The Uses and Abuses of "Antisemitism"

"Stalin cast them as "rootless cosmopolitans" colluding with "American imperialists" to undermine the Soviet Union. In Hitler's fevered imagination, they were bacilli infecting the healthy "Aryan" race. They have been denounced as lecherous predators and as omnipotent conspirators, as arch-Bolsheviks and arch-capitalists. Increasingly, these days, "Jew" is conflated with "Zionist," which, as a term of opprobrium, can mean anything from "settler colonialist" to "fascist" to "racist.""

"And right-wing politicians who accuse pro-Palestinian students of antisemitism are hardly credible arbiters. The Trump Administration, which poses as a defender of Jews, has nurtured links to antisemitic extremists; Trump himself has dined with outspoken Holocaust deniers and once said that neo-Nazi marchers raging against Jewish "replacement" of non-Jewish whites included "some very fine people." A hard-right government full of blood-and-soil nationalists which claims to be the protector of a Jewish minority would once have seemed very peculiar indeed."

Antisemitic depictions have ranged from portraying Jews as rootless cosmopolitans or bacilli to accusations of conspiratorial omnipotence. The term 'Zionist' has been broadened into an epithet encompassing settler-colonialist, fascist, or racist, obscuring its original goal of creating a refuge for Jews. Opposition to Zionism does not automatically equal antisemitism, yet political actors frequently weaponize accusations and associations for partisan ends. The Trump Administration exemplified this contradiction by courting extremists while professing Jewish protection. The erosion and repurposing of political language have transformed public debate into denunciation, intimidation, and potential violence.

Read at The New Yorker