Mick Hartley

Worth a read – Kenneth Waltzer in the Times of Israel: Some Notes on Antisemitism Today in the USA.

In the present day, most observers agree, there has arisen a new form of antisemitism, one identified by many observers as “the new antisemitism.”  This antisemitism contains new content distinguishing it from the old and has a presence on the hard left and in some progressive quarters.  But the new antisemitism also includes old content that is repurposed to serve and elaborate the new.  What distinguishes this new antisemitism?  That which the pariah Jew was thought to be in classical or modern racial antisemitism, Israel or the Jewish state is thought to be today. The Jewish state is the collective Jew or the sovereign Jew.  Other nations are celebrated for achieving national self-determination; the Jewish state is not celebrated.   Rather, Israel is thought of as extraordinarily evil, a threat to world order, a violator of human rights, a state unlike any other.  If the new state would be eliminated, the antisemite believes, the world or at least the Middle East would be improved, justice would be at hand, human rights would thrive….

The weight of antisemitic currents influencing campus life and shaping Jewish experiences continues largely to come from the BDS movement and its constituent organizations and from their ongoing campus campaigns to delegitimize Israel as well as their determination to see Jewish students as privileged “whites” without minority experience or sensibilities attuned to the oppressed.  Such people stereotype Jews and are unable to see them other than through their own limited, binary imaginations. The antisemitism that rears its head now also on the right, which sees Jews mainly as nonwhites, comes mostly from off campus and through social media, but the Anti-Defamation League reports white supremacist groups are pushing to recruit college students and are plastering campuses with their message.  Such groups as Identity Evropea and American Vanguard are engaged in “an unprecedented outreach effort to attract and recruit students on American college campuses.”  As American Jewish historian Jonathan Sarna observed in mid-November:  “I don’t know anybody who is looking at this in a serious way who says nothing has changed… American Jews assumed that antisemitism had largely been overcome,” he said. “And then, all of a sudden, unexpectedly, antisemitism … came roaring back.”