The question is now how has Antisemitism become practically mainstream again in all but name?
From my childhood in the 80s and 90s of Eastern Europe, I don't remember discussing Jews or Antisemitism at all, either at home or in school (apart from the topic of WWII), or among friends. There was simply no ambiguity about racism or the Holocaust. The worst thing you could call anyone was "nazi", barring "pedophile". But I knew the word "Nazi", as a synonym for evil, long before I came across "pedophile". I recall only a couple occasions when someone in the schoolyard used the word "Jew" as a slur, but they were without exception not the sharpest knives in the drawer.
I was in my late teens when I experienced actual Antisemitism for the first time. A family member of mine, one who then was best described as a Christian nationalist, once expressed the view that the Jews really take advantage of the Holocaust - that is, they abuse the collective guilt of society to get unfair advantages. And one of my best friends at that time, who generally was a very nice person, turned out to be a rather loud anti-semite when he got in the mood. But as I said, he was a decent and generous fellow, and so was the aforementioned relative, so I saw these as personal quirks of otherwise normal individuals and not part of some general trend in any sense. Once I also noticed a Nazi swastika tattoo on a guy in my sports club, but he was a former convict and also not one of the brightest, so I didn't consider him representative either.
During my university years, I have never heard anyone among my fellow students mentioning Jews a single time, at least according to my recollection. I was in my early twenties and working already when a close colleague of mine during a common lunch in the office's kitchen started talking about how it was actually the British who "invented" concentration camps in South Africa, and Hitler was a bad man perhaps, but not the worst. I was flabbergasted and found myself out of words. But I still remember thinking how bizarre it is that young, university-educated professionals think it perfectly normal to find excuses for Hitler in front of their peers. In his defense, the said colleague was quite supportive of Israel, or at least definitely preferred them to the Arabs.
In the years to come, there was another couple of occasions when acquaintances or distant family members (everyone has a crazy aunt?) brought up the Jews in public. Not many, but enough. My dad told me once half laughing, half exasperated, that people in the local pub, whose knowledge of the outside world ended at some Greek beach, explained to him with great confidence the machinations of New York Jews. My erstwhile friend by that time had completely gone down the rabbit hole, and on one occasion in a small company of friends, he told us in a hushed, conspirational voice that secret multi-party negotiations were being held to import 2 million Jews to Hungary.
These incidents were isolated and anecdotal. Then George Soros started a late-life career as the bogeyman of Eastern Europe and the lid seemed to open. I have heard good faith arguments against my belief that Soros's prominence is due to his Jewishness. None was convincing. Still, by and large, I believed that anti-semitism is mostly spread among the not very-highly educated.
However, very recently a friend of mine, a very elite, a very leftish American, who never misses an opportunity to lambast the US for its racism against the blacks, in the middle of a conversation casually dropped that the Jews have too much influence in Washington. And he followed it up with a reference to the strange sartorial habits of the Orthodox Jews, whom, he said with a wink in his eye, he just calls "penguins".
Another acquaintance from Hungary told me that in his city, among the well-off people, open homophobia and gypsy jokes are now passé, but people don't feel inhibited when the conversation turns to Jews. Which it does not infrequently.
And then came Oct 7, 2023. Thousands of Hamas terrorists broke into Israel and killed more than a thousand Israelis specifically targeting civilians. They gang-raped women, killed children and elderly people, and kidnapped more than a hundred of them. They posted videos of kids lying as bloody lumps in their cribs and dead women barely recognizable as human bodies anymore. And in London, Sydney, and many capitals in the world, and at Ivory League universities like Princeton, Standford, and Berkeley, people stormed to the streets celebrating Hamas and condemning Israel. It merits repetition. There are students and professors at the world's best universities, who celebrated not the vague idea of Free Palestine, but the massacre itself.
In the past two weeks, hundreds of anti-semitic attacks have been reported in Western countries. This absolutely blows my mind.
People have been recently and currently massacred, violently oppressed, and abused all over the world. Minorities in Arab countries. Uyghurs in China, countless ethnicities in Africa, and in the post-Soviet states. Nothing could happen to them that would provoke a similar wave of street protests in the Western world, and what is mind-boggling, is that these protests now are triggered not by what Jews did to Palestinians, but the exact opposite. By a massacre of Israeli civilians carried out by one of the two Palestinian quasi-governments elected by Palestinians.
After the original shock and inevitable sympathy for Israel, it only took a week for the New York Times to come out with a front page on the bombing of a hospital in Gaza by Israeli forces. They published the report based on information solely from Hamas and didn't think any verification was needed. It turned out that the missile was fired by not the IDF but by an Islamist organization. No apologies came from the Times. Whatever was behind the Times' actions, the story fits very well in the Leftish trend of desperate attempts for bothsideism.
What the fuck is going on?
I have a very simple thesis that partially explains growing anti-Semitism, and goes like the following. Antisemitism, and racism in general, is the natural state of the world. A chronic disease of society, if you will. A leftover from pre-historic times. It causes only mild discomfort when things go well, but sometimes it bursts into a violent fever. In this metaphor, the Second World War and the Holocaust in particular worked as a vaccination against unsavoury ideologies. It was such a strong dose that it has inoculated almost the whole world against racism, permanently and completely pushing it out of the accepted range of public discourse for many decades. Its effect is fading now in tandem with the memories of the war, but for generations, it was so strong that it made people oblivious of how remarkable and novel this new shared mindset was historically.
We tend to think that the ban on open racism and the collective moral judgment of Nazism came into effect right after 1945. People were so shaken by the horrors of the war, that by the time it was over, they were united in rejecting racist ideologies for good. But actually, surveys showed that as late as the 60s, a third of Germans had a positive view of pre-war Hitler. That is, they thought that barring that catastrophic decision to launch a World War, Hitler wasn't a bad chancellor. It took decades until a consensus had crystallized, which lasted for many decades.
The general opinion about eugenics and racial purity right before the war is similarly shocking when someone reads about it for the first time. Quotas on Jewish university admittance were commonplace not only in Germany and Eastern Europe but in the United States as well. John Maynard Keynes, one of the most famous liberal economists of the 20th century was an active supporter of eugenics. And in that regard, he wasn't an eccentric.
And if you think Jews had it bad in the first half of the twentieth century, just go further back in history. Pogroms, lynchings, and witch hunts used to be for the masses what football matches are today.
What is unique about the current anti-semitism, that perhaps for the first time in history, it is driven by Left-wing morons instead of the usual suspects (in the West at least. East from the Elbe, it's the same old story). Bone fide antisemite right-wing nutjobs like Marine Le Pen in France and Marjorie Taylor Green in the US came out immediately in support of Israel (probably because they figured they hate the Arabs more) while Jeremy Corbyn and Jean-Luc Mélenchon on the other hand couldn't even bring themselves to condemn Hamas. Neither could some prominent leftists in the US Congress. From American universities, which never missed any chance to hector society about social justice and the ever-present racism, the silence has been deafening. And Harvard students found that the best time to go to the street for Free Palestine is when Palestinian terrorists massacred Jewish civilians, babies included, and gang-raped women - and posted videos to social media to boast about it.
Communists and Socialists have always been low-key anti-semites. The hated capitalist financial system was of course run by the Jews, after all. Just eight years after the holocaust, another pogrom (to "thwart" the Jewish Doctors' Plot) was unfolding in the Soviet Union and was canceled only by the death of Stalin. But it was never so outspoken, maybe because of the lofty universal ideas of Communism, maybe because they always posed as anti-fascist, and fascism got intertwined with anti-semitism.
At first glance, it can seem surprising that anti-semitism can surge right now in the current Zeitgeist, which is so loudly anti-racist, when woke idiots find a fascist in every bush. But it's actually not that hard to explain (this is not a sophisticated worldview). A crude but not inappropriate definition of being woke is to be constantly and obsessively on the look for oppression everywhere and sympathize with the underdog unconditionally. Israel, for the first time in thousands of years, is a dominant regional power, and it doesn't matter that it's a tiny island in a sea of Arabs (look at the map. Just take a break and look at the map), the Palestinians are the downtrodden, so the Jews have to be the evil ones.
Still, this explanation is incomplete. The Chechens have been brutalized by the Russians, the Uyghur by the Chinese, Saddam Hussein wiped out Kurdish villages with chemical weapons, and African warlords and dictators did and are doing unspeakable things all the time. Yet, there are rarely any public protests against these in the West.
The difference is that progressives designate Jews as white and Palestinians as people of color and this tells you all you need to know about who the bad guys are in this simple place called the Middle East.
Based on all the above, a simplified but useful way of thinking about the question is that there are two strands of anti-Jewish sentiment. Those characterizing themselves as anti-Zionists are nominally agnostic about Jews themselves but critical of the actions of Israel as a state. This itself is a heterogeneous group consisting of general anti-West activists (like Noam Chomsky), people sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians, and people who sympathize with anyone who seems to be on the short end of the stick.
The other strand is represented by run-of-the-mill antisemites who vent out their frustration in the local pubs and blame the Jews for their national or personal misfortunes, and talk about Rothschilds and Jewish plots for world domination. Based on my personal experiences, I would estimate at least 30 percent of the population being susceptible to these ideas to varying degrees. This is a spectrum running from rabid anti-semites to otherwise normal men of the street with half-baked ideas about the world which is too complex for them.
The two strands reinforce each other. The first makes criticism of the Jews a morally defensible stance and with that, it provides an umbrella for real Jew-haters for whom Israel is just a pretext. Those are happy to finally find themselves in a respectable company, while progressives don't much care what company they are in as long as everyone joins the choir.
To summarize it from a bird's-eye view, the different forces in play are the following. Our modern moral values rooted in the Enlightenment are locked in a constant battle with the much older grass-root Antisemitism courtesy of religion which is fed heavily by our instinct of xenophobia courtesy of human nature. Against those atavistic tendencies stand the taboo set by the Holocaust, which time erodes a bit more every year. And finally, there is the modern anti-Israel sentiment which is reinvigorated by the woke craze, pushing the taboo more and more to the side, so Antisemitism can flow freer again under some more palatable guise.
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