Thoughts on Anti-Semitism

By Penny Rosenwasser

I’ve been thinking about anti-Semitism and I’m still gathering my thoughts, but one thing that I’m very clear about is that there is nothing inherently anti-Semitic in criticizing Israeli government policy -- and there is a lot to criticize. Having clarified that, at a recent Bay Area demonstration, a demonstration which was so uplifting, seeing 25,000 of us in the San Francisco streets, together protesting Israeli government policies against the Palestinian people, several people came up to me who were frightened at the signs we saw with a swastika inside a Jewish star. It is not OK to equate the Jewish star with the Nazis. We don’t need to compare Ariel Sharon to Adolf Hitler to call what Sharon is doing completely abhorrent. What the Israeli army and government are doing is horrible enough all by itself. Such comparisons don’t serve anyone; they only scare Jews and shove us back into that victim place of feeling that the whole world is against us. The symbol of the star with the swastika also blurs the distinction between the Jewish people and the Israeli government’s policies. As human rights activist Susan Freundlich explains, "Where anti-Semitism is really shows itself is in the spilling over of the rightful condemnation of Israeli government policies into the hatred of Jewish people as a whole, where the criticism of a policy becomes the blanket condemnation of a people." But back to those star and swastika signs why do those signs frighten us?

Because for 2000 years there has been a recurring cycle of anti-Semitism in the world, of Jews being attacked and murdered and exiled from one country, then being invited into another country where our skills were useful, serving as convenient scapegoats when someone was needed to blame for a poor economy or other domestic problems, and so again being forced to leave, or convert, or be killed. It is a history that has left us feeling like victims. And some of us are frightened because in recent weeks some Jews have been physically attacked, and synagogues have been desecrated with swastikas here in the United States, and even in Berkeley. In France and Belgium, Jewish cemeteries have been vandalized and synagogues attacked and burned. And with France’s right-wing demagogue Le Pen getting 18 percent of that nation’s vote, some of us start to wonder: is it happening again? Of course we wonder.

But here in the United States in 2002, our world has become more complex. Just as we have these fears -- and there is good reason for them -- we also need to recognize that things have changed. Jews in this country have gained economic stability, civil rights, and political power, and we have many many allies. For example, this past April African- American scholar Cornell West did civil disobedience at the U.S. State Department with Rabbi Michael Lerner, "in solidarity with suffering Palestinian and Israeli brothers and sisters" (italics added). West emphasized, "We must keep in touch with the humanity of both sides." And in France millions of people took to the streets to protest Le Pen’s racist anti-immigrant platform. What I think is important for us to realize is that Jews were victimized for a very long time. But we are not victims any longer. We really are not. Even though in the last nineteen months 470 Israelis have been killed -- many by Palestinian suicide bombers, which is horribly tragic, in the big picture, the Israeli army is the fourth largest army in the world. It is an army which itself is victimizing Palestinian people, an army which has killed 1,500 Palestinians in the same nineteen months. We have heard of many horrors in Jenin alone: Palestinian civilians being used as human shields for Israeli soldiers, people buried alive under their demolished homes, people drinking out of sewers because no fresh water was allowed in, people bleeding to death in the streets because no ambulances were permitted to reach them. As Jews who care about Jews here, and about Jews in Israel, we need to hold all these complexities: the reality of past Jewish persecution and how we still carry fear from that experience, especially the Holocaust; the reality of our current relative security here in the United States; and the reality of Israeli government policies that are brutalizing Palestinians as you read this today, policies that are only bringing more and more Israeli deaths, and less and less security for Israel. Because just as anti-Semitism is on the rise, my Israeli colleague Terry Greenblatt (who directs Bat Shalom) describes how anti-Arab racism is rising inside Israel and that we cannot talk about one without talking about the other. For example, there are posters in Jerusalem which read "Don’t hire Arabs." Do we remember signs like those against our own people? We cannot let ourselves take comfort in the badge of victimization: when we point the finger at anti-Semitism, we must also point the finger at Israeli government policies that target Arabs. As Jews, let’s notice how our fear can paralyze us; let’s acknowledge that old place inside us that starts to feel "everyone hates the Jews." It’s not our fault if we feel this way -- but this time let’s work through these feelings, so that we don’t take out our fear or grief or outrage against any other people, be they Palestinian, or Muslim, or African-American or Jewish. Let’s stand against the oppression of Jews and the oppression of Palestinians, against the oppression of all people who are marginalized because of their skin color or ethnicity or social class or body size or gender or sexual orientation or age or disability. Let’s do all we can to build a movement for peace and justice for all peoples, not a movement of hatred towards any people. Let’s value all lives as precious and worth protecting, and not allow any people to be demeaned or villified. As a Jewish teacher of mine, Diane Balser, wrote: "It will not work to be for the survival of only one people. The survival of both peoples are important to the well-being of all." Let’s build alliances and bridges between us, not walls and buffer zones. As much as it hurts me to see that equation of the star and the swastika, I also see how Ariel Sharon’s policies fuel anti-Semitism, how he and other leaders manipulate Jewish fear, how they feed those feelings of victimization just as George W. Bush (I refuse to call him "President") has whipped up people’s fears in this country after 9/11. It makes me more committed than ever to say NO to Sharon, to say NOT IN MY NAME! It helps me recommit to changing what the Israeli government is doing -- because if we can do that, the symptoms will change as well. I want to close with the words we know so well from Rabbi Hillel: "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am for myself only, who am I? If not now, when?"

Penny Rosenwasser is an active member of A Jewish Voice for Peace and Bay Area Women in Black (in the San Francisco Bay Area)

Copywright 2002 Penny Rosenwasser