https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/10/books/review/how-to-fight-anti-semitism-bari-
Bari Weiss has written what must be judged a brave book. That it must be is a badge of shame for the “progressive” America with which she identifies.
Should it call for courage for a politically liberal American Jew like Weiss to point out that Jews, though a tiny percentage of the population of the United States, are the victims of over half of its reported hate crimes? That anti-Jewish rhetoric, once confined to right-wing extremists, now infests the American left, too?
Should someone like Weiss, an editor and opinion writer at The New York Times, have to expect brickbats from her colleagues for observing that a vicious demonization of Israel and its supporters has become routine in much of the American left and endemic on college and university campuses? That whatever its failings, Israel is a remarkable human adventure that deserves at least as much sympathy as criticism? That it is only natural for a Jew to care deeply about a Jewish state’s welfare and survival? That Jewish solidarity is as legitimate as any other form of human solidarity?
Should she have to fear ostracism or damage to her journalistic reputation for pointing out that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, while theoretically distinguishable, have long merged into a single ugly phenomenon? Or that it is obscene, less than a century after the Holocaust, to class Jews with their historical “white oppressors”?
Unfortunately, as Weiss writes in “How to Fight Anti-Semitism,” the answer to all these questions is yes.
Weiss’s book, whose careful organization and articulate prose belie its hurried composition in the wake of last October’s Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, is not just about the left. (A native of Pittsburgh herself, she retains a strong attachment to its Jewish community.) The Pittsburgh shooter was a lunatic-fringe white supremacist, and “How to Fight Anti-Semitism” seeks to be evenhanded: Its chapter on the anti-Semitism of the left is preceded by a chapter on the anti-Semitism of the right and followed by a chapter on the anti-Semitism of radical Islam. Though not claiming to be original, Weiss is admirably succinct in her explanation of why groups having nothing else in common are united in their dislike or hatred of Jews. “In the eyes of the anti-Semite,” she writes, “the Jew is … everything.” It is not the actual Jew that most anti-Semites hate (many of them have never met one) but what they project onto him. “He is whatever the anti-Semite needs him to be.”
