Recent expressions of antisemitism: An informal sampling

The list below represents some of the ways I've observed antisemitism expressed in my surroundings and the world. This is NOT a systematic list; these are the events I've just happened to stumble upon in the news, or which I directly experienced. As you read it, think about the thousands of antisemitic acts that are reported to Jewish agencies and human rights groups, which I have not attempted to note here - and the many others which never get reported, whose victims see reporting their experiences as futile.

Though most things here occurred in the past year or two, I've also recorded things I heard about several years ago. The point of writing it down is to remind myself, when I'm in doubt, that antisemitism is real; and it's not some isolated incident in one or two uniquely backward places; it remains widespread and it retains social power. This list is also to help us think about how we ought to define antisemitism as it is expressed in the 21st century.

The links next to articles may include the primary source, corporate media reports, articles by Jewish organizations/media, as well as popular expressions of antisemitism in more grassroots sites responses to the events.

-    April Rosenblum

updated 3/18/06

Institutional antisemitism, and antisemitism in the halls of power

Oct. 03 - Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad's speech to the Organization of the Islamic Conference (a summit of the world's Muslim leaders), in which he urged moderate political tactics by Muslims, both praised Jews' achievements and asserts that "the Jews run this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them," and that "they have now gained control of the most powerful countries."  Full text - ADL   http://www.aztlan.net/mahathir.htm  CNN coverage

Jan - March 05 - 20 MPs from Russia's parliament (from the Communist party and the nationalist Motherland party) plus 500 prominent Russians who signed on, delivered an open letter to the Russia's Prosecutor General asking that it ban all Jewish organizations in Russia. The letter centered on calling Judaism "anti-Christian and inhumane" and "extremist" and sought out distasteful passages in medieval Jewish texts to prove it. It renewed accusations of the Blood Libel, declaring that some of Judaism's "most zealous followers practicing ritual killings. Many cases of this ritual [killing of Christian babies] were also proved in court." In response to Jewish advocacy against the waves of physical attacks on Jews in Russia in recent years, the letter said that many Russian acts of antisemitism are provoked by "anti-Christian" behavior by Jews, or are organized by Jews themselves in order to bring Russian patriots under suspicion. It ended: "It can be said that today the whole democratic world is under financial and political control of the international Jewry, which a point of pride for prominent bankers... And we don't want our Russia...to become one of those countries that are not free." After intense political pressure, the request to ban all Jewish groups was retracted - but the accusations remain supported. Partial translation - NCSJ  NSCJ compilation of coverage

I heard of this story at the time through a Yiddish-language newspaper. When I tried various combinations of searches today (3/17/06) on CNN.com, the New York Times, BBC news & BBC online, I found almost *nothing* reported on it. But Jewish organizations - and white supremacists like David Duke who are applauding it - are well aware of the story's importance.  Coverage on David Duke's website  

July 05 - Argentina's current President, Nestor Kirchner, acknowledged that for the past 11 years, the Argentine government has not only not actively investigated, or pursued suspects in, the 1994 bombing of the country's central Jewish community center (AMIA) but has actually been destroying evidence. The bombing, which killed 86 people, was blamed on Iranian terrorism; Argentine Jews, however, have long pointed out reasons to suspect that members of the government were aware of, and possibly participated in, the bombing plans - not surprising in a country where the military's virulent antisemitism was a key part of government strategy as recently as the dictatorship that ended in 1983. Pagina12 (en espanol)

Aug. 05 - Ukraine's Conservative party asked President Yuschenko to open criminal proceedings against Chasidic "Judeo-Nazi" rabbis for teaching from a text described as racist in Jewish schools. The party was suported by MAUP, the largest private university in the Ukraine, which prints 70 percent of the antisemitic literature in the Ukraine and has 12 branches throughout the country. Founded by "prominent representatives of the Ukrainian ruling elite,” MAUP has given an honorary doctorate in history to David Duke, and hosted the conference he co-chaired, “Zionism as the Greatest Threat to Contemporary Civilization." JTA coverage   JTA on MAUP

Dec. 05 - Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, called the Holocaust a myth created by Jews (and that regardless, Palestinians shouldn't pay the price). In October, Ahmadinejad declared that Israel should be wiped off the map, in the midst of a widely-publicized effort to expand Iran's nuclear capabilities. BBC story

Early 2006 - In the wake of the riots against the Danish cartoons, denying, or "questioning" the Holocaust has become a standard way that critics of Europe's racism & Islamophobia propose to measure freedom of speech and fairness. The argument becomes, if you're really not prejudiced against Muslims, you'll be willing to question the Holocaust. Why would a test like this center around the torture of any oppressed group? And within that, why is it Jews which get picked?

Pakistan's president, General Pervez Musharraf, became a key international leader to make this part of his repetoire, in a Feb. 27th interview. Full text - BBC   Tehran's Hamshahri newspaper, which thanks to government subsidies is the most widely-read & distributed paper in Iran, responded to the cartoons by declaring an International Cartoon Competition on "What is the Limit of Western Freedom of Expression?" where debate was encouraged on "alleged historical events like the Holocaust" as a tactic to break the West's silencing of discussion about Western imperialism. Hamshahri's rules of entry

The U.S. Christian Right... Not sure how to characterize them; in some ways they clearly have institutional power, in other ways not; in some ways they're clearly antisemitic, in other ways just anti-everyone else who doesn't do as they do. Just as food for thought, harrassment of Jewish students at the U.S. Air Force Academy (Report from ReligiousTolerance.org  Rense.com's antisemitic posting on Air Force Academy)... the Dec. 2005 right-wing Christian furor over the White House's "holiday cards" and organized boycotts of major chain department stores who use the "Happy Holidays" slogan... And most importantly for international politics, the organized right-wing Christian Zionist movement, which exerts its political and financial strength to push for Israel's expansion, so that Armageddon and their messiah will come - with Jews converted, enslaved or consigned to the pits of hell. And all the Palestinians and Israelis who get killed in the conflict today are just collateral damage in the plan. TheocracyWatch on Christian Zionism  Excellent discussion on Talk2Action   One of Michelle Goldberg's many good pieces

Mass popular antisemitism

First off we have the constant destruction of Jewish cemeteries throughout Western and Eastern Europe. This is so commonplace, it hardly sounds like "news" when it happens. The people that died in the Holocaust didn’t get burials - so these cemeteries are largely from Jewish communities that existed before the war. In European towns where markers of Jewish life have often been almost completely erased, these cemetaries are often the few remaining signs of vibrant Jewish communities that once held millions of people. I think people on the Left, especially antiracists like me who think institutional racism is where the real story is at, often think of this as just harmless venting; it's not a sign of danger, because it’s not killing a Jew. But think about the impact it has on the Jews growing up there, how it is psychological warfare that impacts everything a Jewish child knows about themselves and the world. This is the message they grow up taking in: It’s not good enough that the Jews are already dead, we want to kill them worse. Or, We so want you dead that we wish we were the ones who had gotten to kill the ones in these graves.

Same thing with the intense amount of anti-Jewish graffiti in cities around the world. (See some images here)  When I was in Buenos Aires, Argentina, my Jewish friends didn't bat an eye at the graffiti all around us (I saw "Jews = IMF," "Media = Jews," "US = Jews," "TV = Jews," and the ever-appealing, "Liberate Us From the Jews" - and that was all in the average, middle-class neighborhoods); but they did take it more personally that antisemites targeted their own homes, in a "We know where you live" kind of phenomenon. Photos

Then there's the murders, and the targeted street attacks. I thought it was bad in January, when a 20-yo man entered a Moscow synagogue just before services, shouted, "I came to kill you!" and proceeded to randomly stab people. Eight people were injured but succeeded in subduing him. Exponent story  But that paled in comparison to the targeted kidnapping of 23-yo Moroccan-Parisian Jew Ilan Halimi by a gang who proceeded to torture him to death over three weeks. The group is charged with repeatedly sought out Jews for kidnappings, insisting that they knew Jews had money. Halimi's family - who couldn't afford to send him to college, let alone pay the ransom demanded - followed police instructions to remain passive, and were furious when he died and French police and media resisted labeling it an act of antisemitism. Intl Herald Tribune This is apparently the second targeted torture-murder of a French Jew in three years; but back in 2003, says the sister of 23-yo Sebastien Sellam, "No Jewish organization wanted to touch Sebastien's murder. Everyone was afraid to say it was anti-Semitic. Can you imagine the noise it would make all over if they'd recognize the murder as anti-Semitic? The whole country would be shocked. I'm sure their silence stemmed from political considerations." Ha'aretz story

People who are easily identifiable as Jewish are the ones most vulnerable to physical attack - noticeable Orthodox Jews like David Rosensweig, killed in Canada, or the Moscow rabbi whose 20-yo stabber told Russian TV; "Why did I try to kill him? That's a good question indeed... My motto isn't about fighting Jews, it's about fighting the evil that is Judaism." CNN story Within that, routine beatings and street intimidations of Jews, like the ones discussed in this ADL report on Russia. are still more the norm than murders. But there are other attacks designed to target Jews (or those who care about Jews) whether they're visible or not. At least 5 times in Russia in 2002, antisemitic signs ["Death to the Jews," etc.] were rigged with bombs and placed prominently in the middle of highways or roadsides throughout the country. The signs were designed so that those people who passed by and were upset enough about antisemitism to try to take the sign down got bombed when they did so. The victims suffered severe burns, eye injuries, and shrapnel wounds to the legs, among other injuries. BBC story

Consistent threats on Jewish spaces:  In 2003, I studied Yiddish in New York and was surprised to find metal detectors at the door of the Jewish Theological Seminary. When I mentioned to my friend, a Yiddish student from Russia, that I'd never seen this level of security before Sept. 11th, she said that Jewish buldings in Moscow have had to be equipped with them for as long as she could remember.JTA on worsening needs, 1/06 In Istanbul, Turkey, 27 people were killed & 300 injured when two synagogues were simultaneously car-bombed during services in November, 2003. BBC story  In Montreal a Jewish elementary school was firebombed in the middle of the night in April, 2004, destroying the school's library. CBC story  When I couldn't find the local synagogue in Fes, Morocco, locals figured it out by remembering where the building was where there was always an armed guard. In my visit to Buenos Aires in July '05, I was stunned by the amount of security at synagogues. Normally if you visit a synagogue from far away, people are excited to meet you and introduce you to everyone. In Buenos Aires' synagogues I had to go through a security interrogation before entering, and the congregation was required to leave the synagogue the minute services ended. The reality & frequency of the threats diminishes the natural community that grows out of a healthy synagogue.

It wasn't until I first started to really hang out in Jewish circles - general Jewish communities, not just the Jewish friends I've come to know through our shared social justice activism - that I got to know Jews my age from other countries & hear how different their experiences were. My friend Sonja's family stayed in Germany after the Holocaust, but she says there’s no future there for her - despite the fact that her family remains relatively safe by not making an open thing of their Jewishness, she can't bear the bigotry she lives with there. For her, it felt so different to be able to live for a time in Israel. You can see such a change in her face, how much more relaxed and happy she gets when I ask her where she would want to go, and she tells me Israel.

Traveling, too, shook me into awareness - partly from the conversations I had with non-Jews I met, like my classmate from the Midwest who studied Arabic with me in Morocco. She had lived in Egypt and saw Mein Kampf sold casually on the street. My German roommate at the hostel in Buenos Aires was equally casual in his stories of how often he meets regular people on the street in various countries - even in places like India that lack reputations for antisemitism - who are excited to meet someone from Germany, and congratulate him on what Hitler did. I couldn't believe it. And he wasn't prepared for how shocked I was. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are easy to buy in cities all over the world, and are known for selling out faster than they can be restocked. And my own experiences with people and places in Morocco left a deep change in my awareness of Jewish oppression.

In December, there was something close to home; a public menorah in South Philadelphia was knocked down from its high display and destroyed. Forward story But what strikes me as more dangerous, and more revealing of what popular antisemitism is in the U.S. today, are the rumors that get repeated in diverse places that September 11th was caused by Jews; or, statements made much more confidently that the U.S. war in Iraq is being waged for Israel - because surely the U.S. would never wage an unjust war for the U.S.' own ends! Or that in 2003, the movie that had America enraptured was a straight remake of the Passion Play story that used to be performed in Medieval Europe during Eastertime. Like clockwork, mob violence would break out against the local Jews, as a town's Christians learned from the Passion Play who was behind the death of their saviour.

For hundreds of thousands of people, it hasn't gotten old yet - this assumption that where things go wrong, a Jewish perpetrator will be found. I've heard "Zionist plots" declared to be behind everything from al-Qaeda to the conflict in Darfur. A protest of hundreds of Iranians- against the Danish cartoons of Muhammad - hurled firebombs at the Danish Embassy, but chanted “God is Great” and “Death to Israel.” While the building burned, the New York Times says, “a voice broadcast by loudspeaker told the crowd that the cartoons were a Zionist conspiracy, orchestrated by those ‘afraid of our fundamentalism.'” [NYT 2/7/06, A8]  As if the Danes, and the Europeans in general, wouldn't know how to be racist if the "Zionists" weren't there to push them into it.

On the Left

The stuff I describe here is not intended as red-baiting ways of "catching" the Left to get it in trouble. But we DO have to talk about these things openly. We need to be open with each other about what's going on in order to change it. And we need to share our experiences so that when activists think they see antisemitism in action, they feel more confident in speaking out.

Aug. 01 - The World Conference Against Racism featured vital conversations about reparations for descendants of enslaved Africans, Palestinian self-determination and dozens of other key issues. Amid the fierce debates over Israel and Palestine, however, flyers & pamphlets were handed out with classical antisemitic images of Jews, as well as strange glorifications of Hitler; activists saw people sporting buttons such as "Hitler didn't do his job." Flyer  Mary Robinson, the Irish Catholic chair of the NGO conference at the WCAR, was so disturbed by images she had seen, such as Jews with talons for hands and clutching blood-soaked money, that she declared in front of an official dinner, "When I see something like this, I am a Jew." She was booed and hissed when she rose to speak at the closing of the conference. (See passage on the conference in this Guardian story.)

Aug. 01 - An event was held in Philadelphia to highlight the World Conference Against Racism, and build support for the movement for reparations for African Americans. It was widely attended by local radicals and progressives, including many who make antiracist work central to their activism. In a discussion that purported to be about Zionism, the wife of one of the panelists stood up to argue that Black people today need to learn from what Hitler did; that like Germany in the '30s, Jews are the ones controlling the resources, and Black people need to organize in that direction. Few people in the room countered it; there was head-nodding and comments of support. When a Jew had spoken up about earlier antisemitism in the presentation, the most supportive comments in the room ranged from "Not all Jews are greedy," to saying that the Left was really not against Jews, but Zionists; that Jews could get on the right side by choosing not to be Zionists - and that (for those who didn't) “the only good Zionist is a dead Zionist.” A Korean-American activist expressed her opposition, saying that she saw people talking about Jews like they do about Koreans; the response was that it was right to say it about Koreans, too. Members of an anti-racist allies group, all gentiles, who knew the Jewish activist and were present at the event, never spoke to her about it. Months later, when they were asked why not, they said they didn’t know how to act in such a situation.

When the Jewish activist sought out support from a local group in thinking about Black-Jewish relations, she was directed to speak to another Jewish activist who had been among the audience and not spoken out. This activist told her that she was paranoid, and that she shouldn't have publicly disagreed with the speaker or taken up space as a white person in a space for people of color. This woman said that, while she might have challenged the speaker if anti-gay statements had been made, it did not seem appropriate for Jews to do so.

2002 (?) - A friend of mine gave a talk on her experience working with the International Solidarity Movement in Palestine, to a progressive religious congregation in the Philadelphia area. In the Q&A, she was asked about antisemitism in the Palestinian population and responds that she didn't observe it. Afterwards, she told me privately that she saw tons of antisemitism on Palestinian TV, and around her, but that she would never say that to an audience. Hushing news of antisemitism is seen as a responsible way to protect oppressed groups.

Think back to what you learned (we hope) about racism. Hushing up antisemitism, or not speaking out when you see it happening, is as much a dynamic of antisemitism as making an antisemitic statement yourself. We must find ways to point out oppression AND defend oppressed people from footing all the blame.

March/April 04 - Adbusters magazine - a favorite in my local radical bookstore and many others - printed a list of 50 NeoCons, with flags next to the ones who are Jewish. The article, "Why won't anyone say they are Jewish?" received a ton of critical mail and Kalle Lasn, the author & Adbusters' editor, described the negative reaction he got to publishing the piece as “kneejerk political correctness. It’s almost as if… many of them are Jews themselves." Canadian Jewish News interview  In his editorial response, Lasn admitted publishing the article as a provocation, but wrote, "Is it not just as valid to comment on the Jewishness of the neocons as it is to point out that the majority of them are male or white or wealthy or from the Western world or have studied at a particular university?" How interesting, then, that what is being pointed out is not those things. Especially since those things are what the vast majority of the U.S. elite shares. Adbusters text & follow-up

June 04 - A demonstration in Philly against the police murder of a young black man featured a speaker from New Black Panther Party who called from the podium for “Jews, faggots and lesbians” to be killed. The activists who organized the rally didn't make any comment to condemn those statements, even though I know that they disagreed - nor did any of the speakers who followed.

Oct. 04 - Activist filmmaker Wendy Campbell was a guest speaker on Pacifica radio and at La Peña, the esteemed Latino cultural center which is home ground for much of the progressive culture and organizing in Berkeley. Campbell was promoting her film on the Palestinian nakba - the destruction that Palestinian communities suffered in 1948. But alongside that, Campbells's catalogue features films like “Flashpoint: Decyphering Jewish Intellectual Movements”, an interview with Prof. Kevin MacDonald on how “Jewish intellectual movements including Freudian psychology, Marxism (including other radical, leftist politics), the Frankfurt School of Social Research, the New York intellectuals and others, including right-wing Neo-Conservatism, have all been covertly designed to advance specifically Jewish interests – often at the expense of gentile interests. MacDonald’s brilliant analyses offer an alternative view of history which has the potential to change the course of major events still unfolding. It is likely that MacDonald’s reputation will surely grow as his insightful ideas reach larger audiences." Copy of Campbell's site

Sept. 05 - At the huge anti-war mobilization in D.C., I saw plenty of signs charging Zionists with running the show, causing the war, etc (as well as many other signs that eloquently advocate for Palestinians without scapegoating Jews or Zionists). But I'm surprised when I see a man I've worked in a group with - whose members thought it was obvious that we were all against antisemitism, and that there was no need to put more of a focus on it - carrying a sign reading: “JINSA, ADL, AIPAC: Treasonous Agents of Zion." (That's a reference, whether the man knows it or not, to the classic antisemitic archetype of the Jew as one or more of the following: Hidden 'fifth column' in the society, military saboteur, mastermind of the wars, shirker of military duty. It's an archetype that shows up everywhere from the Inquisition to World War II.)

Let's not fool ourselves into thinking anything is obvious. Let's do whatever it takes to make sure our movements for a different world aren't built on a passive acceptance of any form of oppression. If not, be assured that the consequences will come back to haunt us.