[Jewish] Fwd: [HF] new anti-Semitism [long]

[Holly Snyder]

Thought you might find this article by the Chief Rabbi of the UK to be of 
interest.

                                                      Holly Snyder
                                                      Social Science


>Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2002 11:50:34 -0500
>From: Avi Bass <abass at niu.edu>
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>Subject: [HF] new anti-Semitism [long]
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>An analysis of anti-Semitism recommended by several HFers.
>
>              ---- HF: HILLEL-FACULTY ----
>
>The new anti-Semitism
>
>By Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of Great Britain
>
>The new anti-Semitism is coming simultaneously from three different
>directions: first, a radicalized Islamic youth inflamed by extremist
>rhetoric; second, a left-wing anti-American cognitive elite with strong
>representation in the European media; third, a resurgent far right, as
>anti-Muslim as it is anti-Jewish.
>
>It is being fed by the instability of globalization, the insecurity of
>the post-Cold War international arena, and the still-undischarged trauma
>of September 11. It has been allowed to grow unchecked because of a
>general unwillingness among Europe's political leadership to confront
>the problem head on ("For evil to triumph," said Burke, "it is necessary
>only for the good man to do nothing").
>
>It has been aggravated by the breakdown of a morality of right and wrong
>acts in favor of a therapeutic ethic which "feels the pain" of the
>perpetrators of violence. Taken in combination, these are powerful
>forces, to which the countervailing influences of reason, responsibility
>and restraint are as unequal now as they have been at any other time of
>populist ferment and generalized fear.
>
>Anti-Semitism exists and is dangerous whenever two contradictory factors
>appear in combination - the belief that Jews are so powerful that they
>are responsible for the evils of the world, and the knowledge that they
>are so powerless that they can be attacked with impunity. Those two
>factors are in abundant evidence today in many parts of the world.
>
>That this has happened with such speed and so little protest, less than
>60 years after the Holocaust, is profoundly shocking. No one - not Jews,
>not Muslims, not Christians, no one - should suffer this kind of hate,
>and the moral credibility of more than one civilization is at stake. On
>February 28, I thought it was sufficient to sound a warning. Now I think
>more is needed: a call to all those with a sense of history and humanity
>to say: Stop.
>
>No problem was ever solved by hate, falsehood, racism, religiously
>inspired terror, and the willingness to deflect attention from real
>abuses of power, human rights and moral responsibility. Now is the time
>for good men and women to do something: to say "never again," and mean
>just that: Never again....
>
>Let me state the point as simply as I can: anti-Semitism is alive,
>active and virulent in the year 2002, after more than half a century of
>Holocaust education, interfaith dialogue, United Nations declarations,
>dozens of museums and memorials, hundreds of films, thousands of
>courses, and tens of thousands of books dedicated to exposing its evils;
>after the Stockholm Conference, January 27, 2000, after the creation of
>a National Holocaust Memorial Day, after 2,000 religious leaders came
>together in the United Nations in August 2000 to commit themselves to
>fight hatred and engender mutual respect. After all this.
>
>What more could have been done? What more could and can we do to fight
>anti-Semitism? Yet it exists today in many parts of the world: in the
>Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia and yes, in Europe, in more virulent
>forms than at any time since the Holocaust. There can be little doubt
>that it has been the most successful ideology of modern times. Fascism
>came and went. Soviet communism came and went. Anti-Semitism came and
>stayed.
>
>  Like a virus
>
>How does anti-Semitism survive? Sadly, the answer is this: Anti-Semitism
>is not a belief system, a coherent set of ideas. In the 19th and early
>20th centuries, Jews were hated because they were rich and because they
>were poor; because they were capitalists and because they were
>communists; because they kept to themselves and because they got
>everywhere; because they were superstitious believers and because they
>were rootless cosmopolitans who believed nothing.
>
>Anti-Semitism is not a belief. It is a virus - and like a virus, it
>mutates. The human body has the most sophisticated of mechanisms - the
>immune system - to defend itself against viruses. It develops
>antibodies. Viruses defeat the immune system because they mutate. They
>are then able to get past the body's defenses, in effect by persuading
>them that they are friends, not foes. The immune system, alert to last
>year's virus, fails to recognize this year's.
>
>The classic case of mutation happened in Europe in the 19th century.
>There was a belief that in an age of enlightenment - emancipation, the
>French Revolution, the secular nation state - prejudice would die, not
>least the age-old Christian prejudice against Judaism and Jews. What
>happened instead was that religious anti-Judaism mutated into racial
>anti-Semitism.
>
>The word `anti-Semitism' itself was coined in 1879. What made racial
>anti-Semitism so much worse than its religious precursors was that now
>Jews were hated not because of what they believed, not because of how
>they lived, but because of who they were.
>
>You can eliminate a religion by forcibly converting all its followers.
>You can eliminate a race only by genocide. As Raul Hilberg put it:
>"There is a straight line from `You have no right to live among us as
>Jews,' to `You have no right to live among us' to `You have no right to
>live.'"
>
>What we are witnessing today is the second great mutation of
>anti-Semitism in modern times, from racial anti-Semitism to religious
>anti-Zionism (with the added premise that all Jews are Zionists).
>
>It uses all the medieval myths - the blood libel, poisoning of wells,
>killers of the Lord's anointed, incarnation of evil - transposed into a
>new key and context. This could not have succeeded, however, without one
>mutation - a mutation so ingenious, demonic and evil that it paralyzes
>the immune systems the West built up over the past half-century.
>
>The mutation is this: that the worst crimes of anti-Semites in the past
>- racism, ethnic cleansing, attempted genocide, crimes against humanity
>- are now attributed to Jews and the State of Israel, so that if you are
>against Nazism, you must ipso facto be utterly opposed to Jews. I regard
>this as one of the most blasphemous inversions in the history of the
>world's oldest hate. I am shocked that so few non-Jews in Europe have
>recognized it and denounced it.
>
>What then shall we do? I have three messages - one to Jews; a second to
>antiSemites; the third to us, to humanity as a whole.
>
>My first message is to the Jewish community in this country and
>throughout the world. We must not internalize this hate. The great
>mistake Jews made in the 19th century - and it was a mistake made by
>good and serious people - was that to believe that since Jews are the
>object of anti-Semitism, they must therefore be the cause of
>anti-Semitism.
>
>That is untrue. We now have copious evidence that there can be fierce
>anti-Semitism in countries where there are no Jews at all. The moment we
>internalize anti-Semitism, the result is that tortured psychology - from
>ambivalence to self-hatred - against which my last book, "Radical Then,
>Radical Now" [in America, "A Letter in the Scroll"] was directed.
>Ambivalence and self-hatred have injured Jewish life for a century, and
>we still suffer its after-effects today.
>
>Some years ago, in the early years of Russian Glasnost, the following
>episode occurred (I heard it from one of my rabbinical colleagues).
>Glasnost allowed Jews in the Soviet Union to live freely and openly as
>Jews for the first time in 70 years. Unfortunately, it also brought to
>the surface a degree of anti-Semitism that had been suppressed before.
>
>A British rabbi went out to Russia in the late 1980s to help reconstruct
>Jewish life. One day he had a visit from a young woman. She said,
>"Rabbi, all my life I have hidden the fact that I was a Jew. No one ever
>commented on it. Now, though, when I walk in the street, people shout
>out, Zhid, Zhid [Jew, Jew]. What shall I do?"
>
>The rabbi said, "You don't look Jewish. If you hadn't told me, I would
>never have known that you were a Jew. Look at me. With my black hat and
>my black yarmulka and my beard, people probably know that I'm a Jew. Yet
>in all these months that I have been here, no one has ever shouted out
>to me Zhid. Why do you think that is?"
>
>The girl was silent for a minute, and then replied, "Because they know
>that if they shout `Jew' at you, you will take it as a compliment. If
>they shout `Jew' at me, they know I will take it as an insult." The best
>way for Jews to combat anti- Semitism, beyond eternal vigilance, is to
>wear our identity with pride.
>
>Hate destroys
>
>I turn now to the anti-Semite. I say to him or her: Forgive me, but I
>cannot return hate with hate. I fight my hatreds. You must fight yours.
>You cannot fight my battles and I cannot fight yours. But this I can
>tell you: When bad things happen to any of us, there are two different
>questions we can ask - and which we ask defines what kind of person we
>are. We can ask, "How can I put it right?" Or we can ask, "Who did this
>to me?"
>
>The first question - "How can I put it right?" - defines me as a
>subject, a moral agent, a person with free will. The second question -
>"Who did this to me?" - defines me as an object, a victim who, being a
>victim, can only experience resentment and rage. If there is anything
>that paralyzes human freedom and destroys human responsibility, it is
>resentment and rage.
>
>Throughout history, anti-Semitism has been the weapon of choice of
>tyrants, dictators and rulers of totalitarian states because, more
>effectively than anything else, it deflects all justified complaints -
>of the hungry, the poor, the uneducated, the sick, the repressed, those
>denied the most basic human freedoms - away from those responsible, and
>projects them on a mythical enemy elsewhere.
>
>That is why those who care for freedom, democracy and human rights must
>realize that anti-Semitism or mythic anti-Zionism will not liberate the
>supposed victims of Jews but the opposite: It will perpetuate their
>self-definition as victims and thus perpetuate their victimhood. It will
>gain them sympathy but deprive them of all responsibility. It will allow
>them to embark on policies that, in more than one sense, are suicidal.
>The link between self-defined victims and their sympathizers (whose
>intentions are nothing if not noble) is what in therapeutic terms is
>called co-dependency, and its effect is profoundly self-destructive.
>More than hate destroys the hated, hate destroys the hater.
>
>Finally I turn to us, all of us in our shared humanity. There is
>something I must say in its full depth and gravity. Since the
>destruction of the First Temple, nearly 2,600 years ago, Jews have known
>the bread of affliction. Think of the words that Jewish history has
>added to our vocabulary - expulsion, inquisition, ghetto, pogrom,
>Holocaust. I do not want to dwell on that history. It is too painful,
>and besides, I do not think it defines who and what we are. Judaism is
>about sanctifying life, not remembering death.
>
>However, during those 26 centuries Jews adopted three strategies in
>order to survive. The first was initiated by the prophet Jeremiah at the
>beginning of Israel's history of exile. He sent a letter to the Jews who
>had been forcibly taken from Israel, or who had fled. He told them
>(Jeremiah 29): "Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which you
>were exiled, and pray to God for it, for in its peace, you will find
>peace." That is an idea that was ancient even in Jeremiah's day.
>
>It goes back to the opening words of Jewish history (Genesis 12) and to
>God's first call to Abraham, in which He tells him to act so that
>"through you, all the families of earth will be blessed." That was, and
>remains, the Jewish vocation: to be true to our faith while being a
>blessing to others.
>
>That is what Jews sought to do for some 25 centuries: to contribute to
>the countries in which they lived by developing businesses, enlarging
>trade, adding to the arts and sciences, to poetry and philosophy, and
>above all, to the spiritual heritage of mankind.
>
>That was the first strategy. It failed. It failed because, until the
>19th century, Jews had no civil rights. They lacked the protection of
>the law. They were dependent on the favor of the ruler, and when it was
>no longer in his interest to keep Jews, they were expelled: from England
>in 1290, and then, in the course of the next two centuries, from
>virtually every country in Europe, culminating in 101 years of
>anti-Jewish persecution in Spain and finally the expulsion, in 1492.
>Thus, the first solution failed.
>
>What was the second? It arose in 19th century Europe, and came about as
>a result of enlightenment, emancipation and the birth of the secular
>nation-state. For the first time in history, Jews were offered equal
>rights as citizens. The promise was that the rule of reason would dispel
>the ancient mists of prejudice.
>
>The failure of that dream is one of the most devastating chapters in
>European history. The depth of its failure is measured by this: that
>virtually all the great philosophers of modernity - Voltaire, Fichte,
>Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Frege - made sharply anti- Semitic
>statements in the course of their work (these are documented in my book
>"The Politics of Hope"). The greatest German philosopher of the 20th
>century, Martin Heidegger, was an enthusiastic member of the Nazi Party
>who never, in the postwar years, recanted, atoned or apologized for his
>acts. Thus the Europe of reason, enlightenment and philosophy became the
>Europe of the Holocaust. (I speak, of course, not of Britain, one of the
>honorable exceptions). The second solution failed.
>
>No safety in Europe
>
>Zionism was born in the consciousness of that failure. It began in 1862
>with Moses Hess, friend of Karl Marx, and the first person to diagnose
>the emerging German anti-Semitism. It was followed in 1882 by the
>assimilated Russian Jewish doctor, Leon Pinsker, after the great Russian
>pogroms of 1881.
>
>Then, in 1895, Theodor Herzl, a Viennese journalist covering the Dreyfus
>trial in Paris, heard the crowds cry "A mort les Juifs" ("Death to the
>Jews"). France at that time was widely regarded as the most civilized
>nation in Europe, the home of the revolution, the birthplace of the
>Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. When he heard that cry
>on the Parisian streets, Herzl knew that Europe was no longer safe for
>Jews. This is what he wrote a year later. It sums up the experience of a
>century of Jewish life in Western Europe:
>
>"We have sincerely tried everywhere to merge with the national
>communities in which we live, seeking only to preserve the faith of our
>fathers. It is not permitted to us. In vain are we loyal patriots,
>sometimes super-loyal. In vain do we make the same sacrifices of life
>and property as our fellow citizens. In vain do we strive to enhance the
>fame of our native lands in the arts and sciences, or her wealth by
>trade and commerce. In our native lands, where we have lived for
>centuries, we are still decried as aliens, often by men whose ancestors
>had not yet come, at a time when Jewish sighs had long been heard in the
>country."
>
>He added: "I think we shall not be left in peace."
>
>The idea of Hess, Pinsker and Herzl was simple. If the nation-states of
>Europe had no place for Jews, then Jews must have a nation-state of
>their own. Sadly, it took the murder of two-thirds of Europe's Jews
>before the state was born.
>
>That solution must not fail. For the only fourth solution is the one the
>Nazis called "the final solution." That is why Jews must have a safe
>collective home, in the sense defined by the poet Robert Frost, who
>wrote "home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to
>let you in."
>
> >From here on, we must stand and fight our ground. There is no other. We
>must fight it with courage, integrity, honesty, cogency, with neither
>animus nor hate nor desire for revenge, but we must fight it - and Jews
>must not be left, yet again, to fight it alone.
>
>Why have Jews been persecuted and hated throughout the ages? Not because
>they were better than anyone else, not because they were worse than
>anyone else, but because they were different and because there is a
>natural human tendency to dislike the unlike, to fear the stranger and
>hate what we fear.
>
>But surely, every nation, each faith, every culture is different. That
>is so. What made Jews singular is that, with more tenacity than anyone
>else, they insisted on the right to be different, the duty to be
>different, the dignity of difference. In the days of the Alexandrian
>Empire they refused to be Hellenized, so they were persecuted. In the
>days of Rome, they fought for the right to practice their faith, and
>they were persecuted.
>
>In Christian Europe they resisted conversion, and they were persecuted.
>Today, in an Islamic Middle East, they are not Muslims; and so they are
>persecuted. Had the majority of Jews capitulated under any of these
>dispensations, they would have spared themselves and their children much
>suffering and grief, and today there would be no Judaism and no Jews.
>
>Our ancestors believed - I dare still to believe - that no one should be
>forced to abandon his faith, traditions, history and loyalties to have
>the right to be free, to walk down a street without fear of being
>attacked, to build a place of worship without fear of it being burned
>down. I was a student at Cambridge. The synagogue in Cambridge, built in
>the 1930s, has no windows in the walls that face the street, because of
>the fear then that if there were, they would be broken. That fear has
>now returned, if not in Cambridge, then in Paris, Marseilles, Brussels,
>Berlin.
>
>Anti-Semitism is a crime against humanity - not because Jews are human
>beings (I hope that much will be conceded) but because human beings are
>Jews, by which I mean difference is the essence of our humanity. There
>is a fine rabbinic saying, 2,000 years old, that "When a human being
>makes many coins in the same mint, they are all the same. God makes
>every person in the same image - His image - and they are each
>different." The miracle of creation is that unity in heaven creates
>diversity on earth. Or, as I have put it elsewhere, the fundamental
>challenge is to see God's image in one who is not in our image.
>
>A world that has no room for Jews, has no space for difference; and a
>world that lacks space for difference has no room for humanity. That is
>why anti-Semitism is not a, but the, paradigm of a crime against
>humanity.
>
>The unfolding tragedy in Israel will not be solved by demonization,
>myth, blood libels, reiterations of medieval fantasies, modern forgeries
>like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, attacks on Jews and synagogues
>throughout the world, evasions, lies, and conspiracy theories. Political
>problems have political solutions, and they require nothing less than
>truth, fact, relentless honesty, self-criticism, the capacity to
>compromise, and a willingness to prefer an imperfect peace to the
>perfect purity of holy war, sacred suicide, and murderous martyrdom.
>
>Anti-Semitism begins with Jews but never ends with Jews. Now is the time
>for those who care about humanity to join in the defense of humanity, by
>protesting this newest mutation of the world's oldest hate.
>
>(Ha'Aretz, Sept. 8, 2002)
>
>
>            HF: HILLEL-FACULTY  Commentary and discussion
>            for university/college *Jewish* faculty/
>            To respond: "reply"  To subscribe: HF at niu.edu
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