Jamaal Bowman, AIPAC, and the politics of using 'anti-Semitism' as a slur
Author Peter Beinart wrote a bonus essay to his Substack last week, in light of Jamaal Bowman’s loss in his primary race last Tuesday.
Bowman had become an outspoken critic of Israel’s actions in Gaza, and as a reward AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) decided to spend $15 million to defeat him.
His challenger, George Latimer, was not only backed by Republican-traced funds but also endorsed by established Democratic centrists like Hillary Clinton. So it was a race in which Bowman received both barrels.
Beinart, weighing in, said that “the onslaught that Jamaal Bowman faced for AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups . . . was fundamentally about one thing. It was about the fact that Jamaal Bowman was a passionate supporter of Palestinian freedom.” He continued:
“The second thing I want to say about Jamaal Bowman and this race is that you can’t disentangle the attack that he came under because of his views about Israel from the opposition to him simply because he was a courageous and passionate progressive on a whole range of issues. The thing that’s important to remember about people who give a lot of money to AIPAC is it’s not just that they’re pro-Israel, or that they’re generally Jewish. They’re also extremely wealthy. And it’s often difficult to disentangle their pro-Israel politics from their class perspectives. But things fuse together, right? They don’t want supporters of Palestinian rights in Congress. But they also don’t want people who are going to raise their taxes or try to fundamentally change the American economic system.
“And so, when you defeat Jamaal Bowman, it’s kind of a twofer because you get rid of a critic of Israel, but you also get rid of someone who potentially could threaten your own bottom line. And one of the dirty little secrets, I think, about Jewish organizational life is that people find it often easier to say that they oppose progressives because those progressives are anti-Israel or supposedly ‘antisemitic’ than to admit that partly they’re doing it for economic self-interest because they’re just really rich people who don’t want progressives like Jamaal Bowman because those people might threaten their bottom line.”1
Here Beinart admits / reveals that ‘antisemitic’ is often used as a code word or euphemism to obscure the actual intent behind the deployment of the term.
But Beinart doesn’t stop there. He says:
“The third point I want to make about Jamaal Bowman has to do with race. Now, it’s not true that AIPAC opposes Black members of Congress simply because they’re Black. Which is to say if there’s a really, really pro-Israel Black member of Congress, like Ritchie Torres, they’re thrilled about that, right? But it’s also not coincidental that so many of the people that AIPAC tries to destroy politically are Black or other people of color. And that’s because people who have a family history of oppression in the United States are more likely — not always, by any means — but, on average, are more likely to identify with the Palestinians because of their own experience. They’re more likely to feel, as Jamaal Bowman did, a kind of moral obligation to themselves and to their own ancestors to go and see what’s actually going on to Palestinians who lack basic rights in the West Bank.
“And so, when you go to politically destroy people who care about Palestinians, you’re going to end up destroying a disproportionate number of those people who will be Black or other people of color.”2
In American jurisprudence, a cornerstone of determining if a policy is racist is to look at its outcomes. A racist policy need not have been put in place by a racist or with an aim to harm non-majority populations specifically for that policy nonetheless to have a disproportionate or slanted outcome that functionally favors the majority over others. A similar mechanism here is at work.
But that’s the mechanism inherent in the redefinition of ‘anti-Semitic’ as designed to encompass criticism of Israel. This is evidenced by the history of the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) redefining of that term and the material conditions surrounding that change.
The redefinition was meant to target leftist critiques (which, again, in the main consist not of attacks against Jewish people but of Israel). And those critics in the late ’60s and into the ’70s tended to be Black Americans, other people of color, and New Leftists, many of whom happened to be Jewish.
Matthew Berkman, in his work “Coerced Consensus: Jewish Federations, Ethnic Representation, and the Roots of American Pro-Israel Politics” (2018), revealed:
“But nowhere were the implications of the [American Jewish] community’s rightward shift on Israel more evident than in an address to the 1974 Plenary by Benjamin Epstein, national director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Presenting the thesis of his recently published book, The New Anti-Semitism (co-authored with the ADL’s Arnold Forster), Epstein identified the American ‘Radical Left’ as a ‘political movement quite as threatening to Jewish security as the Radical Right.’
“This assessment — that Black activists and ‘New Left’ student protesters who challenged Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians embodied a form of anti-Semitism on par with the American Nazi Party — hinged on the erosion of prior conceptual distinctions between American Jewry and the State of Israel. [...]
“Beyond debuting the ‘New Anti-Semitism,’ Epstein’s speech is instructive for the way it relates conflicts over Israel to the organized Jewish community’s withdrawal from civil rights activism and its emergent embrace of a ‘colorblind’ racial politics. Identifying the period from 1945 to 1965 as a ‘golden age’ of American Jewish security and prosperity, Epstein alleged that Jewish socioeconomic advancement had since come under attack by an alliance of liberal, anti-Israel, and Black Power forces.”3
At this time, the ADL had gone through a change in leadership, turning more right-wing both in terms of economic as well as social conservatism. So this rebranding of what ‘anti-Semitism’ constituted was both opportune and instrumental. There was intent.4
So there is a throughline during this era when “anti-Semitic” gets repackaged. Once repurposed, the term could then be launched against ideological opponents, an attack that tends to leave no fingerprints on the weapon.
I want to emphasize the point that language has been subverted to destroy political and ideological opponents in an asymmetrical way.5
Above and beyond that, something spoken by Jeffrey Sachs lines up with what Beinart says about wealthy (pro-Israel) donors and economic self-interests. In a recent interview about the trajectory of U.S. internal politics and foreign policy, Sachs said:
“Internally, our [U.S.] politics became very corrupt financially, starting in the 1970s. Limits on campaign fundings were taken away, even by the Supreme Court. It was a campaign by the corporate sector, so that big businesses could spend money to influence American politics. [...]
“Then, afterwards, there were many legal rulings which said corporations can spend whatever they want on ‘corporate free speech’ (we called it) to influence policies. Well, this meant that American government stopped being ‘one person, one vote’ and it started being ‘one dollar, one vote.’ Money really corrupted American politics, and in the American way — in the free market way — it was ‘legal corruption’! It said you can buy Congressional votes with campaign contributions.
“And now our campaigns are billions of dollars of spending by rich people. Our candidates spend most of their time with rich people, with corporate lobbies.
“So this is what happened, in my view, on the domestic side. The Congress doesn’t want to hear from average people — it wants to hear from big donors, the ones that finance the campaigns. And then it’s possible to take over whole categories of politics.”6
Sachs added that “[t]he Israel Lobby is money for Congresspeople, for their campaigns, coming if they support whatever Israel says.”
Moreover, “[t]he military–industrial complex pours in money to Congressional campaigns, as long as the Congress[people] say, ‘Yes! Buy more military arms! Have a big defense budget!’ And so on.”7
Here, Sachs does not address the flip side of the situation (i.e., punishment rather than reward), possibly because this year marks only the second season ever of AIPAC directly entering into the funding of — and now the targeting of — Congressional candidates.8
The campaign against Bowman was “unprecedented” and “historic” because AIPAC dropped $15 million on a primary challenge. This wasn’t even the general election. His opponent, George Latimer, attracted funding by some conservatives. That said, considering the patterns of voting by constituents, AIPAC probably determined that they could not wait for the general election to back a typically conservative candidate because, with the presidential race at the top of the ticket, the Democrat in Bowman’s district would likely come out the winner. So they had to dispatch him now.9
So that goes to the structural circumvention of “people politics” as practiced in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. Combined with the Powell Memo10 (written in 1971) and girded by economic restructuring in the Reagan administration,11 such circumvention truly rerouted the flow of influence in Congressional campaigns and changed who the real constituencies were of these lawmakers.
“Our candidates spend most of their time with rich people . . . The Congress doesn’t want to hear from average people — it wants to hear from big donors.”
When three university presidents testified in front of Congress last December and two were subsequently toppled, that was because big donors of those schools’ alumni threatened to withhold or withdraw their contributions.
When Columbia University students set up encampments to protest their school’s involvement in the munitions companies that are providing weapons to Israel in its campaign against Gaza, big donors got on a Zoom conference call with New York City Mayor Eric Adams and convinced him to send police to campus to enact force against these students.
One press correspondent, Miguel Marquez of CNN, said live on air as he witnessed the deployment of the police force on Columbia’s campus on May 1st, “I’ve covered lots of this sort of stuff around the world, and I’ve never seen this many police moving into one area.”
Donors did that. Donors have the ear of politicians. The people power of the student movement was crushed, literally, with police batons, horses, rubber bullets, and bulldozers.
So this is structural, and decades in the making.
In terms of Bowman and AIPAC, it’s important — and instructive — to revisit the political dynamics of the ’70s, so as to observe when this shift along the political spectrum was occurring in the broader Jewish American community. Most Jewish Americans had graduated into the middle class or beyond,12 and fewer were fronting small businesses, preferring to join the ranks of those in big business.13
The ADL as an organization, after 1967, found their top positions commanded by those with right-leaning politics, very much in contrast to its previous outlook; and Jewish community organizations were dropping a multi-issue social justice focus to concentrate solely on defending and promoting the image of the State of Israel. (There was a direct and measurable correlation between such advocacy and the volume of community contributions.14
That’s a synergistic combination of forces in one particular community in the American populace. There almost certainly was some sort of combinatorial effect of these different trends coalescing all at once.
And that trend cannot be separated from the backlash to the civil rights agenda that arose in both the white and Jewish populations in the late ’60s – early ’70s. How does one get away from people politics? Civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights — these were all key victories of people politics. And conservatives were looking for methods by which they could neutralize such grassroots people power.15
Welcome to the present, where a group can twist a spigot and turn a firehose of money onto a Congressional race, swamping it and changing the flow of outcomes. Courageous Jamaal Bowman, as Beinart called him, stood as stalwartly as he could, but that type of tide could sweep anyone from the field.16
Peter Beinart, “Jamaal Bowman’s Courage.” Substack, June 26, 2024. Emphasis added.
Ibid. Emphases added.
Matthew Berkman, “Coerced Consensus: Jewish Federations, Ethnic Representation, and the Roots of American Pro-Israel Politics” (2018), University of Pennsylvania (dissertation), pp. 316, 317. Paragraph spacing added for clarity in reading.
This change in definition also corresponds to events unfolding on the ground. For example, a teacher strike pitted Black community members against Jewish administrators in New York City in 1969, and legal challenges by Jewish activists to then brand-new affirmative action policies meant to address centuries of anti-Black discrimination drew the ire of Black activists in the early ’70s. See Berkman, ibid., pp. 317-318.
This is a point I plan to revisit in a future essay regarding the deployment of the word ‘anti-Semite’ as a slur.
“Jeffrey Sachs: How did US Lose Self-control in Internal Politics and Foreign Policy?” Wave Media, YouTube, June 26, 2024, ~ 0:37.
Ibid.
“Long a nonprofit lobbying organization that championed U.S. support for Israel, AIPAC’s explicit entry into electoral politics is relatively new. For years, the group’s endorsements were used by various aligned PACs that sent money to candidates or spent independently. But AIPAC launched several groups of its own during the 2022 election cycle, including a super PAC. It also began to bundle money for AIPAC-endorsed candidates, collecting donations that it then sends to campaigns. It quickly became the biggest bundler of any lobbying group, sending more than four times as much money as any similar PAC.” Jessica Piper and Haley Fuchs, “Bipartisanship or Republican meddling? AIPAC is the biggest source of GOP donations in Dem primaries.” Politico, June 9, 2024.
Incidentally, these patterns are very reminiscent of dynamics of the white primary in the American South before civil rights-era voting reforms. See V. O. Key, Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (1949 / 1984), pp. 619-643.
Of note, the Powell Memo discusses left politics specifically. Of the purported social threats to business interests, the Powell Memo asserts that the culprits are “not unexpectedly, the Communists, New Leftists, and other revolutionaries. . . The most disquieting voices joining the chorus of criticism, come from the most perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians” (pp. 2-3).
Compare that to the supposed sources of danger identified by Benjamin Epstein, mentioned previously: “an alliance of liberal, anti-Israel, and Black Power forces” which “synthesiz[ed] a unitary threat from anti-Israel and civil rights currents” (Berkman, op. cit., pp. 317, 318). These were potent sources of leftist movements in the United States at the time. Berkman notes that “among the more alarming symptoms of urban decay and Jewish racial reaction [in the late 1960s] was the growth of the Jewish Defense League (JDL), a miiltant Jewish nationalist organization that combined armed ‘defense’ patrols targeting African Americans with hardline pro-Israelism and anti-Arab racism. The ‘gut feelings’ expressed violently by the JDL at the street level were rearticulated by Epstein and other neoconservatives into a more genteel doctrine of explicit Jewish self-interest, one that would increasingly hold sway in the organized community” (ibid., pp. 319-320, emphasis added). This gentility complements and even parallels the tone and articulation found in the Powell Memo.
“America’s neoliberal economic turn transformed the communal balance of power as federation and welfare fund professionals lost influence and autonomy to an increasingly wealthy conservative donor base. Among the major beneficiaries of this process was AIPAC. Infused with millions of dollars in right-wing contributions, AIPAC underwent a total restructuring. It replaced communal oversight with a board dominated by Republican donors, vastly expanded its professional staff, and enhanced its proprietary networks[.]” Berkman, ibid., p. 301.
“By the late 1960s, most American Jews had achieved middle class status.” — Berkman, op. cit., p. 319.
“After the war, Jews moved en masse into the middle class, and the Jewish working class virtually disappeared. The second and third generations were not attracted to the small businesses established by the immigrant generation and instead sought employment in government, the professions, academia, and big business.” — Edward Shapiro, “The Ordeal of Success: American Jewry Since World War II,” American Jewish History (1993), Vol. 81, No. 1, p. 98.
“Journalist Robert Spero would later maintain in Present Tense magazine that, in the aftermath of the Six Day War [in 1967], ‘Israel soon took up most of the time of [Jewish] organizations’ bureaucracies and accounted for much of their often considerable budgets.’ No Jewish organization, Spero claimed, ‘felt it could survive financially or hope to maintain even its declining membership without devoting a significant portion of its agenda to generating public support for Israel.’ Institutional records bear out Spero’s claim. By 1973, pro-Israel advocacy had become the AJC’s [American Jewish Committee] single largest spending area (roughly 30% of the total), while the Anti-Defamation League—a domestic civil rights organization—dedicated almost half of its budget to programs related to the Middle East.” Berkman, op. cit., p. 281.
I am not painting a conspiracy, just to be clear. Persons need not to have coordinated their actions for such forces to have come together. Perhaps it was what one might call a “perfect storm.” But there’s no doubt that these trends happened about the same time.
Observe, too, influence at the very top tier of our politics. Just this weekend, in an interview exploring the aftermath of the first and perhaps only presidential debate of this cycle, Janelle King, a Republican consultant, had this to say about speculation that Biden might step aside:
“I do disagree with the fact that we [would] have to wait for Joe Biden to determine whether or not he’s going to drop out. I truly believe that who’s going to decide this are the donors. When donors say, ‘I’m no longer investing in a candidate that is feeble and cannot string two sentences together,’ that’s when the decision’s going to be made. I don’t think it has anything to do with Biden, to be honest. I think that Biden will get to that convention, and if they decide that they no longer want to support him and they have someone else in mind, they will put that person up, and they will get those delegates to vote for that person.”
“After the US presidential debate, should Democrats dump Joe Biden?” The Bottom Line (Al Jazeera English), YouTube, June 30, 2024, ~ 10:55.