by David Winner
As a species of Jew, the child of a self-declared “violent atheist” Jew and a gentile mother, I’ve found some use in the Jew vs. Zionist distinction. Long before October 7th and the genocide in Gaza, I’ve found it hard to extricate the history of Israel from the erasure of the Palestinian people. Please look around for a clip of Rabin revealing what Ben Gurion told him about Palestinian villages in the late forties if you doubt that conclusion.The Jew/Zionist distinction has allowed me to remain proud of my Jewish heritage while distancing myself from Israel.
But rage against “Zionists” has recently begun to seem broader than disdain for Israel.While it was comforting that Khymani James, a student leader of the pro-Palestinian movement at Columbia University thought only Zionists (not Jews) deserve to die and that we should be “grateful” that he was not “just going out and murdering Zionists,” I wondered why he was threatening to kill people and how killing supporters of Israel in New York would help Palestinians in Gaza.
But the Jew/Zionist distinction really lost ground with me after Jared Moskowitz, a democratic congressman from Florida, received death threats over the phone proclaiming the need to “kill every single fucking Zionist scumbag” because “the US. Government needs to kill Jews.”And then, of course, there has been Tucker Carlson’s sudden opposition to Trump in part because of his “globalist” sympathy with Israel and Jews. These haters clearly hold no distinction between Zionists and Jews. And none of them (clearly racist) show any concern for Palestinians.
Of course, I was worried and saddened to hear all this as a Jew myself and a person who wants, as Rodney King so plaintively put it decades ago, for people to “just get long.” But it also revealed a problem with what had once seemed like a useful term.
Those (Jew or Gentile) who live in overeducated progressive worlds where prejudice is scorned at least on the surface may not fully realize the nature of garden variety American antisemitism and its disconnect from Israel/Palestine. For many years as a community college English teacher in Jersey City’s diverse working-class neighborhood of Journal Square, I have occasionally failed to prepare properly for class and allowed free-floating discussions based on my tiresome liberal orthodoxy: from the forever wars and brutalization of suspects post September 11th to Donald Trump’s various obscenities. Often these unstructured conversations have tangentially meandered their way over to the terrible perfidy of the Jews. Generally kind and unwilling to alienate their grader, my students can’t always wrap their heads around the idea that I (not wearing orthodox clothes or looking particularly semitic) am actually Jewish. My students come from remarkably diverse backgrounds: white and Black Americans: South Asians, Arabs; Chinese; men and women from almost every corner of Africa and Latin America. But there are no Jewish students. While some Italian Americans and Irish Americans remained in Hudson County through the white flight of the 70s, almost all the Jews left the area, so few humans around to be juxtaposed against the negative stereotypes. The negative view of Jews stem from the usual charges: greed, wealth, conspiracy, dishonesty. And some unfortunate truths. While Jews are hardly conspiring to rob impoverished gentiles of affordable housing, almost all the terrifying massive and expensive housing developments coming up around Journal Square are built by Jared Kushner and other Jews.
The potential retirement or change of a term need not be as fraught or dramatic as Zionism. My late parents, both English professors born nearly a century ago, were bothered by some garden variety semantical changes. One that sticks in my mind is “hopefully,” which, according to them, meant full of hope (Hopefully, he embarked on his world tour.) rather than an expression of hope (Hopefully, I won’t lose my temper.). Certainly, by now, the meaning that annoyed my parents has replaced what they felt to be the correct one.
That’s just the natural fluctuation of language. Starting over fifty years ago, gay ceased to necessarily mean happy or the quality of happiness but either the quality of being attracted to people of the same gender, “She’s gay.”, or a noun meaning the same thing, “The gays are trying to kill me,” a quote from the Sicilian sequence of The White Lotus.
Hopefully “hopefully” along with “gay” are politically neutral terms, but the minute a term seems to get used by progressive people, other progressive people begin to use it ironically, then right-wingers use it pejoratively. As far back as when I was in college in the utterly progressive Oberlin of the mid-eighties, the term PC (politically correct) was already something of a joke. Rumor had it that the term originated at Berkeley even earlier than that, but for my friends and me, it meant someone pretentious and/or absolutist in their progressive politics.
By 1991, George H.W. Bush was already using the term to lambaste liberals, and don’t get me started on “woke.” I’m far past the age of having my finger on the pulse of new terminology, not that I never was, but I have never known anyone progressive or encountered anyone progressive on social media to use that term. Immediately, it became the province of more conservative people: from old school moderate Democrats mocking people further to the left to MAGA banning everything from Black Studies at high schools and universities to basic discussions of LGBTQ rights in the name of being anti-woke.
Back to the Jews for a moment. Many years ago, 1995, Tikkun editor, Michael Lerner was invited by Cornell West to speak with him at Howard to address antisemitism in that HBCU and in the Black community at large.
Why, a young woman in the audience demanded, did Jews have to have their own term for prejudice against them. Why can’t we use the term racism like everyone else?
There are some reasonable responses to the question. Jews come in all colors, and we can’t really be held responsible for nomenclature first used in Germany 150 years ago, but, truly, I’ve had the same question myself, and I’ve also wondered why the term never gets applied to, Arabs, our Semitic brothers and sisters. Neither Lerner nor West had much to say, and the conversation quickly moved on.
That term, antisemite, has recently come into focus. Throughout the world (the UK and EU in particular) anti-Jewish violence has been on the rise. But I don’t think it has much to do with Palestine. Torching synagogues and beating up people wearing yamakas hardly help the Palestinian cause. But the Trump Administration and their supporters have deported, detained and censured hundreds of so called “antisemites,” people with legal status in our country who have simply supported Palestinian rights and criticized Israel. By that measure, I should be deported myself.
Like so many, I watch the reels that seem to pop up randomly up on my phone. In one, a woman who looked Jewish in her early forties complains about the problem she’s had going into bookstores. She must look up each title and each author before purchasing them because so many are “antisemitic.” But books don’t get sold in mainstream American bookstores that represent the nasty tropes that sometimes come from my community college students – not much about our greediness, our conspiracies, our horns, nor our drinking of Christian blood. Bookstores reflect the cultural norms of educated middle class American society in which outward expressions of prejudice are discouraged. The only sort of “antisemitism” that the (perhaps AI-generated) woman could possibly experience would be objection to Israeli policies, which, as I’ve been trying to argue, is not necessarily antisemitic.
Hopefully everyone woke and PC knows that not supporting Zionism isn’t antisemitic. That word salad is an attempt to use all the words I’m demanding that we cancel in the same sentence.
But where does this leave us? Words are so permeable, but people often reveal their bias by their choice of them. People who use “woke” are often conservative. When conservatives use “Zionist,” they might be hating on Jews. And many of those who complain about antisemitism are antisemitic.
One final word before I close, “Jew”. Non-Jews can have trouble with it. They may say Judaic or Jewish person because “Jew” sometimes sounds, well, antisemitic. And it occurs to me that the problem lies with the absence of a viable epithet for Jews, akin to the N-word. Yeah, there is “kike,” but I’ve never heard anyone use that. The epithet for Jew is really Jew as in “you dirty, greedy, fucking Jew.” Maybe someone needs to coin a new one. It’s not like anti-Jewish sentiment is going away, and people need a word to use while hating on us.
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