Read Eric Fusfield's op-ed in the Jewish Journal.

If one were to draw a straight line between recent controversies involving the Colleyville synagogue attack, Whoopi Goldberg, and Brooklyn College, respectively, one would find a common theme: the negation of Jewish identity.

The attack on Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas was “not specifically related to the Jewish community,” an FBI agent said in a press conference afterward, even though the perpetrator’s stated intention had been to communicate with a rabbi in New York whom the attacker fancifully assumed controlled the fate of an imprisoned terrorist.

The Holocaust was not an example of Nazi genocide against the Jews, but rather a mere illustration of “man’s inhumanity to man,” Goldberg said on her talk show, “The View,” notwithstanding Hitler’s well-documented pronouncements about Jewish racial inferiority and his intention to eradicate European Jewry altogether. At Brooklyn College, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights has opened an investigation into claims of anti-Semitic harassment, including a warning by an administrator to a Jewish student to “get your whiteness in check.”

​Increasingly, Jewish identity in America is subsumed by notions of “whiteness,” as the lens through which many Americans view race doesn’t allow for a nuanced understanding of Jewish identity. Jews don’t conform to standard definitions of a racial, ethnic, or religious group, so the temptation to characterize all or most of them as white based on skin color is understandable, if problematic.

But the consequences of diminishing Jewish identity and relegating Jews to the white and privileged class, as some of the Brooklyn College aggressors did, have already proven themselves to be serious.  The Colleyville episode showed that it is possible, even though the FBI later walked back the agent’s remark, to dismiss an attack on a Jewish target as an essentially random occurrence.

The Whoopi Goldberg episode demonstrated that, even at a time when some Holocaust survivors are still living, the power of the Holocaust to educate younger generations has been devalued, as the central narrative of anti-Jewish genocide has been undermined. At Brooklyn College, two Jewish students in the graduate Mental Health Counseling program felt compelled to withdraw because of the stress of the harassment they endured on campus.

To see how little regard is paid to Jewish sensibilities with respect to cultural slights, one need look no further than the University of California’s instructional publication, “Recognizing Microaggressions and the Messages They Send.” The document provides a list of examples of comments that target individuals based on their memberships in “marginalized groups,” a category that seems not to include Jews or Israel supporters, despite the alarming degree of hostility directed toward Jews on UC campuses in recent years. We learn from UC’s list that the statement “America is a land of opportunity” is a microaggression, while none of the anti-Semitic tropes routinely used to bash Israel and intimidate Jewish students merit a mention.

But the gravest danger posed by the redaction of Jewishness from discussions about marginalized groups is the unsettling public apathy toward an antisemitism that has increasingly turned violent.  In October 2018, the deadliest mass killing of Jews in American history occurred at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.  Other deadly attacks on Jewish targets have followed.

According to 2019 FBI hate crime statistics, Jews are overwhelmingly the most heavily targeted religious group in the United States. More than 60 percent of hate crimes in that category were directed toward Jewish targets in 2019.  In May 2021 anti-Semitic violence spiked in the wake of clashes between Hamas and Israel.

Antisemitism comes from multiple sources: the far right, the far left, and Islamist extremists. All of these streams of Jew-hatred must be treated with great seriousness. They are all variations of an ancient social illness that has shown a unique ability to persist and adapt to modern circumstances.

The different forms of antisemitism that manifest themselves today find support across political, cultural, and religious lines. The overlap and interconnectedness of these viral hatreds has fed a normalization of antisemitism evidenced in public comments, violent attacks, the bullying of students, and the minimization of the Holocaust.  It is also reflected in the callous indifference of those who claim to protect vulnerable groups but reflexively opt to treat Jews as privileged oppressors, regardless of the vulnerability of Jewish individuals and institutions.

​As we continue to devise and implement strategies to confront antisemitism in the U.S. and abroad, it is important to ask, when did the diminution of Jewish identity become acceptable? When did antisemitism stop being a form of oppression?  When did it become OK to dismiss antisemitism as a distraction from other social or political priorities? Most of all, where are our allies?

The answers may be uncomfortable for some, but for Jews, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has taken office, becoming the first Social Democrat born after the end of World War II to head the federal government.

His rise to power comes during a year when thousands of protesters, many of them on the political left, demonstrated against Israel’s defensive operations in Gaza.  Cities across Germany erupted in violence, as rioters burned Israeli flags, while flying Hamas banners.

Last year, Jusos, the Social Democratic Party’s youth wing, passed a resolution declaring its PLO-Fatah counterpart, which has called for Israel’s destruction, its “sister organization.”

Germany’s outgoing Chancellor, Christian Democrat Angela Merkel, repeatedly spoke about the crucial nature of Israel’s existence. But her statements were belied by Germany’s frequent votes in favor of one-sided anti-Israel resolutions at the United Nations. In 2019, German UN Ambassador Christoph Heusgen equated Hamas rockets with Israeli bulldozers at a time when Hamas was firing projectiles at Israeli civilians.

​The growing normalization of anti-Israel activity in Germany tends to confirm the fears of Jews, who have long worried that the generational shift taking place in Germany works against the long-term German-Israeli relationship. With new leaders in power who neither lived through World War II nor its immediate aftermath, the lessons of the Holocaust might fade more easily — their resonance with a younger generation diminished or lost altogether.

The false perception of Israel as a colonial occupier in the Middle East, nurtured on the European left since the 1967 Six-Day War, has made German support for the Palestinian cause, and even open hostility toward Israel, increasingly palatable. Gone for some is the once bedrock assumption in German politics that Germany owned a special responsibility for maintaining Israel’s security.

The rise in Muslim immigration to Germany has helped shape this dynamic. Refugees and migrants from the Middle East often bring with them a viewpoint that is decidedly anti-Israel. They consequently resist the sense that they are integrating into a country with a historic responsibility to protect Israel.

Chancellor Scholz has said some encouraging things about the German-Israeli relationship. At an Israel solidarity rally near the Berlin Holocaust memorial in May, he affirmed Merkel’s famous pledge that Israel’s security is Germany’s “reason of state.”

But a look at the coalition agreement the Social Democrats have formed with their governing partners, the Free Democrats and the Greens, reveals some disturbing departures from former pacts. Israel is not referred to as a Jewish state in the document, while language critical of settlements and calling for a return to 1967 borders suggests the West Bank will be a sticking point in bilateral relations. Also, the agreement insists on negotiations with Iran, but does not decry the Iranian nuclear program.

The passage of time and the increasingly casual embrace of anti-Israel public attitudes in the country that gave rise to the Holocaust has hastened the need for the new left-of-center government to reassert Germany’s position as Israel’s leading defender in Europe. The German government should vote against anti-Israel resolutions at the UN, and persuade other European Union countries to follow suit. In a country that refuses nuclear weapons of its own, the government should insist that Iran be barred from acquiring nukes. And Germany should focus its attention on terror, incitement, and the Palestinian Authority’s consistent refusal to negotiate as the biggest obstacles to peace — not Israeli settlements.

Germany’s “reason of state” ethos demands that it take these proactive measures and embrace its historic role as Israel’s principal ally in Europe. With anti-Israel sentiment increasingly morphing into antisemitism, the urgency in rebuking anti-Israel activity — at the UN, within the EU, and among the German public — is greater than ever. Germany’s new government should infuse the German-Israeli relationship with new purpose and vitality. Seventy-six years after the Holocaust, history, and the future, demand it.

Read Fusfield's expert analysis in the Algemeiner.

The recent struggle to remove antisemitic and anti-Israel content from a California ethnic studies curriculum demonstrated the formidable challenge posed by the academic doctrines of Critical Race Theory and “intersectionality.”

To the extent that Israel is depicted as a white colonial occupation project and the pro-Palestinian cause as a proxy for racial equity in the United States, the Jewish state will be stigmatized and Jewish individuals and institutions will suffer.

The fight to overhaul earlier drafts of the California curriculum opened a window into the difficulty of the Jewish predicament.

Jews are frequently portrayed as part of the privileged dominant class, while their status as targeted victims is often ignored Israel is seen as a European, colonial outpost, while the fact that most of its Jewish population is descended from communities that lived for centuries in the Arab and Muslim world before their expulsion from those countries, is hopelessly obscured.

In other words, Jews are losing further control of the public narrative about them. This point is underscored by the incursion of antisemitic violence into racial justice protests in the US and Europe. The death of George Floyd was followed by attacks on synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses in a number of cities, most recently three Israeli restaurants in Portland, Oregon, in January. The frequent appearance of the slogan “Free Palestine” in graffiti on Jewish targets showed the popular tendency to register discontent with the Jewish state by harming Jews in the Diaspora. An anti-racism rally in Place de la Republique, in Paris, featured signs with directives such as “Stop collaboration with Israeli State terrorism” as the crowd chanted “dirty Jews.”

Enter into this demoralizing picture two new proposed definitions of antisemitism, one offered by Jewish academics on behalf of the Nexus Task Force; the second, titled the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, presented by a group of progressive Jews under the aegis of the Van Leer Institute. Both documents profess to serve the cause of confronting antisemitism by identifying its contemporary manifestations — unless, of course, those manifestations take the form of anti-Israel demagoguery.

Why would Jewish critics of Israel feel the need to offer these re-imagined definitions of antisemitism?

B’nai B’rith has long advocated for broad usage of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which is steadily gaining acceptance around the globe. The IHRA definition illustrates how criticism of Israel can (and all too frequently does) cross the line from legitimate policy debate into antisemitic hatred.

Demonizing Israel by calling it a racist or Nazi-like state, or simply denying Israel’s right to exist, would be examples of antisemitism under the IHRA definition, because such language is intended to undermine Jewish self-determination and relegate the Jewish state to pariah status, thereby gravely threatening its national security.

Such limitations, however, cause Israel’s most vociferous critics to bristle.

Those who see a basis for comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa no longer wish to feel inhibited about drawing those analogies by a definition originally adopted in 2016 by the IHRA — an international organization comprised of 34 member countries — and since then, by many individual governments around the world. Instead, they would prefer to say, as the Jerusalem Declaration does, that nearly any criticism of Israel is fair game, and is not per se a form of antisemitism.

Both the Nexus Task Force definition and the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA) open the door for abuse toward Israel, but the latter does this with a disturbing level of specificity.

What’s acceptable under the expansive JDA definition? “Criticizing or opposing Zionism as a form of nationalism.” In other words, Jews are the only people, one could argue without being accused of antisemitism, who are not entitled to a homeland or national movement of their own.

The JDA further tells us that “it is not anti-Semitic, in and of itself, to compare Israel with other historical cases, including settler-colonialism or apartheid.” Meaning, hurling the most insidious possible allegations against Israel, as its critics frequently do in an attempt to challenge the Jewish state’s basis for existing, is not antisemitic. And so on.

According to the JDA, anti-Israel boycotts “are not, in and of themselves, anti-Semitic,” even though the stated intention of the BDS movement’s founders is to eliminate the Jewish state. Nor is imposing a double standard on Israel an act of antisemitism: “In general, the line between anti-Semitic and non-anti-Semitic speech is different from the line between unreasonable and reasonable speech.” Thus, Israel’s critics need not be “reasonable” to wave their free pass when charges of antisemitism surface.

The timing of these two alternative definitions of antisemitism is highly lamentable. With Jews already losing the rhetorical war around social hatreds, the authors are handing out newly minted permission slips to Israel’s harshest critics, as though anyone whose goal is the demonization or outright elimination of the Jewish state would ever strive to be reasonable.

Grotesque distortion of Israel in school curricula is, by the new logic, not antisemitic. Nor is BDS, or incendiary anti-Israel resolutions at the United Nations and other international fora.

Anti-Israel hatred that finds expression in the public square or on university campuses, whether such venom explicitly holds Jews accountable for Israel’s actions or not, too often is simply hatred of Jews in another guise. This sinister strategy of using Israel or Zionism as a proxy for Jews has just been infused with new vitality by two new antisemitism definitions that may purport to identify and combat antisemitism, but in truth help facilitate it.

Read Fusfield's expert analysis in the Algemeiner.

Meet Grant Napear. The basketball broadcaster was fired after tweeting “All Lives Matter” following the killing of George Floyd.

Meet James Bennet, the former New York Times editorial page editor. Bennet was forced to resign after publishing an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton calling for military force in response to rioters.

Meet Louis Farrakhan. The head of the Nation of Islam has referred to Jews as “termites” and castigated them for their “Satanic influence.”  Chelsea Handler and other celebrities tweeted their praise for his “really powerful” message about racism.  Fox Soul TV scheduled a broadcast of his planned July 4 address before deciding instead to air excerpts of speeches by multiple Black leaders.  Two Philadelphia Eagles teammates subsequently promoted Farrakhan on their Instagram pages.  TV host Nick Cannon has used his YouTube talk show to praise Farrakhan, invoke anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and challenge the authenticity of the Jewish people.

Meet Al Sharpton, an activist who has referred to the Jewish community as “diamond merchants” and “bloodsucking Jews” and in 1991 instigated violence with his anti-Semitic demagoguery during the Crown Heights riots. Sharpton, who has not publicly apologized for his past behavior, hosts a daily program on MSNBC and will lead a march on Washington this summer.

The cases of Napear and Bennet are symptomatic of a cancel culture that exhibits minimal tolerance for an individual who has expressed or shared a controversial opinion.  Napear’s “All Lives Matter” comment is considered by some to be a racist response to the Black Lives Matter movement.  In Bennet’s situation, dozens of New York Times journalists tweeted their contention that his decision to run the Cotton op-ed endangered the lives of both Blacks and the newspaper’s staffers. The pressure to remove both Napear and Bennet was immediate and decisive.

Farrakhan’s critics, including several public figures, prompted Fox to scrap his TV appearance.  And Chelsea Handler, after initially doubling down, ultimately deleted her tweet and apologized for it.  But Farrakhan has met personally with at least seven members of Congress and continues to speak before large crowds, often using those occasions to spew anti-Semitic polemics.

Sharpton has faced his own share of detractors, although he maintains his perch at MSNBC and continues to absorb praise from highly prominent public officials who have hailed him as a civil rights champion.  His August 28 address in Washington, scheduled to coincide with the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, is expected to draw about 100,000 participants.

What is notable about Farrakhan and Sharpton is not just that they have survived criticism for their anti-Semitic pronouncements, but that they have never acknowledged or repented for their anti-Semitism.  The plaudits they win from public figures and loyal followers not only burnishes the legitimacy they claim; it affirms their sense that they can blunt or simply dismiss any criticism that comes their way.  “You only repent when you mean it, and I have done nothing wrong,” Sharpton has said.

A nationwide spike in anti-Semitic hate crimes in the past year has increased the concern of American Jews for their own safety.  According to a report by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernadino, Jews were the most highly targeted group in 2019 in the country’s three largest cities: New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.  The killing of four people in a Jersey City, New Jersey kosher supermarket on Dec. 11 and an attack on Hasidic Jews at the home of a rabbi in Monsey, New York two weeks later illustrated the stark brutality of the threat facing the Jewish community.

As heightened awareness of the racism and injustice suffered by African-Americans has shortened the national fuse on racial issues and understandably fostered an atmosphere of zero tolerance for racial bigotry, Jews and other opponents of hatred could reasonably ask:  Where is the commensurate outrage over anti-Semitism?  Why does cancel culture fast-forward past the hatred of Jews?
​
Racial justice and the sacredness of Black lives deserve the full recognition owed by American society.  But as long as the threats to Jewish safety and dignity persist, we have to demand that those perils also be taken seriously.  This means that longtime purveyors of anti-Semitism should not be mainstreamed, their offenses deemed negligible or otherwise rationalized and contextualized.  Jewish individuals deserve no less.

The U.S. killing of Iran’s Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani and Iran’s subsequent mishandling of its Covid-19 response have left the country in political and economic disarray as its flailing regime gropes for answers.

​Two years into a deep recession triggered by the return of U.S. sanctions, Iran is facing further economic struggles as the Coronavirus promises to shrink the country’s trade and slow its production and services. The death of Soleimani and his close advisors, meanwhile, has left a power vacuum in Iran’s military that has weakened Iran’s momentum in Iraq and in its other spheres of influence, such as Lebanon and Syria.

When Iran first began to exhibit an outbreak of the virus in late January, the regime responded with denials of the pandemic’s scope and predictable accusations that the U.S. both created the virus and attempted to spread it further through medication and equipment. Iran continued to encourage large religious gatherings, continued flights to China, and diverted funds and medical supplies that could have been used to contain the virus. With accurate numbers hard to gauge because of the regime's obfuscation, Iran to date has sustained at least 86,000 cases of Covid-19, more than China and more than any Middle Eastern country other than Turkey. A number of senior officials have tested positive for the virus and at least two members of parliament have died of it. To exacerbate matters, more than 300 Iranians have died after consuming methanol in response to a fake remedy that has spread across Iranian social media.

Soleimani, Iran’s second most powerful figure after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khameini, had used brutal violence to repress civic movements in Iraq and Lebanon that threatened Iran’s grip on their legislatures. He had also used his security machinery to consolidate a land corridor through Syria and steer the course of the war in that country.

Iran’s recent antagonistic naval maneuvers around U.S. warships demonstrate a desire to project strength in the wake of the U.S. airstrike that killed Soleimani and his core power structure. Eleven Iranian Revolutionary Guard (IRG) speed boats with mounted machine guns harassed American ships in the Persian Gulf. The IRG also launched its first ever space launch as part of a program that could hasten the country’s ballistic missile development. But without the onerous sanctions the U.S. has placed on Iran, the regime would undoubtedly have poured tens of billions more dollars into military spending, as evidenced by the dramatic spike in their military budget in the years following the 2015 nuclear deal.

These crises have thrown into sharp relief some of Iran’s most habitual tendencies: seizing political opportunity rather than improving conditions for their own population; deferring to the religious establishment, including religious practices that ignore social distancing; and, invariably, propagating anti-Semitism. Iran’s health ministry this month sponsored a Coronavirus cartoon contest in which ghastly anti-Semitic illustrations figured prominently.

Meanwhile, the Iranian press has promoted reports claiming “Zionist” culpability for the virus. “Zionist elements developed a deadlier strain of Coronavirus against Iran,” state-run Press TV asserted last month. Of course, this did not stop Grand Ayatollah Naser Makarem Shirazi from conceding that Iranians would be permitted to use a Coronavirus vaccine developed by Israel if “the treatment is unique and there is no substitute.”

Prior to the eruption of the virus, protests swept the country in the wake of the IRG downing of a Ukrainian airliner in January. The following month, parliamentary elections devolved into chaos after the hardline Guardian Council barred thousands of moderates from running. As the crises in Iran mount, the country’s economic, political, and health security may continue to founder. Given the uncertainty of Iran’s future and the threat the regime poses to Middle East stability and Israel’s existence, much hangs in the balance.