Stopped Talk­ing About Gaza, as well as Dear Non-Jewish Activists: and This is not my com­mu­nity. (Other posts on Alas that are impor­tant include Links to Israeli and Jew­ish voices oppos­ing Israel’s attacks on Gaza and Inhu­man. There are oth­ers as well.)

There is also a tan­gen­tially related post up at Fem­i­niste, “Dis­tin­guish­ing a Polit­i­cal Stance from a Racist Stance”, the dis­cus­sion of which deals with the issues raised by the com­mon use of the term anti-Semitism to mean Jew-hating, espe­cially when the term is used to describe the words or actions of Arabs, who, obvi­ously, are Semitic (far more so than I am, for exam­ple). Indeed, the rhetor­i­cal ques­tion asked by the Arab author of the paper to which this post refers is, “How can we, as Semi­tes, be anti-Semitic?” Julie’s com­ment, I think, does a fine job of cri­tiquing that ques­tion and how it is often used, so I am not going to repeat it here. My point in rais­ing the whole ques­tion of the term anti-Semitism is to explain why I write it the way I do: antisemitism.

I wish I could remem­ber the book where I first encoun­tered this tac­tic so I could quote for you accu­rately the orig­i­nal ratio­nale behind it, but I can’t. I have been writ­ing the term this way ever since I read that book, how­ever, because it allows me to con­tinue using the word in com­mon usage for Jew-hating while at the same time draw­ing atten­tion away – how­ever slightly – from the fact that in its orig­i­nal form it referred to Semitic peo­ple, and even then, it did so inac­cu­rately. When Wil­helm Marr pop­u­lar­ized the term in 1879 so that Jew-hating would have a sci­en­tific and there­fore objec­tively, legit­imiz­ing word that could be used to refer to it, he obvi­ously did not even con­sider the Arabs wor­thy of notice. The term, in other words, has a dou­ble oppres­sion embed­ded in it, and it would be much bet­ter if we could find a dif­fer­ent word, espe­cially since dis­cus­sions of the Israeli-Palestinian con­flict, the sit­u­a­tion of Jews in the Arab world and so on inevitably involve ques­tions of Arab anti­semitism. Anti­semitism, how­ever, is the word that we have. “Jew-hating” is dif­fi­cult, I think, because the word “hat­ing” inher­ently raises the stakes and implies that all expres­sions and man­i­fes­ta­tions of anti­semitism exist at the same level of inten­sity and harm­ful­ness and so it removes, for me any­way, the feel­ing that nuance is pos­si­ble in these dis­cus­sions. “Ori­en­tal­ism,” which is men­tioned in a quote in one of Julie’s com­ments might be a term that encom­passes as April Rosen­blum – the per­son Julie quotes – says, “a larger oppres­sion that both groups [Arabs and Jews] expe­ri­ence,” but it would take quite a bit of work, I think, to make that term really use­ful in describ­ing the oppres­sion of Euro­pean Jews who are so clearly not “Ori­en­tal,” even though I would agree they were “ori­en­tal­ized” as part of their oppres­sion; and since I do not want this series of posts to have to do that work, I am going to stick with the term that we have, though in a form that is, I hope, alien­ated enough from itself that peo­ple will be will­ing to accept it as the word that refers to the (usu­ally racial­ized) hatred of the Jews.

53 thoughts on “What We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) When We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) antisemitism and Israel — 1”

  1. Pingback: Alas, a blog » Blog Archive » What We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) When We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) antisemitism and Israel

  2. Thanks for this. I’m glad you’re doing this series. I was seri­ous – I really have learned quite a lot from your par­tic­i­pa­tion in these con­ver­sa­tions thus far. It helps a lot that you’re dis­cussing per­sonal anec­dotes here. At that other post, well… I don’t really know *what* specif­i­cally is being called anitsemitic.

    And you know? I did start to won­der about geo­graphic loca­tion over the course of these threads – and how that might affect one’s expe­ri­ences of anti­semitism. For my part, I did not even *know* about any of these stereo­types before I became an adult. I never heard other kids voice them either, and I was… Well, I was white but also fairly per­cep­tive in pick­ing up stereo­types (My dad was kind of an anti-racist activist.). What I *did* hear (in the South) were racist state­ments about Blacks and Latin@s – and some­times also about Arabs.

    I do think geo­graphic loca­tion affects these things. I’m from a part of the Bible Belt where Black/White and now Latin@ rela­tions define much of our his­tory of racism. I came through pub­lic school at a time when the Chris­t­ian Right was in the mid­dle of its ascen­dancy in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics. This hugely affected my school expe­ri­ence. Absti­nence edu­ca­tion had just become a hugely politi­cized ordeal, as had “cre­ation­ism” in the schools. All of my Biol­ogy books had dis­claimers pasted in them explain­ing to us that evo­lu­tion is “just a the­ory and should not be under­stood as defin­i­tive truth.” As there were very, very few Jews in my school, I very rarely – if ever – heard Jews discussed.

    What I *did* hear was evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian *ide­al­iza­tion* of Jews as “God’s Cho­sen peo­ple.” (Daisy has a good post on this right now, linked from one of those threads.) I knew about the Holo­caust and about the stereo­types that the Nazis asso­ci­ated with Jews, but I never heard any­one ever repeat them. I *did* hear Jews sub­jected to extremely essen­tial­iz­ing ide­al­iza­tion (largely these Chris­tians thought they could facil­i­tate the Armaged­don that they sought to bring about through the state of Israel. Chris­tians talk­ing about how Israel holds a “spe­cial place” in their hearts. Peo­ple like Sarah Palin who “love Israel.”). This is an insid­i­ous form of stereo­typ­ing, I think, but it isn’t the same as what has been delin­eated as tra­di­tional anti­semitism. I am only famil­iar with these more tra­di­tional tropes as a result of my Eng­lish major encounter with Shy­lock at the age of 18, as well as with some other lit­er­a­ture and phi­los­o­phy. I have never once heard any­one actu­ally spout them. If I had, I’d rebuke them in short order. I have always asso­ci­ated these tropes with Nazism, and it’s hor­rific to me that you encoun­tered so much of this in New York as a child.

    Since my grand­fa­ther was a Mason, I knew a slight bit of infor­ma­tion about the Pro­to­cols of the Elders of Zion – and specif­i­cally that it was a hoax deployed by Nazis in order to jus­tify the killings of both Jews and Freemasons.

    All of this is to say: There are rea­sons why I feel auto­mat­i­cally defen­sive when some­one accuses me of being anti­se­mitic in an Isarel/Palestine dis­cus­sion. First of all, I have *not once* deployed any of these tropes. Nor has any­one ever shown me where I have (or where they might be read into any­thing I’ve said). My impas­sioned response wrt I/P has a lot more to do with my instinc­tive oppo­si­tion to the Chris­t­ian Right – and noth­ing at all to do with any any of these tropes. Which I never learned, which (despite what David seems to be argu­ing) were never deeply ingrained in my edu­ca­tion in the same way as the racism I learned (I did need to deal with and over­come that.). I can’t make this claim about all of the South – or even about all of my city – but this was my expe­ri­ence. Every­thing I ever heard about anti­semitism was that it was *so* evil, so ter­ri­ble, that it brought about the Holo­caust. Hav­ing never seen it in any of these con­tem­po­rary con­texts, I feel like I am being called a Nazi when some­one says “anti­semitism.” And again, if I’m draw­ing on any of these tropes, I’m open to hear­ing about it, it’s just… My oppo­si­tion to Zion­ism (and par­tic­u­larly to the Chris­t­ian Zion­ism) that I have encoun­tered so much more often – has noth­ing at all to do with Jews. And when I’m told that I must sup­port Zion­ism in order *not* to be an anti­semite, I’m a lit­tle con­fused: I don’t see that as anti­semitism. I see it as anti-Dominionism, and I’m unapolo­getic about it.

    By the time I reached col­lege, I did encounter some of these things – in Shake­speare, in Marx, in other lit­er­a­ture. But I was an adult who was able to rec­og­nize it for what it was by then, and so… Still, I never heard any­one say these things. It was not a part of the racist/ethnocentric cul­ture where I grew up, not really. And at that time, I was highly involved in pro-Palestinian activism and engaged in dia­logue with a very large Arab pop­u­la­tion down South.

    And so… I think it helps me to rec­og­nize what a dif­fer­ence geo­graph­i­cal loca­tion makes. I would guess that many of these stereo­types might be more well known in the North and in places like New York or Chicago or Boston than they were in my com­mu­nity. Your expe­ri­ences help me to under­stand the con­text of these things a lot more. While I can under­stand the sorts of expe­ri­ences that lead one to sus­pect prej­u­dice, it’s really hard for me to respond to ques­tions about some kind of “deeply ingrained anti­semitism” that I am alleged to pos­sess. It just *wasn’t* a part of my social­iza­tion, at all. And it’s hard for me to engage when that becomes the assump­tion. Or when I feel that I am being called upon to prove my anti-antisemitism creds for voic­ing crit­i­cisms of Israel. And, in any case, what would that help? Wouldn’t *any­one* in such cir­cum­stances claim that they weren’t really anti­se­mitic? So… If charges about anti­semitism are to be lev­eled, shouldn’t they have more to do with one’s obvi­ous deploy­ment of these big­oted stereo­types? But they’ve been lev­eled at me for merely crit­i­ciz­ing Israel. And so… See­ing what you have to say here is help­ful. I mean, maybe I should just, well, move on when this hap­pens. I have reflected. I started doing so ten years ago when I first met a large com­mu­nity of Jews (through the orga­ni­za­tion Jews for a Just Peace), and this kind of stereo­typ­ing is just…really not where I’m com­ing from. At all. In any case, thanks for your post. I am con­tin­u­ing to learn a lot.

  3. btw, I sus­pect gen­er­a­tion may also make a dif­fer­ence. You say you were in third grade in 1970, mean­ing I’m about 17 years younger than you.

  4. You know, I won­der if there is any par­al­lel with man­i­fes­ta­tions of racism – and reac­tions to being called a racist – in the US. Where I come from, every­one talks about racism. Despite its lim­ited suc­cess, I think the Civil Rights Move­ment really suc­ceeded in get­ting racism talk out on the table. And so… It’s pos­si­ble to sug­gest that some­one said some­thing racist and to then have a calm dis­cus­sion about it.

    But now that I’ve moved up North… Racism is under­stood as some­thing that is *only* a South­ern prob­lem, and peo­ple react to charges of racism as if they have just been called the Grand Dragon of the KKK. I mean, it is taken to be The Worst Thing in the World Ever. And I don’t know how to respond to that… Racism talk was a big part of my social­iza­tion, and it’s NOT that big of a deal to just…speak about it or con­sider the unin­tended racist con­se­quences of var­i­ous remarks.

    And so… It has occurred to me more than once that there might be a par­al­lel here wrt my reac­tion to being called anti­se­mitic. So, I have gone back and looked over at my words and scoured over them for exam­ples that could appear to be draw­ing on the sorts of stereo­types that you men­tion here. And I can’t find any, but nor, really, can any­one else. So, the charge seems to be mainly that my oppo­si­tion to Zion­ism (with all the his­tor­i­cal bag­gage and com­plex­ity that word car­ries) makes me an anti­semite. And I don’t know what to say about that. I really do not. I don’t think that oppositino about a *polit­i­cal project* that is being funded by my gov­ern­ment – and that has dire human­i­tar­ian con­se­quences – is anti­se­mitic. It’s not that I don’t *under­stand* why Jews may feel they need the kind of secu­rity allegedly pro­vided by the state of Isreal (I hon­estly don’t think Israel is mak­ing Jews safer.). It’s that I’m sick­ened by the many human rights abuses that my gov­ern­ment either engages in or funds. And I have a right to be upset about that. I don’t know… When I, as an Amer­i­can cit­i­zen, am tac­itly respon­si­ble for thou­sands upon thou­sands of civil­ian deaths through­out the Mid­dle East (and cer­tainly not only – or even mostly – as a result of Israeli state aggres­sion), and when these deaths are ongo­ing and num­ber in the thou­sands… It feels urgent. Too urgent to stop and reflect, to be honest.

  5. Kristin–

    There is a lot to respond to in your com­ments, which are won­der­ful. Thanks for leav­ing them. Unfor­tu­nately, I am now start­ing to prep for the start of classes tomor­row and I don’t know when I will have the time to give them the atten­tion they deserve. Let me just say that I do not think your oppo­si­tion to Zion­ism, and as you have phrased here I assume that you mean Zionism-as-embodied-in-the-policies-of-the-state-of-Israel, is anti­se­mitic in the least. What becomes dif­fi­cult is when the oppo­si­tion to Zion­ism flows over into how Jews under­stand our­selves as a peo­ple, which clearly is not mono­lithic, but cer­tainly one valid way of under­stand­ing the Jews is as a peo­ple with (a dis­persed and dias­poric) national iden­tity – if that is not too much of a con­tra­dic­tion in terms. In other words, to deny the valid­ity of Zion­ism as one pos­si­ble idea about Jew­ish identity/being/whatever does, I think, start to get into the realm of anti­semitism. There is a longer con­ver­sa­tion to be had about why I think that is so, and I am hop­ing the series of posts I want to write will start to get at it – but let me say that I do not per­ceive your words as you have writ­ten them here as hav­ing crossed over into that realm.

  6. I would just like to thank you for writ­ing this. I am not a par­tic­i­pa­tor on Fem­i­niste (I read occa­sion­ally, but I do not con­sider it a place that I can com­ment safely), but I appre­ci­ated your com­ments there as well.

  7. Thanks for this, and yeah, I am refer­ring to Zion­ism as embod­ied in the poli­cies of the state of Israel, but it’s help­ful to me to (begin to) under­stand how it’s not *just* that to the Jew­ish com­mu­nity. Makes much more sense to me now, and I’ll try to clar­ify far bet­ter when I speak of Zion­ism as embod­ied in the poli­cies of the state of Israel (and sup­ported by the Domin­ion­ist fun­da­men­tal­ist Chris­t­ian com­mu­nity in the US as well).

  8. “What becomes dif­fi­cult is when the oppo­si­tion to Zion­ism flows over into how Jews under­stand our­selves as a peo­ple, which clearly is not mono­lithic, but cer­tainly one valid way of under­stand­ing the Jews is as a peo­ple with (a dis­persed and dias­poric) national iden­tity – if that is not too much of a con­tra­dic­tion in terms. In other words, to deny the valid­ity of Zion­ism as one pos­si­ble idea about Jew­ish identity/being/whatever does, I think, start to get into the realm of antisemitism.”

    I am really look­ing for­ward to your devel­op­ment of this, because this is some­thing I need to understand.

    I am anti-Zionist as in say­ing that I think the cre­ation of the polit­i­cal state of Israel was wrong. (Another thing is that now that it is here I am firmly against any idea or plan to vio­lently *dis­man­tling* it.) Both because the land where it was cre­ated was not empty, so it resulted in the dis­en­fran­chise­ment of other peo­ple — and because I believe nation­al­ism in the form of cre­at­ing a one-nation polit­i­cal state is wrong as a polit­i­cal project in the first place, no mat­ter who it is that does it.

    But to me, the con­cept of a “Jew­ish nation” is another thing, dif­fer­ent from the actual, polit­i­cal state that is Israel. “Nation” and “Polit­i­cal State” are two dif­fer­ent con­cpets to me. If Jews — or some Jews or even one Jew only — feel that the con­cept of a Jew­ish Nation is impor­tant to their iden­tity, I don’t think it is my busi­ness as a non-Jew to ques­tion or even dis­cuss that. I think it is my busi­ness instead to lis­ten and to try and under­stand what that means to the peo­ple in question.

    Would you say that this stance is anti­se­mitic? The prob­lem I had with David Shraub’s argu­ment over at Fem­i­niste was exactly this. I read him as say­ing I should accept anti­semitism in myself because I think the cre­ation of the state of Israel was wrong. I can’t do that.

    I think my expe­ri­ence is some­what sim­i­lar to Kristin’s with respect to anti­semitism. My coun­try (Nordic) does have a Jew­ish minor­ity, but I never met anti­semtic tropes any­where but in his­tory lessons either when I grew up (and then they were pre­sented as some­thing wrong and evil.) (This of course doesn’t have to mean that anti­semitism was never a prob­lem any­where in my coun­try as I grew up, only that *I* never expe­ri­enced it or heard of it.)

    In the ear­lier years of my adult­hood, anti­semitism con­tin­ued to be a his­tor­i­cal or for­eign phe­nom­e­non only to me. The fact that one of our for­mer sec­re­tary of for­eign affairs was a Jew was some­thing I was not even aware of before he gave an inter­view about the holo­caust expe­ri­ences of his fam­ily. The fact that he was a Jew was not in any way a secret — it was not like it was “revealed” in that inter­view or any­thing — it was just me not pay­ing atten­tion because no one either in the media or among peo­ple I related to con­sid­ered his Jew­ish iden­tity to be even remotely rel­e­vant to his posi­tion or pol­i­tics. I didn’t agree with him polit­i­cally so spent a lot of energy dis­cussing his polit­i­cal agen­das — but the fact that he was Jew­ish never entered into that.

    I first met anti­semitism as a real prob­lem in my com­mu­nity and as some­thing I was made aware of as a con­tem­per­ary prob­lem with the rise of the neo-Nazi move­ment. Those groups have never been big here, but they have popped up now and then, and have some­times tar­geted syn­a­gogues etc. That has made me furi­ous, always, as it has any­one I have related to or dis­cussed with, the main media included. But the bulk of neo-Nazi activ­ity in my coun­try has been tar­get­ing Mus­lim immi­grants and blacks (includ­ing assas­i­na­tion) so even in that con­nec­tion the topic of anti­semitism has not been the most promi­nent one. Neo-Nazism = Racism has been much more promi­nent, because of their own activities.

    My stance to the state of Israel was orig­i­nally informed mostly by “Sol­i­dar­ity with the Pal­is­tini­ans” groups in the sev­en­ties (yes I am that old…)- but I am not an activist on that front now, because I think too many there have been too will­ing to excuse or explain away if not down­right applaud too many wrongs on the Pales­tin­ian side. Ter­ror­ism and rad­i­cal Islamism are both big wrongs to me, no mat­ter who it is that advo­cates or employs it…

    Now, because of the ongo­ing esca­la­tion of the Israel/Palestinian con­flict, both anti­semitism and the accu­sa­tion that a critque of Israel beyond a cer­tain point is in itself anti­semtic, is on the rise here. The anti­semitism in con­nec­tion to this con­flict doesn’t seem to reach back very much to old anti­se­mitic tropes, though, at least not on any major scale. It is more a con­flat­ing of Israel with all Jews, with some peo­ple (most trou­ble­some of all, young peo­ple) no longer say­ing they are “against Israel” but “against the Jews” — and a few believ­ing this gives them the right to attack and blame *any* Jew for what is going on in the Mid­dle East — Jew­ish chil­dren included! This is very trou­ble­some and poten­tially very very dan­ger­ous, con­sid­er­ing the hor­rors it may lead to. For instance, the Neo-Nazis are applaud­ing and seek­ing to influ­ence anti-Israel demon­stra­tions etc…

    Ok, enough of where I come from. One thing I have learned from the dis­cus­sion in the thread over at Fem­i­niste, is that it is maybe more impor­tant in this con­text than in many oth­ers to know where peo­ple are com­ing from… I admit that I have prob­lems hear­ing anti­semitism in con­nec­tion with my own polit­i­cal views, too — it *does* read “Nazi” to me — and *that* has always read as “Evil on Earth” to me, an ide­ol­ogy I per­ceive as being as far away from my own views as you can get. I mean I have no prob­lems if some­one says to me that they think I am *unfair* or *wrong* to call the state of Israel a nation­al­is­tic project. But since Nazi ide­ol­ogy is also rooted in —  among a lot of other things! — nationalistic ideas, it is hard for me to under­stand how my anti-nationalistic stance can be even remotely com­pared to a Nazi ide­ol­ogy or the cores of anti­se­mitic ideas.

    But then, of course, my crit­ics may hear “Nazi” when I say “nation­al­is­tic ideas” too, per­haps with as much right as me when I hear “anti­semtism” as “Nazi”. It is dif­fi­cult to take these things as calmly as one per­haps should, for all of us, I guess…

    Ok, this is get­ting too long. You don’t have to answer exten­sively here when you are plan­ning to develop these themes more in a series of posts — which I am look­ing for­ward too a lot. But I would like to know if you con­sider my polit­i­cal view on Zion­ism anti­semtic, and why.

  9. Torill, you wrote

    But I would like to know if you con­sider my polit­i­cal view on Zion­ism anti­semtic, and why.

    I rec­og­nize that nei­ther you nor Kristin are ask­ing me to be a spokesper­son for the Jews about what is and what is not anti­se­mitic, I just feel the need to say that, obvi­ously, I can­not and would never try to fill that role. That being said, I will tell you that I don’t think your views are anti­se­mitic. To treat Zion­ism as you would any other nation­al­ism is very obvi­ously not sin­gling Zion­ism out for spe­cial treatment.

    There is more I want to say about what you and Kristin have to say about never hav­ing encoun­tered anti­se­mitic tropes/images/stereotypes, because I think that the absence of edu­ca­tion about those things, as well as Jew­ish cul­ture in gen­eral – espe­cially since the Holo­caust – is a kind of struc­tural anti­semitism, in the same way that the absence of edu­ca­tion about racism and homo­pho­bia, for exam­ple, as well as about African-American and gay and les­bian cul­ture, are exam­ples of struc­tural racism and homo­pho­bia. But I don’t have the time to say more than that. I need to prep my classes.

    Thanks for commenting!

  10. Heh, no, not ask­ing you to be a spokesper­son. This is just use­ful to me because I’m real­iz­ing that it’s impor­tant – as Torill men­tions – to under­stand where peo­ple are com­ing from here.

    It’s prob­a­bly inac­cu­rate to sug­gest that I knew noth­ing about Jew­ish stereo­types. What I was sug­gest­ing, to be more clear, was that I never heard folks – who nev­er­the­less often felt com­fort­able say­ing racist things about Blacks and Latin@s all over the place – deploy them. I *only* heard about them in the con­text of Nazi Ger­many and the Klan (and other neo-Nazi groups). For instance, we’d see doc­u­men­taries in school about the Holo­caust that would intro­duce evil pro­pa­ganda videos of the time as such. What I did *not* know was that peo­ple who were not iden­ti­fied with Nazi move­ments still used and/or deployed these stereo­types. I can see how this might be a form of struc­tural anti­semitism, but I would also sug­gest that… It has some­thing to do with the fact that these *weren’t* free-flowing stereo­types where I came from, *and* we were edu­cated about how wrong these things were. I knew about the ongo­ing pres­ence of racism not because my teach­ers really taught us about its per­sis­tence, but because I saw it every sin­gle day in every facet of my school sys­tem – Black kids tracked into reme­dial classes for no obvi­ous rea­son, Black kids pun­ished far more severely than white kids for alleged “mis­be­hav­ior,” the red­neck con­tin­gent with Con­fed­er­ate flags fly­ing from their pick-up trucks. This is my expe­ri­ence. It per­me­ates that region in a way that these anti­se­mitic tropes, I think, may not.

    But the Klan was in decline dur­ing my time and in my com­mu­nity. In the ten years before I came through school, a huge pub­lic bat­tle had been waged to weaken and dis­credit the Klan – and to drive it out of the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area (where I grew up). I’m pre­pared to believe that that area is dif­fer­ent from most of the South wrt racism and anti­semitism as well. It’s fairly pro­gres­sive and some­what mod­er­ate with the excep­tion of the Chris­t­ian Right’s polit­i­cal power. As with the Nazis, my edu­ca­tion also asso­ci­ated great and ter­ri­ble evil with the Klan. It’s just that, given our con­text, we knew that peo­ple could deploy racist stereo­types *with­out* being mur­der­ous Klan mem­bers – that’s why we could talk about racism and call peo­ple out and begin to deal with it. I did not – and don’t – have such a con­text when it comes to antisemitism.

    Any­way, no, I’m not ask­ing you to be the arbiter of all things anti­se­mitic as a Jew­ish per­son. I’m just real­iz­ing that con­text is really, really impor­tant here. I had *no idea* that my use of the term “Zion­ist” could be heard as a code word for all Jews every­where (and Jew­ish iden­tity to boot), but that’s a *really* impor­tant thing to know when dis­cus­sion I/P, eh? I mean, as some­one who as no sym­pa­thy for essen­tialisms like this, I would hate to ever be heard as spout­ing them. So, that’s one way that I could be *heard* as spout­ing anti­se­mitic tropes even though that’s not at all where I’m com­ing from. I guess I’m just say­ing… It’s really impor­tant to get the con­texts around these words, I think. And I’m glad you’re explain­ing some of them.

  11. Thanks for a speedy answer!

    “I rec­og­nize that nei­ther you nor Kristin are ask­ing me to be a spokesper­son for the Jews about what is and what is not anti­se­mitic, I just feel the need to say that, obvi­ously, I can­not and would never try to fill that role.”

    I under­stand. I would never expect any one indi­vid­ual to rep­re­sent a whole group, and never go around say­ing: OH, I know what “The Jews” think because I spoke to this guy online and he says… I don’t even believe that any such sin­gle entity as “The Jews” exist, any more than I believe that about any other group of people.

    I feel the need to say also that I don’t expect any ran­dom Jew to always have an oblig­a­tion to “edu­cate” me on every aspect of anti­semitism or any other topic related to Jews. Or tell me what to do to not be anti­se­mitic. Or what­ever. It is just that since we have both recently par­tic­i­pated in a dis­cus­sion that became pretty heated and — and since what you posted here was a lit­tle unclear to me — I asked *you in par­tic­u­lar* about *one par­tic­u­lar line of argu­ment* that I have used in this *par­tic­u­lar* dis­cus­sion to check were the two of us stand in *this par­tic­u­lar conversation*.

    I felt the need to say it in this nit­picky fash­ion right now, because I realise that some­times peo­ple belong­ing to under­priv­ielged groups may be pretty pissed off by priv­eleged white het­ero­sex­ual women (which I know that I am) com­ing up to them and ask­ing for abso­lu­tion and a “bona fide anti-racist/semitist/homophobic etc. card” that they can show in any dis­cus­sion from now on… I solemnly swear that I will never use the “I am not an anti­semite, because Richard J. New­man said so!” card in any argu­ment with anybody!

    Ok.

    Just to clar­ify about my back­ground: It is not that I never encoun­tered any anti-semitic tropes as a grew up — I did, I was edu­cated about them and read about them later, quite exten­sively too. As I was also thouroughly edu­cated about Holo­caust in school. But I never saw or heard any of those tropes being used against any actual Jews, or spo­ken in earnest against Jews in gen­eral, whether in the media or in my “real life”. Ever. Like I said, it may be that I just wasn’t in those cir­cles where it hap­pened, so there­fore didn’t know. When­ever I heard of it as a phe­nom­e­non in the mod­ern world, it was referred to as some­thing hap­pen­ing else­where in the world.

    It may very well be that I was sub­jected to a kind of national pro­pa­ganda as a child — or self deceit (as in: “this kind of thing is hap­pen­ing in ugly racist soci­eties else­where, but not *here* in *our* coun­try any more, because we are so Good and Spe­cial. Yes, ugly things hap­pened here dur­ing the war, but that was in the past.”) — made pos­si­ble, per­haps, by the fact that the Jews are a com­par­a­tively small group in our coun­try, so not espe­cially threatening…

    Of course, the real per­sons to ask whether my expe­ri­ences are indeed a result of actual anti­semitism made invis­i­ble in my soci­ety as I grew up, so part of a struc­tural anti­semitism, or if it really *was* rel­a­tively scarce here in those days, would not be me, but the Jew­ish of the same age as me in my country.

  12. Pingback: Alas, a blog » Blog Archive » What We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) When We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) antisemitism and Israel - 2

  13. I wanted to thank Kristin and Tor­rill for con­tin­u­ing to engage this issue. Kristin, I had a num­ber of thoughts about Chris­t­ian Zion­ism and whether it’s anti­se­mitic, but I left them over at Daisy’s place because it seemed more ger­maine to her post and I didn’t know if that’s a topic Richard planned on tak­ing on.

  15. http://​daisys​deadair​.blogspot​.com/​2​0​0​9​/​0​1​/​m​o​r​e​-​o​n​-​i​s​r​a​e​l​-​g​a​z​a​-​a​n​t​i​s​e​m​i​t​i​s​m​-​a​n​d​.​h​t​m​l​?​s​h​o​w​C​o​m​m​e​n​t​=​1​2​3​2​5​6​0​6​2​0​000

    As you’ll see in my com­ment, I have a pretty strong inter­est in the sub­ject because I’m mar­ried into a fam­ily of evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians includ­ing Chris­t­ian Zion­ists. I dis­agree with Daisy and Kristin that these folks are not anti­se­mitic, though it takes a dif­fer­ent form than the more com­monly known kinds.

  16. ching­ona: I’m not sure that I com­pletely agree that it’s not anti­se­mitic either. As I say here, I think it’s essen­tial­iz­ing in a way that isn’t eman­ci­pa­tory, what­ever it is. It seems clear to me that it doesn’t fit the “tra­di­tional” anti­se­mitic tropes that are being asso­ci­ated here (and there) with anti­semitism (like asso­ci­a­tions with money, bank­ing, schem­ing, etc.), but it is… Well, it’s an –ism of some sort, yeah. I’m not really qual­i­fied to judge whether it “counts” as anti­se­mitic or not, but I’m sure at least that it’s prob­lem­atic (and essen­tial­iz­ing in another way).

  17. Also – ching­ona, if you’re inter­ested in find­ing out more about this, the two books that I listed at Daisy’s blog are good.

  18. The argu­ment I’m mak­ing is that anti­semitism isn’t just those old tropes. It’s more than that. At least, it looks that way from where I sit.

    When I read up above that you never heard any­one say any­thing anti­se­mitic, every­one thought Jews were great, it just feels false. Not false like you’re lying, but false like they don’t really think we’re great.

    I think the other per­spec­tive I bring to this is that when I was a kid in Texas, I got a lot of the “Christ-killer” stuff. I never got the money stuff there but I def­i­nitely got the Christ-killer, so I think I’m pre­dis­posed to be sus­pi­cious of Chris­tians’ views of Jews. I’m actu­ally amazed that you say you never heard stuff like that.

    Thanks for the rec­om­men­da­tions (though you don’t have to con­vince me of the dan­ger rep­re­sented by the Chris­t­ian Right).

  19. Hey ching­ona: i responded to you more over there on Daisy’s blog. You must have an inter­est­ing per­spec­tive on this – I’d love to see a post from you too. To be clear, I’m not com­pletely in agree­ment with Daisy over there, but I am in agree­ment with the over­all point she’s making.

  20. I saw that. I responded to her and started to respond to you, but I think I’m piss­ing her off, and it’s not my intent and I’m not part of her com­mu­nity, so I’m just going to talk to you here (sorry, Richard) instead of tromp­ing all over her blog.

    I’m sure there are a lot of peo­ple wouldn’t use the word anti­se­mitic — just that it’s prob­lem­atic or dehu­man­iz­ing or essen­tial­iz­ing or what­ever. It’s not like any of those words are good things, so I’m not wed­ded to anti­se­mitic, though I’ll con­tinue to per­ceive it that way.

    But I kind of dis­agree with you on this:

    I’m not unequiv­o­cally claim­ing that this can­not be con­sid­ered anti­se­mitic … I do think it’s clear that it’s not what we have been refer­ring to over on fem­i­niste (and on Richard’s blog) as “tra­di­tional” anti­semitism (it’s none of these “tra­di­tional” tropes hav­ing to do with greed, money, banks, etc.). It is…prejudice of some kind

    I think this is part of the sub­text that at least some of the com­menters were bring­ing into the dis­cus­sion at Fem­i­niste. I know I brought it into the conversation.

    Read­ing your first cou­ple com­ments on the top of this thread here made me real­ize just how much peo­ple really were talk­ing past each other on the Fem­i­niste thread. The words we’re using don’t mean the same thing to us. It sounds like you’re used to mov­ing in activist cir­cles that use words like Zion­ist one way and there were a bunch of peo­ple on the thread that use Zion­ist in a dif­fer­ent, broader, looser way. It was a real light­bulb moment for me when you wrote that you didn’t real­ize that Zion­ist could mean some­thing other than sup­port­ing the Israeli government’s poli­cies or that Zion­ist could be heard as a code word. And it was a real light­bulb moment when you said that being accused of anti­semitism made you feel like you were being called a Nazi. I don’t think I ever called you anti­se­mitic (if I did, I’m sorry), but when I was using that word on that thread, I def­i­nitely didn’t mean “Nazi.”

    I’m sure you’ve read Richard’s sec­ond post by now. It basi­cally says every­thing that I was hop­ing peo­ple might get out of dis­cussing anti­semitism and why dis­cus­sions about I/P seem to get so hor­rif­i­cally fraught between peo­ple who actu­ally agree on a bunch of stuff — like Pales­tini­ans are peo­ple too and peace depends on respect­ing their human rights and extend­ing full civil rights, lift­ing the Occu­pa­tion, etc.

    Sorry for hijack­ing your space here, Richard.

  21. I don’t feel hijacked at all. In fact, I was going to ask Kristin if she could dis­till for me what Daisy is try­ing to say. I found her very dif­fi­cult to read, but I think she is try­ing to say some­thing very impor­tant. While I have never lived in the south, I have had my share of run-ins with evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians, not a few of whom have given me the idealized-chosen-people line; it has always struck me as clas­si­cally anti­se­mitic (though in a very round­about way) in that it is, like an awful lot of explicit Chris­t­ian anti­semitism, rooted in the idea that the Jews were cho­sen and then made a fatal error in not accept­ing Jesus as the messiah.

    I rec­og­nize that Daisy is also try­ing to make a polit­i­cal point and that it is some­how con­nected to what she sees as a dou­ble stan­dard, but I was unable to fig­ure out just what that dou­ble stan­dard is. And this may be because it is late and I am tired. So I will stop here.

  22. Richard, if you have com­ments on what I’ve writ­ten, would love to hear em.

    Kristin, this state­ment, “I think it’s essen­tial­iz­ing in a way that isn’t eman­ci­pa­tory, what­ever it is.” – is quite brilliant.

    As I said in my post, I think a great deal of what Kristin and I describe, has to do with “sacred blood” – certainly a Chris­t­ian con­cept. But I’ve heard 3 fundies in 3 days rev­er­en­tially state some­thing like, “Jews/Israelis are related/kin to Our Lord” – and I really think this sen­ti­ment can’t be underestimated.

    Kristin: I knew about the Holo­caust and about the stereo­types that the Nazis asso­ci­ated with Jews, but I never heard any­one ever repeat them. I *did* hear Jews sub­jected to extremely essen­tial­iz­ing ide­al­iza­tion (largely these Chris­tians thought they could facil­i­tate the Armaged­don that they sought to bring about through the state of Israel. Chris­tians talk­ing about how Israel holds a “spe­cial place” in their hearts. Peo­ple like Sarah Palin who “love Israel.”). This is an insid­i­ous form of stereo­typ­ing, I think, but it isn’t the same as what has been delin­eated as tra­di­tional antisemitism.

    I don’t think this is as under­stand­able to peo­ple who don’t con­front it every day. Thank you for the val­i­da­tion of my com­ments. One of the three fundies I men­tion above, said she “loved Israel” too…and then I came here and read your com­ment. Major irony!

  23. I think she’s being defen­sive because of being trolled by Tfb, but I read her point basi­cally as just:

    The Chris­t­ian Right – not AIPAC – is the polit­i­cal power in the US that keeps the blank check flow­ing to the Israeli mil­i­tary. That David Schraub’s post speaks of Zion­ism in the US – and never men­tions the Chris­t­ian Right con­stituency that con­sti­tutes that vast major­ity of Amer­i­can “Zionists” – seems like a glar­ing hole in his dis­cus­sion. Then some­one like Tfb shows up sug­gest­ing that it’s accept­able to col­lude with the Chris­t­ian right on “prag­matic” grounds – some­thing that should also be a huge prob­lem for any­one engaged in what David calls “lib­er­a­tionist theory.”

    So, basi­cally… She thinks there needs to be more dis­cus­sion about the rela­tion­ship between Zion­ist Amer­i­can Jews and the Chris­t­ian Right. Tfb does seem to be align­ing her­self with them on the grounds of some­thing like, “It’s embar­rass­ing and dis­taste­ful but polit­i­cal expedient.”

    I think she’s pissed because she keeps being read as sym­pa­thetic with fun­da­men­tal­ist Chris­tians even though she isn’t.

    For me, it’s also impor­tant to note that the *only* peo­ple I have ever met who iden­ti­fied as Zion­ists were, in fact, fun­da­men­tal­ist Chris­tians. All of the Jews I’ve ever known, in fact, ran in sim­i­lar activist-y cir­cles and iden­ti­fied as “anti-Zionist.”

    chi­nonga – I’d like to hear more from you on this as well – as an Amer­i­can Jew with a fun­da­men­tal­ist Chris­t­ian family-in-law. Out in the real world, I real­ize that peo­ple who have not grown up in (or at least very close to) insu­lated fundie com­mu­ni­ties don’t really…get it. Like, at all. Despite their (the Chris­t­ian Right’s) per­se­cu­tion com­plex, they wield a lot – a *lot* – of polit­i­cal power in this coun­try – and still do. They own all of our paramilitary/private mil­i­tary orga­ni­za­tions (like Black­wa­ter). I think they’re the biggest threat to demooc­racy in this coun­try that there is, hands down.

    And I don’t think their sup­port of Israel should be accepted as a “nec­es­sary – if embar­rass­ing – evil.” Because it does come at the cost of the safety of the peo­ple of Israel and Pales­tine (They *are* try­ing to facil­i­tate Armaged­don, Left Behind series style, and most peo­ple in the region are expected to die in the process.).

    I said a bit more on this on your other post (part 2), but I’d be inter­ested in hear­ing more about your expe­ri­ences with these peo­ple as well.

  24. Daisy – Yeah, def­i­nitely. I think it’s… Well, in any case, I find that peo­ple who didn’t grow up in these kinds of cir­cles and/or come into very inti­mate con­tact with it on a daily basis – have a dif­fi­cult time grasp­ing the stran­gle­hold that the Chris­t­ian Right has on Amer­i­can pol­i­tics. And they end up think­ing I sound para­noid about it, but well…

    There’s a rea­son Obama has pledged to main­tain the faith based ini­tia­tives pro­gram, even though it has served (pri­mar­ily) as a front for fun­nel­ing money to far-right evan­gel­i­cal orga­ni­za­tions… He has to appease the Chris­t­ian Right to some extent. I’d ven­ture it’s also why he asked Rick War­ren to deliver then invo­ca­tion and why he issued some a dire warn­ing to mis­be­hav­ing “Mus­lim nations” in the world com­mu­nity. Sixty per­cent of this country’s cit­i­zens don’t believe in evo­lu­tion, and that kinda begs the ques­tion, “What *else* do they believe/not believe in?”

  25. Daisy, did I men­tion this yet in this con­ver­sa­tion? Right after 9/11, I heard a Chris­t­ian pas­tor give a prayer ser­vice. I thought it’d be fairly apo­lit­i­cal: “Let’s love and pray for each other blah blah blah…” But the pas­tor said, “Any­one gets in the way of the peo­ple of God, and it’s gonna be bloody.”

    I walked out and later asked him to clar­ify – he was refer­ring to Amer­i­cans and Israelis. We’re the “Cho­sen Peo­ple of God,” as the expla­na­tion goes. I explained very nicely then that he would never see me again.

  26. Also, chi­nonga:

    “The words we’re using don’t mean the same thing to us.”

    Yeah, I’m def­i­nitely real­iz­ing that.

  27. That David Schraub’s post speaks of Zion­ism in the US – and never men­tions the Chris­t­ian Right con­stituency that con­sti­tutes that vast major­ity of Amer­i­can “Zionists” – seems like a glar­ing hole in his discussion.

    What I would say here, though, is that David is Jew­ish and approaches Zion­ism as a Jew. I can’t speak for him, but I wouldn’t be sur­prised if he sees Chris­t­ian Zion­ism as both prob­lem­atic and A PROBLEM, but basi­cally tan­gen­tial to Zion­ism as he under­stands it and relates to it. When he said he defines Zion­ism as basi­cally the idea that it’s good that the Jew­ish state exists, a lot of peo­ple got really upset. It prob­a­bly sounded like he was try­ing to obscure the vio­lence that has been wreaked in the name of Zion­ism and Zion­ism as it has been deployed by the Israeli gov­ern­ment. But in my own expe­ri­ence, a very large per­cent­age of Amer­i­can Jews agree with David that hav­ing a Jew­ish state is a good thing, at least in the­ory, and iden­tify as Zion­ist by that def­i­n­i­tion, includ­ing many who strongly oppose Israeli gov­ern­ment policies.

    I’m really, really, really not try­ing to open up the dis­cus­sion about whether Zion­ism is jus­ti­fied — I think both sides were pretty well hashed out on that Fem­i­niste thread. I’m talk­ing lan­guage and per­spec­tives here, not con­clu­sions and policies.

    Chris­t­ian Zion­ists cer­tainly are the vot­ing block and the power struc­ture being appealed to with the U.S.‘s pol­icy toward Israel. Jew­ish votes may mat­ter in New York and Florida, and the elec­toral col­lege may give us a lit­tle more heft, but quite frankly there just aren’t enough of us. And fiercely pro-Israel, no mat­ter what, Jews give cover to the Chris­t­ian Zionists.

    But when most Jews think about Zion­ism, I think Chris­t­ian Zion­ists are the fur­thest thing from their minds. One thing I think David asked for that I would agree with (if I read him right) is to ask peo­ple to engage with why some Jews sup­port Zion­ism, which is the safety issue that Richard dealt with really well in the sec­ond post. It sounds like you know a lot of Jews who are involved with peace work and iden­tify as anti-Zionist, so it’s prob­a­bly a shock to you to real­ize there are a whole lot of other Jews who hear “anti-Zionist” and actu­ally hear “anti-Jewish safety.” (And I apol­o­gize if I’m mis­char­ac­ter­iz­ing — this is what I’m gath­er­ing from your com­ments.) But that’s what they hear. Some­times it’s what I hear. I’m work­ing on that. I really am.

    In your first com­ment, you wrote: “My oppo­si­tion to Zion­ism (and par­tic­u­larly to the Chris­t­ian Zion­ism) that I have encoun­tered so much more often – has noth­ing at all to do with Jews.” When I first read that, it actu­ally really offended me. I hope you don’t get defen­sive, because I know you didn’t mean it an offen­sive way and after read­ing it three or four times, I think I actu­ally mis­read it the first time. I now think that what you’re say­ing is that your oppo­si­tion is not moti­vated by your feel­ings toward Jews. But when I first read it, I thought you were say­ing “the Jews have noth­ing to do with this. This is a Chris­t­ian thing.” And that felt to me like you were just dis­ap­pear­ing the Jews out of the dis­cus­sion. I felt sim­i­larly on that Fem­i­niste exchange with Julie over the ety­mol­ogy of anti­semitism. When you asked “why not just use big­otry?” I felt to me like you were try­ing to erase an entire his­tory and per­spec­tive from the dis­cus­sion. And I think it’s fair for David to say that no, the Jews need to be in the dis­cus­sion, and not just the anti-Zionist Jews.

    Not that we can send a rep­re­sen­ta­tive, and even if we did, it wouldn’t do much good. I don’t know if you’ve heard the expres­sion “One Jew, two opin­ions.” We are a con­tentious bunch, if I may indulge in one stereo­type, but it’s also an aspect of Jew­ish­ness that I’m very proud of.

    I bring these things up now not to put you on the defen­sive and cer­tainly not to attack you, but since we seem to be com­mu­ni­cat­ing a bit bet­ter than before (on Fem­i­niste), just to point out some areas that got my spidey-senses tin­gling. Just some food for thought. Again, I’m talk­ing lan­guage and per­spec­tive, not pol­icy positions.

    Per­son­ally, I’m not com­fort­able iden­ti­fy­ing as a Zion­ist because it’s become so asso­ci­ated with mil­i­tarism, but I’m not com­fort­able call­ing myself anti-Zionist. I just can’t do it. Post-Zionist? Azion­ist? Non-Zionist? No, I’ll just keep writ­ing com­ments that test the lim­its of the form.

  28. Out in the real world, I real­ize that peo­ple who have not grown up in (or at least very close to) insu­lated fundie com­mu­ni­ties don’t really…get it.

    I guess it depends on who you talk to. As long as I have been polit­i­cally aware, maybe since mid­dle school, I have been extremely fright­ened of the Chris­t­ian Right and every­one in my fam­ily is, a lit­tle bit as Jews but really — almost entirely — as sec­u­lar­ists. I think I had such a bad opin­ion of evan­gel­i­cals that when I first met my in-laws I almost expected them to have horns. But they were (and are) very nice peo­ple on an indi­vid­ual level. I just find their pol­i­tics abhor­rent. I have a pretty intense anthro­po­log­i­cal inter­est in evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tian­ity and the dif­fer­ences between dif­fer­ent strains. It might be old hat to you but “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory” by Ran­dall Balmer is a great on this and comes with just the right mix of clear-headedness and sym­pa­thy, as some­one who grew up evan­gel­i­cal and now strad­dles the fence — not able to com­mit to it but still drawn to it. It’s funny because my hus­band and I in some ways are from the same Amer­i­can sub­cul­ture — dis­af­fected sub­ur­ban punk rock youth — but in other ways, I feel like we’re in a cross-cultural rela­tion­ship. And I actu­ally say that pri­mar­ily as some­one who is very sec­u­lar, but I think being Jew­ish gives an added com­plex­ity to it. To really muddy the waters, my in-laws have started attend­ing a church where the pas­tor is a Jew­ish con­vert who still con­sid­ers him­self Jew­ish — a Mes­sianic Jew — and tells them that he is what a “real Jew” looks like. Oh, and yes, he is a Chris­t­ian Zionist.

  29. Kristin, Just to fol­low up (quickly: I know I said in my other com­ment that I have work to do) on chingona’s com­ment on this state­ment by you:

    That David Schraub’s post speaks of Zion­ism in the US – and never men­tions the Chris­t­ian Right con­stituency that con­sti­tutes that vast major­ity of Amer­i­can “Zionists” – seems like a glar­ing hole in his discussion.

    I think ching­ona is right to point out that David is respond­ing to Zion­ism as a Jew. I would go one step fur­ther and say that, while the point you make is impor­tant and nec­es­sary and cor­rect if you want to talk polit­i­cally about “fol­low­ing the money,” etc., I find the whole notion of Chris­t­ian Zion­ist – at least as you are talk­ing about it – to be an oxy­moron. I don’t know who coined the term, but if it was the evan­gel­i­cals, then that feels to me like good ol’ fash­ioned cul­tural appro­pri­a­tion and it needs to be chal­lenged on those terms. This is an idea that needs to be unpacked a good deal more, since it’s not that I think one has to be Jew­ish to be Zion­ist (in the sense of sup­port­ing a Jew­ish state), but the idea that one sup­ports Jew­ish state­hood to the end of elim­i­nat­ing that state to facil­i­tate the end times (if I have that cor­rect) is anti­thet­i­cal to Zion­ism period. Again, I am not ques­tion­ing the impor­tance of deal­ing with evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian sup­port for Israel and every­thing that implies, but to call that sup­port Zion­ism and to ask some­one like David, or me, or ching­ona for that mat­ter, who is wrestling with ques­tions of Zion­ism as a mat­ter of iden­tity, to try to incor­po­rate a response to Chris­t­ian Zion­ism, as if it were sim­ply another fla­vor of Zionism-as-part-of-Jewish-identity is to ask us, and I am say­ing this very awk­wardly because I am typ­ing so fast, to turn the notion of Zion­ism itself into a con­tra­dic­tion in terms.

  30. ching­ona and Richard: I’ll respond more later, but I’m run­ning late for now.

    ching­ona:

    “In your first com­ment, you wrote: “My oppo­si­tion to Zion­ism (and par­tic­u­larly to the Chris­t­ian Zion­ism) that I have encoun­tered so much more often – has noth­ing at all to do with Jews.” When I first read that, it actu­ally really offended me. I hope you don’t get defen­sive, because I know you didn’t mean it an offen­sive way and after read­ing it three or four times, I think I actu­ally mis­read it the first time. I now think that what you’re say­ing is that your oppo­si­tion is not moti­vated by your feel­ings toward Jews. But when I first read it, I thought you were say­ing “the Jews have noth­ing to do with this. This is a Chris­t­ian thing.””

    You’re right – it was about how my feel­ings about Zion­ism are not moti­vated by bad feel­ings about Jews. I should’ve been more clear.

    I think this is fair too:

    “When you asked “why not just use big­otry?” I felt to me like you were try­ing to erase an entire his­tory and per­spec­tive from the discussion.”

    So, I prob­a­bly should’ve said more about it. Julie had been explain­ing how racism as a con­struct doesn’t quite fit with anti­semitism and isn’t all that descrip­tively help­ful when it comes to talk­ing about these things. My ques­tion was merely seman­tic, though I should’ve clar­i­fied there: “Well, the word big­otry doesn’t have the same intu­itive mean­ing as racism nec­es­sar­ily, wrt assump­tions that race is out­wardly obvi­ous… What about that?” I wasn’t dis­agree­ing with the notion of “anti­semitism” as a con­cept, just won­der­ing about the claim that no other descrip­tive term “worked” that I saw crop­ping up there. And I was frus­trated with that thread, which had attempted to open dis­cus­sion about Arab women’s expe­ri­ences of oppres­sion, but well… That never got off the ground. So, I was being fairly terse.

    Richard: I think it prob­a­bly was Chris­t­ian evan­gel­i­cals who coined the term “Chris­t­ian Zion­ists.” I have mostly seen it used in aca­d­e­mic dis­courses about Domin­ion­ist Chris­tians who iden­tify as such. You’re right – it’s not “another fla­vor of Zion­ism.” I *do* think that it dom­i­nates or at least strongly influ­ences the way in which Zion­ism is under­stood in gen­eral in this coun­try, and while I can see why it would be unnec­es­sary in a con­ver­sa­tion only among Jews, well, if his aim is edu­ca­tion… Any­way, what you’re say­ing makes sense, but it’s easy to read that omis­sion (prob­a­bly unfairly) as: “Well, that’s an embar­rass­ing but polit­i­cally nec­es­sary polit­i­cal alliance innit.”

    In any case, though, agreed. It does seem like cul­tural appro­pri­a­tion. But it has also strongly influ­enced my views/opinions/understanding of “Zion­ism” as such – and prob­a­bly those of many other Amer­i­cans, given how dom­i­nant it is. It’s been rammed down my throat a few too many times: “Oppo­si­tion to the poli­cies of the state of Israel is oppo­si­tion to God’s Cho­sen Peo­ple, and any­way, the Jews are our broth­ers and sis­ters and have a spe­cial role in the End Times des­ig­nated in the book of Rev­e­la­tion.” That’s basi­cally how it goes.

  31. Kristin:

    I *do* think that [Chris­t­ian Zion­ism] dom­i­nates or at least strongly influ­ences the way in which Zion­ism is under­stood in gen­eral in this country

    Can you send me to sources/documentation of this? I would love to see it.

  32. And I was frus­trated with that thread, which had attempted to open dis­cus­sion about Arab women’s expe­ri­ences of oppres­sion, but well… That never got off the ground.

    I shared that frus­tra­tion, which is one rea­son I didn’t go par­tic­i­pate in that thread, espe­cially after get­ting so caught up in the other one.

    But I do think it speaks to why what seems like seman­tics actu­ally mat­ters. State­ments like “How can we be anti-Semites when we’re Semi­tes our­selves?” just raise hack­les because a lot of peo­ple think that sounds igno­rant and then they don’t lis­ten to the rest of it. I don’t hold it per­son­ally against the women who wrote that — to have your very iden­tity asso­ci­ated with big­otry and ter­ror­ism every­where you turn would be an incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult expe­ri­ence, and I wish their story could have been heard bet­ter. I gather that Lau­ren isn’t Jew­ish (am I wrong?), but if she were, maybe she would have picked a dif­fer­ent quote from the piece to start the dis­cus­sion. (Which is not to say that peo­ple couldn’t have backed away from the key­board, counted to 10 and re-engaged with it. They could have and maybe they should have. But cer­tain phrases tend to set peo­ple off and make them ques­tion the motives of the per­son using them, and that def­i­nitely is one of them.)

  33. As for Chris­t­ian Zion­ism, do you think that really is the rea­son most Amer­i­cans are sup­port­ive of Israel? It’s always seemed to me like it’s more gen­eral racism toward Arabs/Muslims, and a sense that Israel is sim­i­lar to the United States as a coun­try set­tled by pio­neers, fight­ing a com­mon enemy, etc. I tend to see Christ­sian Zion­ism as very influ­en­tial in pulling the levers of power in the Repub­li­can Party and team­ing up with AIPAC in lob­by­ing, but not that rel­e­vant to the aver­age per­son on the street’s view of Israel. In the (admit­tedly small) office where I work, I’m the only Jew­ish per­son and def­i­nitely by a very wide mar­gin the most crit­i­cal of Israeli pol­icy, when these things come up. But if I were to start talk­ing about Chris­t­ian Zion­ism, I would be met with blank stares, and if I explained it to them, I think they would be appalled. I think they think of it as “What’s Israel to do? It’s not like you can rea­son with those peo­ple” or “Those peo­ple only under­stand force,” not as some vision of Cho­sen Peo­ple and bring­ing about the Sec­ond Coming.

  34. I’ve never slung the word “Jew” around so much as I have in these dis­cus­sions. I always say that I’m Jew­ish, and often feel really uncom­fort­able when peo­ple are iden­ti­fied as “a Jew.” Like when Leiber­man was on the 2000 ticket and peo­ple wrote that he was the first Jew to be nom­i­nated for vice pres­i­dent. It made me cringe every time I read it. I pre­fer Jew­ish because it’s one aspect of who I am or who any­one is, but say­ing some­one is a Jew sounds like that’s all they are, and noth­ing more.

    I’ve been using Jew because writ­ing Jew­ish peo­ple over and over gets tire­some. Jew is shorter. But when­ever some­one says “Jew,” part of me hears it as an insult. (Did you eat? No, Jew.) And I think it’s inter­est­ing, for lack of a bet­ter word, that the very name of what we are can be an insult. You don’t need to reach for words like Heeb or Kike. Just say “Jew” in the right tone of voice, and it’s an insult.

    This isn’t really addressed to any­one in par­tic­u­lar, just a ran­dom thought.

  35. Richard: I’m busy all day, but I’ll try to come up with some doc­u­men­ta­tion tonight. I may not be entirely cor­rect – it may have more to do with geo­graph­i­cal region (In the South, Chris­t­ian Zion­ism is *def­i­nitely* the rea­son for the sup­port of Israel.). Any­way, yes, I’ll list some things later this evening.

    ching­ona: In response to your ques­tion. I’ll say more tonight when I get home, but, well… I think the answer is com­pli­cated. I don’t think it’s all about anti-Arab racism because anti-Arab racism was not always nearly as vir­u­lent as it became after 9/11. I think it has a lot to do with a per­ceived sim­i­lar­ity in the found­ing myths/histories. We have a pretty firmly entrenched sense of “civic reli­gion,” and many Amer­i­cans see this coun­try as a kind of “promised land.” Con­fla­tions are made all over the place that link the two narratives.

    I think it’s the so-called Chris­t­ian Zion­ists who are most politically…influential in all of this. I’ll asy more about this when I get home.

  36. I think it has a lot to do with a per­ceived sim­i­lar­ity in the found­ing myths/histories. We have a pretty firmly entrenched sense of “civic reli­gion,” and many Amer­i­cans see this coun­try as a kind of “promised land.” Con­fla­tions are made all over the place that link the two narratives.

    This makes a lot of sense to me. In fact, in think­ing about where I was on Israel and where I am, I’ve real­ized that I bought into a lot of found­ing myths about Israel in a way that I never, ever did about the United States.

  37. Richard…you totally shouldn’t have linked over at fem­i­niste! Now I’m going to feel invited to par­tic­i­pate! :)

    My expe­ri­ence with fundies in par­tic­u­lar is sim­i­lar to Kristin’s, although I did hear some anti­se­mitic com­ments from time to time. So I’ve also expe­ri­enced what has been referred to as Chris­t­ian Zion­ists (that term was used often in my child­hood). So I sus­pect we have sim­i­lar rea­sons for our sus­pi­cion of US involve­ment in Israel. [Note par­tic­u­larly, that I am not sus­pi­cious of Israel itself, just of US involve­ment in Israel.]

    It’s some­thing I con­sider deeply trou­bling and by def­i­n­i­tion anti­se­mitic. The fun­da­men­tal ele­ments of the evan­gel­i­cal move­ment expect and desire that Jew­ish peo­ple die. They want mas­sive apoc­a­lyp­tic lev­els of death. Now I don’t believe for a moment that such an event is “fore­told” or that there is some prophecy being ful­filled. How­ever, I believe that if a group of peo­ple with power believe in a prophecy badly enough they may cre­ate cir­cum­stances under which they make it come true.

    This fright­ens me with respect to Israel and Pales­tine in par­tic­u­lar because it feels to me as if the US is inten­tion­ally cre­at­ing an explo­sive situation.

    Ching­ona,

    Yes I do think the fundies are more pow­er­ful than we typ­i­cally think them to be. If you read Sharlet’s The Fam­ily you might change your mind about how much influ­ence fundies have in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics. That is one seri­ously dis­turb­ing expose.

    But more impor­tantly, I do think that even the less rep­re­hen­si­ble (oops, did I say…why yes I did!) strains of Chris­tian­ity have a sim­i­lar refrain. Per­haps they don’t openly pray for the Armaged­don like the fundies do (or have a book that describes it in detail!), but there is this vague intu­ition that Israel must exist for the Sec­ond Coming.

    Cer­tainly, I don’t think that’s the only rea­son. For exam­ple my grand­fa­ther sup­ported the cre­ation of Israel (and basi­cally every action Israel might pos­si­bly take) because of his expe­ri­ences. He was a WWII vet that helped to lib­er­ate a con­cen­tra­tion camp and never fully recov­ered from the expe­ri­ence (PTSD that con­tin­ued until his death sadly). In his opin­ion, noth­ing the world could ever do would make up for what we (as a world com­mu­nity) allowed to happen.

    While I’m not sure all Amer­i­cans would com­pletely agree with my grand­fa­ther, I do think there is some con­scious or uncon­scious feel­ing of guilt that we didn’t act sooner and that we turned away those refugees that came to us in search of a safe haven. If that makes sense.

    Of course that may also be regional or gen­er­a­tional. Given yours and Richard’s expe­ri­ences as a child it seems like some peo­ple thought it was per­fectly accept­able to be assholes.

    Also, I’ve also always been uncom­fort­able using the word “Jew” to define someone…thank you for finally help­ing me clar­ify part of why. (The other part is that I’ve heard it used as an insult, so I never wanted the word to come out of my mouth the same way it came out of some asshat’s mouth.)

  38. Over at Daisy’s, I referred to a fight I had with my father-in-law. Let me share what he actu­ally said. Per­haps it will help explain why I think Chris­t­ian Zion­ism is actively hos­tile to Jew­ish interests.

    He said the rea­son all this “strife” is going on is because back in the day, when God gave the land to the Israelites, he told them to kill every­one liv­ing there. And they dis­obeyed him and inter­mar­ried with the peo­ple liv­ing in the land. They were pun­ished with the Dias­pora and all that entailed — every humil­i­a­tion and every tor­ture, every pogrom, every per­son burned at the stake, up to and includ­ing the Holo­caust — was part of God’s pun­ish­ment of the Jews for dis­obey­ing his order to com­mit geno­cide some 3,000 years ago. Now, the Jews have reestab­lished Israel, which is good, but they still haven’t fully com­plied with God’s will. They have not occu­pied the his­toric bound­aries of Israel described in surveyor’s detail in the Bible, and they have not com­pletely removed the Canaan­ites (the Pales­tini­ans) from the land. Until they do so, they will con­tinue to suf­fer. Once they com­ply with God’s will, they will all see the light and accept the love of Jesus.

    For dis­put­ing this — not, at first, from a Jew­ish per­spec­tive, but from the per­spec­tive of “I can’t believe I’m sit­ting at a table with some­one advo­cat­ing genocide” — I was told that I was spit­ting in God’s face and being incon­sis­tent with my beliefs. (Appar­ently he’s under the mis­taken belief that most Jews see the Bible as the lit­eral word of God. I’m not espe­cially reli­gious as it is, and Reform and even Con­ser­v­a­tive aren’t exactly Bib­li­cal lit­er­al­ists.) I tried a lot of dif­fer­ent tac­tics. If the Bible is so clear, why do the ultra-Orthodox oppose Zion­ism? What about the Chris­t­ian Pales­tini­ans? He wasn’t hav­ing any of it. His Chris­t­ian Jew­ish pas­tor — the “real Jew, cir­cum­sized in the spirit not in the flesh” — told him so and he read it in the Bible. It’s not that he wants peo­ple to suf­fer or enjoys it. But these things are proph­e­sied and WILL come to pass.

    Cherry on top: This was the very last hour of our week­long Christ­mas visit. We had a 14-hour drive home, so lots and lots of time to talk about it and think about it amongst our­selves. In my argu­ment, I was focused on the impli­ca­tions of what he said for the Pales­tini­ans. On the drive home, I real­ized that what he was say­ing about the Jews was pretty damn bad, too. God wants chil­dren to be blown up on buses and in cafes to goad the Israelis into ful­fill­ing his divine will. And then I had a thought: How many peo­ple in the Bush admin­is­tra­tion think exactly like my father-in-law does?

  39. Ching­ona, let me also sug­gest Harold Bloom’s THE AMERICAN RELIGION, kind of schol­arly but gives you an excel­lent idea about the way Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tian­ity has kinda merged with the whole new-age Gnos­ti­cism vibe… in his opin­ion it has pro­duced a new “Amer­i­can religion” – dunno if I agree with that, but he’s so much fun to read!

    Read it, keep­ing the fig­ure of Rick War­ren (and ilk) in mind… he wrote it long before War­ren was a house­hold name, yet seemed to antic­i­pate his entry onto the world stage.

  41. Apolo­gies for dis­ap­pear­ing from the con­ver­sa­tion. I’ve just started teach­ing my own uni­ver­sity classes for the first time… Am a lit­tle overwhelemed.

    But… So, two books:

    Michelle Goldberg’s King­dom Com­ing is about the rise of Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism in the US and men­tions Chris­t­ian “Zion­ism” extensively.

    Also, Chris Hedges wrote a book called Chris­t­ian Fas­cists. I don’t think it’s as good, but it also doc­u­ments some of these things.

    Wendy Brown (a polit­i­cal the­o­rist) pub­lished a cou­ple of arti­cles over the past few years in which she talks about the rela­tion­ship of the Chris­t­ian Right to Amer­i­can pol­i­tics (and specif­i­cally for­eign pol­icy). She also touches on this in her book, Reg­u­lat­ing Aver­sion: Tol­er­ance in the Age of Iden­tify and Empire.

    I’ll try to come up with a cou­ple of other things over the next few days. It’s just… My time on the inter­nets is prob­a­bly going to be a bit limited.

  42. By the way, I’ll post other sources of doc­u­men­ta­tion as I remem­ber them. Domin­ion­ist Chris­tian­ity is not a topic that I research aca­d­e­m­i­cally, in gen­eral, because it’s a lit­tle too depress­ing – and close to home.

    The book on Black­wa­ter is also fairly infor­ma­tive as I recall. That’s Jeremy Scahill’s Black­wa­ter: The World’s Most Pow­er­ful Mer­ce­nary Army.

  43. This web­site has a num­ber of links and an entire sec­tion on Chris­t­ian Zionism:

    http://​www​.theoc​ra​cy​watch​.org/

    They give some basics on Chris­t­ian Zion­ism and also have a list of links:

    http://​www​.theoc​ra​cy​watch​.org/​c​h​r​i​s​t​i​a​n​_​z​i​o​n​i​s​m​.​htm

    Israel

    Estab­lish­ment of the State of Israel was seen by Chris­t­ian Zion­ists as ful­fill­ment of God’s Covenant with Abra­ham. In con­trast, it was seen by most Jew­ish Zion­ists as a place where Jews would be safe. To read about the estab­lish­ment of Israel, click here.

    The early sec­u­lar gov­ern­ment of Israel agreed, for prac­ti­cal rea­sons, to leave the ancient Jew­ish lands of Samaria and Judea out of its bor­ders. To read more about Israel’s pre-1967 bor­ders, click here.

    After the War of 1967, which Israel won in just six days, Israel occu­pied the ancient Jew­ish lands of Samaria and Judea in the West Bank along with the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Desert to the South, the Golan Heights in the North. and all of the city of Jerusalem. That war was seen by Chris­t­ian Zion­ists and some ultra-orthodox Jews as a sign that God was fur­ther ful­fill­ing His promise to Abra­ham. To read more about the War of 1967, click here.

    To read a chronol­ogy of set­tle­ment growth, click here.
    Likud And Falwell

    Gov­ern­ment sup­port of set­tle­ment build­ing accel­er­ated dra­mat­i­cally in 1977 when Men­achem Begin became Prime Min­is­ter. Begin’s ultra­na­tion­al­ist notions had made him a fig­ure on the fringe for the first three decades of Israel’s exis­tence, but his Likud Party had finally come to power.

    Iron­i­cally, Begin won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1978, along with Pres­i­dent Anwar Sadat of Egypt, for sign­ing the Camp David Accords. Thanks to skill­fully man­aged nego­ti­a­tions on the part of U.S. Pres­i­dent Jimmy Carter, Begin agreed to return the Sinai desert to Egypt, but refused to dis­cuss the Jew­ish set­tle­ments in the West Bank and Gaza. And this is where our story begins — the same year that the Camp David Accords were signed.

    That year, 1978, Begin invited The Rev­erend Jerry Fal­well for his first offi­cial visit to Israel, and the fol­low­ing year, 1979, his gov­ern­ment gave Fal­well a gift — a Lear Jet.

    Begin’s tim­ing was per­fect. He began work­ing seri­ously with Chris­t­ian Zion­ists at the pre­cise moment that Chris­t­ian fun­da­men­tal­ists in Amer­ica were dis­cov­er­ing their polit­i­cal voice.

    The same year that Fal­well received his Lear Jet, 1979, he formed the Moral Major­ity, an orga­ni­za­tion that changed the polit­i­cal land­scape in the United States. What was Falwell’s inter­est in Israel? He was a Dis­pen­sa­tion­al­ist. Dis­pen­sa­tion­al­ism is a sys­tem of the­ol­ogy that believes the Jews must return to Israel as part of God’s plan for Christ to return. To read more about the his­tory of Dis­pen­sa­tion­al­ism, click here.
    An Expanded Israel

    In order to ful­fill Bib­li­cal prophecy, Dis­pen­sa­tion­al­ists have been work­ing hard to ensure that the world’s Jews return to Israel and occupy all of Pales­tine. To facil­i­tate that process, Dis­pen­sa­tion­al­ists have been lead­ing groups of pil­grims to Israel since Falwell’s first visit in order to win finan­cial and polit­i­cal sup­port for the Jew­ish set­tle­ments in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

    The late Grace Halsell, author of Prophecy and Pol­i­tics, par­tic­i­pated in two Falwell-led pil­grim­ages to Israel in 1983 and 1985, and quotes a fel­low Chris­t­ian pil­grim on the tour:

    “The Jews must own all of the land promised by God before Christ can return. The Arabs have to leave this land because this land belongs only to the Jews. God gave all of this land to the Jews.” (p.87)

    The late Ed MacA­teer, con­sid­ered to be the god­fa­ther of the Reli­gious Right, talked about his expan­sion­ist dreams for Israel in an inter­view on CBS’ 60 Min­utes: Zion’s Chris­t­ian Soldiers.

    “I believe that we are see­ing prophecy unfold so rapidly and dra­mat­i­cally and won­der­fully and, with­out exag­ger­at­ing, makes me breath­less. Every grain of sand between the Dead Sea, the Jor­dan River and the Mediter­ranean Sea belongs to the Jew.” When asked if that includes the West Bank and Gaza, his answer was “Every bit of it.”

  44. This, in par­tic­u­lar, in response to your spe­cific question:

    Influ­enc­ing Washington

    Akiva Eldar, jour­nal­ist for the Israeli news­pa­per Ha’aretz, claims that Chris­t­ian Zion­ists are pour­ing money into Israel. “But that’s not the only way they are sup­port­ing Israeli set­tle­ment of the West Bank.”

    The most impor­tant thing is that they have so much influ­ence in Wash­ing­ton, that they are so influ­en­tial in the White House and in Con­gress. (Bill Moyer’s NOW, June 6, 2003.)

    Jerry Fal­well told 60 Minutes:

    There are 70 mil­lion of us. And if there’s one thing that brings us together quickly it’s when­ever we begin to detect our gov­ern­ment becom­ing a lit­tle anti-Israel.

    Pas­tor John Hagee’s Cor­ner­stone Church raised $1 mil­lion dol­lars in 1977. When asked if he real­ized that sup­port of Likud’s poli­cies and the increase in Jew­ish set­tle­ments was at cross-purposes with US pol­icy, Hagee answered:

    I am a Bible scholar and a the­olo­gian, and from my per­spec­tive the law of God tran­scends the laws of the United States gov­ern­ment and the US State Department.

    The Vil­lage Voice, May 18, 2004, doc­u­mented that National Secu­rity Coun­cil Near East and North African Affairs direc­tor for Pres­i­dent George W. Bush, Elliott Abrams, actu­ally met with the Apos­tolic Con­gress, a dis­pen­sa­tion­al­ist orga­ni­za­tion, to dis­cuss their the­o­log­i­cal con­cerns. Three weeks after that meet­ing Pres­i­dent Bush reversed long-standing U.S. pol­icy, endors­ing Israeli sov­er­eignty over parts of the West Bank in exchange for Israel’s dis­en­gage­ment from the Gaza Strip.

    From Stephen Zunes, For­eign Pol­icy In Focus, June, 2004:

    It appears, then, that right-wing Chris­t­ian Zion­ists are, at this point, more sig­nif­i­cant in the for­mu­la­tion of U.S. pol­icy toward Israel than are Jew­ish Zion­ists, as illus­trated by three recent incidents.

    * After the Bush administration’s ini­tial con­dem­na­tion of the attempted assas­si­na­tion of mil­i­tant Pales­tin­ian Islamist Abdel Aziz Rantisi in June 2003, the Chris­t­ian Right mobi­lized its con­stituents to send thou­sands of e-mails to the White House protest­ing the crit­i­cism. A key ele­ment in these e-mails was the threat that if such pres­sure con­tin­ued to be placed upon Israel, the Chris­t­ian Right would stay home on Elec­tion Day. Within 24 hours, there was a notable change in tone by the pres­i­dent. Indeed, when Rantisi fell vic­tim to a suc­cess­ful Israeli assas­si­na­tion in April 2004, the administration-as it did with the assas­si­na­tion of Hamas leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin the pre­vi­ous month-largely defended the Israeli action.
    * When the Bush admin­is­tra­tion insisted that Israel stop its April 2002 mil­i­tary offen­sive in the West Bank, the White House received over 100,000 e-mails from Chris­t­ian con­ser­v­a­tives in protest of its crit­i­cism. Almost imme­di­ately, Pres­i­dent Bush came to Israel’s defense. Over the objec­tions of the State Depart­ment, the Republican-led Con­gress adopted res­o­lu­tions sup­port­ing Israel’s actions and blam­ing the vio­lence exclu­sively on the Pales­tini­ans.
    * When Pres­i­dent Bush announced his sup­port for the Road Map for Mid­dle East peace, the White House received more than 50,000 post­cards over the next two weeks from Chris­t­ian con­ser­v­a­tives oppos­ing any plan that called for the estab­lish­ment of a Pales­tin­ian state. The admin­is­tra­tion quickly backpedaled, and the once-highly touted Road Map essen­tially died.

  45. For­give my jump­ing in at this point in the con­ver­sa­tion (espe­cially as it seems to have moved on), but I feel impelled to inter­ject (in the most pedan­tic man­ner pos­si­ble). I would like to offer some clar­i­fi­ca­tion about the term “Zion­ist.” It seems that the dis­course about Israel/Palestine is impeded by con­fu­sion that sur­rounds this label, which is under­stand­ably con­tested. Real com­mu­ni­ca­tion is facil­i­tated, how­ever, by avoid­ing hav­ing one’s lan­guage col­o­nized by the rhetor­i­cal arti­fices of one inter­est group or another.

    Obvi­ously there is not one “Zion­ism” but a bevy of con­tend­ing Zionisms. Beyond these dis­tinct ide­olo­gies, “Zion­ism” has been appro­pri­ated col­lo­qui­ally as an abstrac­tion (for many Israelis “Zion­ist” sig­ni­fies all things good and vir­tu­ous, for many Arabs it con­notes all things wicked and oppres­sive). In this respect the term has been ren­dered so mul­ti­va­lent and vague as to be nearly sapped of all util­ity. Is there any resid­ual con­tent that is use­ful for polit­i­cal dis­course? “One form” through which all Zionisms may be indicated?

    David Schraub seems to have got it nearly right– to merit being called “Zion­ism” an ide­ol­ogy or con­cep­tual posi­tion must con­form to one cri­te­rion: Zion­ism entails a belief in the right of a Jew­ish state to exist. This basic stance unites all the var­i­ous fla­vors of Zion­ists we could iden­tify: from David Ben Gurion to Sarah Palin to the mem­bers of Kahane Chai. I would include myself among this very expan­sive group.

    Two things should be evi­dent if one con­tem­plates this under­stand­ing of Zionism:

    1)The belief in the right of a Jew­ish state to exist leaves vast room for dis­agree­ment among Zion­ists. Those of us who believe that a Jew­ish state right­fully exists within the pre-1967 bor­ders of Israel are as far apart from those in Kahane Chai (who believe in a Greater Israel that con­forms to the bound­aries of the king­dom of David and Solomon) as the moon is from the stars.

    2)The social sig­nif­i­cance of Zion­ism shifted pro­foundly in the cross­ing of the his­tor­i­cal thresh­old of 1948. Prior to that date Zion­ism was an abstract ideal the para­me­ters of which were lim­ited only by the imag­i­na­tion. Once a Jew­ish state actu­ally existed, how­ever, any com­mit­ment to its right to exist entailed the accep­tance of cer­tain estab­lished real­i­ties. Late 19th and early 20th cen­tury Zion­ists would have been happy to found Zion in Argentina or Uganda, which would have been fine by me. The fact that Zion is now in Israel has resulted in real tragedy (those alter­nate Zions may have as well, we’ll never know), but that has not shaken my com­mit­ment to Zion­ism in prin­ci­ple. That said, my being a Zion­ist does not imply any­thing about my opin­ion about Israeli state pol­icy, any more than my aver­ring that Amer­ica has a right to exist can be used to infer whether I voted for Barack Obama or John McCain.

    The shift in the social sig­nif­i­cance of Zion­ism after 1948 has con­tributed to con­fu­sion it causes in today’s polit­i­cal dis­course. When Israelis speak of “Zion­ism” in the abstract today, it means some­thing like “the spirit of ’76″ did to late 18th and early 19th cen­tury Amer­i­cans: the abstract per­sonal and polit­i­cal virtues embod­ied in the found­ing strug­gle of their Repub­lic. Of course, every Israeli politi­cian wants his or her pub­lic per­sona and pol­icy deci­sions to be per­ceived as “Zion­ist.” But this does not argue for the wis­dom of those of us out­side of Israel who would like to com­ment on Israeli pol­i­tics asso­ci­at­ing “Zion­ism” with the spe­cific poli­cies of Israel’s gov­ern­ment. To do so is com­pa­ra­ble to capit­u­lat­ing to Sarah Palin’s claims to speak for “real Amer­ica.” Any out­sider crit­i­ciz­ing U.S. pol­icy wield­ing Palin’s def­i­n­i­tion of “real Amer­ica” would alien­ate both those who agreed with her (who would not want to hear the U.S. crit­i­cized) and those who did not (who would be offended at being excluded from “real Amer­ica”). In the same way, cri­tiquing the inva­sion of Gaza (for exam­ple) as a “Zion­ist” pol­icy offends both those Israelis who sup­port the pol­icy and those (admit­tedly a minor­ity, if poll num­bers are to be believed) who do not, for whom Zion­ism is an unequiv­o­cal good.

    As for whether anti-Zionism is anti­semitism, I would assert that it is. Whether or not any nation has the “right” to exist is obvi­ously a philo­soph­i­cally com­plex issue, and even if one stip­u­lated that nations have a right to exist, the unique con­sti­tu­tion of Israel as a “Jew­ish state” raises eth­i­cal quan­daries. All of these con­cerns are eclipsed for me, how­ever, by the prac­ti­cal real­ity of the Holo­caust and its his­tor­i­cal impli­ca­tions. For bet­ter or worse, we live in a global sys­tem con­sti­tuted of sov­er­eign nation-states. For all the recent talk of an approach­ing “post­na­tional world,” events in places like Bosnia, Kosovo, Chech­nya, Iraq, and East Timor demon­strate that the nation-state remains the most robust and impor­tant entity in our geopo­lit­i­cal com­mu­nity. One only has to com­pare the plight of the Czechs or the Serbs to that of the Tibetans or the Kurds to under­stand the pro­found sig­nif­i­cance of national sov­er­eignty to the global stand­ing and com­mu­nal prospects of any given peo­ple. A world in which Israel existed would not have been a world in which the Holo­caust could have occurred, and the con­tin­ued exis­tence of Israel is the only sure safe­guard against the recur­rence of a Jew­ish geno­cide. This is the con­text in which one must under­stand the impli­ca­tions of anti-Zionism. Any oppo­si­tion to the right of Israel to exist is an exis­ten­tial threat, not merely to Israel itself, but to the Jew­ish peo­ple as a body and to Judaism itself in all its var­i­ous man­i­fes­ta­tions. Ergo anti-Zionism = antisemitism.

    I’m sorry if these last com­ments re-crossed ground that you have already cov­ered in other threads of this con­ver­sa­tion. Thanks, Rich for these very vivid and thought-provoking posts.

  46. Richard–
    I just read your orig­i­nal post, and some of the com­men­tary, and I am aghast! I was 2 years behind you in high school and never imag­ined that the peo­ple in my com­mu­nity would be so cruel. Igno­rant, sure – what were there, maybe half a dozen Jew­ish stu­dents and an equal num­ber of teach­ers in our high school (if that) – but the taunts and indig­ni­ties that you suf­fered were exam­ples of noth­ing less than hate. And in chil­dren that hate comes from their par­ents and com­mu­nity, because unless they are taught it, chil­dren know noth­ing about anti­semitism. It is to Joan’s credit that she sup­ported you against her father’s Holo­caust denial(and Joan I think turned out remark­ably well, con­sid­er­ing her father, it seems), but I fear she was an excep­tion.
    Mr. Giglio was another story; he had been a sem­i­nar­ian and almost went into the RC priest­hood, so I sus­pect he was com­ing from a dif­fer­ent, yet also mis­guided direc­tion. I knew noth­ing of the pen­nies, though I do recall anti­se­mitic com­ments made in pass­ing to other non-Jews. Grow­ing up Armen­ian, we always felt a con­nec­tion to the Jew­ish peo­ple, as we were both the vic­tims of geno­cide, but we are also fiercely Chris­t­ian, and I will admit to hav­ing encoun­tered some anti­se­mitic atti­tudes amongst the Arme­ni­ans I know. But in my fam­ily, prej­u­dice and intol­er­ance were, frankly, not tol­er­ated. Even hatred of Turks (pretty ram­pant among the Arme­ni­ans) was not accept­able to my par­ents. But get­ting back to your expe­ri­ences, those kids could not claim igno­rance, because at least start­ing in Junior High, we were taught about the Holo­caust, we read the diary of Anne Frank in Junior high school, we dis­cussed the major reli­gions of the world, and learned the his­tory of Israel. I know I did not have any obvi­ously anti­se­mitic teach­ers, though I can imag­ine there were a few. But that doesn’t account for the type of treat­ment you received. Admit­tedly, part of it was stan­dard youth intol­er­ance of “difference” – I’m sure if there were Mus­lim stu­dents, or sikhs, or even fun­da­men­tal­ist chris­t­ian stu­dents who dressed or acted dif­fer­ently from “every­one else” they would have been sin­gled out. But that is dif­fer­ent from spray paint­ing anti­se­mitic slo­gans in a library, the vio­lence and des­e­cra­tion. I do know the one or two African Amer­i­can stu­dents in our school also received sub­stan­tial abuse, and I always thought it was ridicu­lous that the way the school dis­tricts were laid out; African-american stu­dents who lived 2 blocks from our school had to go almost 2 miles to another school in our dis­trict. I have to face the fact that I group up in a pretty racist, anti­se­mitic neigh­bor­hood, and I am dis­gusted with myself that I was mostly unaware of how badly you were treated. I hope that the sit­u­a­tion is bet­ter for Jew­ish (and other minor­ity) chil­dren today, but I am not sure. I live in a sim­i­larly white/Catholic area to where I grew up, and some atti­tudes are sim­i­lar, though thank­fully we have a much more diverse pop­u­la­tion than our old neighborhood.

    I will make my way through all the com­men­tary here, it is very inter­est­ing! But I did want to reach across the years and apol­o­gize for my own obliv­i­ous­ness to what was going on, and, if I ever, in my igno­rance or mis­un­der­stand­ing, hurt or offended you, I offer my sin­cer­est apolo­gies. Per­son­ally, I remem­ber you as a smart and inter­est­ing guy who mys­te­ri­ously showed up dur­ing my sopho­more year.

  47. Well, per­haps, but I never would have found the post oth­er­wise. I stum­bled upon it look­ing for her! But you are right, just using her first name is prob­a­bly more appro­pri­ate. And you can edit this com­ment out if you like, too!
    I am very glad you are doing well and I am also glad to hear Flo­ral Park is dif­fer­ent now (I know it is more eth­ni­cally diverse). Some­times the “good old days” were def­i­nitely not so good! I look for­ward, when I have some time, to look­ing at all these posts and responses to see where my views fit into the spec­trum.
    All the best,
    John

  48. Pingback: Alas, a blog » Blog Archive » Iranian Experts Out Harry Potter as a Member of the World Zionist Conspiracy

  49. Pingback: feminist blogs » » What We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) When We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) antisemitism and Israel - 1

  50. Pingback: Richard Jeffrey Newman - J Street and Poetry and Jewish Poli­tics and Jewish Poets and Jewish Poe­tics and Holo­caust Tri­via­li­za­tion and Israel and Pales­tine and anti­se­mi­tism and How Can Cul­ture be a Tool for Change if You Won’t Let