Guno צְבִי
We fight, We win, Am Yisrael Chai
A gunman entered the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh during Shabbat morning services on Oct. 27, 2018, killing 11 worshippers and wounding six more in the deadliest attack ever on Jews in the United States.
On the same day in 1938, the Nazis started rounding up and sending Polish Jews living in Germany back to Poland.
The throughline of those 80 years — from the expulsion of Polish Jews to the Tree of Life massacre — is white supremacy. The same line stretches from my mother’s incarceration in Auschwitz to the virulent antisemitism of this past year — from white nationalist rallies to a mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, inspired by racist and antisemitic conspiracy theories.
Last October, the Washington, D.C., chapter of the Sunrise Movement, a climate activist organization, announced it would not participate in a voting rights coalition with several progressive pro-Israel Jewish groups because of their positions on Israel. It did not condemn progressive non-Jewish groups with similar stances on Israel. In so doing, it crossed a line from a political expression against Israel to antisemitism.
After private and public lobbying by progressive Jewish organizations, the national Sunrise Movement called out its chapter’s antisemitism: “Singling out Jewish organizations for removal from a coalition, despite others holding similar views, is antisemitic and unacceptable.”
This obfuscation of right- and left-wing antisemitism is a grave mistake. It obscures fundamental differences between them and impedes our understanding of how to combat antisemitism on each end of the political spectrum. And it detracts from the critical role ADL and other groups play in countering right-wing antisemites, from Marjorie Taylor Greene to Kanye West to Donald Trump.
For example, unlike other forms of antisemitism in America today, left-wing antisemitism is often a hatred that begins with anger toward Israel. It is not a hatred of Jews qua Jews. As the historian Steven Beller told me, “Antisemitism stemming from the Israel-Palestine conflict is not inherently due to antisemitic ideology, nor a sense of the Jews not being legitimate members of society.”
https://forward.com/opinion/522629/the-mistake-in-equating-right-wing-and-left-wing-antisemitism/
On the same day in 1938, the Nazis started rounding up and sending Polish Jews living in Germany back to Poland.
The throughline of those 80 years — from the expulsion of Polish Jews to the Tree of Life massacre — is white supremacy. The same line stretches from my mother’s incarceration in Auschwitz to the virulent antisemitism of this past year — from white nationalist rallies to a mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, inspired by racist and antisemitic conspiracy theories.
Last October, the Washington, D.C., chapter of the Sunrise Movement, a climate activist organization, announced it would not participate in a voting rights coalition with several progressive pro-Israel Jewish groups because of their positions on Israel. It did not condemn progressive non-Jewish groups with similar stances on Israel. In so doing, it crossed a line from a political expression against Israel to antisemitism.
After private and public lobbying by progressive Jewish organizations, the national Sunrise Movement called out its chapter’s antisemitism: “Singling out Jewish organizations for removal from a coalition, despite others holding similar views, is antisemitic and unacceptable.”
This obfuscation of right- and left-wing antisemitism is a grave mistake. It obscures fundamental differences between them and impedes our understanding of how to combat antisemitism on each end of the political spectrum. And it detracts from the critical role ADL and other groups play in countering right-wing antisemites, from Marjorie Taylor Greene to Kanye West to Donald Trump.
For example, unlike other forms of antisemitism in America today, left-wing antisemitism is often a hatred that begins with anger toward Israel. It is not a hatred of Jews qua Jews. As the historian Steven Beller told me, “Antisemitism stemming from the Israel-Palestine conflict is not inherently due to antisemitic ideology, nor a sense of the Jews not being legitimate members of society.”
https://forward.com/opinion/522629/the-mistake-in-equating-right-wing-and-left-wing-antisemitism/
