Antisemitism and the Future of Analysis
In 2018, I directed a film entitled Islam and the Future of Tolerance. The film, based on the published dialogues between Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz, champions the importance of conversation and productive disagreement in the face of an emotionally charged, massively important, and consequential topic.
The film doesn’t have a traditional protagonists vs. antagonist structure. But if it has a nemesis, it would be something like the confusion and intellectual paralysis which results in an inability to honestly critique a set of ideas. The hero then is the freedom and courage to conduct open honest analysis and, as the title suggests, the principle of intellectual, ethnic, and ideological tolerance which is crucial to uphold in a liberal post-Enlightenment tradition.
The nemesis to this honest pursuit of analysis was encapsulated in the charge of “Islamophobia” which was, and still is, often used to shut down any inquiry into the complex motivations of specific forms of violence. To emphasize the primary point, the idea was not that ideology was the only factor to discuss, but that it must be considered in conjunction with other forces like history, economics, class dynamics, individual psychology, resource distribution, and political sociology. The point was never to ignore something like the geopolitics of oil consumption, for example, but that, in the complete analysis, religious ideology should, and must, also be considered. All of this must also be done while not erasing the real phenomena of racism and discrimination towards Muslims, but rather, to help combat it.
I was (and still am) convinced that the real tragedy of that particular conversational roadblock was that it was preventing a necessary shift towards moral reforms within Islam which would advance human rights. And much more importantly, it was promoting a significant upgrade to the language used within the West to help distinguish ideas and the people who subscribe to them. The conversation introduced categories like “Islamism” as distinct from “Jihadism” as distinct from “conservative Islam” as distinct from “reforming” or “liberal Muslims”. When I was making the film, I was thinking mostly about preventing discrimination and hatred against Muslims in the West much more so than I was deluding myself to think that the Holy Books would be reformed in Indonesian madrasas.
In light of the current war being waged in Gaza and the pathetic state of public conversation on the topic, I want to share my life experience regarding another extremely dangerous and urgent phenomenon which takes a disturbingly similar form.
Chosen
I was born in 1982 in a Conservative Jewish household in an American suburb. Judaism has always been a strange sort of thing which dances conveniently between calling itself an ethnicity and a religious ideology. I’m an atheist, as are both of my parents. As a family, we attended high holidays and the very occasional shabbat service. I was Bar Mitzvahed and attended Hebrew School until I was a teenager. I was never given a very strict vision of metaphysics or the Supernatural from my Judaism. For example, I was never told what would happen to my soul or other souls after death.
I learned the Biblical stories. I learned about Noah’s animals and the flood, Moses leading the enslaved Jews out of Egypt with the help of a homicidal plague sending God, and, of course, Abraham nearly sacrificing his son on a mountain before God’s angel tapped him on the shoulder at the last moment and whispered “just kidding”. I learned about these things through cartoons, children’s books, songs, movies, and as I got older, discussions with the local religious leaders of my synagogue and translations of the Torah. But none of those things really mattered to the kind of Judaism that I was being indoctrinated into. In fact, my sarcastic tone in the retelling of those stories carried only mild discipline or condemnation, and sometimes even comical agreement from Rabbis themselves. What really mattered to the Jewish story that I was learning was one thing and one thing only: Israel.
Israel, I was told, was “promised to the Chosen People by God”. But again, that religious bent wasn’t really the thing to take seriously. What I needed to take seriously was the story that Jews were not safe in the world and that Israel was a modern political miracle and the only safe haven for Jews. It was under constant threat and always just hanging by a thread, right from the start. I, as a born Jew, could play a crucial role in ensuring that it survived. That was my birthright, my burden, and my doctrine.
This “under threat” story was supported by a Holy Book which told of endless persecutions of Jews by their enemies for thousands of years. Every American Jew knows the joke that Jewish holidays gatherings all go like this: “They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat.” But, again, I need not take the word of a Holy Book with incredibly suspect fact-checking as the proof of this story. I only had to talk to my oldest relatives to learn about the horrors of the Holocaust to verify the overall ethos.
I was brought to the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. by my Hebrew School on a sort of pilgrimage of this mythology. The museum is incredible and should absolutely be visited by everyone. The darkest depths of human depravity are on full emotional display. In the context of the Jewish experience which I was being exposed to, it was easy to feel the perpetual shadow of extermination which casts itself over my lineage. And if I am not diligent, it will come for me again. This visit happened a few years before nearly all of my friends went on summer trips to Israel which included spending intimate time with the Israel Defense Force (IDF) between an itinerary of fun and festivities. That trip, it was easy to see, was the “real” Bar Mitzvah which would complete one’s right of passage into the Jewish community rather than the religiously outlined Bar Mitzvah which was supposed to grant one the right to read from the Torah.
My Jewish education can be summarized in such a way where the holiest tenant of post-holocaust Judaism is distilled to a two word prayer: “Never Again”. The prayer is intentionally vague as it leaves open interpretation to either be extended to read “Never Again to anyone anywhere” or “Never again to us”. This interpretation fault line has become a full political fracture in the Jewish conversation and mirrors the more familiar “nationalist vs globalist” tension in post Cold War discourse.
In either interpretation of “NeverAgainIsm”, the state of Israel takes center stage as an enclave and fortress. I was given a steady diet of reminders that antisemitism is not just a thing in museums, and not only contained to anomalous fascists flare ups in distant parts of the world. No, antisemitism is everywhere and somehow always rising. Given that truth, it’s important for Jews to have a place to flee in the event that things go sideways in Europe, America, or elsewhere. The evidence of the Holocaust was rather convincing that there is something to that logic and that it could happen very quickly. It didn’t matter that Seinfeld was the number one show in America in my youth, the antisemitism tide rises suddenly and we could be washed away in a flash. My Hebrew School and parents would ensure that I would also receive all news items about antisemitic graffiti appearing on synagogues and the gravestones of Orthodox Jews, a group of people we had nothing in common with except for this powerful mutual story of historical survival, some common ancestors, and a few overlapping traditions.
For many of the Jews I grew up with, this form of identity is profoundly meaningful and constitutes the entire gravitational force to their engagement with doctrinally outlined behaviors like wearing a yarmulke, fasting on Yom Kippur, or keeping kosher. It isn’t about getting into heaven or obeying religious dictates for reasons of divine commandment, it’s about paying homage to the lineage and performing a silent promise that you are doing your part to pass the flame along to the future in an improbable act of solemn and noble defiance. This kind of participatory secular community holds a deep appeal, even to a skeptical teenager like I was.
But there was this nagging issue clinging to this “Never Again” ship of identity which discouraged me from boarding fully. There were all these people who were claiming that they were being brutally mistreated and oppressed at the hands of this special safe place that I was told was crucially important to support. They were called Palestinians.
Sticks and Stones
To a peace loving liberal teenager watching violent clashes on a grainy television, it seemed like the Palestinians had some legitimate gripes. Or, at least, it seemed like throwing rocks should not be met with live deadly bullets. That looked pretty “unfair” and it ran counter to the playground ethics which we were all learning from the same parents who were sending us to Hebrew School.
I was given a lot of explanations for this response which absolved Israel of moral wrongdoing. I was told to put myself in the shoes of the Israelis and understand their difficult situation and how they didn’t really want to hurt anyone but they really “had no choice”. As I grew a bit older, I was informed about political histories which placed the blame for the deaths at the feet of Arab nations. Those Palestinians fled their homelands willingly a long time ago, or were instructed to leave by other governments. Those governments had lost the land in a war. It was all “fair and square” and the Palestinians were just being “sore losers”. The Israelis were just playing by the rules and, of course, I mustn’t forget that the antisemitic monster wears a lot of masks throughout history. This really was just another iteration of the same phenomenon.
To many of us, it was difficult to shake the feeling that this was all a bit hypocritical. It was difficult to decipher the truth from the web of revisionism and self righteousness regarding the psychological makeup of Jews that we were getting. But what was undeniable through it all was NeverAgainIsm which had a way of silencing any doubts about Israel’s so-called defensive aggression. Even if the story about the Palestinians that we were getting wasn’t exactly correct, it didn’t really matter in the face of an existential threat. To the liberal American Jew, everything could be justified by efforts to prevent the next Jewish Holocaust which was always looming just around the corner. This includes forming alliances with ideologies and ideas which would otherwise be abhorred. The only thing that mattered in the consequentialist mathematics was if the alliance would bolster the unwavering defense of Israel from its bloodthirsty antisemitic enemies.
I witnessed my liberal Jewish community shrug when Israel would happily embrace extreme religious right-wing Christians who champion the state of Israel for their own rapturous reasons. I grumbled, but was hushed, as my community watched the relentless expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, even while I knew many of them to be privately opposed to them. It didn’t matter that the settlers were loudly preaching a religious mandate that was clearly outlined in the Torah and granted them divine claim to the land. My community knew not to take those wacky religious ideas of the settlers too seriously but it told itself that those settlements were a necessary buffer zone for security and Israel’s survival. I gritted my teeth as I sensed the dehumanized attitude towards Gazans, whom I was urged to not extend compassion towards in the same way as I was towards Jews. At best they were unfortunate pawns of a geo-political game and at worst they were simply endorsing a new form of Nazism which must be caged, stifled, and surveilled in the name of Israel’s survival. It was explained to me that Palestine really did not even exist and never did. The people were the result of a myth created by Arab nations who simply had it out for Israel. They were just poor brainwashed people who now had to be kept in perpetual quarantine until a Palestinian leadership which was “serious about peace” could emerge.
All of these things were perfectly explained by the “Never Again” mantra and the ever-present threat of antisemitism, a phenomena I was told was global and aggressive but which I had never experienced personally. Israel must behave in these ways in the face of these facts. And she has to take any friend she can find, even the ones that we normally wouldn’t be caught dead with at a political convention.
Here is the contradiction that I was piecing together. I didn’t know what it meant to be a Jew and I began to worry that whatever Judaism was, it was in grave danger of distorting itself into a disfigured extremism which would bring about the biggest threat to its survival of all.
A Jewish Mother’s Son
I really liked Hanukkah. Eight days of presents and fun spinning toys. What’s not to like? I wasn’t the first to note that this felt like a very American phenomena where assimilating Jewish families inflated a minor holiday which happened to fall on the calendar near Christmas. This would help distinguish the American Jews from their neighbors while also participating in an American tradition and, of course, quell the jealousy of Jewish children when they saw their classmates' cool new sneakers. But this holiday also had the perfectly apt dual nature of Post-Holocaust American Jewry. It intertwined yet another story of Jewish survival in the land of what is now the West Bank against an enemy dedicated to its destruction with a touch of divine intervention where God helps tip the scales in favor of his Chosen people. The Maccabees' revolt against the evil Greek emperor succeeded against all odds and was punctuated by God performing a miracle and extending the burn time of the oil used to light the eternal flame when they reclaimed their Temple. I could choose to dismiss the divine part of the story as a fairytale but I would have to take seriously the other parts in the ways in which it helped bolster NeverAgainIsm.
Beyond all the external threats which I must pay close attention to, there were some other things I should know about Judaism’s survival. I was not so subtly urged to disapprove of intermarriage. Or if one happened between some distant friend or relative, I was to take some solace in knowing that the children of such an alliance would be “raised Jewish”, whatever that meant.
By the time I was 13 I knew that I didn’t believe a word of the religious ideology. I would read along with the English translation of the prayer books as the congregation chanted and nodded in Hebrew, a language which nearly all of us knew how to pronounce but almost none of us knew how to translate. I thought that Judaism’s scriptural moral tenets were quite bad and unexamined. And I didn’t even like the food very much. All of this, I was told, wasn't a problem for my Jewishness. In fact, it kind of incorporated me into the classic self-deprecating “Jewish” humor tract and some rabbinical concept about “wrestling with God”, as if doubt and skepticism was a distinctly Jewish invention. But when I began to outwardly question the moral conduct of the state of Israel. That was a big problem. To do that was to question the unquestionable.
My experience is echoed in the results of a Pew Research Poll of American Jews held in 2020. They found that eight-in-ten U.S. Jews say caring about Israel is an essential or important part of what being Jewish means to them. What is interesting about the result is how generational this response was. When the most extreme form of the question was posed as “caring about Israel is essential to being Jewish” 52% of Jews 65 and older responded in the affirmative and only 35% of the respondents aged 18-29 did. This generational slip is to be expected as the memory of the Holocaust and Israel’s founding begins to shift from direct experience, to grandparents' vague stories, to hazy family lineage and exhibits at museums. This generational slide is also no secret to Israel which must be sensing that its default unconditional American support may be fading. In a rush to secure itself from this slackening support, it began to take more and more extreme positions in the 90’s and now has handed over the keys to its policy towards Palestinians to its own religious extremists, the ones who take the divine parts of the stories of Hanukkah very seriously.
One of the most telling pieces of data in the Pew Research was the stark difference between Jews who believe “God literally gave them the land of Israel.” 87% of Orthodox Jews agree with that statement while only 46% and 26% of Conservative and Reform Jews do respectively. That same Orthodox group gave Donald Trump an 86% approval rating regarding his policy towards Israel, someone who is not exactly well read on the religious doctrines of the Torah.
This was all worrisome to me because you have to understand something. Judaism is very important to my mother and I want her to be happy. I am a Jewish mother’s son, if nothing else.
We used to argue about the issue of Israel’s dangerous external and internal alliances and American Judaism’s blurring of its lines between being a religion about moral community and a narrowly defined political advocacy club. The arguments got nowhere until one day during a particularly ugly flareup of Israeli violence, she called a truce by admitting that she knows herself to be too emotionally close to see the issue of Israel clearly. She explained that ending her unconditional support and love of Israel would feel like an “amputation” to her. The analogy is powerful and halting. I learned from then on to bite my tongue. But my worry continued because I knew what was at stake was not Israel’s survival, it was Judaism’s, the thing she really cared about.
I knew that American Judaism was in deep trouble if it would complete its morphing into an expression of blind Israel support while Israel itself behaved in some incredibly difficult ways to support. But this outcome seemed impossible to avert because it had also developed armor in the form a rhetorical shield which accused any critique from outside of itself as “antisemitic” and any from inside of itself as the mere rantings of a “self hating Jew”. If this armor could not be pierced and the mutation was total, this would represent the realization of the existential fears which Jews always were so sure would come in the form of an external enemy.
But the familial truce was in place.
So, over the next two decades of my life after graduating college, I only whispered as Israel operated in lock step with my concerns. It steadily charged towards becoming an ultra-nationalist and exclusive religious entity. It has now become such a thing with the likes of Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Neftali Bennett at the helm of its government and military. In the last five years, it enshrined its status as a nation state for Jews into its constitution (something my parents used to proudly point out it had never done as evidence of its open and equal society). It stripped its judicial branch of important checks on executive power. It continued to build settlements and arm and militarily protect the settlers in the West Bank under the severely strained logical guise of “security”. It strategically choked access to natural resources in the West Bank in an effort to influence Palestinians to vacate land which Jews desired. They did this while flaunting the United Nations and even the open disapproval of the United States. I knew the ready-made response to this would be that the United Nations was biased and “antisemitic” and should be generally ignored.
I shuddered, but remained silent, when I would watch reports of aggressive Jewish youth mobs shouting “Death to Arabs” through the streets of Jerasalem who openly declare holy instructions from the Torah to not be homosexual and claim the real estate under their Arab neighbors feet was promised by God to them. There were some media outlets interested in documenting the rapid rise of murders of Palestinians at the hands of religious Jews, and a few interested in covering the desecration of Christian graveyards by Jewish extremists. I knew that mentioning the rise in these hate crimes and pointing to alarming electoral polling data from the settlements which showed them strongly supporting openly racist and Jewish-Supremecy political parties would be met with dismissals that they were just a small minority without much real power. And that even if their interpretation of religious Judaism was not the same as the secular NeverAgainIsm in which I was brought up, their behavior aligned with the survival of Israel. So, we should dampen our criticism of these things. I would be treated with a vague hand-waving claim that their presence in the West Bank was actually helping Israel stay safe (81% of liberal Israeli Jews claim that they make Israel less safe).
There was only one news item which caused me to fail to withhold outright laughter at just how complete the disfigurement of American Judaism had become. A planned settlement named after Donald J Trump broke ground in the disputed Golan Heights. It was called Trump Heights. Really? This was just too much.
The Prohibition Against Analysis
People have a very hard time understanding the difference between an explanation and a moral justification. It really shouldn’t be that hard. Let me offer a few simple examples.
If a used car salesman fails to mention the faulty motor in a car which he is about to sell, his actions are perfectly explained by the rational forces of a desire to make money. Is that explanation a moral justification for his slimy sale? Of course not.
If a poor person steals a loaf of bread to feed his starving children, his actions are perfectly explained by his motivation to keep his family alive. Is that explanation a moral justification of the theft? Well, that’s an interesting argument where you may have to provide more context and history to the story to decide how you feel about it.
If a man shoots another man who was threatening him with a knife, his actions might be explained as an act of self defense. Is it a moral justification for him pulling the trigger? That certainly invites much more context and history before one could decide. There is a messy legacy of legal efforts to categorize different types of contexts and codify them into legal lines which hopefully track with the moral ones for cases such as this one.
And if a group of men rapes, massacres, and kidnaps other men, women, and children from another group, can the action be explained? Well, sure it can be. This is where honest conversations about context, psychology, history, ideological commitments, racism, tribalism, and so on, all should be in play. Could any of those explanations add up to a moral justification for the action? No. Of course not. But declaring that it can not be morally justified should do nothing to erase or diminish the explanations.
For anyone who has ever tried to do this kind of thing regarding acts of terror, you are surely familiar with the rabid cries of “antisemitism”, “moral equivalence”, or “relativism”
Why does no one not want to speak about explanations? I think the answer is incredibly important and desperately urgent.
People often describe actions which completely defy moral justification as “senseless”. In other words, there is no explanation for them. There is no sense to find in the reasons for it occurring, which therefore rules out any possible moral justification from the start. But happily, those types of actions which defy all explanations are incredibly rare. In fact, they might not exist at all. Even an explanation such as “the murderer went insane due to a disease” is a kind of explanation. There is another way in which “senseless” might be understood in this context though.
One might say that an act was “senseless” because the action does not act in service of the stated goals of the actor. For example, if I say I want to not get sunburnt but then I sit outside in 100 degree weather without a shirt all day. You might say that this was “senseless”. In this usage of the word, you might be saying that the act of terrorism was senseless in that it will not further the goals of the terrorists themselves. I doubt that this is the usage which most people are assigning to describing acts of terrorism.
One can also describe a morally unjustifiable event as an act of “evil”. This can merely be a rhetorical way to express outrage, but it can also be a way to appeal to supernatural (i.e. senseless and unexplainable) forces as the only legitimate explanations. If an act is an act of “evil” then it defies explanation and therefore moral justification. Or it assumes the goal of the action is a state of evil. So, even if the action is effective in trying to bring it about, it is only serving the purpose of an evil world. “Racism and antisemitism” has been elevated to this status in recent centuries as forces of “evil”.
I recall a particular lesson in my Hebrew School where we were learning about the events which lead up to the Holocaust. My teacher was describing Adolf Hitler as an “evil monster”.
I was in the mood of taking NeverAgainIsm seriously and I raised my hand. I wanted to make the point that “monsters” don’t actually exist. Adolf Hitler was a man. He was a man whose actions had explanations and we should discuss them even while we all understand that, of course, the explanations would never amount to “moral justifications.” If we were really serious about our NeverAgainIsm then we should not be waiting to combat “monsters.” We should be on the lookout for humans with some describable combination of power, ideas, national contexts, charisma, zealotry and so on. That’s what would come walking down the street, not a flaming devil with glowing red eyes. The instructor would have none of it.
“Are you defending Hitler?” My strained effort to respond with “Of course not. His actions are morally indefensible. I’m merely trying to explain Hitler” got nowhere. The resistance to explain the morally indefensible runs very deep.
Plato once said that “man is the rational animal”. Many psychologists have suggested that perhaps we are the “rationalizing” animal. But in either case, to explain another person's actions is to humanize them. To fail to engage in the effort to do this is to dehumanize not only them, but oneself. Once the process of dehumanization is total, then the stage of annihilation of the other is trivial. For when they cease to be explainable, they cease to be able to carry out morally defensible actions and thus no longer matter.
This is why the long standing prohibition against explaining Palestinian terrorism must be lifted. We should trust ourselves to be able to examine motivations for actions without fear that we are morally justifying them.
This, of course, is also true about analyzing and explaining Jewish and Israeli fear and anger. But the case that I am making is that the emergence of NeverAgainIsm has served to provide the entire explanation of that fear and anger, and therefore morally justify all Israeli action and alliance forming. This is done while denying the same kind of explanation for something like the Palestinian telling of the Nakba as an explanation which would equally morally justify Palestinian action and desperation.
Never Again to whom?
I believe in the doctrine of “Never Again to Anyone Anywhere”. I contend that this is a worthy rallying cry for humanity and should be studied and examined more closely than any holy book ever should. It ought to be the new organizing principle for a world where humans have amassed destructive power which was once only reserved for all powerful Gods.
And it turns out that being born into Judaism does grant me a special role. I, and many other people like me, have been given a fascinating front row seat to the most profound materialization of this doctrine in a post-industrialized world. We have some unique insights to offer to help further this new form of secular devotion. We can share our experiences of confusion, frustration, and concern as we have watched American Judaism struggle to find an identity which retains the practices of religious worship while coalescing around a true story of political survival.
Judaism, I would argue, has not done very well in this unique role as the custodian of this Universal NeverAgainIsm. It has stifled criticism of itself behind (explainable) nightmares of the always imminent return of deadly antisemitism and it has forged a pseudo global-Israeli-citizen personality where critique of Israel’s actions are taken as direct personal threats to its very identity.
But, to cut Judaism some slack, the task was tremendously difficult. The world had never experienced anything quite like the Holocaust nor had it seen an attempt by a newly formed International Body to create a state like Israel in a place quite like the British Palestinian Mandate. This is all very new and it was bound to be a challenge.
But the clock is ticking on this opportunity for Judaism to be trusted with the Universal Never Again doctrine. The “Never Again To Us” crowd is winning the argument. The type of Judaism which takes religious commandments quite seriously is in command of the most important pockets of the Israeli government and Israeli and Palestinian geography. The alliance with the Christian fundamentalist conservative core of America may have immunized Israel to the fickle American voter’s full support, but it has created some outrageously reputationally damaging bedfellows.
At the time of this writing, Gaza is under a total siege and being bombarded relentlessly. The West Bank is starting to see increased raids by the IDF which has already resulted in several deaths. IDF soldiers have beaten the legs of mourning pallbearers as they attempted to move the coffin of a journalist who had been shot in the head. This was all done in the name of security and Israeli survival, even the funeral beating which the IDF claimed was to prevent an incitement to violence. It is yet to be seen what the outcome of the impending ground incursion into Gaza will be. The Israeli leadership shifts their stated intentions and endgame daily from an elimination of Hamas, to the reduction of Hamas, to rescuing the hostages.
As a reminder, all of that behavior has explanations which should be analyzed freely. Though some of the actions are approaching the morally indefensible distinction as well, if they have not already blown past it. It is a useful practice to imagine certain actions which would rise to this level of “morally indefensible though still explainable” well before they happen. And if you find yourself in a position where no imaginable action by Israel could ever rise to that status, even when done in the grips of pain, anger, and fear, then you have fully lost whatever humanity and goodness that a religion should be imbuing in its followers.
Israel, and thus Judaism, stands on the brink. It is in danger of being fully enraptured by factions which have confidently put the entire Jewish duality of NeverAgainIsm and Divine Privilege into their pocket. And if that happens, then we will, unfortunately, be waiting for another group of surviving people to take the front row seats of Universal NeverAgainIsm as they attempt to learn from the experience of people who lost the struggle for what used to be called Judaism.
Let us hope it is not too late to speak up.