Why is Antisemitism Still Being Minimised on the Left?
By Melanie Goldberg
Throughout history, antisemitism and Jewish oppression have always been minimised and trivialised. Even in progressive circles, many continue to disregard the severity and impact of antisemitic incidents. Jewish people are being murdered and ethnically cleansed, and this still isn’t enough to warrant support from those who should be unquestionably giving it. This is why we are fearful.
Most of the antisemitism that I and many of my Jewish friends have faced has been from the left or from people who uphold ‘progressive values’. The right tends to utilise more obvious clout. However, the exact same tropes are championed on the left – they just vary semantically.
There is a fundamental misunderstanding and wilful ignorance surrounding Jewish people as a racialised ethnic minority. The Shoah was not a religious crime; the Nazis did not ask which Jews attended synagogue. Jews were targeted specifically because they were considered to be the antithesis of White, Aryan Germans. They weren’t even afforded the classification of a separate race but instead were considered a ‘sub-race’. Racial antisemitism continues to be based on the trope that Jewish people are inherently not White, that wherever we exist we are always the ‘other’. David Baddiel’s Jews Don’t Count explains these concepts very eloquently, and I would wholly recommend it to anybody who wants to start learning about antisemitism.
We already know what to expect from the right, the typical White supremacist material that all of us Jewish people are aware of. The left claims to be anti-racist yet are unabashed perpetrators of racism themselves. Jeremy Corbyn is an unabashed anti-Semite, and so are his apologists. Personally, I gave him the benefit of the doubt the first time and voted for him. However, his constant series of ‘blunders’ became impossible to ignore. Praising a mural that every single Jewish person could clearly see was wildly antisemitic was no accident, neither was referring to Hamas as friends (their charter quite literally calls for the destruction of Jews), claiming that ‘Zionists’ (i.e. Jewish people) who have lived in the UK their whole lives are still a foreign entity, writing a foreword for a book that claimed Jewish people were in control of the banking world, or defending Ken Livingstone’s comments about Jews being in cahoots with the Nazis. None of these were accidental, and to be succinct, anybody who claims otherwise harbours antisemitic bias.
Moreover, tokenising fringe Jewish groups that are widely considered as a small minority in the broader communities just emphasises even more so that only some Jewish lives are valuable. These Jews are the ones that can be trusted, the anti-Zionist ones that engage in soft Holocaust denial (yes, that’s you JVP). I have oft seen the Neturei Karta utilised as ‘good Jews’. This is an extremist group that are only pro-Palestine because ‘the messiah’ isn’t here yet and because they are resentful of secular Jewish people in Israel. They have also engaged in Holocaust denial and blamed the Mumbai Jewish community for the 2008 attacks.
Most antisemitism I have experienced has either been from evangelical Christians or left-wing, progressive folk. After writing a blog for a platform that claims to elevate BAME voices, I was subsequently attacked in the comments section with extreme antisemitic harassment. With comments such as ‘Jews cause most wars’, and ‘Jews have wiped out the Middle East’, you would think such a platform would take this seriously. Not only were these people not banned from the platform, but one also continues to be a regular contributor to it. No other post received anything other than positive feedback. In a similar vein, the creator of another platform demanded that I, as a Jew, must answer for the Israeli government.
University has also been another place that has been unwelcoming. After questioning a Glasgow University professor and ethics committee member on his support of a Bristol lecturer who has now been fired for antisemitism, he publicly targeted me on his Twitter page, calling me ‘The Lobby’, alluding to the trope of Jews ‘pulling the strings’ of powerful politicians. He has also directly blamed Jewish organisations for the actions of the Israeli government, recycled the old ‘thirty pieces of silver’ trope and has reposted quotes from neo-Nazis. Again, unsurprisingly my university has refused to act; targeting Jewish students is seen as acceptable.
Jewish people are oft accused of conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism and of ‘crying wolf’ because we are seen as untrustworthy and only interested in gaining more political and financial power. There is irrefutable proof that whenever there is an escalation of violence in Israel and Palestine, Jewish people everywhere are targeted. The Community Security Trust is the UK Jewish security agency, and they recorded 628 antisemitic incidents in May, compared to 135 in April prior to the fighting.
We are the only racialised group that are considered unqualified by progressive groups to self-define racism. We are constantly told that because Jewish people are financially comfortable, we are no longer at risk of persecution. For one, the assumption that Jewish people are mostly financially stable is a lie deeply rooted in ancient antisemitism. Secondly, even if this were true since when did money offer protection from persecution?
It didn’t offer protection to the million Jewish people who were expelled from Arab countries and whose assets, now deemed to be worth over 15 trillion dollars (just under 1 trillion at the time), were seized by authorities and never returned. It didn’t protect the Jews from the Shoah, from Kristallnacht.
If Jews were indeed wealthy, where were the armed guards outside of a Copenhagen synagogue when a member was shot dead outside? Or outside of a Jewish school in Toulouse? If Jews were irrefutably privileged and are no longer considered valid ‘candidates’ for protection, why was Holocaust survivor Mireille Knoll senselessly murdered in her own home? What about Sarah Halimi, also killed in her own home? Or Ilan Halimi, kidnapped and murdered because it was assumed he was a rich Jew?
The facts speak for themselves. Stop trivialising our very real fears and stand up for Jewish people.