Antisemitism: The Old and the New
The antisemitism of the left comes from our civilization's enemies, internal and external (1300 words, 7 minutes)
We have seen an explosion of antisemitism here in Canada, and likewise across the West, a scandalous metastasis of a shameful prejudice. This new antisemitism comes from the left, once the home of enlightenment and the enemy of bigotry. And while the old antisemitism is mostly confined to losers on social media, the new comes from above, from the intelligentsia and the institutions.
I therefore turned with interest to an article in Saturday’s Globe and Mail under the title, “The tragedy of our time is that antisemitism rises equally from the left and right.” The Globe, once a Tory paper, has recently gone woke (and become completely unreliable), so I was briefly encouraged to see at least the acknowledgment that left antisemitism is a problem. I was quickly disabused of any hope: the primary object of Gopnik’s ire is inevitably Donald Trump.
This makes Gopnik a useful example of the left’s blind spots, all the more useful for his not being a fool. His essay, now reprinted in the Saturday review section of the Globe, began as an address at Massey College of the University of Toronto, not far from the site of a recent long-lasting antisemitic occupation. This he does not mention, nor the ongoing violence in our streets.
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The old antisemitism, the antisemitism to which Hitler gave genocidal expression, insisted that Jews were less than fully patriotic. They were not properly national, being accused of transnational and cosmopolitan loyalties. The new antisemitism attacks Jews for being Zionists, which is to say for being loyal to Israel, a Western country. Israel is seen by the left as a Western settler state, and the left directs at Israel the hatred normally reserved for that most compelling Western settler state, the United States. Once antinational, Jews are now accused of being too nationalist.
The left’s hatred of Israel is an inevitable consequence of its anti-Western ideology: if you believe axiomatically that Western countries are creations of colonial white supremacy and therefore always and essentially in the wrong, you will end by condemning Israel and supporting Hamas. This is the basic logic of the left’s conception of history (as I argued here), and many follow it with a dogmatism too stupid to recoil from the absurdity of its necessary ending in queers for Palestine.
Gopnik does not see this: he insists on seeing the old and the new antisemitisms as sharing an origin. Apparently, the roots of antisemitism are to be found in anti-elitism, elites being “defined simply as people who read and argue about their reading.”
His treatment of the new anti-colonial and anti-Western antisemitism consists of little more than a verbal trick: one aspect of the old antisemitism was anti-intellectualism (true); current elites think themselves intellectual (true), and their critics are for Gopnik really criticizing their broadmined sophistication (false); so criticism of elites follows what Gopnik calls “the base template of antisemitism.”
Gopnik’s real target is Donald Trump, lumping in Brexit and the French National Rally for effect. For Gopnik, good people are universalist and intellectually engaged; antisemites are neither of these things, so anyone he thinks particularist or anti-intellectual is an incipient antisemite. Adding elites into the mix makes criticism of current elites not merely anti-intellectual but implicitly antisemitic, a very pleasant conclusion for a New Yorker writer; his audience at The Globe and at Massey College will like it too. Ergo, Trump, who has a Jewish daughter and is unapologetically supportive of Israel, is antisemitic.
The great blind spots in Gopnik’s account are two, and both obvious: left anti-semitism depends for much of its popular support on immigrant Muslim populations, and also on the Antifa left, a demi-monde of permanent students, baristas, trust-fund kids, and others in search of a purpose now provided by the cause of “revolution intifada.”
The Hamas/Hezbollah Islamic fundamentalists and the queers for Palestine start at very different places, but are united by their hatred for the West, and above all for the United States, the most powerful Western nation, and for Israel, the most admirably combative.
Muslim fundamentalists begin with the recidivist anger of a defeated people confronted with the manifest superiority of a Western power. The Arabs have started at least six wars with Israel, depending upon how you count, and have consistently lost (1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, and 2023, and yes one can debate 1956; the constant terrorism and missile attacks of recent decades don’t easily fit the list of years). A religion both militant and eschatological, based from its origins on military conquest, and promising the ultimate victory of Islam, is regularly humiliated on the battlefield by a power its theology hates. The resultant anger has now been imported into our streets by short-sighted politicians in search of immigrant votes.
The Antifa left starts from a different religion, the secular religion of Marxism, but ends in the same hatreds: of America, of the West, and most of all of Israel. The left’s roots are in the secular intelligentsia, and much of their popular support comes from students and others keen to feel idealistic and on the right side of the present big issue. America is a hetero-patriarchal racist genocide state, the ever-expanding list of epithets pointing to the iterations of cultural Marxism that constitute the left’s ideology. All that is needed is anti-imperialism to cement the link to Islamic fundamentalism.
A key difference between the old antisemitism of the right and the new antisemitism of the left is that the old came from sub-literates in beer halls or their mother’s basement; the new comes from high-status and highly credentialed people in our society’s most prestigious institutions. The antisemitism of the right came largely from below; the new antisemitism comes from above. This is a point to which Gopnik of The New Yorker, The Globe and Mail, and Massey College is strangely blind.
Much of the new antisemitism is a foreseeable consequence of mass immigration, exacerbated by the abandonment of any attempt at assimilation (as Ayaan Hirsi Ali has seen). Under the hegemony of cultural Marxism, diversity is an irrefragable good, rendering assimilation tantamount to racism if not cultural genocide. We have lost the elementary measure of self-confidence that would be needed to require immigrants to assimilate into our foundational culture.
Gopnik himself illustrates these problems: for him, the opponents of mass immigration are the real antisemites, and the violence pro-Hamas protesters bring to our streets goes unmentioned. We now have mobs of masked men harassing Jews in the streets of Toronto, Montreal, New York, and London, but Gopnik like so many progressives, like the editors of The Globe and Mail, thinks Trump is the problem.
Just this weekend men were arrested in Montreal preparing to firebomb a synagogue, a crime passed over in silence by The Globe.1 But for Gopnik, Trump and other nationalist politicians are voices of “authoritarianism” and “popular fascism.” The “fascism” accusation is particularly ridiculous against those who wish to contain the state within its proper boundaries (as I pointed out last week). It is an accusation that echoes the old Marxist habit of calling everything right of centre “fascist,” an unintentional reminder of the Marxist roots of current progressive ideology.
The new antisemitism comes from within the institutions, speaking in the dulcet tones of “diversity” while importing millions of foreigners from a hostile and inferior civilization, and recruiting to its service an alienated sub-intelligentsia of Antifa radicals primed for violence against their own society. The new antisemites don’t just hate the Jews, they hate the rest of us too, and for the same reasons. The problem of antisemitism is part of a larger problem of cultural self-confidence: we need to secure our borders, to re-establish order in our streets, and to recapture our institutions from the self-hating left, the root of the new antisemitism.
I read the Globe in order to know what the Ottawa bubble thinks, not in order to know is actually happening. Sad, as you say.
Excellent and much appreciated - thank you! Your insights into Gopnik's repulsive self-flattery are dead-on, but actually the old antisemitism was top-down, too. The antisemites in Nazi Germany filled the universities, and of course seduced the immature, easily-led youth. Yes, there were unthinking thugs throughout the ranks, but they really only followed what the thinking thugs (!) were saying. In early Christianity, religious authorities - priests and scholars and Church Fathers - were the ones responsible for anti-Jewish theology, because theology's an intellectual business. Almost all the major Western philosophers have been anti-Jewish, to one degree or another (there's great book by David Nirenberg, "Anti-Judaism", that traces the whole long history). Anti-Jewish prejudice misuses intellect and perverts rational thought, but it's always connected to a belief system (for lack of a better term). Hitler said the Jews "invented conscience", so it seems he thought that if he got rid of all Jews everywhere, he could live a life of conscience-free criminal self-indulgence.
I think anti-Jewish prejudice always has to do with *what people tell themselves about themselves*, if that makes any sense. Which is why psychoanalysis was considered a "Jewish science" by the Nazis. In an important sense, antisemitism is just anti-psychology. On some level, doesn't everyone believe it's important to be "good", and doesn't everyone except psychopaths want to feel okay about themselves, to at least feel "good enough"? (Psychopaths always feel fine, so they have no problem here.) Then some authority tells you it's okay to do everything you know is really evil, because if you do it against Jews, it will become not just good, but Extra-Double-Plus Good! Who can resist?
Really, only people who can tell the difference between good and evil, in a real-life way. Gopnik is exploiting this elitist trope to excuse his lazy, safe, entitled self from facing reality.
Thank you again.