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ANTI-SEMITISM

Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews by David L. Bernstein and Natan Sharansky

Woke Antisemitism is a firsthand account from a top Jewish leader about how woke ideology shuts down discourse, corrupts Jewish values, and spawns a virulent new strain of antisemitism.

In May 2021, amid another conflict with Iran-backed Hamas, Israel took a beating in both the mainstream press and social media. Notwithstanding the rocket fire aimed at its citizens, the Jewish state was portrayed as the oppressor and the Hamas government in Gaza as the oppressed. While Israel has always been subject to excessive scrutiny, this time was different. What had changed in the ideological environment? A veteran leader of Jewish advocacy organizations and a self-described liberal who has broken with the far left over the adoption of woke ideology, David L. Bernstein traces the growth of woke ideology in his life and career from a remote academic study to an international post-colonialist movement, then a faddish campus ideology, morphing into corporate diversity programs to a dominant ideology in mainstream institutions, including many Jewish organizations. Bernstein shows how core ideological tenets—such as privilege, equity, whiteness, and the oppressor/oppressed binary—can be and are weaponized against Jews.

What’s more, surveys tell us that Americans are self-censoring at record rates. Jewish institutions, long known for their robust deliberative processes and open discourse, have not been spared. Many have uncharacteristically dodged controversial issues and have simply fallen in line. He warns that, unabated, the ideology will disenfranchise the American Jewish community and sap Jewish pride. He puts forward a strategy for restoring liberal values and countering political extremism and antisemitism, focusing on rebuilding the political center strategy.

Kenneth Roth, Crybaby of the Western World The anti-Semite hiding behind being a Jew has had his way long enough. by Hugh Fitzgerald

https://www.frontpagemag.com/kenneth-roth-crybaby-of-the-western-world/

Kenneth Roth retired last year as the head of Human Rights Watch, where he had been paid the colossal sum of $600,000 a year. He was looking forward to being a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, figuring that someone of such earth-shaking eminence in the NGO world would have no trouble getting a fellowship. By the waters of the Charles he would sit down and write, forsooth, a book about his exploits as a defender of human rights. He had already been awarded a fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania for the coming year, but clearly, he preferred the cachet of the Kennedy School, and Penn would have to wait. Then something unexpected happened. His application for a fellowship was turned down by the Kennedy School. Roth was furious. How dare any institution turn down Kenneth Roth, one of the world’s foremost defenders of human rights, for anything? He wrote a self-pitying piece in The Guardian, claiming that a cabal of supporters of Israel, “rich donors” to the Kennedy School, must have pressured the school’s Dean, Douglas Elmendorf, to turn down his application because of what Roth demurely, and inaccurately, calls his “criticism of Israel.” He had not the slightest proof of this, but that has never stopped Kenneth Roth. He is still, along with his claque of admirers, hoping to pressure Dean Elmendorf into reconsidering. I don’t think it will work.

Jonathan Tobin has a complete account of the contretemps here: “Harvard Didn’t Cancel Kenneth Roth; it Decided Not to Honor an Antisemite,” by Jonathan S. Tobin, JNS.org, January 13, 2023:

Cancel culture in academia is a serious problem. There is no sector of American society in which dissent is so routinely crushed, or where free speech is most endangered, as the country’s leading institutions of higher learning. So, the story that someone was supposedly denied a fellowship at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government because of his political beliefs seems to fit into a familiar pattern of shunning and silencing those who don’t adhere to the orthodoxies worshipped by the elites.

The Whitewashing of Antisemitism, a Hatred of Many Colors by Richard Bernstein

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/01/19/the_whitewashing_of_antisemitism_a_hatred_of_many_colors_876229.html

It was a common occurrence on the streets of one of New York City’s Jewish neighborhoods: A man dressed in the long black coat and broad hat worn by Hasidic Jews was walking in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, his two young children in hand, when suddenly a black man ran up behind him and hit him hard on the back of the head. 

Incidents like that one last May unfold repeatedly in New York, several of them in December alone – an outdoor menorah in Coney Island vandalized; a father and son wearing yarmulkas shot with a BB gun on Staten Island; a group of visibly Jewish boys chased by a gang firing a taser and shouting “Jews run! Get out of here”; a Hasidic man beaten outside a bus stop in Crown Heights.   

Rationalizations for black antisemitism can be strained, as when the spewings of billionaire rapper Ye, the former Kanye West …
Invision

Such attacks are part of a larger groundswell of antisemitism that has received wide notice across the country in recent years. But what has not gotten much attention is the reticence to even mention the ethnicity of antisemitic perpetrators unless they are white. It appears that discussion of this ancient hatred is being constrained by contemporary politics.  

In covering and condemning these acts, most major news outlets and politicians from President Biden on down have described antisemitism as almost entirely a sub-species of white supremacy or white nationalism, invoking the mob in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 shouting “Jews will not replace us,” or the murder of 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 by a white nationalist fanatic.  

This narrative obscures the complexity and diversity of the sources fueling the spike in antisemitism, some experts say. Right-wing hate groups are playing their usual part, but so too are blacks and members of other minority groups. The non-white antagonists are erased from the public discourse even though it’s generally understood that it’s hard to address a societal problem when society is unwilling to discuss it openly and honestly.  

Shady Jewelry Jews in the Current TV Season By Rabbi Elliot B. Gertel

For some reason, two Law and Order franchise series and two police series, one fledgling and one long-running, are obsessing on Jews and jewelry. Their Jewish personages were all far from gems in character, if not outright murderers or enablers of murder, advancing anti-Semitic tropes that have been much in the news in recent weeks.

An episode of Law and Order-related FBI: Most Wanted (10-4-22) began with kipah (skull cap) and zizit (fringes)-donning diamond dealer Jared Horovitz (Zachary Fineman) hurriedly handing a rap artist’s blue diamond mouth-piece to an armored car driver, concerned, he says, about keeping it safe over the Sabbath. The driver is robbed and killed as he leaves the store.

This “religious” Jew is depicted as keeping no written records, upping insurance policies and avoiding taxes and mysteriously manipulating funds to afford a suburban home and city quarters to romance a stripper. The latter will describe him as “that super gross diamond dealer,” whom a Cartel sex-trafficker has “put” her “up to” (monitor?).  He says that he is “separated,” and “an open book.” 

Curiously, however, in this episode written by Wendy West, no clear connection is made between the diamond dealer and the robbery-murder. He is trotted out early, briefly (and gratuitously?) as a side show. But why? Does he fulfill some TV quota for requisite representation of seedy Orthodox Jews?

The pilot episode (11-16-22) of new CBS series, East New York, featured a developer named Adam Lustig (Scott Cohen), “the major developer in East New York.” Written by series producers William Finkelstein and Mike Flynn, the hour lost no time exposing Lustig’s false denial of knowing Nikolai Dushkin (Miro Barnyashev), a site foreman on one of his projects.  Are we supposed to wonder whether Lustig is an arrogant American-born Jew and Dushkin a murderous Russian Jewish immigrant?  In a choppy, jumbled, loosely-written plot, Dushkin tries to kill Lustig over a loan financed by blue diamond smuggling (of course) involving the exploitation of a young African mine worker. Lustig’s closest thing to a moral defense is the mantra, “Nothing my lawyer can’t handle.” 

The Biden Administration Takes Aim at Israel By Lincoln Brown

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/lincolnbrown/2023/01/13/the-biden-administration-takes-aim-at-israel-n1661557

A brief bit of biographical background: when I was in high school, I ran with a pretty diverse group of people. Yes, kids, there was a time in America when we were perfectly capable of embracing diversity without an official mandate. While I assure you that I am telling you the truth, that is another story for another time.

I hung out with black kids, Asian kids, Mexican kids, all kinds of kids. In fact, in my circle of friends, I was the only WASP around. There was a decent-sized Jewish population in my part of town for some time. I used to see people walking to temple on Saturday mornings. And I saw the synagogues around the neighborhood, which from time to time would be vandalized with swastikas.

I worked off and on during high school for a catering company that served the local synagogues. I remember one night, someone asked me to get a dish down from a cupboard. They were serving meat that evening and I grabbed a dairy dish. That is a mistake I only made once! Well, you have to learn somehow. Hanging around with Jewish kids, like the black kids, Catholic kids, and Mexican, and Asian kids I ran with, I got to meet their parents and their grandparents. Some of whom had the numbers from the concentration camps tattooed on their arms.

And quite frankly, all of my friends and I shared the same concerns. Namely, where could we get beer, and where were all the girls? Hey, it was high school. Because of those experiences, I have never understood the hatred of Jews. That hatred never was and has never been a part of the equation of life for me.

One would think that in a supposedly-enlightened age, the naked hatred and prejudices of the past would have already been consigned to history. But of course, this is not an enlightened age. People are motivated by stereotypes, rhetoric, and a situation in Israel that they do not fully understand or care to research, protest and vomit talking points in fits of rage. Because rage has become the coin of the realm. It is the fuel for egos and a lubricant of the gears of power.

Universities Decide Jewish Students Don’t Need Protection All groups are equal, but some groups are more equal than others. January 12, 2023 by Richard L. Cravatts

https://www.frontpagemag.com/universities-decide-jewish-students-dont-need-protection/

In their zeal to construct an academic setting that reflects the true diversity of the nation—and simultaneously attempts to redress past discrimination and exclusion— universities have created campuses that have evolved in an opposite direction. Rather than helping students adapt to the real diversity of society outside the campus walls, the diversity ‘movement’ in the hands of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) diversocrats has served to create balkanized campuses where victims of the moment segregate themselves into distinct and inward-looking racial and cultural groups—exactly the opposite intention of the diversity credo.

Students from “underrepresented,” “marginalized,” and “protected” minority groups, who may well initially arrive at campuses thinking of themselves as part of mainstream society, are taught, in the name of diversity, to think of themselves differently: as part of a racial, cultural, sexual, or political subset of American life and victims of what is purported to be systemic bigotry.

In his engaging book, A Nation of Victims: The Decay of the American Character, Charles J. Sykes traced the growth of this culture of victimization and suggested that it has increasingly opened wide divisions between races, economic and social classes, and the advantaged and the disadvantaged — particularly when self-defined victims make unreason­able or exaggerated demands on the larger society by which they feel victimized.

“In the society of victims,” Sykes wrote, “individuals compete not only for rights or economic advantage but also for points on the ‘sensitivity’ index, where ‘feelings’ rather than reason are what count. Once feelings are established as the barometer of acceptable behavior, speech (and, by extension, thought) becomes only as free as the most sensitive group will permit [italics added].”

Jew-Hate at American Universities by Richard Kemp

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19298/jew-hate-universities

[The Amcha] report paints a stark picture of an increasing, intensifying and carefully coordinated campaign of attacks on Jewish identity at over 60% of the colleges and universities that are popular with Jews, including 2,000 incidents intended to harm Jewish students since 2015.

[T]hese activists demand an end to Zionism, which… means just one thing: an end to the democratic State of Israel. This itself is antisemitism in any book and is spelt out as such in the US State Department definition of antisemitism.

Despite expending so much energy against their fellow students, German Gentiles had plenty left for their Jewish professors. Unsatisfied with Nazi race regulations restricting Jewish faculty, students boycotted the classes of those who were exempt under the race laws and pressured university authorities to dismiss them. The result was that every Jewish professor who was still legally allowed to teach had resigned by 1935.

The Amcha report characterises the situation on US campuses today as a crisis for American Jews. It is much more than that. It is a crisis for us all that one section of our student body is bullied, abused, intimidated and cast down by their fellow students and often abandoned by their professors and faculty authorities.

It is high time for the federal government, under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, to withdraw its funding from all universities that participate in bigotry such as that.

As Jews were hounded out of German universities in the 1930s, where would you have stood? Many of us would like to think we would have found the moral and if necessary physical courage to stand up for our fellow students rather than see them persecuted, bullied, abused and thrown out. Well, now we can actually put our courage to the test as before our eyes we see a re-run of an almost identical pattern of antisemitism — this time at American colleges, with a similar picture at universities in Britain and elsewhere in the West.

A new study by the antisemitism watchdog Amcha Initiative documents a pervasive, relentless assault on Jewish identity at US universities.

Time to stop fearing the Jew-Hating bullies and fight back! Diane Bederman

https://dianebederman.com/time-to-stop-fearing-the-jew-hating-bullies-and-fight-back-pikuach-nefesh/

I apologize for the length of this article. It is much longer than most of my blogs. I tried to reduce the words by editing the number of Jew hating incidents reported in 2021-the most recent year of hate statistics…

Time for the Jewish people to worry less about others, Tikkun Olam, and more about Pikuach nefesh: the preservation of human life that overrides virtually any other religious rule of Judaism. We have the moral and ethical right to protect ourselves including carrying weapons to prevent attacks on our people; especially in synagogue. Protecting life is above all other religious considerations.

Rabbi Hillel asked: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And being for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?” The time has come, dear Jews to be for ourselves.

We are living in a time where demonizing the Jews has become culturally acceptable. Jewish students are being bullied for being Jewish and for Israel being a white colonial oppressor against the oppressed Palestinians. Critical Race Theory is targeting Jews.  The time has come for the Jews to stand up to this endless industrialized bullying, this “coercive” aggression that is purpose-driven, not fear- or anger – driven. It’s the type of bullying that demonstrates an absence of ethics and compassion. It is bullying that has a tangible goal, carried out under intellectual control and will involve sufficient violence to achieve its goal, influencing social outcomes. This is the bullying of Jews taking place taking place in the 21st century and it’s time to fight back. Literally.

Although Jewish people constitute less than one-half of one percent of the world’s population, no other people have been as harassed, attacked, impugned more than the Jews from time immemorial. When it comes to the Jews and Israel, facts don’t matter. We live in a world where facts and critical thinking have been overtaken by feelings and wishful thinking.

The New, New Antisemitism Black antisemitism is spreading in strange, dangerous ways. Why? By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/28/the-new-new-antisemitism/

The old antisemitism was more a right-wing than a left-wing phenomenon—perhaps best personified by the now-withered Ku Klux Klan.

A new antisemitism followed from the campus leftism of the 1960s. It arose from and was masked by a general hatred of Israel, following the Jewish state’s incredible victory in the 1967 Six-Day War. 

That lopsided triumph globally transformed Israel in the leftist mind from a David fighting the Arab Goliath into a veritable Western imperialist, neocolonialist overdog. 

On campuses, Middle-East activism, course instruction, and faculty profiles are now virulently anti-Israel—and indistinguishable from anti-Jewishness. 

When columnist Ben Shapiro spoke at Stanford University in 2019, left-wing posters were plastered around campus depicting Shapiro as an insect menace. A “BenBGon” bug spray bottle in Nazi fashion unsubtly suggested that a chemical agent is the best remedy to make sure Jews “be gone” from the premises. 

The avowed socialist Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) retweeted the old propaganda boast, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” 

Tlaib knew well “to the sea” could mean only the extinction of Israel itself and its 9 million Jews. She deleted her tweet—but only after an outcry of protest. 

Anti-Zionists and leftist Palestinian activists Linda Sarsour and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.)—“it’s all about the Benjamins”—often made no effort to hide their antisemitism. 

Yet now a dangerous new, new antisemitism is trending, predominantly among African-Americans—especially prominent politicians, celebrities, and billionaires. 

The old trope that blacks inordinately were prejudiced against Jews due to past inner-city stereotypes of exploiting Jewish landlords has been recalibrated. It is now repackaged by black elites claiming that their careers are overly profitable to and orchestrated by “the Jews.”

It has been difficult to find any major black leader who has not trafficked in antisemitism, whether Jesse Jackson (“Hymietown”), Al Sharpton (“tell them to pin their yarmulkes back”), Louis Farrakhan (“gutter religion”), or Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright (“Them Jews”). 

Yet what is different about the new, new antisemitism is the open defiance, often even or especially when exposed. 

Kayne West was met with pushback after warning, “I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.” Yet he trumped that by soon praising Adolf Hitler. 

The Black Hebrew movement absurdly claims blacks are the real Biblical Jews, Jews the imposters. Black Lives Matter clumsily disguised its antisemitism when claiming Israelis were committing mass genocide in the Middle East.

When novelist Alice Walker was chastised for praising virulent antisemite David Icke (he claimed that Jews formed a cabal of “lizard people”), she too was unremorseful. Walker retorted that Icke was “brave” for publishing his nutty rants. 

Rappers from Public Enemy and Ice Cube to Jay-Z and Kanye West all spouted anti-Jewish venom. And billionaires, from the late Michael Jackson to LeBron James, dabbled in antisemitic talk, the first in lines from lyrics, the second in retweets. 

In the hate-crime statistics, blacks as perpetrators are overrepresented, and, as victims, Jews and Asians are overrepresented. “Knock out the Jew” occasionally resurfaces as a common sport among New York city black youth.

In our “woke” age, race is seen as an indemnity policy for any self-described victim. Thus even elite blacks, as the still oppressed, cannot be seen as oppressors against “white” Jews. 

A New Report Exposes Endemic Campus Jew-Hatred Palestinian activism morphs into an attack on Jewish identity, not just on Israel. by Richard L. Cravatts

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-new-report-exposes-endemic-campus-jew-hatred/

The campus war against Israel, now some decades old, has been unrelenting in its vicious assault against the Jewish state, led by such radical pro-Palestinian student groups as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) with some 200 chapters nationwide.

The real intention of this pro-Palestinian activism, now encompassing a large swathe of academia, is, clearly, to exclude Israel from the community of nations and to prevent supporters of the Jewish state from even defending it or offering counterarguments to the falsehoods and lies that comprise so much of anti-Israel rhetoric and expression—the Palestinian “narrative” with little connection to history and fact. The desire to affect the complete and comprehensive purging of pro-Israel students, faculty, and organizations is not, as it is often disingenuously positioned, mere “criticism of Israel.” It is much more repellent and insidious than that, and new evidence reveals this activism is a targeted attack, not only on Israel but on Zionism, Judaism, and Jewness itself.

In fact, an important new report from the AMCHA Initiative, a campus antisemitism watchdog group, has exposed how the cognitive war against Israel has expanded its reach and virulence and now seeks to malign, not only Israel itself, but any ideology or communal organizations connected to Israel, Zionism, and Jewish identity. The report, “Campus Antisemitism and the Assault on Jewish Identity,” exposes an “insidious phenomenon that has taken root on college campuses of late: a pervasive and relentless assault on Jewish identity that is likely to have dire consequences for the Jewish community in the years to come.”

As cataloged in the report, the AMCHA Initiative’s “online database of antisemitic activity includes nearly 2,000 incidents involving the targeting of Jewish students for harm since 2015. In addition, several of AMCHA’s annual reports have documented the alarming increase over time in the frequency and intensity of such incidents, particularly those motivated by animus towards Israel and its on-campus supporters . . . .”

While observers of the Israeli/Palestinian debate have long suspected that just under the surface of anti-Israel activism was a simmering and malignant anti-Semitism. It has been assumed that anti-Semites can disguise their hatred of Jews by claiming, usually disingenuously, that they were only criticizing Israel and its politics, not Judaism, Jewish communal organizations, Jewish self-determination, and other aspects of students’ Jewish identity that, as the AMCHA report uncovered, have become increasingly more visible and harmful to Jewish students.