How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Author:Bari Weiss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2019-09-09T23:00:00+00:00

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Anti-Zionism is not just anti-Semitism because of current reality. Anti-Zionism is also anti-Semitism because of history.

In Jewish day school, we talked a lot about Hitler; at lunch we played a dark game in which we’d wonder aloud who would survive. At night I would have horrific dreams about my family being hunted down. But I’m not sure I ever heard my teachers mention Stalin’s name, let alone Lenin’s. Considering that there were newly immigrated Russian Jews in our school—kids who were picked on for their accents and bad haircuts—the omission is puzzling. We, the spoiled ones, had little idea what these families had endured in the Soviet Union, what their parents had sacrificed for a better life here.

So why did we know so much about Hitler and so little about the anti-Semitism that gripped the place now called Russia? If it was a question of body count, Stalin’s was higher by far. Perhaps it was because many of our grandparents had survived Hitler’s death camps. Perhaps it was because the American Jewish identification with the political left made the oppression of Jews under the Communists seem somehow less bad, or at least less comfortable to discuss. The dream of a better world speaks to Americans, and particularly Jewish Americans, in a way that blood-and-soil politics never will. Perhaps—as I would come to learn as an adult when I read about the Doctors’ Plot or the Night of the Murdered Poets—it was because of the sordid and tragic role Jews play in this line of anti-Semitic history. Perhaps it was recoil from the overreach of McCarthyism.

Or maybe it was the happy result of massive American Jewish activism on behalf of Soviet Jews in the 1980s, which Gal Beckerman documents in his superb book When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone. On December 6, 1987, at three years old, I, along with my parents and 250,000 others, marched in Washington, D.C., to demand freedom for Soviet Jewry. Ultimately, they were freed. The Iron Curtain fell. Perhaps because the good guys won, the devastation of Soviet anti-Semitism became a fast-fading memory.

But the nasty and long legacy of anti-Semitism on the political left is one very much worth remembering today. As many well-intentioned people look to understand why a very small but very vocal group of Jews seems as deeply opposed to Jewish interests as many of our community’s enemies, these Jews ought to be understood in context, as part of a long history of left-wing anti-Semitic movements that successfully conscript Jews as agents in their own destruction.

The conversation inevitably begins with Marx. The debate about whether Marx was an anti-Semite largely focuses on his essay “On the Jewish Question,” which contains lines like these: “What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.” Some say these words can only be read as passionate anti-Semitism. Others say that Marx is merely ridiculing anti-Semitic tropes. Still others maintain that Marx means to point

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