​Mordecai Martin Nicole Cardoza ​Mordecai Martin Nicole Cardoza

Distinguish anti-Zionism from antisemitism.

Simply put, there is no place for antisemitism in anti-racist work. Antisemitism is antithetical to collective liberation, and it is real. Yet, the accusation that the left is as inherently antisemitic as the right is false: antisemitism in the right, specifically in white supremacist groups, is deadly, systemically legitimized, and funded (JFREJ).

Happy Wednesday! And welcome back to the Anti-Racism Daily. Today, Mordecai joins us to unpack the discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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– Nicole

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By Mordecai Martin (he/him)

Simply put, there is no place for antisemitism in anti-racist work. Antisemitism is antithetical to collective liberation, and it is real. Yet, the accusation that the left is as inherently antisemitic as the right is false: antisemitism in the right, specifically in white supremacist groups, is deadly, systemically legitimized, and funded (JFREJ). While it is true that there has been a global rise in antisemitism (HRW), it is also notoriously challenging to quantify incidents, especially in the US (Jewish Currents).

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Antisemitism is distinct from other forms of oppression in that it positions an oppressed people, the Jews, as themselves oppressors and therefore a target for other oppressed peoples’ rage (April Rosenblum). In the United States and Europe, antisemitism protects capitalism and its almost exclusively Christian elite ruling class by pushing blame onto Jews, labelled by modern antisemitism as an “inferior race” (JFREJ). On the right, the “great replacement” trope favored by the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter and several Republican representatives claims Jews orchestrate mass migration of non-white immigrants to majority-white countries (HeyAlma). On the left, Marxist analysis of the elite capitalist class of accumulators can be twisted into the conspiracy theory that Jews control the world’s wealth and media.

In the United States, antisemitism dates from colonial times, when Jews were defined as “filthy” by the Dutch, and continued in the lynching of Leo Frank (Dinnerstein), the refusal to accept Jewish refugees in WWII (USHMM), Ivy League restrictive quotas (Karabel), and consistent occurrence of hate crimes. Most recently, on May 18th, Iranian Jewish diners outside a West Hollywood restaurant were attacked by a group in a vehicle with a large Palestinian flag (Eater). Witnesses report the assailants shouted antisemitic slurs and asked which of the diners were Jewish before instigating the melee (NBC). The same day, a Los Angeles driver attempted to run down a Jewish person in the street. Two days later, two men attacked a pedestrian wearing a yarmulke in New York, yelling, “F**k Jews!” The latter attack came the same day as Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire that ended Israeli bombardment of the Palestinian territory of Gaza (CNN). There’s no room to split words: such acts of violence are baldly antisemitic and must be denounced and opposed.

The Anti-Racism Daily has previously written about the need for Americans to oppose U.S. support of states that brutalize those under their rule. The state of Israel, like the United States, would certainly qualify. According to Amnesty International, Israel engages in “institutionalized discrimination against Palestinians” and that “torture and other ill-treatment of detainees, including children, were committed with impunity” (Amnesty International). Attacking random Jewish people does nothing to remedy these injustices; the government of Israel is not run by people eating at West Hollywood sushi restaurants. To say that Jewish people are responsible for the actions of a Jewish state is as blatantly prejudicial as claiming all Chinese people are responsible for COVID-19.

Conflation of Jews and the modern State of Israel serves entrenched right-wing power. The project of colonialism needs a friendly state in the Middle East. Numerous Jewish movements in resistance to Zionism have existed and continue to exist, like IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace (InTheseTimes), but they are ignored or sidelined in favor of an overwhelming narrative of Jewish support for Zionism. This ignores the fact that Zionism was itself rooted in antisemitism, as early Zionists internalized a sense of inferiority and proposed that the only solution to the “degeneration” of Jews was to create a modern nation-state (Project Gutenberg). The state of Israel, supported by the white supremacist projects of the United States and other settler-colonial nations, has limited not only the political imagination of Jews but of all progressives (Cornel West, Lamont Hill). One way our political imaginations have become limited is a refusal to believe in a future for the region where Palestinians and Jews are both welcome to live peacefully and have a right of return (The Guardian).

White supremacy cannot operate without antisemitism. Similarly, we cannot understand and defeat white supremacy without understanding antisemitism. We must use our imaginations beyond the state of Israel and what we are told is the only way for Jewish safety: there are many possible worlds without antisemitism and without colonialism in the modern Israel/Palestine region.

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​Mordecai Martin (he/him/his) is a 5th generation New York Jew and writer, who conducts interviews for The Poetry Question and whose fiction work has appeared in X-Ray, Funicular, and Gone Lawn. He lives in a small but not tiny house with a cat named Pharaoh and a wife named Atenea. He tweets @mordecaipmartin and blogs at http://www.mordecaimartin.net.

Key Takeaways

  • The United States has a long history of antisemitism and antisemitic ideas can be found across the political spectrum, though it is especially well-funded and deadly on the right.

  • The identification of all Jewish people with the State of Israel is a right-wing, antisemitic idea. Jewish anti-Zionism has a long history.

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It's Tuesday! And we're unpacking the rise in antisemitism and the history of the divide – and unity – between the Black and Jewish communities. Antisemitism runs deep in white supremacy, but today's newsletter focuses specifically on the hateful rhetoric shared by prominent Black men in the media. As a Black woman, it pains me to see how our experience with racism doesn't always make us more sensitive and empathetic to other forms of discrimination and violence.

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Join the #NoSafeSpaceForJewHate and #48HoursSilence boycott on Twitter. 

If you identify as Black and/or Jewish: Talk about how anti-Blackness or antisemitism shows up with your family. How can you commit to advocating for that community's needs? Have the recent events detracted you from the other's fight for justice?

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Antisemitism in the News
 

The news has been filled with antisemitism rhetoric, much of which has been perpetuated by high-profile, Black men. Some examples in the media include the following:

  • On July 4th, Louis Farrakhan used his platform on YouTube for his annual Criterion Speech. In the speech, he blames Jews and their control and power for the “ills of the world.” The speech reached over 200, 000 viewers digitally (YouTube).

  • On July 6th, DeSean Jackson of the NFL’s Philadephia Eagles shared anti-Semitic tweets, one of which claims to quote Hitler (CNN).

  • On July 16th, Nick Cannon, the host of Fox’s “The Masked Singer,” was fired from Viacom after an anti-Semitic conversation with longtime anti-semite and rapper Richard Griffin (Newsweek).

  • Over the weekend of July 26, British rapper Wiley posted a string of anti-Semitic comments, prompting the #NoSafeSpaceForJewHate and #48HoursSilence walkout on Twitter (CNN)

These instances align with a concerning rise in antisemitism over the past couple of years. The Anti-Defamation League's annual audit determined there were 2,107 antisemitic incidents in 2019, a 12% increase from the 1,879 that were recorded in 2018, and many organized by white supremacist organizations (ADL Website). But racial tensions have long been fraught between the Black and Jewish communities, most notably in cases like the Crown Height riots of 1991, which began with the death of a 7-year-old Black boy (Atlantic), and the brutal attack at a Hasidic rabbi’s home in Monsey, N.Y. (NYTimes). 


This influx in antisemitic rhetoric by Black people in the midst of a racial equity movement begs us to question and examine the relationship between Black and Jewish communities. Although both communities have experienced discrimination, displacement, terror, and trauma by the same white supremacist groups (Forbes), relations between them are tenuous and stem from a deep history of misconceptions.
 

Antisemitism and Blackness
 

The rise in antisemitism within the Black community often stems from disparities in economic opportunity and religious centrism. But first, it’s important to note that many of the ideologies that were used to oppress and discriminate against Jews were the same ones used to dominate and control Blacks after the transatlantic slave trade. This is an insight that Malana, who refers to herself as a “Black & Jewish educational fairy godmother,” explained in a comprehensive tweet thread that's been featured by major publications. She takes us through history from the beginning.

“Historically, the very idea of racism initially came from Spain and its treatment of Jews during the Inquisition,” she wrote. “These types of racial codifications were later used to entrench chattel slavery in what would become the U.S.” (Twitter).

Malana Krongelb has been sharing consistently about Blackness and anti-Semitism. Follow her at @malanasqueendom.

Indeed, some of the first set of discriminatory laws based on race were written in 1449 in Spain. The birth of these laws set forth a chain of events that later resulted in other laws, like the Jim Crow laws of the South, used to subjugate and control a different group of people because of their race (Atlas Obscura).


Economic Opportunity
 

Lee Sigelman from George Washington University argues that the economic success of Jews and their historical presence and power within financial systems perpetuates negative attitudes towards Jews, especially from Black men, as Black people in America have been historically disenfranchised and denied access to wealth and wealth accumulation (JSTOR).

Many Jews were the key stakeholders to loans or homes that Black families wanted and needed. With the wide-spread discrimination of Black families by the banking and real estate industries, many people in the Black community expressed resentment towards Jews and their position of economic power (JSTOR).

Cannon mentioned “The Rothschilds” in his podcast interview, a reference to a long-held stereotype against Jews. The Rothschilds were a prominent Jewish family and banking dynasty that spanned across and controlled Europe for the greater part of 200 years. The patriarch, Mayer Rothschild was known as “The Founding Father of International Finance” (Britannica). When people talk about “The Rothschilds,” it is a reference to the perceived power and dominance Jews have over financial, political, and other major global systems.

But it's important to note that not all people in the Jewish community are bankers and financiers. Furthermore, Malana notes that “many Jewish people in Europe were forced to work in banking because of laws restricting them from entering other types of work,” and “it was the racist/anti-Semitic structures that pushed Jewish people into that system in the first place” (Twitter). This unfair stereotype perpetuates the racist rhetoric between communities.
 

Religious Centrism
 

The belief of being a “chosen” people is also something shared by many in the Black and Jewish communities, but its result is discord. Henry Goldschmidt of Wesleyan University posited that Blacks and Jews “use narratives of biblical history and Israelite descent to define what is typically described as their ‘racial’ and ‘religious’ identities— and conversely use race and religion to support their claims to Israelite history and define themselves as the chosen people” (JSTOR).

This religious centrism puts them directly at odds with one another. Some members of the Black community have expressed the desired ownership over the term “Semitic,” which means “relating to or denoting a family of languages that includes Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic and certain ancient languages such as Phoenician and Akkadian, constituting the main subgroup of the Afro-Asiatic family” (Oxford). But, as Malana emphasizes, one group’s liberation is not dependent on the erasure of another (Twitter).

Anti-Semitism, Anti-Blackness and Whiteness


The important thing to remember when analyzing the relationship between the Black and Jewish communities isn't the differences, but what they have in common. Antisemitism, like anti-Blackness, are both rooted in whiteness and white nationalism, regardless of who expresses it. Our system is designed to pin communities against one another, and often, marginalized communities attack each other to grapple for relative power that feels more accessible than the whole. The notion that a group can be "better" than another is in itself a concept started and perpetuated by white nationality and Christianity (Newsweek).

And when conversations about one marginalized community turning against another dominate the headlines, it shifts the responsibility away from the majority, eschewing them from responsibility. Tablet Magazine notes that, despite the tabloids in January 2020, there is no evidence that Black Americans are driving the rise in antisemitic violence, which was re-iterated in the data from the ADL audit mentioned above (Tablet Mag).
 

Intersectionality as a Black Jew


It's also easy to forget in this narrative there are over 200,000 Black Jews in America who may feel forced to pick sides (J Weekly). The stories of one community against another can erase the intersectionality of many who identify as both Jewish and non-white (among many other types of social locations and identities that cause further marginalization). In these cases, in particular, it’s important to listen to the stories of Black Jewish people, who are facing both anti-Blackness and antisemitism in everyday life. Story Maps shares more examples. Malana herself noted that “a lot of Black trolls have been coming at me saying I am only saying this because I am anti-Black, and that I am anti-Black because I am mixed race” (Twitter).

“I know lots of white Jewish people are racist. I know lots of Black people are anti-Semitic. I know these communities have hurt each other and I know from personal experience it is much harder to be Black in the US than it is to be Jewish. But all oppression is connected”.

Malana Krongelb, educator and writer, via Twitter

Despite all of this, Black and Jewish communities are often united together as allies (CNN). Many Black civil rights leaders have rallied against anti-Semitism and violence against Jewish people (Tablet Mag). And the two communities have always been powerful when we've rallied together to fight injustices throughout history (Newsweek). We must commit to denouncing antisemitism along with other anti-racism movements to ensure that we dismantle systemic oppression for all.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • There's been a rise in antisemitic language over the past couple years, accelerated by recent hateful rhetoric by prominent Black men

  • The Jewish and Black communities have had a tenuous relationship, despite the commonalities in their experience

  • Pitting marginalized groups against one another can eschew the responsibility of racism and discrimination from those most privileged and powerful

  • The liberation of one community is impossible without the liberation of another

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Thank you for all your financial contributions! If you haven't already, consider making a monthly donation to this work. These funds will help me operationalize this work for greatest impact.

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