Zeev Jabotinsky, the famed writer, political theorist, and Zionist leader, instinctively sympathized with other ethnic and national minorities against the Russian Empire’s program of forced assimilation and Russification. That sympathy was not always requited; in Poland, his open palm was met with a clenched fist.
“I absolutely refuse to understand how one can take account of the national demands of a people that refuses in principle to reckon with the Jewish people’s national rights,” a frustrated Jabotinsky wrote in 1913. As he saw it, reciprocity was a prerequisite for forming a political alliance. “In politics, considerate behavior is inadmissible unless it is mutual. For there can be only two options: either all nationalities have an equal right to their cultures and the national sentiments of each are sacred and inviolable, or there are no such rights at all, in which case the national sentiments of the Poles are as little sacred as those of the Jews. Equality is for all or for none.”
Today, the American Jewish community demands no such reciprocity; it tolerates and even encourages movements that reject Jewish particularism. The result is a disaster for U.S. Jews, who are overwhelmingly left-of-center and highly politically engaged — and thus used as instruments in their own erasure by the commissars of Leftist identity politics, who regard Jews as white oppressors who must atone for their “privilege.” Few non-right-wing Jews call attention to this trend. That is what makes Bari Weiss’ book, How To Fight Anti-Semitism, both intellectually refreshing and useful.
“Whereas once it was enough to criticize Israeli government policy, specifically its treatment of Palestinians, now Israel’s very existence must be denounced,” Weiss writes. “Whereas once it was enough to forswear the Jewish Defense League, now the very idea of Jewish power must be abjured. Whereas once Jewish success had to be explained, now it has to be apologized for. Whereas once only Israel’s government was demonized, now it is the Jewish movement for self-determination itself.”
Weiss laments the Left’s demand that Jews shed their “stubborn particularism” as a prerequisite for political belonging: “Jews are welcome so long as they undertake a kind of secular conversion by disavowing many or most of the things that actually make them Jewish.”
Weiss’s book is not merely about Left anti-Semitism: Its section on right-wing Jew-hate comes first. But by covering all kinds of anti-Semitism, Weiss makes a threefold contribution to the debate. First, because she is a liberal, her condemnation of left-wing bigotry comes with more credibility. Second, because she is a staff editor and writer at the New York Times, her words reach those who might not otherwise hear them or who might not take them seriously if they weren’t coming from the Times. And third, because Weiss seeks to be politically comprehensive, shining the hot lights on all sides, she effectively de-politicizes anti-Semitism by taking it out of the realm of partisan finger-pointing.
Weiss’s ecumenical approach helps us understand strains of anti-Semitism that are frequently ignored by the media. Right-wing anti-Semitism is fairly straightforward. The tiki torch Nazi poseurs in Charlottesville chanted “The Jews will not replace us”; it doesn’t take a Talmudic debate to figure out what animates them. But the belief — expressed by New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, the communications director for Rep. Ilhan Omar, and other Democrats — that anti-Semitism is an exclusively right-wing phenomenon is not only wrong but dangerously so. “There were 1,879 incidents of anti-Semitism in America in 2018, according to the anti-Defamation League. Just 13% of them (249) were carried out by members of white supremacist groups,” Weiss says.
In de Blasio’s New York, Orthodox Jews are experiencing a frightening wave of violence the city has done nothing to stop. “The fact that the victims are most often outwardly identifiable, i.e., religious rather than secularized Jews, and the perpetrators who have been recorded on CCTV cameras are overwhelmingly black and Hispanic, inverts the perpetrator-victim dynamics with which most national Jewish organizations and their supporters are comfortable,” wrote Armin Rosen at Tablet. “A close look at these cases reveals no apparent connection to neo-Nazis, the alt-right, Donald Trump, jihadism, the BDS movement, or any other traditional cause of anti-Jewish behavior.”
How To Fight Anti-Semitism is tightly argued and clocks in at just about 200 pages. What it’s able to accomplish in that time is remarkable, but it really shines in two areas. The first is dispensing with the lazy defense of anti-Zionism as distinct from anti-Semitism. As Weiss shows, it really is a form of anti-Semitism.
Israel “exists. It is not an abstraction.” So pointing to the history of Jews opposed to the theoretical Jewish state in the early part of the 20th century is dishonest. The latest polls find 95% of Jews have favorable views of Israel, so the number of Jewish anti-Zionists is practically a rounding error. There’s a reason for this: Since Israel’s founding in 1948, being an anti-Zionist has meant not merely opposing the establishment of a Jewish state but supporting the existing Jewish state’s destruction. “The kumbaya of the anti-Zionist dream guarantees a very bloody reality, and anti-Zionists should be forced to defend it,” Weiss writes. Anti-Zionists are conspicuously focused on being “anti” the existence of only one state: the Jewish one. While Weiss acknowledges that some legitimate criticism of Israel gets unfairly labeled as anti-Semitism, she notes that it is more often the case that anti-Zionists are trying to launder Jew-hatred as criticism of Israeli policy. “To be an anti-Zionist in Poland before the Holocaust is one thing. To be one today is something else entirely,” she says. “It is not to be ideologically opposed to an idea. It is to be against the largest Jewish community on the planet.”
Weiss has famously become the target of an insane degree of online spite — not from random folks on the internet but from fellow journalists and commentators, as well as activists. Her book shows why: She consistently forces her antagonists to face the realities of their positions instead of letting them hide behind abstractions.
The other great triumph of the book is the final chapter, which fulfills the promise of the title: “How To Fight.” She tears into the defensiveness that leads so many Jewish Americans to fight on their accusers’ terms. She approvingly quotes a former Columbia student (Weiss is also an alumnus): “A man calls you a pig. Do you walk around with a sign explaining that, in fact, you are not a pig? Do you hand out leaflets expostulating in detail upon the manifold differences between you and a pig?”
Weiss counsels Jews to stop negotiating the terms of their own existence. She also quotes former British Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks: “Non-Jews respect Jews who respect Judaism, and they are embarrassed by Jews who are embarrassed by Judaism.” Likewise, she asks readers to call out anti-Semitism, “especially when it’s hard” to do so. That means criticizing minorities, such as Ilhan Omar, who regularly use anti-Semitic tropes, rather than letting the fear of being called a racist intimidate you into silence.
Weiss tells readers to “expect solidarity.” As Jabotinsky recognized a century ago, it’s not “equality” if you’re not given equal standing. “We should not make a deal that requires us to erase ourselves,” Weiss writes. She advises other members of the tribe to “lean into Judaism,” not toward secularization and assimilation.
When, in 1982, then-Sen. Joe Biden tried to cajole Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin by holding U.S. aid to Israel over Begin’s head, the prime minister reportedly responded, “I am not a Jew with trembling knees.” Bari Weiss has picked up Begin’s baton in compelling fashion with a timely warning against a Judaism that trembles at the knees.
Seth Mandel is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
