The concept of a "new anti-Semitism" is inherently contradictory. This is how.
Reading an article about Austrian “new anti-Semitism”1 in 1980, I see that the author has some interesting, even salient, points. But, aside from my main objection to the style of this article of simply stating things as though they were incontrovertible fact, the underlying argument seems confused in terms of how it views prejudice. (The article is Bernd Marin’s “A Post-Holocaust ‘Anti-Semitism without Anti-Semites’? Austria as a Case in Point,” published in Political Psychology.)
The argument seems to be that, because prejudice in Austria expressed itself in the past as a particular prejudice against Jewish people in the form of anti-Semitism, the fact that there was still an atmosphere of general prejudice meant that that generalized prejudice is actually particularized anti-Semitism in submerged form. Marin doesn’t seem to consider that the atmosphere of generalized prejudice could be just that: generalized and not about anti-Semitism per se at all.
Indeed, my argument would be that prejudicial attitudes are fungible, able to be transferred or moved onto one population or another depending on the needs of the current circumstances. That contributes to the “generalized” nature of such an atmosphere: the prejudice is structural, the attitude is protean (that is, able to be “beamed” onto a target population, and individual resentments and grievances tailored for contemporary political circumstances).
There are some interesting points, as I noted earlier, but they are difficult to extricate from the above entanglement of ideas that otherwise could be evaluated singly and not as a (con)fused block.
For example, Marin states:
“[F]or most Austrians, ‘the Israelis’ seem to represent a kind of ‘non-Jewish Jews,’ almost another category of the always tolerated ‘excepted Jew’ extended to a national level. ‘The Arabs’ (‘The Palestinians’), on the other hand, are assigned various properties of the traditional anti-Semitic stereotype and thus become scapegoats of a kind of ‘new anti-Semitism.’ So the paradoxical constellation has come about that only insofar as they represent ‘non-Jewish’ properties, ‘Israelis’ count as ‘Jews’ who are accepted, whereas ‘the Arabs’ are rejected precisely because of the attribution of supposedly ‘Jewish’ properties.
“[T]his view of the Arab-Israeli conflict also seems to have the particular psychological function of foisting the responsibility for restitution onto ‘the Arabs.’”2
In my view, prejudice being fungible, this state of affairs is easily explained and understood, whereas Marin needs for anti-Semitism in particular to remain the focal point of the dynamics at play.
I daresay some of this may derive from the idea (untestable and thus unfalsifiable) that anti-Semitism as a prejudice is in a class by itself that should be analyzed differently from what would be involved in “regular” racism or bigotry. It’s a form of exceptionalism. In this case, it seems to make Marin contort in order for the arguments to seem to cohere. From a forced perspective, even the most convoluted surface can appear level.
Continuing from the last segment, Marin says:
“At the same time the overwhelming partisanship for Israel in the Middle East conflict is determined by Israel’s political position in the world as an ally of the ‘Western world’ and of its changing big-power interests. This partisanship, caused by power policy, is mainly mediated by newspaper reporting: the influence of the press is strong because of the lack of direct experience, as well as the far-reaching unanimity of judgment of the situation.”3
This recalls the effect of unanimity as demonstrated in the Asch conformity experiment. (Solomon Asch found, as I noted in a recent essay, that a person is inclined to believe an unsubstantiated piece of information if at least three people assent to its veracity in unanimous fashion. A break in unanimity will disrupt the effect.)
Marin continues:
“The reports on Israel in the Austrian daily papers evidence the dominance of calculated interest politics over emotional, moral, or ethical considerations, even with emotionally loaded issues. The ‘turning on and off’ of existing emotions by the press follows clear-cut political calculations, and provides an excellent example of journalistic management of prejudice:
— No genuine coherent position determined by firm principles (apart from the mentioned identification with changing bloc interests) was or is taken regarding the parties to the conflict.
— Therefore, there is no continuous and uniform image of Israel in the Austrian newspapers; rather, it is strategically accentuated to suit present political needs.
— Even where reporting about Israel is explicitly referring to the Nazi past or to moral considerations, it is not affected by them in any way. Feelings for or against the Jews / Israelis are massively used by the papers, but do not influence the papers’ policies at all. They only serve as changing set-scenes of reports, as they are needed politically. This led — between 1948 and 1973 — to almost grotesque comments and position changes towards the Israelis and their Arab counterparts.”4
“Suiting present political needs” snaps interchangeably with what I was saying about the fungibility of prejudice.
More from Marin:
“[T]he Austrian population's knowledge of ‘Israelis’ and ‘Arabs’ is produced artificially to the point of including subtle nuances of associations, images, emotions, and partisanships. To this extent these cliches differ from the traditional stereotypes of Jews as they still exist today. They are no longer — in spite of their continuing social functions — the expression of current economic or political interests: they are manipulated for given effects, but they are not intentionally created as means for political aims. But images of Israel are today fabricated instrumentally, rationally goal-oriented, and circulated as symbolic weapons in current international conflicts.”5
These are all salient points! They survive nearly forty-five years later. It’s especially important that we consider the mechanisms behind this “turning on and off” of public sentiment through the Israel-Palestine conflict by the press.
Yet in the section that I quote below, in light of the horrors that Israel is currently perpetrating in Gaza, Marin’s argument is turned completely on its head:
“[T]he dissociation of stereotypes of Jews and Israelis in the popular mind is at the same time a result and a prerequisite of the political strategy followed by the press in the Middle East conflict, in order to be able to mobilize changing moods relatively rapidly. Only if the images of ‘Jews’ and ‘Israelis,’ spontaneously connected, can be kept apart and specific aspects stressed, only if ‘Israelis’ are not equated continuously with the negatively judged ‘Jews’ can Israel and its policies be presented by the press as deserving of support — even in politically right-wing, latently anti-Semitic publications.”6
Today, it is primarily through the disambiguation of ‘Israeli’ and ‘Jew’ that we are able to place proper blame for the genocidal actions occurring in Gaza where they belong, instead of attributing such blame onto “the Jews” more generally. It’s vitally important that we who witness this genocide keep these two categories separate.
That takes us right back to the fact that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism, as Zionism is not Judaism; nor are all Jewish people Zionists (nor all Zionists Jewish).
If we recognize that Jewish people in general are not responsible for what Israel is doing in Gaza, that can be done only if a division between ‘Jew’ and ‘Zionist’ exists. Yet, if we note that distinction, then the whole equivalency of “anti-Zionism = anti-Semitism” falls apart.
Zionist advocates and apologists need for both things to be true: for people to be considered anti-Semitic if they consider Jewish people as ‘Jews outside of Israel’ and anti-Semitic if they don’t consider Jewish people outside of the Israeli context (i.e., Israel as a “safe haven”). Those advocates and apologists can’t have it both ways.
Here’s another segment that is truly on-point:
“[T]he existence of the Jewish national state, Israel, in Palestine as well as the presentation of its pioneers and soldiers as a ‘Jewish antitype’ to the traditional anti-Semitic stereotype both allowed larger segments of the population to admit for the first time the feeling of guilt and the need to make restitution indirectly. In connection with Israel, they could concede parts of their guilt feelings that had arisen through the complicity, always denied, in the persecution and extermination of the Jews during Nazism. The founding, existence, and safeguarding of this Jewish national state was now itself perceived as a restitution achievement. Repressed guilt could thus be projected onto the ‘Arabs,’ ‘Palestinians’ who themselves suffered injury, or ‘Russians’ supporting them. The siding with Israel could be interpreted as support of the (‘good’) Jews, which enabled many Austrians to demonstrate to themselves and others sympathy, responsibility, solidarity, and the absence of prejudice.”7
That explains the mechanism of projection exactly right.8
However, I’d like to offer up the confounding factor of generational differences. Just as with anti-Black sentiment in the States, which ameliorated in the wake of the civil rights movement, the view of Jewish people inevitably changed in the wake of World War II. People were not inculcated with such stereotypes — not reflexively. And, as the culture grew more accepting, the generation coming up “missed” that lesson in prejudice. Thus, that upcoming generation aren’t (as) susceptible (if at all!) to this dynamic of needing to expiate guilt.
So they’re not casting about, looking for substitute scapegoats for the bigotry they harbor — they were never inundated with such bigotry in the first place.
I’m speaking very generally, of course, at the level of culture. Individuals and particular families may indeed have continued to hold such attitudes and so may have passed them down to succeeding generations. But culturally speaking, across the West, attitudes became more tolerant, so citizens were not made automatic repositories of such prejudice.
So it’s a mistake to say that this generation has taken it upon themselves to sublimate anti-Semitism and to express said anti-Semitism as disdain for Israel. Those people may never have been (sufficiently) exposed to anti-Semitism to internalize it in the first place — let alone metamorphosize it into this clunky, unwieldy, non-intuitive form of expression of hostility toward a social group via the denigration of a state.
Matthew Berkman, in his dissertation “Coerced Consensus: Jewish Federations, Ethnic Representation, and the Roots of American Pro-Israel Politics” (2018), notes on page 316, “Whereas, in the 1950s, [Jewish American] community relations agencies viewed themselves as combatting manifestations of domestic anti-Semitism arising out of, but ultimately distinct from, legitimate debates about the Middle East, by the 1970s American Jewish institutions had so thoroughly identified themselves with Israel that the ADL [Anti-Defamation League] could effectively redefine anti-Semitism to include hostility towards, or even a simple lack of affection for, the Jewish state.” Here he referenced The New Anti-Semitism (1974), published by Arnold Forster and Benjamin Epstein, both of the ADL.
Bernd Marin, “A Post-Holocaust ‘Anti-Semitism without Anti-Semites’? Austria as a Case in Point,” Political Psychology (1980), Vol. 2, No. 2, p. 66.
Ibid., p. 66.
Ibid., pp. 66-67.
Ibid., p. 67.
Ibid.
Ibid.
“Accusing someone else instead of ourselves relieves us of subjective guilt feeling and is a mental defense mechanism against recognizing our own guilt. This is typical of the process of projection. . . . In this way the anti-Semite projects onto the Jew the aggressions diverted from his own ego, thereby sparing himself the perception of guilt.” Ernst Simmel, “Anti-Semitism and Mass Psychopathology,” in Anti-Semitism, A Social Disease (1946), pp. 50-51. Ernst Simmel, editor. International Universities Press: New York.