The features that make antisemitism a truly bewilderingly unique form of hate are too many to elucidate but there is one to which I would like to draw your attention.
It seems that there is no “right way” to be a Jew. There is no direction the Jew can take in order to be deemed acceptable due to any stereotype or prejudicial notion.
In this vein, virtually any social, political, or economic dichotomy can become tainted by antisemitism. Who “the Jew” votes for, his pet cause of choice, and racial identification. It all becomes a rather predictable Rorschach test for one’s own prejudices.
Selling antisemitism to the masses
Consider the most obvious. If you are an antisemite and a fervent capitalist, then Jews are the Communists, conspiring to overthrow the free enterprise economic system and start anew. If you are an avowed Communist, it’s the Jews who are truly behind the curtain of international banking, corporate greed, and what have you.
Hitler knew this: National-Socialism. Two sociopolitical philosophies in diametric opposition. Yet, depending on one’s own fiery prejudice, the Jew was the common denominator, and thus, the consensus political target for extermination.
Religion no doubt plays its part (as do secularism and atheism). There’s a derivative brand of Jew hate just for you. Go after those Orthodox Jews and their “barbaric” ritualistic circumcision and kosher slaughter.
Religious and holding firm in classical values? Just flip the script upside down and read it backward. It’s those godless Jews behind feminism, pornography, and homosexuality trying to corrupt our children and erode our traditional way of life.
It simply does not end. It only changes contextually every now and then.
Antisemites abhors Jews equally for the age-old stereotype of greed as for their philanthropy. Walking through a university campus or passing a hospital and seeing the Jewish names of donors on the building and they think: “Damn rich Jews putting their names everywhere like they own the place!”
Again, two completely diametrically opposite stereotypes – neither one an accurate depiction of the average Jewish person’s attitude toward money and charity – paint every Jewish person as one or the other, contingent on nothing more than circumstantial convenience.
Perhaps the recent most example is playing out currently in our global discourse on coloniality and race. In Europe, where it once was convenient to scapegoat the stateless Jew, “othered,” as the enlightened like to say, and ostracized him for his origins in the Orient. Then, the Jews were perhaps slightly darker in complexion and not truly part of any European country. Once Jews achieved statehood in Israel, overnight they became “white supremacists, “European colonizers” and the like.
Never mind that Sephardim, Jews from the Iberian peninsula who went on to populate Diaspora communities, particularly in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire, account for the majority of Jews currently living in Israel.
Never mind that only relatively recently six million Jews were murdered because they were not European enough. Not German enough. Not white enough.
It is entirely irrelevant whether the refrain being angrily shouted at the Jew is “Go back to Poland” or “Get out of Poland.” The directions might be different, but the intended destination is always the same: the destruction of the Jewish people.
It simply does not matter. The Jew is always wrong. Antisemitism is a living, breathing embodiment of non-falsifiability, an illogical death trap where reason cannot reach. Do not try.
The Israel-Hamas war
Consider this: While Israeli hostages are being released by Hamas, they are paraded in front of a jeering crowd in a public spectacle. Surrounded by masked men, guns at the ready, with cameras thrust in their faces, the hostages are made to read from scripts and thank their captors. In a previous display, a bewildered Omer Shem Tov was instructed to kiss one of the terrorists on the forehead in a grotesque and morbid display. Propagandists will use this scene as definitive proof that he was “treated nicely” in captivity.
However, the very moment he or she crosses into Israeli territory, instantly any testimony about his time and torture in captivity is reduced to being mere “Zionist propaganda.”
Though galling, nobody can claim that it is inconsistent. Again, the Jew is always wrong.
While some of these epithets and cultural dichotomies may be better known than others, the point holds. In the mind of the antisemite, there is no action the Jew could take to cease being so contemptible. The Jew is hated for being a Jew in essence. All the other affectations are just that and have no bearing on whether or not there will be a target.
It is inescapable. All there is to do is accept the fact that antisemitism is an amorphous, intangible, and extremely malleable force that not only permeates its way into virtually every significant movement and political zeitgeist, but morphs to match the agenda of its wielder.
The right thing to do is not to change ourselves, but to accept the protean nature of the hate lobbed against us, and strengthen our resolve.
The writer is a Jewish Canadian with a history of community volunteering and activism on campus, in media and in local politics.--