Antisemitism comes in many flavors. It can be casual, thoughtless riffing by people who are unaware or uncaring. It can be, and often is, a derivative of Israel-hatred. It can be the child of left-wing “intersectionality,” which mobilizes disparate groups against a single “enemy.” The Carlson/Owens/Fuentes model is actually an update of the Lewis Farrakhan model, as articulated by minor-TV personality Nick Cannon a decade ago.
The Biden administration created a 60-page “US National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism,” which simply reduced Jews to the canary in the mine, noting that “people who express hatred toward Jews frequently hold other biases based on actual or perceived religion, race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, or gender identity.” The report adds that antisemites frequently use “AntiBlack, and anti-LGBTQI+ themes… Those who target Jews also target women, Black, Latino, Muslim, AANHPI, and LGBTQ+ Americans, and so many other communities.”
In this view, antisemitism is a “red flag” rather than a problem. Sometimes it may be. Mostly it is not.
What is the answer? For many, the answer is offering/demanding Holocaust education and/or a visit to Auschwitz.
A few years ago, when a football player made blatantly antisemitic remarks, a Jewish player invited him to visit Auschwitz. Some nasty young people in Philadelphia took an antisemitic graphic to a sports bar owned by a Jewish person. They photographed the poster in the bar and then posted on social media, where it went viral. The owner said he would take the perpetrators to visit Auschwitz at his expense. They didn’t go.
Those promoting a visit to Jewish history appear to have forgotten the public figure who visited Auschwitz only a few years ago. His overwhelming impression, he said, was shock. “Shocked that I saw pictures of Jewish women giving their babies to Nazis. How could they do that?”
Wrong lesson.
So, if visiting Auschwitz is not the answer, what is?
The Fundamentals of Antisemitism
Carlson and Owens and Fuentes, among others, seem to believe, as Cannon said, that the problem goes “as deep as the Rothschilds, centralized banking, the 13 families, the bloodlines that control everything,” even outside America. Cannon worried about “giving too much power to the ‘they,’ ” and they turn out to be “the Illuminati, the Zionists, the Rothschilds.” He attributed his beliefs to Louis Farrakhan. “Every time I’ve heard him speak, it’s positive, it’s powerful, it’s uplifting… for whatever reason, he’s been demonized.”
This is the heart of antisemitism – left and right, religious and secular, and other. Antisemitic agitators know perfectly well that Hitler engineered the genocide of the Jewish people in Europe—no denial there. On the other hand, they believe the Jews are responsible for what happened to them.
Here is their platform:
The Jews brought it on themselves. How? By being Jews —by doing all the nasty things agitators, including Farrakhan, charge “the Jews” with doing. Those things don’t bear repeating here or anywhere, but if “the Jews” did those things in Europe and they do those things in the US, and in Israel, according to the “intersectionalists,” well then, can you blame Hitler for a little overreaction? Can you blame American antisemites for the pogrom in Los Angeles, or the shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue? The Chabad of Poway? The murder of two Israelis on the streets of Washington, DC?
If those Jews just wouldn’t do what Jews do, they intone, they wouldn’t be hated. What do they do? Well, you know, Rothschilds, blood, money, “termites,” and all.
The Answer
The answer for Americans lies in understanding American Jewish history, including specifically Jews in the American Civil Rights Movement.
For example, do they know about Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who walked across the Pettus Bridge in Selma with his friend and partner, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.? If all they know is the film “Selma,” they don’t, because Rabbi Heschel was edited out. “Racism is Satanism,” said Rabbi Heschel. The line, at least, should have stayed in the movie.
Do Tucker and Owens know about Jewish New Yorkers Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, who, with their black colleague James Cheney, were registering black voters in Meridian, MS, in the 1960s? They were murdered together, and their bodies were dumped together in the woods.
Does Cannon know the names Arthur Lelyveld or Edward Sachar?
If they are professional antisemites, they won’t care – but a lot of other people might.
Try Professor Joel Spingarn. White, Jewish, Republican, and the second president of the NAACP and chairman of its board from 1913 until he died in 1939. Spingarn High School in Washington, DC, is named after him. Among his collaborators were Jacob Schiff, Jacob Billikopf, and Rabbi Stephen Wise.
Or Julius Rosenwald, founder of Sears, Roebuck & Company in the late 19th century, who collaborated with Booker T. Washington. For his 50th birthday, Rosenwald gave away $700,000 ($16 million today), including $25,000 to the Tuskegee Institute, which Washington used to build schools in rural Alabama. Rosenwald and Washington became partners in education. By the time Rosenwald died in 1932, there were 4,997 Rosenwald schools across the South, educating 35 percent of all black children in the South and 27 percent of all black children.
And in the north, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers (ACW) took the lead in organizing newly arrived blacks into union membership—over the opposition of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) national board. Herman Grossman was the first president of the ILGWU, and Bernard Braff the first secretary-treasurer.
There is more—there is so much more—and ignorance of the failure to understand AMERICAN history is surely not limited to the fringes of racial politics.
The Lesson
For Jews, all people are created in the image of God, which meshes completely with the American belief not only that “all men are created equal,” but also that “they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” Having been deprived of those rights in Europe, and across much of the Middle East and North Africa, Jews—an often-despised minority here in the United States—were true believers in that promise. Jews have used and still use that promise as leverage to work toward redeeming the promise for us and everyone else.
Necessary disclaimer: Yes, America is still working on the promise; we’re not there yet. But as Americans since 1654, Jews have been and remain partners in civil and human rights. THAT, not Auschwitz, is what the antisemites need to know.
Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of The Jewish Policy Center and Editor of inFOCUS Quarterly.
