(Jewish Group) Dont Appropriate Anti-Semitism. Jews Are More Than Our Suffering
(THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP! RESPECT!!)
Decades after Holocaust, European intellectuals, some of them Jewish, began writing books and articles investigating the European history of ideas which led to fascism and, ultimately, to the concentration camps. Many of these intellectuals, prominent philosophers and critical theorists like Jean-Francois Lyotard, began using “the jew” as a trope or concept (indicated here with the lower case). For them, “the jew” describes not the Jewish people per se, but rather any minority group scapegoated by the majority culture. Typically, “the jew” is powerless and homeless; Jews are transient, aliens against whom nationalists and populists define themselves. “Anti-fascism,” French writer Alain Finkielkraut writes, “had established the Jew as a value: as the gold standard of oppression, as the paradigm of the victim.”
As the recent article in the The Forward demonstrates, universalizing Jewish persecution to talk about “the jew” is still very much in vogue.
Borrowing from Zygmant Bauman, Helene Meyers argues that former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is being subjected to anti-Semitism because she is a “jew,” a victim, in her case, of malicious political rhetoric. Since Jewishness has been universalized into a concept of victimhood, anti-Semitism can be directed at non-Jews like Clinton. The article recites some of the rhetoric leveled at Clinton from across the political spectrum to suggest that the former Secretary of State is our national “scapegoat,” or our conceptual jew.
That Hillary Clinton — ex-Secretary of State, former Senator, and current multi-millionaire who won 65.8 million votes in the 2016 presidential election — inhabits the position of “the jew” reveals the absurdity of turning Jews into a concept.
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