For the past few years, I have been struggling to comprehend how the October 7 Hamas-led terrorist attacks on Israel turned so many liberal and progressive groups against the Jewish state.
Ruth Wisse has an answer that deeply resonates with me. And she wrote about it nearly 35 years ago, in her 1992 book If I Am Not for Myself…The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews.
Wisse, now 90, was a professor of Yiddish and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. A long-time political activist, she is affiliated with the conservative Tikvah Fund.
Wisse in a nutshell: Antisemitism has taken hold because it provides a convenient “organizing target” for a phenomenon that has taken hold of the left: “grievance coalitions.”
She reaches back to Nazi Germany to explain her thesis.
“Every country has problems and Germany at the time had lots of them,” she said on a recent episode of the Ask Haviv Anything podcast. “You’re unemployed? The Rothschilds have your job. You feel that other people are running the shops? Of course it’s because of the Jews. Wagner even said, ‘Jews are ruining music.’”
Wisse calls this “the politics of the pointing finger.” If you could identify a people that existed “in small enough numbers not to be a threat, but large enough to [be visible], that becomes the perfect organizing target for grievance and blame.”
Map that onto today’s reality.
At Harvard, “there are 33 different ‘grievance groups.’ They’ve been around for decades,” she claims. There’s the anti-war movement, “all the anti-capitalist movements, Occupy Wall Street, the rioting of the radical feminists.”
These groups were initially separate. “Then suddenly come the Palestinians who say, ‘Hey guys, we’ve got a flag, we’ve got a costume, we’re the number one grievance group. Follow us.’”
That gave the grievance groups their organizing target, exactly like in Germany 100 years earlier.
The same phenomenon is occurring among the often-bickering Arab nations of the Middle East. “Nothing else can build a coalition as easily as the coalition of forces against the Jews,” Wisse emphasizes.
As for the polemics at the United Nations against Israel over the years? “It had nothing to do with Israel. It was just for organizing.”
Antisemitism, as a result, needn’t incorporate the message “I hate Jews.” It can simply be “Who or what explains the injustice we all oppose?”
Using the Jews as an organizing principle is essentially “cost-free,” Wisse adds. Joining an actual anti-capitalist coalition might threaten your business interests. Joining a climate coalition could entail economic sacrifices. But hating Israel “just gets you headlines.”
Dara Horn, author of People Love Dead Jews, has a new book coming out with the provocative title, The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living. In it, she argues that antisemitism is not just an organizing target but an outright “lie that is used to acquire or maintain power.”
Antisemitism is particularly sticky, she says, because unlike typical bigotries which view others as inferior, antisemites see Jews as especially powerful. Taking power away from privileged groups and giving it to marginalized ones doesn’t look like racism, Horn explains. “It looks like social justice.” The haters can then consider themselves morally righteous.
Those of us on the receiving end typically try to explain why the accusations aren’t correct.
Responding to specifics is always a bad idea, Wisse says. “Whatever you do, don’t defend. Never defend. Because the problem being articulated is not the real problem.”
If the accusation is “Israel is uniquely evil,” don’t respond with, “Look how extraordinarily virtuous we are.”
If we’re called settler-colonialists, don’t answer “Jews are indigenous.”
When we’re brushed off with the “genocide” defamation, it does no good to point out all the precautions the IDF takes.
“Once you step into that frame, you already are in the defendant’s dock of a show trial,” Horn warns.
It’s not that factual rebuttal is never appropriate. But rather than trying to demonstrate Israel’s liberal values, instead ask questions. Interrogate how “genocide” became a slogan, why the accusation has achieved such extraordinary currency, and why the Jewish state is so readily cast in this role.
In a 2014 video interview with Bill Kristol, Wisse insists we demand to know who’s the political entity that’s “asking the question and what right do they have to put Israel on the block here?”
“There’s so much more ignorance than malice out there,” says a surprisingly optimistic Horn, “and that is such an opportunity. This is absolutely a solvable problem. Most Americans are not fans of the hate movement. Most Americans are not interested in harassing their neighbors, vandalizing property or pushing people out of public life.”
Horn has created an educational program for middle school students – Jewish and not – she calls the Tell Institute. “A lot of what we’re teaching is how to understand when you might be being manipulated.
When Horn lectures on college campuses, inevitably, a student will take the microphone and scream, “Zionism is genocide.” But when Horn probes the student further, “they have nothing.”
They couldn’t tell you what Hamas would do if a “queer for Palestine” entered Gaza any more than they could identify which river and which sea animates the protesters’ chants.
“Complexity is exhausting. Moral certainty is exhilarating,” notes Nahum Kaplan on his Moral Clarity Substack. “Once everyone has been assigned a position, moral judgment becomes [simply] administrative.”
This is not a fight we can ignore, adds Sam Harris, neuroscientist, podcaster and creator of the app Waking Up. “When you look at what antisemites also hate, you find they hate everything that makes culturally rich, diverse, open societies possible. [Instead], they bring censorship, political repression, conspiracy thinking and the politics of dehumanization and scapegoating.”
Halting the use of antisemitism as an organizing principle for grievance coalitions is ultimately a necessary “defense of the moral and institutional architecture that makes free societies possible,” Harris concludes.
That’s an organizing target everyone should want to get behind.
I first wrote about antisemitism as an organizing target for grievance coalitions for The Jerusalem Post.
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