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Anti-Semites with PhDs Are Harder to Fight

(Globe and Mail-Canada) Bari Weiss - In order to be welcomed as a Jew in a growing number of progressive groups, you have to disavow a list of things that grows longer every day. Whereas once it was enough to criticize Israeli government policy, now Israel's very existence must be denounced and the very idea of Jewish power must be abjured. It is why Jewish leaders of the Women's March were subjected to anti-Semitic attacks and exclusion by the movement's other leaders. It is why at the University of Virginia, Jewish student activists were barred from a minority-student coalition to fight white supremacy. We like Jews just fine, they say, as long as they shed their stubborn particularism and adhere to our ever-shifting ideas of justice and equality. Jews are welcome so long as they disavow many of the things that actually make them Jewish. It remains hard for many to see it as threatening because it attempts, at least at first, only to marginalize Jews rather than murder us. Neo-Nazis are straightforward. We know they wish us dead. Anti-Semites with PhDs, the ones who defend their bigotry as enlightened thinking, are harder to fight. The writer is an editor for the Opinion section of the New York Times and the author of How to Fight Anti-Semitism, from which this is adapted.
2019-09-13 00:00:00
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