On My Desk Now: Some Tentative Thoughts on Confronting Antisemitism in America

Last week, I attended an anti-antisemitism training workshop in my neighborhood cosponsored by Malkhut and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ). Broadly speaking, the training is part of JFREJ’s larger agenda of building solidarity with other marginalized communities who, as they put it on their website, share “a mutual interest in fighting white supremacist ideology.” More specifically, as one of the presenters described it to me, the goal of this particular training—the audience of which would be primarily Jewish—was to help Jews think about how to respond to antisemitism on the left in ways designed to build understanding, trust, and solidarity, rather than by writing off the people or organizations that expressed the antisemitism as irredeemable antisemites by definition.

I’m glad I went. It was good to sit in a room with other Jews and talk about legitimate concerns for Jewish safety without framing antisemitism as something transcendent and eternal, and I appreciated the way the group did not shy away from acknowledging the differences between antisemitism and other forms of hatred while at the same time rejecting the notion of a hierarchy of oppressions. We obviously did not solve anything during the couple of hours we spent together, but the discussion was thought-provoking in important ways, at least for me, and I thought I would share with you some of what I’ve been mulling over these past few days.

One of my ongoing frustrations with discussions of antisemitism in the United States, both within the Jewish community and in society at large, is that they are overwhelmingly framed by one of two contexts: the Holocaust or the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Either Hitler’s Final Solution is held up as the ultimate expression of antisemitism or antisemitism is defined as the real reason that anti-Zionists are anti-Zionist. These two contexts, of course, are not parallel. The Nazis were antisemitic by definition, while anti-Zionists are not. As lenses of analysis, however, they share a kind of historical blindness in that they each elide the history of institutionalized antisemitism in the United States. The JFREJ training did not share that blindness per se. We barely mentioned the Holocaust, and the presenters addressed the question of whether anti-Zionism is by definition antisemitism in a way that made clear it is not, without denying that some antisemites use anti-Zionism as a kind of camouflage. Nonetheless, I found myself wondering if a framing that more explicitly invoked the history of antisemitism in this country could help strengthen even further the kinds of solidarity JFREJ’s trainings are intended to build.