Why does the ‘woke left’ tolerate anti-Semitism?

A Jewish solidarity march in New York City.

Towards the end of May, one London-based Jewish academic colleague told me: “When you hear a group of demonstrators chanting ‘Death to the Jews’ you feel scared. But when you see that the people around them take no notice and don’t react to their vile outburst of anti-Semitism you feel alarmed and alone.”

There has been much discussion about the recent explosion of anti-Semitic hate throughout the Western world. However, what is arguably even more disturbing is that a significant section of society, particularly the woke left, appears to pretend it is not happening or seem indifferent to manifestations of anti-Jewish hatred.

The current epidemic of anti-Semitism has not left Australia untouched. According to Dvir Ambramovich, chairman of the Anti-Defamation Commission, the rise of anti-Semitism is “so bad it is actually tough for the ADC to keep track of all the reports”.

Yet compared with other parts of the world the situation in Australia is relatively benign. In Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain and the US there have been numerous physical attacks on Jewish people. Synagogues have been defaced and vandalised, and abuse has been hurled at Jewish people including children going to school. Convoys of aggressive anti-Semites invaded a Jewish neighbourhood in London yelling through their megaphone: “F..k the Jews … F..k their mothers … Rape their daughters.”

Neo-Nazi group the National Socialist Network perform a Hitler salute at Swinburne University in Melbourne.

The situation is particularly worrying in the US, where many Jewish people living in small towns and parts of New York feel threatened to the point of not wearing their kippah in public.

Anti-Semitism has started to leak into the mainstream. Social media has turned it into a contagion, normalising anti-Semitic tropes and attacks. Following the recent outbreak of violence in the Middle East, the Anti-Defamation League’s Centre on Extremism found “17,000 tweets which used variations of the phrase, ‘Hitler was right’ ” in just one week.

Frequently, individuals who call out anti-Semitic acts are attacked for not also criticising Islamophobia or Israel’s action in Gaza. Recently, April Powers, the chief equity and inclusion officer at the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, left her position following an outcry that she did not mention Islamophobia in her statement about the rise in crimes against Jews. Power, who is black and Jewish, was more or less told that you can’t talk about anti-Semitism unless you mention the plight of Palestinians.

Orthodox Jews walkthrough the Borough Park section of Brooklyn, New York. Picture: AP

Take the example of the chancellor of Rutgers University in the US, who recently sent a message to students deploring the widely increased incidents of hate crime against Jews. The university’s Students for Justice chapter issued a statement attacking the chancellor for “exclusively addressing anti-Semitism” and ignoring “the extent to which Palestinians have been brutalised by Israel’s occupation and bombing of Gaza”. The students asserted that since the chancellor’s statement coincided with pro-Palestinian protest, it “cannot be separated from widespread attempts to conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism”. In effect the implication conveyed by the students was that groups such as the Palestinians or Black Lives Matter had a bigger claim for support than the targets of anti-Semitism. Evidently, the chancellor got the message because he issued an email, titled “An Apology”. The email apologised to the university’s Palestinian community members and indicated that its initial message condemning anti-Semitism “fell short” of creating a “place where all identities can feel validated and supported”.

This episode at Rutgers exemplifies the growing tendency to couple the growth of anti-Semitism with the conflict in the Middle East. The portrayal of anti-Semitic violence as a punishment for Israel’s action serves as an attempt to minimise the significance of this form of hate. Speaking in this vein, anti-Israel campaigner Tariq Ali told a Palestine rally in London: “Stop the occupation, stop the bombing and casual anti-Semitism will soon disappear.”

At the rally where Ali spoke, there were plenty of illustrations of “casual anti-Semitism”, such as a placard showing a picture of Jesus bearing the burden of the cross and demanding “Don’t Let Them Do The Same Thing Again”. Elsewhere, one protester in front of the Israeli embassy shouted to an Islamist mob that “We want the Zionists, we want their blood”. If these are examples of casual anti-Semitism, one wonders what the more hard-core variants look like.

An 18th century Menorah undergoes a clean at the Jewish Museum in London. Picture: Getty

The term “casual anti-Semitism” conveys the idea that Jews are responsible for the predicament they face. This point was highlighted by Ali when, attacking Israeli right-wingers, he yelled; “They have learnt nothing from what happened to them in Europe. Nothing.” From his chilling rewriting of history, the Holocaust is interpreted as an event the Jews have brought upon themselves.

It is unlikely you will encounter terms such as casual anti-black racism or casual Islamophobia. The reason it is OK to minimise the significance of anti-Semitism as casual is because the prevailing culture of identity politics associates Jewish identity with negative connotations. This sentiment is conveyed not only by Islamist mobs but by some mainstream institutions as the BBC. This year the BBC’s flagship politics program, Politics Live, hosted a debate on whether British Jews were an ethnic minority. That this question could be debated was justified on the ground that since Jews had progressed so much in society, they might not be “seen as a group deserving recognition”.

That Jewish identity might not deserve the recognition accorded to others is underpinned by its association with privilege. In an age in which white privilege is depicted as a cultural crime, Jews are often represented as a unique, hyper-white community who have far more privileges to check than others. Often this reaction against “Jewish privilege” meshes with hostility to Israel to produce a unique 21st-century species of anti-Semitism. This is why even though victims are routinely celebrated today, the oppression of Jews and the experience of the Holocaust do not provide contemporary Jews with legitimate claims to victimhood.

In effect, Jewish identity seems to have lost much of its moral authority among people influenced by identity politics. The post-Holocaust victim status of Jews has been revised – they are now portrayed as powerful, privileged and the aggressor. From their perspective Jews are fine in the Disneyfied form of Holocaust victims, but the ones that are alive today are regarded as the apotheosis of white privilege.

The politicisation of identity is not confined to campuses or to groups promoting their own personal lifestyles. Given the support identity politics enjoys among the cultural elites, it exercises a powerful influence over wider society. Its ambivalence toward Jewish identity is actively exploited by Islamist campaigners targeting Israel. In Britain, Robert Jenrick, the Secretary of State for Communities, warned last month that he feared the recent outburst of hate was fuelled by the revival of Islamist extremism.

But who needs these Islamists when the Hamas slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” – a hateful call to wipe Israel off the map – is frequently chanted by the woke left? The attitudes that inspire this so-called “casual anti-Semitism” indicates that identity politics can rapidly mutate into a threatening and violent force. It is this sanitised medium of identity politics that legitimates the revival of the age-old bigotry against Jewish people.

Frank Furedi is an author, commentator and professor of sociology at the University of Kent in England.