(Jewish Group) How Anti-Semitism Rises on the Left and Right

(THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP! RESPECT!!)

ate crimes against Jews have been on the rise around the country for several years, but this past month saw a spike in violence in the New York area. On December 10th, three people were fatally shot at a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, along with a police officer who was killed nearby. Eighteen days later, five people were stabbed at a Hanukkah celebration in an Orthodox community in Rockland County. In December, police also filed hate-crime charges against several people who attacked Orthodox Jews on the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn. According to the Times, of the hate crimes that were reported to the New York City Police Department in 2019, more than half were directed at Jews.

There have also been increased attacks on other racial and religious groups; hate crimes against African-Americans remain the most common racially motivated hate crimes, and there has been a significant rise in violence against Latinos and the transgender community in recent years. To what extent can anti-Jewish violence be tied to other hate crimes, and to what extent should it be understood as having a distinct history and motivations? To discuss these questions, I recently spoke by phone with David Nirenberg, the dean of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, who has written extensively on the history of anti-Semitism. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why prejudice against Jews seems to arise in so many different eras and contexts, and the unhelpfulness of always thinking about anti-Semitism as a manifestation of politics.

Some historical eras, including ones you have written about, have been characterized by their relationship to anti-Semitism. Does it feel like we are in an era worth defining as such, and, if so, how would you characterize it?

Yeah, it does feel to me like we are in an era worth defining in terms of anti-Semitism or anti-Judaism, by which I mean we are in an era where many different societies are reviving ways of explaining the complexity of the world in terms of the dangers posed by Judaism or Jews. It is not always real Jews. There are many societies that spend a lot of time thinking about Jews and Judaism where there are no Jews actually living today. And I think we are definitely in a period in which more and more registers of multiple societies are thinking in those ways. We often think of anti-Semitic periods as periods in which thinking about Judaism is a convincing way of explaining what’s wrong with the world to people on many parts of the political spectrum, like in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. And I think we are similarly in such a period today.

Do you think it is worth thinking of anti-Semitism today as akin to the prejudices that afflict many different religious and ethnic minorities, such as Muslims or Hispanics in the United States? Or is it distinct in important ways?

That’s a really tough question, and, in some ways, I hate to distinguish between different forms of prejudice or hate. When you think about some of the most enduring prejudices—for example, the asymmetries of power between men and women—these are structural aspects of our global society. But I do think anti-Semitism is distinctive in certain ways. One of those ways is that it really does transcend particular political contexts. There aren’t a great number of Jews in Hungary or Poland, but thinking about Jews is a crucial part of nationalism—or anti-globalization or whatever you want to call it—in Hungary and Poland today. And I think that’s different from the way most of the other groups you mentioned are used in the world’s imagination.

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