Daily Alert Archives

Jeremy Corbyn's Ironically Ahistorical Anti-Semitism

(Atlantic) Deborah Lipstadt - British Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn declared that Zionists "clearly have two problems. One is that they don't want to study history, and secondly, having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, they don't understand English irony, either." It wasn't their ideology he attacked, but what he deemed their lack of Englishness - that "Zionists" might live in Britain for a very long time, even all their lives, and still remain alien, unable to grasp either history or irony. For this Jew, this was a cut to the quick. For what is it but a sense of history and irony that has sustained Jews through the vicissitudes of their collective experience? Jews are obsessed with history. Every Jewish festival is linked to a moment in the collective history of the Jewish people. The central prayer of every Jewish service describes God as the Lord of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And no sense of irony? Jews have relied on irony to help them traverse the most difficult moments in their history. It was this latest recording from Corbyn that left many Jews utterly convinced that this was a man in whom contempt for Jews ran deep - far deeper than necessary. Maybe Corbyn should be reminded of the retort offered by Benjamin Disraeli, a prime minister of Jewish origin, when attacked in the House of Commons for being a Jew. "Yes, I am a Jew. And when the ancestors of the right honorable gentlemen were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon." The writer is Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University.
2018-08-31 00:00:00
Full Article