This (very long) post serves multiple purposes:
It’s part of a school project
I just attended an event which really got me deep into this
The topic is fascinating and worth understanding
May is Jewish American Heritage Month. I didn’t know until this year, and I think a lot of other Jews fall into the same camp.
Why this year do I know of it? Why this year am I paying attention?
1. Setting the stage
1.1. A second Zion
Since the Holocaust, the United States of America has been incredibly open and welcoming to Jews. Our country houses the last remaining major population outside of Israel.1
Jews make up less than 0.2% of the world’s population; in the US, we’re nine times as prevalent.2
The so-called “Golden Age of American Jews” (and its supposed end) was recently discussed at length in The Atlantic so I won’t dwell on it here. Suffice it to say that our legacy in the country is far-reaching and generally successful—and predicated on universalizable liberal principles.
This was the country for us; we loved it and it loved us back. The Shalom Hartman Institute (which promotes pluralistic dialogue and exchange between North American and Israeli Jews) aptly puts it: our people after World War 2 went “From No Home to Two Homes.”
1.2. The Jew
Yair Rosenberg writes that antisemitism is widely misunderstood. It’s not a simple prejudice, nor a systemic injustice. Rather, it’s an all-pervasive “conspiracy theory about how the world operates.”
The Jew is the villain.
If you’re a racist, The Jew is poisoning the nation’s blood with their support of immigration (or simply their existence). If you’re an anti-racist, The Jew is perpetuating settler colonialism and systemic racism. If you’re a Christian, The Jew killed your savior and eats your children.
“The invisible hand of [the] oppressor belongs to an invisible Jew.”
1.3. Derrida, deconstruction, and oppression
Today’s progressive extremes are becoming far more likely to blame the invisible hand. Derrida’s political deconstructionism why.
In the most basic terms, he argues that justice is ultimately impossible to attain—and that any institution that claims to achieve it must be “founded in violence”; must be causing more harm than good.3
So, of course, in our (literally) unending pursuit of justice, we can’t have an institution getting in the way! The institution must be oppressive—all institutions must be oppressive.
This is the philosophical foundation of the oft-mentioned populist oppressor-oppressed narrative taking hold of academia. The institutions—controlled by the elite, of course—are oppressive, and the people are oppressed by them.
To whom does the invisible hand of the elite belong?
1.4. Conspiracy, Christianity, and conservatism
Blood libel is perhaps the most pervasive antisemitic trope, particularly in conservative Christian circles throughout history.
The populist QAnon movement exemplifies the modern resurgence of this trend, as it bleeds into conspiratorial conservative circles. In its generally anti-elite framing, QAnon draws on similar themes to classic blood libel—Christianity under threat, children under threat, and a deep-state conspiracy covering it all up.
Nearly half of QAnon adherents surveyed in 2021 also believed in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a much older, fraudulent text alleging Jewish control of a deep state plotting against the world’s Christians. When Marjorie Taylor-Greene lambasts the elites for the perceived ills of her society, who is she blaming?
When Donald Trump vows to fight political, social, and intellectual elites—when he vows to exact the people’s retribution—who will it be exacted against?
The invisible hand of the elite oppressor nearly always belongs to The Jew.
2. Israel
2.1. Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, and Smotrich
Benjamin Netanyahu may well go down as the worst prime minister in Israeli history. Mr. Security, as he fashioned himself, not only failed to prevent the single worst attack in Israeli history—the largest violent loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust—but his self-serving politics were what made it possible in the first place.
For years, he and the far-right have “treated … Hamas as an asset.”4 Allowing Qatari funds to enter the Gaza Strip and propping up the genocidal terrorist group5 in an attempt to hinder Palestinian statehood.
And he was successful. Palestinian Authority (PA) popularity has gradually slipped throughout this century, cratering after the October 7 massacre. Netanyahu returned to power for the third time in 2022. In order to do so, however, he partnered with Kahanist and convicted terrorism inciter, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and the somewhat-less-openly Kahanist Bezalel Smotrich.
In the months leading up to October 7, the Israeli public was torn apart in protest and counter-protest over the government’s controversial judicial reform plan. Netanyahu was polling as low as he’d ever been.
Still, after the attack, the country came together. Opposition party leader Benny Gantz joined an emergency government and received a post on the war cabinet—Smotrich and Ben-Gvir were excluded.
But as the war’s dragged on, the Israeli public has grown increasingly frustrated with Netanyahu and tensions have boiled over into the war cabinet. Benny Gantz issued an ultimatum on May 18—Netanyahu could come up with a plan for post-war Gaza by June 8, or Gantz would quit the cabinet and likely call for Bibi’s resignation.
As public consensus begins to crumble6 and internal pressure on Netanyahu mounts, the Jewish State is also facing ever-increasing external scrutiny.
2.2. Occupation, apartheid, and genocide
From 1948 to 1967, Israel was virtually unconditionally respected, accepted, and protected by the United States.
After a period of heightened tensions, in June of 1967, Israel unleashed a series of preemptive airstrikes followed by a rapid ground invasion against its Arab neighbors. It occupied Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula7 and Gaza Strip, the Jordanian-controlled West Bank, and the Syrian Golan Heights in just six days.
Thus began the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Students and activists in the United States began to take notice, but governmental and general public support remained unwavering with the Holocaust still fresh in memory.
Criticisms of Israeli would escalate to ‘apartheid’ after the Oslo Accords of the 1990s. The separation of the West Bank into three administrative regions—“A” under total PA control, “B” under PA civil and Israeli security control, and “C” under total Israeli control—allowed activists to rhetorically replace “occupation” with the more emotionally charged “apartheid.”
As illegal settlements became more expansive (and especially after the 2006 invasion of Lebanon), US support became much farther from unconditional. Relations chilled, though most aid continued to flow.
After the unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 and subsequent blockade (following Hamas’s takeover), criticisms of genocide were thrown into the mix. These accusations have become significantly more mainstream during Israel’s most recent war against Hamas—replacing apartheid as the dominant piece of anti-Israel (anti-Zionist, in fact) rhetoric.
Many Jewish and Israeli academics consider accusations of genocide to be little more than antisemitic Holocaust inversion. They point to the clear definitions of genocide under international law—its predicated on intent to destroy (in whole or in part) some protected group—and note that Israeli decision-makers have not shown intent to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza.
In fact, the evidence of intent cited in South Africa’s argument before the ICJ consists of quotes that have been mistranslated, taken out of context, or made by non-members of the war cabinet like Ben-Gvir and Smotrich.8 It’s unlikely that the World Court will find in favor of a ruling of genocide, and its provisional ruling is often misconstrued as far more damning than it is.
Still, domestic pressure and declining US public support for Israel have forced Biden’s hand—he’s taken a harder line against Israel, even suspending a shipment of military aid over Israel’s incursions into Rafah.9
2.3. Dual loyalty
American Jews are often accused of a dual loyalty to Israel which undermines their Americanness.
In fact, this often-antisemitic trope has existed “for thousands of years [and] been used to scapegoat, harass, and vilify Jews” since well-before the founding of Israel.10
While it’s true that many diaspora Jews feel connected to their homeland, the trope emphasizes a traitorousness that need not underly such a connection. In fact, many American Jews feel comfortable not only taking pride in Israel, but in criticizing its government. And they remain proud Americans as well—similarly comfortable serving and criticizing the US.
In fact, the Netanyahu-induced political instability in Israel has been heavily criticized in American diaspora communities over the past few years, though the majority of American Jews do approve of the government’s handling of the war and less than 10% support the anti-Zionist BDS movement.
While many American Jews appreciate and praise the existence of the State of Israel, they do so alongside loving criticism of its policy, and service to the US. We love both our homes, in equal and complete measure.
3. Scenes from the Liberated Diag
At the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, student protestors had11 installed an encampment on the main quadrangle and passageway on Central Campus—the “Diag.” On Saturday, May 4, a friend and I paid them a visit.
3.1. Do not engage with instigators
Upon our arrival, we told two protestors sitting at a welcome table that we wanted to conduct some interviews for a school assignment. After a brief discussion, we were directed to a “Volunteer” tent in the back of the encampment for further inquiry.
The first thing we noticed there was a document detailing the protest leaders’ guidelines on how “not [to] engage with instigators:”
Setting aside the gross anti-intellectualism and anti-liberalism of the policy (especially guideline #3),12 I was most curious about which guidelines do “pertain to violent instigators.”
I asked a protestor who happened to be walking by.
He told me that they would be surrounded by a larger group of protestors and physically forced out.
Did they get many violent instigators?
“Yeah, sometimes.”
“Like, people come in and try to beat you guys up and take things down?”
“Well, not exactly.”
“Oh. So what constitutes a violent instigator?”
“Trying to provoke a response … like when someone’s really really persistent.”
3.2. SAFE & GEO
The encampment is organized by the Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE), Michigan’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter. On October 7, they released a statement praising Hamas’ indiscriminate massacre of Israeli civilians:
As Israel’s response ramped up, they set out coalition-building in preparation for their eventual occupation of the Diag. By May, they’d built an alliance of scores of student and alumni groups, but one was by far the most important.
Most of the protestors we met on the People’s University for Gaza—Ann Arbor campus were graduate students involved with the Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO), a union of grad workers who have earned a serious reputation for political grandstanding.
“Our mission is to represent, advocate for, and organize graduate student workers,” they claim on their website. Logical enough for a graduate student worker union. “And to build collective power in the pursuit of social & economic justice,” reads the second half of the statement.13
GEO organizers were difficult not to find, and they drew simple connections between all worldwide injustices and the “genocide” in Gaza: one who was breaking down boxes by the refreshments table quickly rattled off “the criminal injustice system [and] US suppression of black power movements” as deeply interconnected with Israel’s war.
“[The incarceral system] doesn’t bring … justice to the victims. All it does is create more pain and more hurt,” she claimed.
I couldn’t help but wonder if a more apt parallel was with Hamas’s “resistance rockets” and their invasion of “colonial Israeli settlements.”
We left her for the refreshment table and shared an awful za’atar pita.
3.3. JVP
Eventually, we found and talked to two Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) members.
The first, “J,” a GEO member, initially got involved in the fight for “Palestinian liberation” back in 2018, after a professor and graduate worker faced retaliation for refusing to write a student a letter of recommendation to study in Israel.
Not a practicing Jew, J’s grandfather was apparently “involved in establishing the State of Israel,” and he characterized his father as a “liberal Zionist.”
“It’s pretty rough with my dad right now,” he said. “I talked to [him] over winter break [and told him] whatever Israel was supposed to be—it’s not, and our family is implicated. And he wasn’t having it.”
I asked what ‘liberal Zionism’ meant to him.
“[My dad’s] not like, ‘Palestinians should die.’ He’s like … ‘both sides, let’s just try to work something out.’”
Another protestor stole J away before I could get any more out of him.
We later talked to another JVPer, “C.” Raised a Reconstructionist Jew from Colorado, C gets along well with her mother, “who’s become much more progressive since October 7.”
And the congregation?
“My parents have been frustrated … with the time it took for the rabbi to call for a ceasefire, though she did eventually release some form of a ceasefire statement.”
C, a graduate student, hadn’t been to class for the last few weeks. Her classes fell on Mondays, when the movement held regular strikes.
“The energy on campus is just a lot different from throughout my four years of undergrad,” she notes, before making her way to that afternoon’s teach-in. “There’s a lot more mobilizing and … political action than there was before.”
3.4. Counterprotestors
A small clump of a dozen or so Jews had gathered outside the encampment, and I walked over to them alone when they seemed finished trading insults with the nearest protestors. A rabbi had brought his young children, probably coming to the encampment soon after the end of shabbat morning services.
He lamented the “ignorance” and “stupidity” of the protestors to me, as he walked away, wrangling his curly-haired son.
I made my way back to the tents for a couple more uninteresting interviews, then we left the Liberated Diag.
4. Where this leaves us
4.1. What they see
Jewish Americans are a remarkably diverse political group. On Israel, some embrace enthusiastic messianic support and some decry the ‘genocidal’ Zionist project—and everything in between.
Most vote Democrat, some Republican—some never vote, though a much smaller share than in the US as a whole.14
But ideology is no longer the defining political property of the American Jew. Today, it’s identity. Wearing a kippah implies complicity in genocide.
The deconstructionists are committed to an unending fight against injustice. The most visible example they can find is—thanks to intense Hamas propaganda—Israel’s war in Gaza. The hand behind that example of institutional violence is clearly Jewish.
To them, all institutional violence is connected (“the criminal injustice system [and] US suppression of black power movements”), so they increasingly see the Jewish hand everywhere.
This is what it means to say “anti-Zionism is (almost always) antisemitism.” Anti-Zionism is (almost always) a somehow socially acceptable way of blaming The Jew for global injustice.
4.2. Engaging with instigators
Is it possible to change this perception? To rehabilitate the image of the politically diverse American Jewry?
I don’t know, but I think we have to try.
Deconstructionism is a fundamentally incoherent and dangerous worldview; one which intends to destroy the liberalism that makes the US a Jewish safe haven. What can we do but fight it?
The extremes of the American right preview the future of the leftist extreme. Their slide deep into populism—and into antisemitism—started just as the left’s has: they saw injustice, and they saw the same Jewish hand behind all of it.
Our job is to interrupt the left’s slide. To be Jewish openly, proudly, and in their encampments. To talk with them. As they’d put it—to “violently instigate.”
If resisting those who hate us is as easy as getting into an argument, how can we fail?
4.3. Judeo-Optimism
I’ve been a Shalom Hartman Institute Teen Fellow since October.
We’ve held two Shabbatonim (weekend-long seminars, basically) bookending three trimesters of learning. The first took place in late October—just three weeks after October 7.
Our learning focused on Jewish ethics then, with a particular emphasis on what it means to fight a ‘just’ war. What it takes to process the pain of our loss and to prevent it from happening again—without committing genocide; without becoming like our enemy.
The second Shabbaton was just last weekend. Nearly 150 of us gathered in a New Jersey Hilton to learn about the history and present of Jewish power, powerlessness, and responsibility. The opening seminar, led by Hartman’s co-president Yehuda Kurtzer gave us a framework to understand how Jews have dealt with powerlessness in the diaspora. There are two types of diaspora Jews, he told us, each split into two camps:
Judeo-Pessimists
Particularist Judeo-Pessimists believe Israel, as the ultimate manifestation of Jewish power, is the only place we can truly be safe.
Collectivist Judeo-Pessimists believe Jews suffer under the same injustices as the other marginalized people of the world and should work with them to tear it all down.
Judeo-Optimists
Religious Judeo-Optimists believe if we pray and have faith, soon the Messiah will come and be our salvation—so why even worry?
Secular Judeo-Optimists believe the project of liberal democracy will ensure our safety and that we should participate enthusiastically; should fulfill our civid duties.
We separated into the four corners of the room based on which we felt most accurate. I and the plurality of my peers made a beeline for secular Judeo-Optimism.
Kurtzer then asked us where we felt we were on October 6th. About half of the particularist Judeo-Pessimists joined our corner.
Then he asked where our grandparents would have been at our age. Nearly all of us congregated under the protection of a secular, liberal America.
Over time, we’re losing our optimism, and we know it—but it’s still our largest camp.
A handful of European countries, Canada, and Argentina all have a few hundred thousand concentrated in big cities—but nothing compares to the US, where at least 6 million diaspora Jews are scattered all around the country. (Berman DataBank)
Primary sources are for hacks. (Stanford Encyclopedia)
And “the Palestinian Authority as a burden.” (Times of Israel)
“Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious,” their original charter proclaims, “It is the duty of the followers of other religions to stop disputing the sovereignty of Islam in this region, because the day these followers should take over there will be nothing but carnage, displacement and terror.” The newer charter facetiously replaces “Jews” with “Zionists,” and changes little else. (Quoted in The Atlantic)
More accurately: consensus is increasingly united against the government
The Sinai would later be returned in exchange for a peace agreement with Egypt at the Camp David Accords in 1978.
(Judge Sebutinde’s dissent, #22)
That particular aid shipment wasn’t necessary to the so-far small-scale offensive, but it was a symbolically important moment demonstrating the weakening of US-Israel ties.
It amounts to little more than: “we believe we’re in the majority so we must be right and everyone else can go suck it”
Why shouldn’t every organization be involved in every social justice everything? Specialization who? (University of Michigan GEO)