I am a Gentile born and bred. A product of the American South and of two long lines of relentlessly Anglo-Saxon agrarian or petty bourgeois Protestants. I mention this because I wish to treat a certain subject the way it was introduced to me: as a moral crystal with facets of human feeling and self-respect besides those of principle, but no facet of personal injury or anxiety.
When I was about 15, my father said he wanted to take me to the movies. It would be just the two of us. This was not unusual in itself. Neither was the venue: a suburban movie theater where I had enjoyed a number of Hollywood trifles and would later work part-time as an usher. What was unusual was the nature of the film. It was a documentary. It was long, and it felt endless. Not that it was boring; on the contrary, it was gripping. At its heart -- its relatively brief dive into the utmost darkness of its subject -- it was searing and eye-opening for a lifetime. Here was a rite of passage.
Afterwards I’d confuse the title of the film with the phrase I retained from it, the idea my father wanted to impress on me at the time: “Never again.” What I had just experienced was in fact the film that established those words in the discussion of the Holocaust. I had been taken to see Mein Kampf, the landmark documentary by the German-born Swedish filmmaker Erwin Leiser.
By that time and for years to come, it seemed natural (to a Gentile innocent) to assume two things about the Holocaust: that it could never happen again, and that everyone would always know it had happened once. The most damning evidence, recorded for posterity by the perpetrators themselves, surely settled both of those questions. The world had changed accordingly, hadn’t it? Enlightenment reigned supreme. And yet my father took care that I should see that evidence and hear those words, “Never again.” What was he worried about?
It turns out there are people who profess not to know that the Holocaust ever happened, but at least it seems
impossible for such a thing to happen again. Ironically, the sense of impossibility may be exaggerated now by having seen what did happen once upon a time. Those images belong to a nightmare, and a nightmare is not a thing one projects into broad daylight. However that may be, broad daylight holds its own awful possibilities.
The emergence of Donald Trump as president-elect of the United States affected haters like an invocation. He had prepared them for the moment during his campaign. By his aspersions on Mexican immigrants, his vicious reaction to a shout of “Black lives matter,” his proposal of a Muslim ban, his mocking of a reporter’s physical disability, his encouragement of violence against protesters – and so on – he promised the onset of a Walpurgis Night when bigots and bullies would be free to ride the wind. His election was followed by what The New Yorker, only nine days later, called “a dramatic uptick in incidents of racist and xenophobic harassment across the country.” Surly transgression was in. After taking office, Trump continued to signal sympathy with elements that had kept to the shadows of our merrily enlightened world. A torchlight parade by neo-Nazis and other white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, gave him an opportunity to abhor the worst effects of his demagoguery without necessarily owning them, but even after intense pressure brought him to say, in a prepared declaration, “Racism is evil and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups,” he proved unwilling to let those words stand for more than a day before effectively unsaying them. Instead, he went on winning the approbation of a man he’d had to disavow (airily, when possible) several times in the course of his public life: David Duke, a former but unreformed leader of the Ku Klux Klan.
Antisemitism is one of the pillars of the KKK’s worldview. After all, the kind of self-loathing that breeds a wish to dominate blacks typically breeds a sense of domination by Jews as well. Personalities drawn to the KKK or other white-supremacist formations will generally want both vices catered to. Donald Trump did not explicitly cater to antisemitism. He could say with more than the usual accuracy that some of his best friends (and family) were Jews, even as he betrayed a garden-variety prejudice in his remarks about Jews generally and perhaps a bit more in his browsing of Adolf Hitler’s speeches. He adopted pro-Israel policies in keeping with the Christian Zionism common among his evangelical Christian supporters. No doubt his own white nationalism was literal -- circumscribed by a mental color barrier -- and did not imply placing Jews beyond the pale. He could take them or leave them. When they faced a threat from emboldened neo-Nazis, he left them. It’s unsurprising that the permissive Walpurgis Night of his ascendancy saw antisemitic violence, such as the massacre of congregants in a Pittsburgh synagogue, that seemed to burst out of history books long closed.
However, the elective affinity between Donald Trump and reptilian antisemites is not the whole story. Antisemitism in America today finds relief and nourishment in two widely separated quarters that have been influenced by Trump in different but fatefully complementary ways.
First there is Main Street America. School districts here and there about the country have become obtrusions of frayed nerves. Educators overreached in applying progressive dogma to the subject of race; parents objected; and Trump-inspired Republicans exploited the friction by starting to roll back even the commonsense teaching of racial history that had been going on for years. Then the progressive-educator class poured oil on troubled embers by setting out to embed the most speculative contentions of the day regarding sex and gender in primary education; the parents became more exasperated; and the Republicans became more exploitative. These school-centered controversies made news and soon came to exemplify a more general struggle between Americans dedicated to cultural renovation projects and Americans who feel that the demands on their moral purses have become too frequent and heavy. None of this involves the question of antisemitism, but the upshot is a state of sociopolitical overload that makes people want nothing so much as to get away from the din. Getting away is bad for vigilance. In that quarter where people who should revolt against antisemitism are occupied in nursing their nerves, antisemitism finds relief.
The quarter in which it finds nourishment today is, shamefully, the one that produced its most stalwart adversaries not long ago: the combined seats of liberal thought and influence. Elite universities, elite news organizations, and even the Democratic Party provide an environment in which antisemitism can thrive and spawn, unstigmatized by the respective communities. This stupendous reversal became not only possible but easy when progressives, with their outward alliances, overtook liberals, with their inward ethics. Now, antisemites who are comfortable working from the left need only two assets: (1) a generic identity that captivates people on the left; and (2) rudimentary skill at gaming the distinction between antisemitism and anti-Zionism.
After the Islamist terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Muslims suffered prejudice and incidents of violence in the United States. Liberals, including many Jews, took a strong stand against this bigotry. Activists drove the point home by positively aligning themselves with Muslims as a class. The terrorists were not to be called Islamists or even religious zealots. Their service to Al-Qaeda must be set down to the economic injustice they were presumed (quite erroneously) to have suffered and to America’s support of repressive regimes in the Mideast. In 2001, the very idea that religious faith remained a potent force in the world was unintelligible to the secularists of the Left. Yet their secularism did not prevent them from crediting followers of Islam with a moral purity unknown in Christendom and insisting on a thoroughly benign interpretation of the Qur’an. (Having read it in its entirety, I can’t go so far.) Fifteen years later, Donald Trump’s antipathy to Muslims set the seal on their standing with progressives. If Trump was against them, progressives would be for them. No questions asked.
This is a replication of the status which progressives accord people with roots in Africa, the place from which white people took black people, enslaved them in what is now the USA, and subjected their descendants to the web of oppression known as Jim Crow. This status is designed to make amends for the dehumanizing practice of slavery by the dehumanizing practice of treating individuals as bumps on a racial monolith. It’s not that white progressives (much less black ones) overlook the individuality of blacks. It’s that they don’t want it to complicate what has become a Marxianesque political project, a game of chess played with gigantic pawns. Blacks in toto are one such pawn. Muslims in toto are another.
Categorically opposing bigotry against a class of people does not entail categorically endorsing the views of its members. Blacks and Muslims, like whites or Christians or Jews, are a mixed lot. Some may be individually bigoted. They may even be bigoted in ways that are endemic to the class.
The meaning of that statement as regards Muslims hardly needs explaining. Historical friction between Muslims and Jews has engendered prejudice on both sides. However, even if the balance of prejudice be equal, the implications for American society today are not. After all, liberal America has chosen to stand foursquare behind Muslims. Anti-Muslim bigotry is going to meet stout opposition. But Muslim bigotry?
Friction between black Americans and Jews is nearly as well known, though its history is much shorter and largely peculiar to urban life. The prevalence of Jewish shopkeepers, moneylenders, landlords, and financial middlemen in predominantly black working-class neighborhoods has caused economic grievances to take the form of ethnic resentment. (More recently, a similar pattern has appeared between urban blacks and Korean merchants.) Again, liberals’ concern is asymmetrical. Within the scope of the actual conflict, it may be a defensible choice to privilege the views of the black working-class side. However, it is not a defensible choice to endorse ill will toward people who have nothing to do with the conflict on account of a shared ethnicity. That’s adopted bigotry.
When a priori solidarity comes to override ethics in those “seats of liberal thought and influence” – especially the universities and the news organizations -- bigotry will thrive where it once was supremely detested. If the bigot speaks from within an approved race or culture, the bigotry will pass for revealed truth. If the bigot's rhetoric starts from an unexceptionable complaint about, say, Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, cooperative listeners will proceed to a shared dislike of Israel – of Israelis – of Jews – under their own steam. Politically engaged students who, in earlier incarnations, might have stood with the Anti-Defamation League will now stand with the eternal antisemite as long as it manifests itself before them without fair hair or blue eyes. Progressive staffers at a major newspaper will make the workplace too hot to hold a Jewish journalist for ideological contrariness compounded by “writing about the Jews again.” A member of Congress whose identity hits the sweet spot with progressives will blithely cycle through antisemitic remarks, professions of innocence, ascents to the high ground, and further descents to provocation while keeping the status of star – or at least star’s best friend – in the cast of Democrats to watch.
Because of uncritical solidarity with entire identity groups, the Democratic Party and the progressive culture with which it is associated have embraced individuals who then function as reactionary provocateurs within them. Surely the eventual outcome will not be another Holocaust. But it can fall well short of that and still be an abomination.
Vigilance against this trend must not be, at bottom, a question of solidarity with Jews. It must be a question of principle, of self-respect, of human feeling, and, most fundamentally, of taste. When you know the kind of world you want to live in, you try to build it out around you as far as your influence will reach. You abhor bigotry because it fouls your world. You have the most enduring motive for opposing it: that it offends you.
