Antisemitism and Power

This is a short essay I wrote a while ago, in response to a solicitation from ISGAP, which had published Eric Gans’s and my book on antisemitism. I never heard back from them, and had assumed it wasn’t exactly the kind of thing they were looking for. I honestly can’t remember when, exactly, I wrote this—it might be as long ago as 2018 (or earlier? internal indications don’t help me). I find that I still agree with the argument and find little of it to be outrun by events, and I thought it might stand as a kind of “position paper” since I’ve been writing and posting occasionally on antisemitism lately, and this sums up fairly well some of thinking behind the X posting in particular:

Since antisemitism invariably accuses “the Jews” of exercising inordinate and unacknowledged power, any discussion of antisemitism should include some accounting of the ways power is acquired and exercised in contemporary society. It makes sense to assume that antisemitism exploits real or perceived gaps between the purported powers delegated to or claimed by social institutions and the actions carried out by those institutions. If an institution acts in ways that seem to undermine its own foundational purpose, it further makes sense to assume that it is being controlled by some power hostile or indifferent to that purpose. And once that assumption is made, it continues to make sense to ask who, in fact, controls it. This is a question the anti-Semite is ready to answer.

There may, of course, be arguments over the purpose of a given institution, and determining what an institution—a government, a university, a corporation—is for is never self-evident. But the institution, in that case, should be capable of internalizing and articulating those arguments. So, for example, we could easily say that at many American universities, the athletic program—the football or basketball team, say—has become too important, and has begun interfering with the actual purposes of the university, such as educating students and housing research. This interference could take various forms, such as the corruption of the grading system and the tolerance of criminal activity by high-value athletes. And we could attribute this to external sources of power, such as donors, or media corporations that can offer huge contracts to universities; and these external sources of power might distort the university’s internal balance of power, in the form, say of a powerful coach making millions of dollars a year. Still, we could continue to see athletics as a legitimate part of the university’s mission, insofar as it fosters team work, school spirit, an understanding of education as involving the entire self and the body, solidarity across the generations, and so on. Within that framework, the administration could redress the imbalance of power and restore the different functions of the university to their proper places. Insofar as we at least believe the university capable of self-correcting in this way, we have no need to look for hidden, insidious powers.

When it is not a question of the hypostatization of a particular legitimate function, though, but the emergence of purposes that can in no way be squared with the primary functions of the institution, things are different. There are two important examples of such a development in today’s world. First, the devotion of more and more Western institutions, in ever greater part, to the goal of “social justice.” “Social justice” is an essentially empty, completely open-ended concept which can therefore only be defined and applied through power. Black Lives Matter will not and, in fact, cannot, tell us what revisions in police procedure would satisfy them; nor can feminists tell us what rules of male-female interaction will eliminate what they consider to be a “rape culture” on college campuses; nor can any transgender advocate tell us when our perceptions and practices of sexuality will have been modified sufficiently as to lift the pale of “transphobia.” Most inclusively, all of the above activists along with the anti-Islamophobists and the Antifa, will never be able to tell us what white people must believe and say, what politicians they must denounce and which they must support, which public policies submit to, in order to be free of the charge of “white supremacy.” Since no limit can be placed on any of these activisms and systems of accusation, and since all the groups mentioned seem to have ample resources and people power, it is reasonable to wonder “what’s going on here”? Since no institution could make “social justice” its purpose without self-destructing in a paroxysm of purges and “struggle sessions,” some form of power extrinsic to the institution seems to be at work.

Second, one can only be puzzled by the increasingly extreme and uncompromising insistence on open borders for immigration and refugees by virtually all the most powerful elements of most Western societies. Since the function of government is to protect and aid the people it is governing, and since no government can make a cogent argument regarding the benefits of mass immigration to the people it is actually responsible for (nor, by this point, do they bother trying), this insistence is extremely curious. No government can claim that recruiting ever more of the world’s population, in the most indiscriminate way, is part of its primary function: it makes the society subject to it poorer rather than richer, less rather than more safe, and divided rather than unified. The proof of this is that anyone who questions these policies in countries like England, Germany, Sweden, Canada, and others is subjected to the most vicious vituperation, often coupled with attacks on one’s livelihood, social ostracism, and even legal sanctions. What kind of government could see as part of its primary function harassing people who express a desire to live in the kind of country, demographically, and morally, that they grew up in? It is no coincidence that in precisely these two areas, social justice and immigration, that many anti-Semites locate the hidden hand of the Jews.

If we wish to reduce and even eventually eliminate antisemitism, it would be better to avoid the temptation of taking the path of the other “social justice” movements, of trying to rouse outrage at ever more finely perceived modes of antisemitism. We don’t need our own version of “microaggressions,” and since both Western and Israeli Jews are firmly situated on the “white” side the hierarchies imagined by social justice warriors, such an approach would be completely ineffective for Jews. A much more intelligent and disciplined approach would be to work to sever all associations between Jews and social justice and immigration fanaticism. Obviously, we can’t prevent Jews from participating in these movements and saying whatever they like about fulfilling genuine Jewish interests or principles in doing so; what we can do, though, is develop and press compelling counter-arguments, to the effect that Jewishness and Judaism do not, in fact, “call for” endless and mindless “liberations” or the demolition of distinctions between nations. Since both social justice and mass immigration fanaticism require a very high tolerance of rule breaking and law breaking, we can make it clear that we stand with those who wish to dramatically lower the tolerance for “transgressiveness” as is necessary for returning institutions, including the government, to their primary functions. We can try to draw as many Jews as possible over to the principle of institutions exercising those powers, and only those powers, consistent with their primary mission, whether that be education, research, the production and selling of goods and services, or the maintenance of order.

One could say that much of the most virulent antisemitism today is directed toward Israel, and supporters of Israel, in particular on college campuses. That is no doubt true, but it is also a more easily contained problem, especially given the approach sketched above. Israel is a sovereign state, and defending itself against antisemitism is in principle no different than defending itself against any other threat. Meanwhile, antisemitism as a problem on campuses really falls into the same category of “social justice,” which, again, is really only a problem insofar as college administrators fail or refuse to maintain order and standards on campus. Finally, the hoary trope (revived and popularized recently by Mearshimer and Walt’s The Israeli Lobby) that Israel and its supporters (highly placed Jews, in particular) control the policy of powerful states like the US seems less worth worrying about, insofar as no one even attempts to show that more than a miniscule portion of American policy is thus controlled (what is the “Jewish interest” in American China policy, for example?), and here again support for a foreign policy overtly supportive of the sovereign rights of states and against the use of American institutions to create new power centers within independent states (like funding for groups agitating for more expansive immigration policies in Eastern Europe, for example) would drastically reduce the power “leakage” that encourages anti-Semitic fantasies.