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Anti-Semitism Is Genuinely Unique among the World's Hatreds

(Times of Israel) Haviv Rettig Gur - The early Zionists shared the idea that the Jews must be liberated from their otherness by becoming a nation like all other nations. Normalize the Jews and you'll end or at least "normalize" anti-Semitism, transforming it to mere banal prejudice. Jewish nationhood and self-reliance would end the world's obsession with the Jew. But the problem is that "anti-Semitism is something entirely unique and that it has nothing to do with the Jews," said Ruth R. Wisse, a now-retired Harvard historian of Yiddish and Jewish history. Jews became stand-ins for the fears and anxieties of competing political camps in a fast-changing world, first in Europe and later in the Arab and Muslim worlds. They became a vocabulary for distracting populations from their troubled leaderships. When the white supremacists marching in Charlottesville in 2017 chanted, "Jews will not replace us," they were explaining away real anxieties by misdirecting them onto a nefarious Jewish power. To European conservatives of the 19th century, Jews were communist agitators. But in the Soviet sphere in the 20th century, they quickly became the regime's favorite target, depicted as a capitalist vanguard. Anti-Semitism isn't simply a dislike of Jews. It involves the role Jews are forced to play in the political imaginations of non-Jews as the incarnation of and explanation for their deepest fears and most vexing social ills. It is not the idea that Israel is doing wrong, but the idea that Israel is what is wrong with the world. It is the political device that brought Adolf Hitler to tell the Reichstag in January 1939 that if a world war was coming, it was the Jews who will have started it. No other people and no other country serves a similar role as the go-to culprit for malaises they can't possibly have caused.
2021-07-29 00:00:00
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