Why Explain Antisemitism?

Jack Omer-Jackaman is the author of Caught Somewhere Between Zion and Galut: Zionism, Israel and Anglo-Jewry’s Identity, 1948-1982 (Vallentine Mitchell, 2019) and deputy editor of Fathom. This opinion piece was delivered as a paper at the inaugural conference London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism in September 2022.

Israel’s response to the 7 October Hamas attacks has emboldened many to say the once unsayable.

Bernard Harrison’s book Blaming the Jews: Politics and Delusion (Indiana University Press, 2020) is, we believe, a vital text. Questioning the assumption that antisemitism affects or targets only Jews, it demonstrates that when allowed to go unchecked, antisemitism is potentially damaging to us all.

The State Department’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, the historian Deborah Lipstadt, says the prejudice is coming “from all ends of the political spectrum, and in between.” It threatens not only Jews, she says, but the stability of democracies.

It does not accurately describe either the foundation of Israel or the tragedy of the Palestinians.

Behnam Ben Taleblu, a native Farsi speaker, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies, where he focuses on Iranian security and political issues. He speaks here with BICOM Director Richard Pater about the role of Iran in supporting its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, to wage war on Israel.

Yes, Ernst Jandl: Humanityyyyyy, we certainly could use a little bit of it. Since the attack of Hamas, I no longer know what this is supposed to be. It becomes a piece of paper on which many beautiful things have been written and then set on fire. And then the ashes, as perhaps in the case of Arthur Schnitzler’s divorce from his wife Olga before a Munich Rabbinic Court, the ashes were ground above the heads of the participants.

(…) To everyone’s misfortune, this conflict is mired in what Wilhelm Reich called the “emotional plague”, the reign of labile emotion which, with no regard for truth, opens the way to passion, entirely devoted to the affirmation of convictions where Nietzsche saw the opposite of truth. When, in our ‘society of the spectacle’, emotion becomes spectacle, tears blur the issues and make the origins of chaos disappear.

As if the world’s Jews don’t have enough problems right now. Still dealing with the aftershock of the worst slaughter of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust, over 200 of us still held hostage by the same murderous fanatics who carried out that pogrom, and with a worldwide wave of anti-Jewish hatred sweeping through our communities, the world’s richest man, Elon
Musk, decided to remind everyone that eliminationist anti-Zionism is not the only game in town when it comes to antisemitism.

Israeli women were raped by Hamas terrorists. Why do women’s organizations remain silent?

Die derzeitige Situation, die durch den an Grausamkeit nicht zu überbietenden Angriff der Hamas und Israels Reaktion darauf geschaffen wurde, hat zu einer Kaskade von moralisch-politischen Stellungnahmen und Demonstrationen geführt. Wir sind der Auffassung, dass bei all den widerstreitenden Sichtweisen, die geäußert werden, einige Grundsätze festzuhalten sind, die nicht bestritten werden sollten.

This essay seeks to register and understand the deeper causes of the appalling reaction of parts of the western academic left to the massacre perpetrated by Hamas on 7 October 2023.