Anti-Semitism And The Far Right

The Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research and education organization and on Friday Daniel Greenberg rote up one of their surveys about what single word people associate with Señor Trumpanzee. "More than six in ten (62%) responded with a negative term, while one in four (26%) provided a positive word and 12% were neutral. Looking among Americans who are negative to Trump, they can be categorized into four separate groups. One-third (33%) criticized Trump’s intellect, maturity, and preparedness for the office of the presidency. A similar amount (28%) were especially harsh toward Trump by describing him as bigoted, corrupt, criminal, and dictatorial. Nearly one in four (23%) spoke negatively about Trump’s personality and conduct with others), while less than one in five (15%) critiqued his ego.

Another PRRI survey showed that nearly half the country--48%-- believe the Republican Party "has been taken over by racists... Democrats overwhelmingly view the Republican Party as being controlled by racists (80%), a view shared by 48% of independents and only five percent of Republicans." Just sayin'. Now let's keep that in the backs of our minds and skill over to a report from last week by Joel Swanson for the Jewish Daily Forward-- The Right Owns Anti-Semitism in America. He wrote that "A survey conducted by the American Jewish Committee last October found that fully 84% of American Jews think anti-Semitism in the United States has increased in the past five years, while 42% believe that the status of Jews in the US is less secure than it was just a year ago. And now we have the concrete numbers to back up our fears: The Anti-Defamation League just released its annual audit of anti-Semitic incidents for the year 2019, and the numbers are as grim as you would imagine... In 2019, the ADL recorded 2,107 anti-Semitic incidents in the United States, a 12% increase from just a year earlier in 2018, and the highest number on record since the ADL began collecting annual data on American anti-Semitism in 1979. Instances of harassment were up by six percent, vandalism was up by 19%, and anti-Semitic assaults rose by a terrifying 56% since 2018. There’s no denying it: The numbers are bad. But in addition to the horror at these numbers, there’s also a political lesson here for the American Jewish community, if we are open enough to learn it. The majority of anti-Semitic incidents in 2019 seem to have been random attacks motivated by personal hatred, not linked to any identifiable political ideology. But the ADL also recorded 270 anti-Semitic incidents inspired by extremist ideology. And out of these identified extremist incidents, one side of the political spectrum was a lot more culpable than the other."

[O]f the three deadliest anti-Semitic attacks committed in 2019, in Poway, Calif., Jersey City, N.J., and Monsey, N.Y., the ADL found that one attack, the Poway attack, was motivated by far-right white nationalism.

...Whatever our community leadership may say, American Jews simply do not hold both sides of the political spectrum equally to blame for rising anti-Semitism. Polling last year found that more than three-quarters of American Jews consider the extreme political right to pose a “very serious” or “moderately serious” threat to the safety of American Jews today, compared to only one-third who believe that about the extreme left.

And when we have a US president who says that neo-Nazis who chant “Jews will not replace us” include some “very fine people” among them, and who shares the very same conspiracy theories about George Soros funding migration to the US from Central America that are cited by synagogue shooters, it’s no wonder that more than half of American Jews place substantial responsibility on the Republican Party for rising anti-Semitism in the US today. (By comparison, fewer than one in five American Jews consider the Democratic Party to be equally culpable for anti-Semitism.)

Despite these findings, the ADL has gone to great lengths to conceal the political implications of its new anti-Semitism audit. In the past, the ADL has called on Congress to avoid the “politicization of anti-Semitism” and the ADL’s press release about its new audit seemed to deliberately avoid using the words “left” or “right,” instead referring only to “extremism.” You have to spend more time digging into the ADL’s findings to learn what the ideological source of most of this non-specified “extremism” actually was.

So, if the ADL’s findings about the main source of anti-Semitism in the US are as clear as they are, and if most American Jews ourselves know that at some level, then why are our community institutions so insistent that “American Jews affiliated with both parties view the far right, the hard left and extremism in the name of Islam as anti-Semitic threats,” in the words of Avi Mayer of the American Jewish Committee?

Why not call out the most significant ideological source of anti-Semitism in the United States for what it is? Why is the ADL’s messaging downplaying what its own findings uncovered?

Some of it no doubt has to do with the disproportionate influence of right-wing Jews in the Jewish institutional community in the US, who have enough power to delay the nomination of the former leader of immigrant aid-organization HIAS to chair the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, despite the fact that HIAS is much closer to the median American Jewish opinion on immigration than its critics are.

And some of it no doubt has to do with a desire to maintain good relations with the Netanyahu government, whose growing ties with the international far-right led Netanyahu to publicly contradict a report by his own government researchers finding that the far-right posed the greatest threat to Jews in Europe. (This finding was recently confirmed by a German anti-Semitism monitor.)

But I suspect the Jewish institutional community’s refusal to call out the ideological source of most American anti-Semitism is not entirely about the influence of right-wing Jews, or about Israel. I suspect some of it has to do with a deeper sense that the work of the American Jewish establishment ought to be above the fray of politics, to operate in the sphere of what historian of American Judaism Lila Corwin Berman terms “depoliticized politics.” In Berman’s words, instead of identifying themselves as partisan, American Jewish organizations “characterized their work as reflecting consensus and nonpartisan communal interests.”

And now this studied insistence on remaining above partisan politics has left us in the odd position where the ADL is refusing to be forthright about its own findings in its public messaging about the 2019 anti-Semitism audit, for fear of being accused of partisanship. The ADL is burying the lede on its own story.

So yes, we should continue to call out anti-Semitism wherever we see it, right and left. But these are scary times to be an American Jew, and refusing to be honest about the biggest source of the threats we face will not make us safer.

Anti-Semitism is not somehow above partisan politics. It is political, and it’s long past time for us to say so.