What is Antisemitism?

Antisemitism is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews. It is not uncommon for people to dislike another person or even a country. But in the case of antisemitism, it describes a profound dislike of one particular people regardless of where they live or what they do. This outlook often spills into antisemitic behavior leading to discrimination, hostility, and ultimately to the persecution of Jews.

The western world is no stranger to antisemitism. Throughout European history, systematic discrimination against Jews was a hallmark of western attitudes toward Judaism.  Over the centuries, Jews were marginalized, barred from many professions, herded into ghettos in Europe’s cities, and even segregated into enclaves such as the “pale of settlement” in Czarist Russia.

Cases of severe persecution and slaughter occurred throughout European history and culminated in ‘pogroms’ (mass killings) of Jews in Czarist Russia in the late 19th century and in the Holocaust of the 20th century, when over six million Jews were murdered under the Nazi regime before and during the Second World War. Today antisemitism continues to be found throughout the western world.

Jews who lived in the Middle East and North Africa did not fare as badly as those in Europe. There were routine conflicts in these largely Muslim and Eastern Christian areas. But large cities like Baghdad and Alexandria hosted significant Jewish communities, and for the most part they lived peacefully with their non-Jewish neighbors under Muslim rule.  Real conflicts between Jews and Muslims began with the entry of western colonial influence in those regions. For example, Jews and Palestinians (Muslim and Christian) lived in harmony in Palestine until the British began to encourage large-scale Jewish immigration from Europe in the early 20th century.

Recently, Jewish American political commentator Peter Beinart published a piece in the New York Times entitled “Has the Fight Against Antisemitism Lost Its Way?” (Beinart article on antisemitism) Beinart shows how antisemitism has evolved over the last 40 or 50 years. He decries the so-called “New Antisemitism” that targets not simply anti-Judaism but also any who criticize the modern State of Israel. While the fight against antisemitism has traditionally been a fight against bigotry and discrimination toward Jews, now the charge of antisemitism is lodged against those who critique Israel for its own discriminatory policies against its Christian and Muslim Arab citizens and those it holds under military occupation. 

Those who level the charge of antisemitism in this way, writes Beinart, “have made the fight against antisemitism into a vehicle not for defending human rights but for denying them. Most Palestinians exist as second-class citizens in Israel proper or as stateless noncitizens in the territories Israel occupied in 1967 or who live beyond Israel’s borders because they, their forebears, or their descendants were expelled or fled and were not permitted to return.”  Those who want to divert attention from Israel’s human rights problems, maintains Beinart, are not friends of the Jewish people. Rather, they enable their Jewish brothers and sisters in their sin against their fellow human beings with whom they share a land. 

The charge of antisemitism is sometimes “weaponized” by those who will stop at nothing to prevent responsible pushback on Israel for its historic and ongoing abrogation of the rights of Palestinians. This is wrong, and not only because it helps perpetuate an unjust political and social situation.  It is a disservice to Jews and to all who fight racism, because when you intentionally conflate standing up for human rights with wanting to hurt the Jewish people, you are making antisemitism into something that it is not. This damages the fight against authentic antisemitism.

Authentic antisemitism – hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews – has not gone away. Far from it. It continues to exist and like all forms of racism, it should be opposed wherever it is found.