(Jewish Group) Stop playing politics with antisemitism

[Behind the Aegis]

(THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP! RESPECT!!)

Yom Hashoah seems as good a day as any to talk about antisemitism. That would be the case even if it wasn’t less than a week since a horrific white nationalist shooting in an American synagogue (the second in a little more than six months) and a shocking antisemitic cartoon published in The New York Times. What those two events seem to require however is a specific focus on the peculiar politicization of antisemitism, in the United States in particular.

Antisemitism used to be something – perhaps the only thing! – that Jews could agree on. Orthodox or Reform; liberal or conservative; Labor or Likud; we all knew antisemitism when we saw it, and it was to be fought tooth and nail. But in today’s historically polarized climate, the tendency to see the antisemitism from ‘the other side’ only has become impossible to ignore.

Cast your minds back to the AIPAC Policy Conference of a few weeks ago. With all the headlines about Democratic absentees from the conference, it was a senior Democrat, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer who got it right about antisemitism:

“When someone names only prominent Jews as trying to buy or steal our elections, we must call it out. When someone says that being Jewish and supporting Israel means you are not loyal to America, we must call it out. When someone looks at a neo-Nazi rally and sees some very fine people among its company, we must call it out.”

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