A note on content
Readers of Thoughts-letter might have noticed that, especially since October 7, I have been particularly concerned about Israel-Palestine, Zionism, anti-Palestinian racism, and antisemitism. I believe that Israel’s genocidal fury in Gaza and the West Bank, backed by the United States, is one of the fronts in the international and domestic assault on democracy, the rule of law, and human and collective rights.
In the early days and weeks of the invasion of Gaza, Israel and its supporters dismissed charges of an unfolding genocide by saying that Israel has a right to defend itself, that the IDF is the most moral army in the world, and that Hamas is hiding behind civilians and inside every hospital, mosque, apartment building, market, school, and ambulance. Social media posts and videos by Palestinians in Gaza exposed the thoughtful and methodical nature of the genocide, drew tens of thousands of students into Gaza Encampments, and exposed Israel and the United States to ridicule and outrage.
Israel’s positive spin wasn’t working, so its supporters turned to criminalizing the criticism. If you can’t convince the world that what you’re doing is not genocide, then make the word itself illegal in public discourse: It’s not that Israel isn’t committing genocide, it’s that anyone who says that Israel is committing genocide is antisemitic. Which turns 15 million Palestinians — an entire people — into antisemites.
MAGA’s attacks on higher education, academic freedom, and free speech began with criminalizing Palestinian students and the Palestine solidarity movement as “antisemitic,” a charge echoed by the Democrats. Mahmoud Khalil is not an international student with a visa; he is a Palestinian refugee with an international student visa. Some liberals respond with “I despise what he says, but I defend his right to say it.” Others want to be sure that he has access to “due process.” Both positions are laudable, but they miss the point: Khalil is in ICE detention not because of what he said or because the government denied him due process; he is facing deportation because the U.S. is complicit in the genocide in Gaza. Ending that complicity must be a critical component of the struggle against the MAGA assault on democracy and human rights.
Who gets to define “antisemitism”?
Speaking of antisemitism, who gets to define it?
I don’t agree that antisemitism should be defined beyond saying that it means the dehumanization of Jews. A definition, by definition, circumscribes the meaning of a word. A definition is what a word means. But words, and therefore their definitions, are embedded in the contexts in which they are used, and some words, as George Orwell pointed out, have political and ideological lives. What gets included or excluded matters.
So we come to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which defines antisemitism as “hatred toward Jews” and gives 11 examples of antisemitism, seven of which have to do with Israel, including “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” and “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.” For the IHRA definition’s supporters, criticism of Israel is antisemitic, which means Palestinians are antisemitic.
This weaponization of antisemitism has generated resistance, and one of the responses to that resistance is an argument based on identity politics. In an op-ed in the Forward, Barak Sella wrote:
On most campuses, we defer to marginalized communities to define their own experiences of hate. Why are Jewish students uniquely denied this right? If Jewish students understand a popular protest chant to be a call for violence toward Jews, why are we so eager to dismiss that response?
Sella is referring to the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
During an email exchange with me last year, a rabbi wrote:
Just as I can address other topics that require a certain authority of lived experience with much more thoughtfulness — I can make definitive claims about queerness, as I have, whereas I can speak to the experience of living in a racist society as a learner, but it’s not my lane to say, e.g., if a politician has addressed racism effectively. Nobody asked me. Not my lane. Just as I would really not want to hear a Christian’s perspective on whether or not X or Y thing was really antisemitic. That’s a Jewish conversation.
Let’s look at this argument.
Sella refers to Jews as a “marginalized community.” At this moment, in the current context, Jews are a minority community, not a marginalized community. A community is marginalized when a nation-state or a government passes laws or implements policies that, for example, exclude members of the community from jobs, federal benefits, or housing, based on racial, ethnic, national, class, or other such differences. Marginalized communities are over-policed as a matter of state policy and have higher rates of poverty and less access to healthcare. Within the Jewish community, Black Jews, trans Jews, queer Jews, poor Jews, and disabled Jews are marginalized, not because they are Jews, but because they are also members of other communities that are marginalized. Jews have been and could again be marginalized.
Beware arguments that claim to speak for an entire group of people: “If Jewish students understand…” Many Jewish students, and many Jews in general, believe that the “river to the sea” slogan is antisemitic. But not the Jewish students who participated in the Gaza Encampments, not the Jews in Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow, not the Jews in Tzedek Chicago, not me. During the Gaza Encampment at Columbia University, Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League called on New York Gov. Kathy Hochul to send in the National Guard to protect “Jewish students.” His concern for the safety of Jewish students did not extend to the Jewish students who were part of the Encampment.
The rabbi says that “it’s not my lane to say, e.g., if a politician has addressed racism effectively.” This statement confuses personal experience of racism with a political understanding of white supremacy and its role in a class society. If you were to ask Angela Davis and Clarence Thomas whether a politician has addressed racism effectively, you would get two different answers. The differences reflect contradictory political and ideological perspectives. When those of us on the Left talk about taking leadership from Black people in the struggle against racism or police brutality, we don’t have Clarence Thomas in mind.
The rabbi continues, “I would really not want to hear a Christian’s perspective on whether or not X or Y thing was really antisemitic. That’s a Jewish conversation.” Hard no. Antisemitism is an objective phenomenon in class society; it exists independently of our identity as Jews or non-Jews and therefore can be studied, understood, and fought by anyone.
Zionism maintains that antisemitism is “Jew hatred,” an ineradicable virus that takes different forms among different groups — e.g., Black antisemitism, Left antisemitism, Christian antisemitism — especially when criticism of Israel is considered antisemitic. From this perspective, Jews have no natural allies in the struggle against antisemitism. Jews in Israel can be safe only by making (antisemitic) Palestinians unsafe, and Jews in the United States can be safe only by shunning (antisemitic) Black people, Muslims, other people of color, and the Left.
From a Left perspective, modern antisemitism is not reducible to “Jew hatred”; it is a racialized dehumanization of Jews that is useful to those in power when they want to deflect anger onto an imaginary enemy. Like other forms of racism, antisemitism is ubiquitous, not because non-Jews are “naturally” antisemitic, but because antisemitism is part of capital’s divide-and-conquer strategy. From this perspective, the only way to defeat antisemitism is through collective struggle against all forms of racism.
The argument that Jews “know” what antisemitism is because they are Jewish, ignores the influence of anti-Palestinian racism, anti-Black racism, Islamophobia, and Zionism on their thinking.
Dad joke
What is another name for a proctologist?
Answer: An analyst.