It’s likely that most or all of today’s posts will be about the antisemitism in America and the world, a form of hatred revealed and exacerbated by the war between Israel and Hamas. There are no other worthy items to post about, so if you’re tired of the war, or of discussions about Jews, just skip today’s posts.
If not, here’s part of an op-ed from the Wall Street Journal—horrors! But it will do you good, even if you’re a liberal, to have a look at the opposition once in a while. In fact, this editorial is not really conservative, but proffers an explanation for the recent spike in antisemitism—an explanation that seems correct to me. Click to read; the author is one of the paper’s editorial writers:
The question, in brief, is why Jews, who, like blacks, used to be seen as oppressed (and indeed, the groups worked in harmony during the civil rights movement of the Sixties) are now viewed as oppressors, while blacks remain in the class of those oppressed. In fact, Jews are at the very top of the oppressors pile. How did that happen?
Swaim’s answer, in brief, is that the failure of American society to bring about a near-equality of blacks and whites over the past sixty years has led liberals to search for a scapegoat, and the Jews are always handy scapegoats.
Now, the quotes from the op-ed, which I’ll divide into “The Problem” and “The Explanation”. There is no section on “The Solution” because Swaim doesn’t really suggest one. Quotes from the piece are indented.
THE PROBLEM
Here we’re not talking about the problem of why blacks remain behind whites in indices of well being and success. That itself is a huge discussion! We’re talking about the problem of the rise of Jew hatred or milder antisemitism in the West.
. . . Yet here we are. Over the past 2½ months, Jew-hatred has rocked elite college campuses. Tony neighborhoods in blue cities have witnessed marches calling for the elimination of the Jewish state and protests outside Jewish-owned businesses—this in response not to the accidental killing of a Palestinian by an Israeli soldier, but to the systematic butchering and kidnapping of Israeli Jews by terrorists.
. . . The Biden administration itself, though so far pursuing a broadly pro-Israel policy in the Middle East, responded to the rash of antisemitic marches and assaults on Jews by announcing a “National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia.”
Do note that the Biden administration also instituted “U.S. National Strategy to Combat Antisemism,” even though this was in May of 2023. So an antisemitic program was already in place, and I don’t think it unseemly to institute a similar strategy about Islamophobia (though I don’t like that word) given that Muslim hate crimes also rose after October 7. But let’s go on:
So far there have been no pogroms in the U.S., only venomous semiviolent protests, individual assaults, libelous social-media onslaughts and willfully misleading news coverage. But the motivation driving today’s Jew-hatred bears some resemblance to those earlier episodes of antisemitic violence. Elite American society has failed in the one aim that gave it definition for more than a half-century: the realization of racial equality.
And that brings us to the next section.
THE EXPLANATION
To Swaim, American liberals, immensely frustrated, strike out at the Jews as a “displacement behavior” for whites’ failure to realize racial equality. (Swaim’s really talking more about equality in income, well being, and so on rather than in the law, as there are no anti-black federal laws and few state ones.)
The term “displacement behavior” first arose in ethology, the study of animal behavior. It covers behaviors in which, for example, animals who can’t achieve their aims, are frustrated, are conflicted, or are being bullied or attacked, respond by showing a ritualized behavior as a response. For example:
Displacement behavior includes SDBs [self directed behavior] such as self-grooming, touching, or scratching, displayed when an animal has a conflict between two motivations, such as the desire to approach an object while at the same time being fearful of that object. Many, perhaps most, birds and mammals groom in similar ways when faced with a conflict between approaching and avoiding another animal (Figure 4.5). In social hierarchies, lower ranking animals groom more frequently than do higher ranking animals, possibly reflecting the conflict between attraction to the social group and avoidance of the higher ranking animals in the group.
In these terms, white adoption of antisemitism or generalized blaming of Jews (as is happening in Gaza) is their response, born of frustration, at not achieving their admirable but difficult aim of bringing about greater equality between whites and blacks. Below you can displacement behavior occurring during elephant aggression, and I give the Vimeo caption:
Two males are engaged in a long Escalated-Contest. In this section the male with the longer tusks has the upper hand. He makes several Advances-Toward the male with the shorter tusks and adopts Periscope-Trunk three times. During this clip both males engage in Displacement-Behavior – the male on the left Displacement-Feeding and the male on the right Displacement-Grooming.
Well, I had to slip some biology in there. Back to the op-ed. Here’s the frustration:
The trouble started in the mid-1970s, when the reality became clear that the liberal answer to racial inequality—the modern welfare state inaugurated by the Great Society—wasn’t working. With each passing decade since, black economic improvement has stalled. As Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom make clear in their book “America in Black and White” (1997), the black poverty rate declined dramatically from 1940 to 1960, less dramatically but still significantly from 1960 to 1970, and hardly at all after 1970. Yet decade after decade, the prescription from right-thinking liberals—elected Democrats, social-welfare agency heads, academic experts in urban studies, liberal intellectuals, entertainment-industry glitterati—remains the same: Double down on ’60s-style social-welfare policy, liberalize crime laws, and vilify whites other than themselves.
. . . In the 2000s, as black economic prospects improved little, the terms became more absurd—and more openly racialist. Liberals complained of “colorblind racism,” the idea that disregarding race exacerbated race relations and was, in effect, racist. The terms “unconscious bias” and “microaggression” are premised on the idea that well-meaning people can spread racial animus by using seemingly innocuous words and phrases. In the 2010s, “equity” and “inclusion” joined “diversity” to form an entire industry of consultants and corporate officers whose stated purpose is to foster equality in the workplace but who go about encouraging everyone to think constantly about racial identity.
All these coinages can fairly be understood as attempts by American liberals to explain to themselves why the beliefs on race they had presupposed for decades remained unimpeachable. At each stage, the effort to avoid rethinking the problem and to cast the blame for continuing racial inequality on somebody else—anybody but themselves—began to look and sound like another version of racism. . .
Note that it is both the Left rather than the Right which more fully embraces the aim of racial equality, and it is the “progressive” Left which has in the last few years demonized the Jews, counting them among the oppressors. Not only that, but Jews are now lumped with whites, even though Palestinians (many with similar genes) are seen as people with color, for Jews are not only oppressors, but generally successful. And all whites,according to race activists like Kendi and DiAngelo, are oppressors, even if they don’t realize it.
While there are causes of antisemitism beyond this form of displacement behavior, they used to be different: they were seen as Christ-killers, as those who controlled banking and the world’s moneyu, and as powerful people set out to rule the world (see the “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” embraced by Hamas in its 1988 charter). As Douglas Murray states, antisemitism is a “shape-shifting hatred”, making Jews the Eternal Other:
For several years a variety of academics and writers had argued that Jews are “white” or “functionally white” or “white passing.” “White,” in this usage, has nothing to do with national or religious identity or genetic characteristics. It signifies allegedly unjust privilege and legacies of oppression. Calling Jews “white” was a way of depriving them of any cover as a racial minority and classifying them with persecutors and exploiters.
As Liel Leibovitz writes in a 2021 essay for Commentary magazine: “The creative genius of Jew-hatred has always been its ability to imagine the Jew as the embodiment of whatever it is that polite society finds repulsive. That’s why Jews were condemned as both nefarious bankers controlling all the world’s money and shifty revolutionaries imperiling all capital; as both sexless creeps and oversexed lechers coming for the women and the girls; as both pathetically powerless and occultly powerful. . . . And if you decide that there’s such a thing as ‘whites’ and that they are uniquely responsible for all evils perpetrated on the innocent and downtrodden, well, the Jews must be not only of them but nestled comfortably at the top of the white-supremacist pyramid.”
Leibovitz, I think, has hit the nail on the head (you can read his essay here). Swaim has a hint of a cure here:
In 2021, when Mr. Leibovitz wrote these words, few detected the Jew-hatred smoldering beneath the surface of progressive thought. The perverse refusal to rethink obviously failed policies on race and crime, or to reconsider shopworn assumptions about why African-Americans had not achieved economic parity with whites, had created the need for scapegoats. To blame whites qua whites worked well enough for a time. But exhibitionist self-hatred is plainly disingenuous and emotionally unsatisfying. The left needed real scapegoats.
What about the Jews? Successful, capitalist, hated by much of the Arab and Muslim world, the Jews—especially Israeli Jews but Jews generally—met the need for a blameworthy Bad People. It was as though the phrase “Never Again,” enunciated endlessly to proclaim the West’s rejection of all the sentiments and ideas that had led to the Final Solution, had become so ingrained in liberal thought that liberals felt they were incapable of embracing the oldest hatred. Never Again . . . but maybe just this once.
. . . The American left, shameful exceptions aside like members of “The Squad” in Congress, has mostly abstained from openly siding with Hamas in the way its counterparts abroad have. But progressives in this country appear paralyzed, unable to condemn the Oct. 7 attack without also condemning “all forms of hatred” and the like. . . .
Note that “we condemn all forms of hatred” is something customarily mouthed when the hatred is mostly from the Arab side, as before Israel responded to the events of October 7. And liberals should condemn it as much as they condemned “all lives matter,” the both-sideist response to “Black Lives Matter.” But liberals can’t force themselves to condemn only antisemitism; they have to condemn all forms of hatred so they don’t look like Jew lovers. The condemnation of “hatred” is an apolitical, anodyne, and designed to avoid taking a political stand while flaunting one’s virtue. It’s like condemning crime in America.
More:
Before Oct. 7, if you had predicted this sudden explosion of Jew-hatred in elite American institutions, you would likely have been called a crank. But you could have made a cogent case for your prediction by noting the many ways in which the nation’s progressive cognoscenti, over the course of the past 50 years, have steadily embraced more preposterous and menacing ideas to explain their failure in the one area they believed themselves both competent and righteous: the creation of racial equality and harmony. Those ideas no doubt appeared edgy and romantic because their target was white people, and what’s the harm in white people condemning themselves? But like amateur wizards playing with incantations, the magic got away from them and produced devilry.
So ending this cause of antisemitism must be to create racial equality and harmony, a good end in itself, and one that, as we all know, is immensely difficult. But real solutions to racial disparities—not just words—must be suggested and implemented, and they must be solutions that haven’t been tried and failed.
And on that day, when the gap between black and white is no longer very large, antisemitism will vanish. Of course, I’m just kidding! For another reason to hate Jews will always arise.
Swain’s argument appears highly contrived. For sure there is hatred of Jews by some people, but for the traditional reasons that Jerry listed (WEF conspiracy anyone?) and they have been enabled by many others who protest simply because of the misguided idea that Israelis (aided by US and other nations) are in a position of power relative to Palestinians. The majority of protestors, who make up a minority of university students, have a black and white view of complex issues such that power differences alone are enough to decide who is “wrong.” Plus they are undoubtedly ignorant of the antipathy and hatred of Jews and Israel in the Middle East (Koran, Protocols, Nazis propaganda during WW2, …), an appreciation of which leads to some understanding of the intensity of the Israeli response and its determination to eliminate Hamas as a proximal threat. And even people who understand the Israeli response are undoubtedly dismayed by the unfortunate collateral harm to civilians, just as we would be by the Dresden bombings or Hiroshima. Imagine those who do not appreciate the realities of Israel’s position in the Middle East?
I think it’s a displacement-excuse. Reasons:
1. Anti-semitism has risen dramatically in all rich western nations, even if they have no legacy of slavery (well, recently) to feel awful about. It was always there, and just needed an excuse.
2. If Jews were once seen as being just as oppressed as African-Americans, they had the nerve to better their situation through their own efforts and without saying thank you to their white(r) saviours, and with the unfortunate side-effect of making their quondam fellow-oppressees look bad.
3. It makes as much sense to blame Jews for the inequalities experienced by African-Americans, as it would to blame African-Americans for the current anti-semitism.
But I do blame the current wave of antisemitism on black people. They and their sympathizers make up the left wing of the American Democratic and Canadian Liberal Parties, without which neither party can win elections (owing to the dependence of black people on the DEI-welfare state.) The totalitarian oppressed-oppressor ideology has captured our institutions and enabled antisemitism which is fundamentally the politics of spite and envy, a game Canadians know all too well.
Could be a form of displacement. But…
I think we need to draw a distinction between latent antisemitism and blatant antisemitism. It’s the blatant antisemitism that has grown recently. Something opened the floodgates to unleash what was already there. I could argue that animus toward Israeli (=Jewish) power in the wake of the Hamas attack in combination with recent and visible expressions of Jewish power in the U.S. (most recently in response to the Hamas war and in response to the crisis at Harvard and elsewhere) have been enough to tip latent antisemitism into blatant antisemitism. These expressions of Jewish power and influence may be all that is needed to explain the surge of Jew hatred in America. They bring the old canards regarding evil Jewish power to the fore.
I’m not convinced that “displacement” is necessary.
I think that op-ed (here’s the paywall-free link, https://archive.is/ujIua) is mostly nonsense. I distrust any analysis that claims the anti-Israel marches are purely a celebration of the Hamas attack and have nothing to do with the thousands of dead Gazas. More importantly, the notion that leftists are engaged in displacement behavior and hate Jews because of their own guilt over failing to end racism is just unsubstantiated psychological theorizing and seems laughably wrong. There is a link between anti-racism and antisemitism that you can make: The people who see everything in terms of racism applied this to Israel and declared that “Zionism is racism,” which is false. But this idea that antisemitism is caused by liberal guilt over racism seems ridiculous.
I never said that anti-Israel marches are a celebration of the Hamas attack, though the op-ed may have. But I don’t accept that; they are a celebration of antisemitism, as you say. And this post was made for discussion. To me it’s worth noting, as I did, that there’s always antisemitism, and different things bring it out. One of those might be the the recognition of the left that they haven’t accomplished anything substantive, and so turn their rancor on Israel.
On the other hand, you clearly haven’t read the rules or mastered the civility of commenting on this site. If you want to see how to disagree in a civil manner, see Mr. Clark’s comment in #1.
And what about the marches and protests (and direct expressions of joy and “exhilaration”) which started October 7 and lasted all the time before Israel answered and any civilian in Gaza was killed? Were they not pure celebration of the Hamas attack? They were quite large and in many places.
For me the giveaway was the many protests against businesses and orgs that are not in Israel but are owned or run by Jews. That’s not pro-Gaza or anti-Zionist, it’s just straight-up hatred of people for being Jewish.
I don’t see it as ridiculous. The dominant academic discourse these days divides everyone into oppressors and oppressed, and maintains that being relatively successful can only have come about owing to being an “oppressor”, which is the worst thing to be.
Yet, Jews tend to be relatively successful (and good luck to them in that), and they refuse to adopt “perpetual victim” attitude that the dominant discourse assigns to minorities. So, woke people are looking at them and thinking: “Which are you? You’re not acting as though you’re oppressed victims, so you must be oppressors”. Doesn’t this help to explain why swathes of the left have turned on Jews?
Yes, correct but let’s go further: Jews are highly intelligent for various reasons, highly creative in the arts and sciences, and TOUGH survivors, as the above comment says. Anyone perceived as superior in any way is going to spark resentment. Jews have survived so long because of their intelligence and accomplishments, making them sometimes useful and important but also bringing down jealousy. All these things have persisted as part of human society and culture for eons. (My theory is that black anti Semitism arose because the holocaust discussion preempted the slavery discussion).
“I distrust any analysis that claims the anti-Israel marches are purely a celebration of the Hamas attack and have nothing to do with the thousands of dead Gazas.”
And yet those same protestors are unable or unwilling to condemn the deaths, rapes, and kidnappings of over 1200 innocent people on October 7. Those protestors are indistinguishable from Hamas apologists.
The fact schools have stopped teaching history doesn’t help – and their HUGE left bias.
Also, the “aesthetics” of the pro-Pal propaganda is effective also.
I’m not going to deny the displacement argument either.
D.A.
NYC
ps Good post and happy new year!
Early on, Zionism thought it needed to be socialist.communist. litterally commune-ist, right? So, “Marx” was fine with that. However, Israel found it useless and failing. Now, Israel is a proud capitalist tiger. Marx is disgusted.
We could also trace the venom against Israel on the “global Left” to that galaxy far
away, once adored by a big part of the pop-Left. Though the USSR at first supported Israel, as a counterweight to Britain in the Middle East, it switched to the Arab side in the early 1950s, extending this geopolitical policy to repression of Jewish culture in the USSR and its colonies, with the standard arrests, show-trials, and executions. Much of the Soviet propaganda against Israel spread to the rest of the “global Left”, particularly from the late 1970s on, when Mapai and related Leftist parties lost their political dominance in Israel.
Today, the river-to-the-sea chanting Progressives have no inkling of their style’s Stalinist provenance; if they have even heard of Stalin, they imagine that he was a contemporary of such other miscreants as Jefferson, Napoleon, Bismarck, and Balfour. These attitudes have a way of long outliving their origins, just as religious attitudes do. The animus against Israel of course extends to Jews outside of Israel, and builds on the old-fashioned antisemitism that Liel Leibovitz summarized in Commentary.
“If not, here’s part of an op-ed from the Wall Street Journal—horrors! But it will do you good, even if you’re a liberal, to have a look at the opposition once in a while.”
I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal and don’t find it to be right wing. It is rated as centrist here: https://www.allsides.com/news-source/wall-street-journal-media-bias
I don’t think that economic lagging of a group of citizens should be regarded as an evil to be fought at all costs. When I graduated, I pursued a career in teaching and science, accepting a relatively modest lifestyle as the price of having a job I would love. Some of my fellow students sought careers in business for higher income. Both choices are legitimate, and neither should be regarded as inferior.
Now let’s imagine similar choices made by whole groups of people through their cultures. Most members of some group may subscribe to “the Protestant ethics and the spirit of capitalism” and work very hard, while most members of another group may opt out of the rat race and prefer to leave work at the earliest time possible to go home and engage with friends or hobbies. The former group will be richer than the latter, but there is nothing wrong with this, even if the two groups differ, among other things, in skin color.
I am of course oversimplifying and idealizing. I know that the situation is not exactly “black workers having lower wages because of leaving early to play amateur football or the guitar”, and black ghettoes are plagued by a myriad of very real and difficult problems. However, these problems stand on their own regardless of the lower income, and I even think that a few have been caused or made worse by the attempts of the mostly white US elite to artificially raise the incomes of black people, and/or by the feeling of some blacks that they are entitled to the same socioeconomic status as whites. Nevertheless, I think that gaps in income should not be regarded as problematic by themselves and, hence, no scapegoats should be sought.
“… another group may opt out of the rat race and prefer to leave work at the earliest time possible…”
How do you feel about this group tapping help from government when they fall short of survival?
I have been, since october 7 thinking a lot about the causes in the rise of antisemitism, and haven’t reached a satisfying enough answer. Nonetheless I think displacement behaviour isn’t. Sure, there’s a correlation there, but I don’t think there’s causation.
All the racial problems and “failed” solutions (I don’t think the could be definiively labeled as that, but that doesn’t matter here) haven’t happened (at least in scope and scale) in Spain and, I think, in Europe. But antisemitism is on the rise too anyway. I remember very clearly, as I was a teenager (80’s and early 90’s) beggining to have a political conscience, antisemitism vas clearly indentifiable and clearly wrong. Nobody had doubts about it. But I also remember, now that I am wrting about it, that this conception was linked to antinazism and the horror of the holocaust, we had a very clear idea what the holocaust was, as it was a staple in culture, mainly TV an Movies.
What I think is that displacement behaviour affects the SHAPE antisemitism takes in USA, but is no deep cause of it. I don’t have a satisfactory answer, but triying to apply Ockham’s Razor, my guess is that antisemitism simply is not in the rise, because it never went away and never subdued (at least that much), it’s just that for a time we were not able to see it in its fullest.
But WWII it’s now about 30 years further in the past from the time I was a teenager, a whole generation. And Antisemitism is not as easily identifiable with nazism, it’s not so shameful to say things against jews, not that much people have in mind the holocaust and the nazis, so it’s more difficult to indentify the hate. I think this is what Swain was pointing out when comenting on Leibowitz.
It’s not a fully satisfiying answer, and it lacks detail, but I thing is the best out there. I sense also that the mainly christian religious background of the west has to do with the persistence under the surface of antisemitism, and that the end of the cold war may have exarcerbated or caused over time the problem, but I don’t have yet a full frame that links all this together.
“I sense also that the mainly christian religious background of the west has to do with the persistence under the surface of antisemitism . . .”
While the term is anachronistic when used in this context, what we would now call antisemitism existed in the ancient world, predating the appearance of Christianity. Moreover, there is very little—if any—Christian influence in the elite precincts from which antisemitism is emerging today in America. That’s not to deny the history of antisemitism in the Christian church; it is to suggest that contemporary antisemitism arises from other sources and is not simply a cultural holdover.
As to contemporary times, and at least in America, I wonder whether one can find a demographic other than Jews themselves who are more supportive of Israel than the devout Evangelicals. Certainly, many of them have theological reasons for doing so, and their assertions about the place of Jews within “God’s plan” would understandably irk many, but the old trope of “Christ killers” does not motivate them—and it hasn’t for a very, very long time.
There is a reason why Netanyahu praises (panders to?) the group. Here is an example from September, when he was speaking to an assembly of American Evangelicals: “You are the greatest friends the Jewish state has. I will never forget it, and the vast majority of Israelis strongly agree with me.” He has made similarly strong statements throughout the years.
https://www.jpost.com/christianworld/article-757395
It’s a curious thought. I have been feeling ashamed of the way the bien-pensants of the West have so quickly turned on Israel, and assumed that there was an undercurrent of anti-semitism there all along that could be induced to erupt by circumstances. But you are, I think, suggesting that perhaps we had, many of us, become more enlightened, and that it has been created anew rather than re-wakened, by—what?—the combination of oppression ideology and Islamism? You’re certainly correct that the relatively few Christians left don’t seem motivated by revenge for “Christ killing.”
“The question, in brief, is why Jews, who, like blacks, used to be seen as oppressed (and indeed, the groups worked in harmony during the civil rights movement of the Sixties) are now viewed as oppressors, while blacks remain in the class of those oppressed. In fact, Jews are at the very top of the oppressors pile. How did that happen?”
The Dialectic – History uses people then discards them – when their Revolutionary potential is drained.
This is the faith of the Left – that The Dialectic will turn throughout History discarding the contradictory parts – retaining the valuable parts to a sublated higher understanding of the Whole.
It makes no sense. Sense is made of it only by faith. The Dialectic is responsible for enormous amounts of misery, suffering, and death through history.
“And so the dialectic progresses.”
-Delgado and Stefancic,
Critical Race Theory – An Introduction,
2017
(Just the quoted part – the long part was mine).
I have seen this idea that “History uses people then discards them” attributed to Hegel. Where in his writings can I find this? Is this a paraphrase or direct quote?
Great question. I don’t know. James Lindsay blurts it out on occasion, and I haven’t found it. BTW I don’t pretend to have found all that on my own – I pick it up from Lindsay’s expositions.
Some literature I’m looking in otherwise lately:
Stalin : Dialectical and Historical Materiaism
Mao : On Contradiction – On Practice
FWIW those two definitely used people then discarded them – but then again so do other leaders.
I might have to get some Hegel and Marx from the library again.
Alternate phrase : “history makes use of people and discards them”
Remember asian-bashing at the height of the covid 19 lockdowns? It became apparent that pretty much all of the bashing was 6 ft+ 240 lbs+ blacks beating up 5 ft, 90 lb, 70 years+ chinese people. The only two social ‘scientists’ (snicker) I could find on the internet to address this were two black female sociologists and both claimed it was evidence of whites setting blacks and asians against each other. They seemed to have left out why it was always blacks attacking asians and never asians attacking blacks. I wonder why. What are the tax dollars spent on social sciences every year? Because I want my share of those taxes refunded.
There is probably a word in some language that I do not speak that describes “something that some suspect but know they should not say out loud.” I think you have given us an example.
Some people just love to have a convenient target, and almost always one that doesn’t fight back. (Like little old Asian shopkeepers. And they don’t to be Chinese— Korean or Japanese would do as well. The point is to sneak attack someone, then feel somewhat righteous about it at the same time.