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**NOVEMBER 13, 2023**
On the Prospect website
The Septuagenarian Sea
Check out the ages of the candidates likely to appear on next
November's ballot and tell me the Democrats wouldn't do better by
going younger. BY HAROLD MEYERSON
'Moms for Liberty' Fanatics Lose Out Big-Time
It turns out that most parents are repelled by howling red-faced bigots
threatening teachers and trying to ban books. BY RYAN COOPER
Business Groups' Reflexive Anti-Worker Demagogy
In New York, the business lobby resorts to apocalyptic ads to stop a ban
on noncompete provisions. BY TERRI GERSTEIN
The AMA Debates a Federal Ban on Corporate Medicine
A new guard is pushing the (once passionately pro-corporate) doctors'
trade group to clamp down on health care profiteering. BY MAUREEN TKACIK
Kuttner on TAP
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**** A Problem From Hell
Trump, Netanyahu, and the resurgence of antisemitism
American Jews of my generation got one of history's longest respites
from antisemitism.
Hitler's extermination of six million Jews shamed the world's
leaders and publics. Country-club antisemitism and admission quotas at
the Ivies persisted; but this was a far cry from pogroms.
The catastrophe of the Holocaust also protected Israel. If you took a
close look at Israel's founding, as respected Israeli writers like
Benny Morris (in his book
**1948**
,
published in 2009) and Ari Shavit (in My Promised Land
,
published in 2013) did two generations later, you noticed that about
700,000 Palestinians were brutally evicted.
But in 1948, most of the enlightened world gave Israel a moral free
pass, earned by the extermination of the six million and the failure of
the West to admit more than token numbers of Jewish refugees from
Hitler. At the time, Israel was a heroic nation, not just of Jewish
pioneers, but of social democratic labor Zionism.
So antisemitism went into one of its intermittent slumbers. Several
factors caused antisemitism to revive, and in new, virulent forms.
Donald Trump valorized violence, dog-whistle threats of violence, and
demonization of the Other. And while Trump has not (yet) explicitly
attacked "the Jews," when thuggery is celebrated, antisemitism is not
far behind.
At Charlottesville, Trump gave a pass to people who were chanting, "Jews
will not replace us." He has taken to using the term "vermin" to
describe his enemies-one of Hitler's favorite words to describe
Jews. And while Trump has a Jewish son-in-law, Trump's former lawyers
and accountants, nearly all Jews, are turning against him to save their
own skins. These people are expendable.
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Sharing dishonors with Trump is Bibi Netanyahu, who has managed to turn
world public opinion against Israel. By cynically equating criticism of
Israel's policies with denial of Israel's right to exist and thus
with antisemitism, Netanyahu is among the all-time perverse
self-fulfilling prophets.
All this creates a horrible blowback to the United States, where
diaspora Jews, resented by many Israelis for being armchair critics of
Israel's excruciating security dilemma, had the temerity to feel safe.
**Haaretz**, Israel's left-of-center daily, recently ran an op-ed
grotesquely titled "The Jews Who Join the Jew-Baiters
,"
conflating criticism of Israel's behavior with support for
exterminating Israel and disloyalty to the tribe. Et tu,
**Haaretz**?
By reducing complex issues to tribal loyalties, such rhetoric not only
energizes antisemitism but destroys a capacity for which Jews have long
been famous, as ancient as the biblical sages and as modern as a
discussion over any Seder dinner table: complex ethical disputation.
This is another annihilation of what's precious in Judaism.
I am writing this from the Brandeis campus, where today's peaceful
demonstration is a protest against the arrests at Friday's
demonstration, which in turn was a protest against the ban of a
pro-Palestinian group. Today's vigil, mercifully, did not take sides.
But as argument becomes uglier, more personalized and more menacing, the
mantle of leadership passes to nihilists who don't mind intimidating
Jewish kids who came to Brandeis (along with those from dozens of other
ethnic groups) to study and to feel safe. When Israel is murdering
babies in Gaza, goes the militant thinking, why should Jews be allowed
to feel safe anywhere?
I recently wrote, in the spirit of Justice Brandeis, that there should
be a clear line between speech and illegal threats of violence
:
tolerate the former, prosecute the latter. But when explicit threats
appear anonymously on Instagram, it's not so easy. Universities are
supposed to be oases for inquiry and dialogue. That whole premise is
obliterated when everything becomes binary and tribal.
Netanyahu is treating Palestinian civilians as collateral damage. Two
other pieces of collateral damage are reasoned dialogue and the
resurgence of antisemitism, which once loosed is very hard to contain.
~ ROBERT KUTTNER
Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter
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