Antisemitism: The Safe Hate

The Women's March has opened a rather large and crowded can of worms. Lots of people are upset about the national movement's apparent alignment with antisemitic rhetoric disguised as anti-Israel propaganda. Tamika Mallory made a feeble effort to proclaim herself not antisemitic the day before she declared Jews have no legitimate right to be in Israel. 

Before going any deeper into this topic, let me state in no uncertain terms that disagreeing with the Israeli government is just like disagreeing with the American government. You can criticize either without hate. It can be done. I do it every day and so, probably, do most Israelis and Americans. I will go on the record as stating I detest Netanyahu, his policies, and most of his coalition just like I detest Feckless Leader and his wacko cabinet, not to mention quite a few Republican and a few Democrat congressclowns. That does not make me anti-Israel; nor does it make me anti-American. In fact, not to voice an opinion would be a dereliction of my American civic responsibilities.

Are we clear on this? Good.

This episode deals specifically with antisemitism, the safe hate. 

If you've got 31 minutes be spare, listen to Tamika Mallory talking about how she is not antisemitic on The Breakfast Club. Then take a listen to her on PBS's Firing Line, less than 24 hours later; you can start at minute 16. She talks a lot about Jews of Color as if they are intrinsically different from Jews, and white Jews as white supremacists. There is some kind of wrong assumption that Jews are somehow racially categorized. That is patently not so. Jews are Jews. You can be any color you want. Color has nothing to do with being a Jew. What does have a lot to do with being a Jew is the understanding that Israel is our physical homeland. Jews are the indigenous people of that little slip of land. The historical record is pretty solid about that. Christians know Jesus was Jewish and lived there. Muslims know that Jerusalem was our holiest city and the Temple stood there long before their mosques. We didn't make the stuff up in 1948. We lived on that land for thousands of  years. We had governments rise and fall. We had currency. We had heads of states, revolutions, exiles, and returns to the land. One thousand years plus of liturgy focuses on Jerusalem as the center of our spiritual, historical, and economic world. This is not myth; physical anthropology demonstrates this is so. But that's not good enough for Tamika Mallory who believes only Palestinians are native to that area. In her language, not only don't we exist in the a historical record, the only Jews that should be included in her limited world view are Jews of color. I don't even know what that means. 

But the truth is, we are actually invisible. 

Kat Graham

We're not a race, we don't come in a single size, color, or nose shape, so even though you think you can pick us out in a crowd, you can't.  We aren't limited to a particular profession, so you can't just target pawnbrokers or landlords, or publishers, or movie producers, or doctors or lawyers, or even bankers. There's no guarantee any of those practitioners are Jewish. You can't even tell by a name: Whoopi Goldberg isn't Jewish, but singer Kat Graham is. We don't fit neatly into any slot, and there's a good reason for that: we're diverse. We're like the invisible friend, the one you blame stuff on. You can do that because you know there is no invisible friend and you know that a little diversion can buy you a little bit of time to bury the body.


The nice Germans peeked outside their windows and saw the roundups, but we weren't their problem, so they closed the curtains and pretended we didn't exist. They did, after all, profit from our disappearance, and who was to think anything of it? It was so easy to hate an amorphous group with no face, no identity, only a label, a little yellow star, with which to identify them. 

It's easy for the white supremacists to hate Jews because we're just a faceless clump. They don't associate us with faces, only innuendo, and if you don't know any Jews personally, well, the it's even easier to blame and hate.

It's equally easy for Tamika Mallory to hate white Jews because we're that same group of blank faces; we have no color, and we're not even the same color as most of the people in the Middle East. She cannot see we are the indigenous people who built that Temple Mount before it held the Mosque of Omar or Al-Aqsa. 

Mallory: The Palestinians are native to the land, you know? They were there for a very long time, and so they’re native to the land.

Hoover: Do you feel that the Jewish people are native, as well?

Mallory: I mean, I understand the history, that — that there are people who have a number of sort of ideologies around why the Jewish people feel this should be their land. I’m not Jewish, so for me to speak to that is not fair.

Hoover: But there are people who are concerned that the language, ‘native land,’ is used to delegitimize Jews from having a state.

Mallory: So, I’ve been very — Again, I’m not Jewish, and so I won’t speak to that. What I will speak to is that I believe that the Palestinians also need freedom in their land.

Hoover: But are Jews native people, also?

Mallory: That is not my call to make.

That's right, it's not her call; it's history's call. Despite overwhelming evidence of two successful kingdoms... an unbroken, constant Jewish presence on the land for over 4000 years... despite all that, she and her friends do not see us because we are not their call to make. Just like the Germans.

That makes us easy to hate. There is no single face, no individual, only a caricature, a cartoon, a meme. Just look at the text books from Gaza or Iran. We're nothing more than a badly drawn illustration. That's intentional. Show photographs, and suddenly we are real people. When you are the purveyor of hate, having your target appear human is not useful. 

Antisemitism, then, becomes the safe hate, the hate everyone else can join together to share. We are the consummate outsider, the invisible minority, the ultimate other. Who easier to dismiss than a mass of non-individuals no matter how diverse they are. They are not us, ergo, get rid of them.

For the record, y'know who also falls into that same ghost world of delegitimization? The Indigenous Nations of North America. Indigenous Peoples have been living in what is tantamount to work/concentration camps for so long, we don't even see it any more. What do you think the res is all about? The only difference between the res and Manzanar is that the res still exists. We should be aligning ourselves with them; we have a joint grievance here. No one wants to admit either group has claim to their own lands. This is not news.

None of this is going away any time soon, and that it's not just on the far right, but on the far left as well. We can all keep sticking our heads in the sand, or we can start having serious discussions about what happens next. The choice is really ours. 

The Wifely Person's Tip o'the Week

Ostriches don't really stick their heads in the sand.

Only humans do that.