Some notes on anti-Semitism:
I could speak to this subject. I mean I'm fairly articulate and everything, sometimes. And it's a concern, it has a lot to do with what happens next, and what's happening now.
It needs to get done, and as far as I can tell no one else is doing it.
I don't want to waste a whole afternoon chasing after this nonsense, but here I am.
Start with your terms.
The semantic fog around the words themselves.
Anti-Semitic means bigotry toward Jews. The reason it's called "Semitic" is...
Fog.
What's a Jew?
Racially I suppose there's some anthropological metric; the Jews themselves - inasmuch as there is a "Jews themselves" which there isn't - but there is a kind of an official, in the sense of it being recorded as religious law, though evidently much in dispute even so, description of a Jew, as being someone whose mother was/is Jewish. The Israeli government makes further distinctions in the process of granting citizenship to potential immigrants. But "Jew" also means a member of or believer in Judaism, a religion. These are neither synonymous nor are they inextricably congruent.
There are many non-believing Jews in the world, and not so many but more than a few non-racially descendant practicing Jews in the world also.
More fog.
No one can say with any definitive confidence what a "Jew" is, to determine if something or someone is being anti-Semitic, or, technically, anti-Jew. Just as no one can say with any definitive confidence where the high tide line is, at the beach. It changes every day. Twice.
Yet there's the Holocaust, the pogroms, the cruel and bizarre suddenness of the Spanish Expulsion in 1492, the fact that Harvard University felt the need to impose a quota on Jewish students in the early 20th c.
Nothing like persecution to create a sense of commonality, at least from a distance.
There's something there, but it won't hold still - and it's nebulous, cloudy, it shifts and changes form.
Yet there are Jews obviously - you can see that - you can say "This man is a Jew."
For instance, Anderson Cooper.
Notice that in this story, pulled randomly from a google search for Cooper, there's a quote from "CNN/U.S. president Jon Klein".
Is Klein Jewish? Is it anti-Semitic to ask that? Is it even important?
When Habib Battah says, concerning the invasion of Lebanon by Israel:"It's very interesting that there is a very big difference in the reporting styles of CNN International and CNN United States. Reporters on the American network will - recently a reporter with the IDF said that Hezbollah is like no terror organization Israel has ever seen, whereas the international reporters won't describe Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. They'll call it a militia. And then, so you kind of wonder, why would they adjust the message based on the audience, when the goal is journalism?"What can we do with that? Klein, Cooper, Israel. Truth, lies, and knee-jerk reactions to atrocity, and that other thing there.
Fog.
A key feature of cliched anti-Semitism is the accusation that "Jews control the (US) media". A list of executives in and owners of the major media corporations would appear to bear this out.
One of the things that happens right there is though, that that will push you outside the pale. It creates a kind of legitimate paranoia. Because if that isn't anti-Semitic, if it is in fact a plain and simple truth - a fact, the American media is controlled by Jews - then what else is also true? What other fantasatic ideas are part of this? How deep does it go?
What follows then can too easily become a descent into the murk - spelunking into the caverns of the arcane, the occult, and the gibbering mad.
Or wandering into a landscape without distinct features, where nothing can be known or certified as true. Something is real, but whatever it is is vague and shadowy.
Fog.
Another simple earmark of stock cliched anti-Semitism is "Jews control the money". Bush appointing Paul Wolfowitz, who happens to be one of the primary architects of the invasion of Iraq, to head the World Bank, didn't do a lot to rebut that. That the heads of institutions like the IMF and the Federal Reserve have been traditionally Jews means something as well, but what?
More fog.
We could say, I guess we are saying, that one of the first lines of defense of a Jewish conspiracy to "control the world" would be accusations of irrational bigotry against the proponents of that "conspiracy theory".
Some country people used to break a yard dog of chasing and killing domestic poultry by tying a chicken that it had killed around its neck, and leaving it there until it rotted off. The cumulative repugnance would be a Pavlovian conditioning agent.
Most people, most sane middle-class white American people anyway, when the term anti-Semitism comes up, think of two things - the Holocaust and whatever imagery of it they've encountered, and their friends and/or relatives who are Jews.
There's no more effective shield in this context, in fact, than the genuine compassion of emotionally healthy people. Defending the defenseless, a heartfelt rejection of unnecessary cruelty.
This is why there's so much radicalizing confusion among that same demographic now.
Lebanon. The obvious victims are not Jews, but victims of Jews.
I've probably got more images working from the Holocaust than most non-Jews - and even many Jews - do. Awful photographs and graphic descriptions; and I have a strong literary imagination. I can get in there. As much as anyone can who hasn't experienced it first-hand.
An argument gets made that only those who have experienced it can know.
But that's my point.
We can say to counter this almost impregnable shield, that very few of the most strident voices making accusations of anti-Semitism were victims of the Holocaust themselves.
Relatives, yes, and possessed of the immediate proxy suffering of identification with those who were.
But I have that, as well.
In fact I have that maybe a little more than your average Jew does.
Because the Nazis took "my" people first, before they came for the Jews.
The freaks, the fags, the commies.
Before the Jews.
We can say that more politely.
Before the Third Reich's Final Solution began to hit the Jews in force, it had already been applied to the deformed and the infirm, the insane, the sexually deviant, and the communists.
But just as with the European Romany, the decimation, the genocide, the documented incontrovertible suffering of these more marginal populations gets marginalized, in the common history of those events, in turn. Smaller numbers equalling smaller significance. So that the Nazi extermination of some lone individual for being "unfit" to enter the borning utopia of the eugenically-engineered social paradise means something, but not much, compared to the millions who perished.
My point would be, insistently, that the numbers are a distraction, that the moral center of that atrocious moment isn't weighted by mass, but intensity, and the intensity is coming from the arrogance and selfishness that drives the hatred and disdain, not the hatred itself.
A few parallels there worth considering, now.
From a distance it blurs and gets vague. More fog.
The Holocaust is about the Jews - to the Jews of course it is - to some of the rest of us though, it's about much more than that. So using it as a shield for conspiracy and intrigue is not as effective on us, as it might be on the more naive and ahistorical - to the more innocent.
Without the Holocaust in its nexus anti-Semitism lacks that ghastly blind imperative - it becomes more just another human failing.
With it, with the weight and urgency of all that suffering behind it, it becomes the ultimate bigotry - and the ultimate justification - except for those whose immediate connection to suffering is as great or greater than that generalized, and collectively borne, injury.
