Postville, Iowa was a small town of little note until in 1987 Lubavitch (Chabad) Jews moved there to establish a kosher slaughterhouse which became extremely successful; yet within 20 years the business had to be declared bankrupt following various criminal convictions including fraud (Bloom, 2008). We cannot assume that Jews who aspire to Torah-faithful purity and morality are any better behaved or nicer than the rest of us. Gentiles are often known as Goyim, Shiksa (female non-Jew, which some claim has connotations of ‘whore’) or Shkutzim (male non-Jew), and black Jews as Schwarze; the term anti-goyism can also be found. Jewish orthodox separatism in dense urban areas inevitably strains the tolerance of others but triggers relatively rare racist incidents involving aggressive anti-Semites. The black American Reverend Jesse Jackson notoriously called New York ‘Hymietown’ in 1984, acknowledging its high proportion of Jewish residents (estimates sit between 8% and 12%), which led to heighted community tensions. In 1979, Jackson had said he was ‘sick and tired of hearing about the Holocaust’. What these examples suggest is that even slight perceptions of others as strangely and wilfully different can fester and erupt, but also that exaggerated differences themselves may invite mistrust and scorn. Blending in is often wiser than standing out.
Longstanding religious beliefs and identities are not easily shed and may even harden with persecution and adversity. Fraser (2016) celebrates the distinctiveness of ethnic minorities, questioning why assimilation is thought so desirable. He cites the case of a 20-year-old Jewish man who has grown up in an orthodox area of London and attended an orthodox school, and hence can barely speak English at all; instead, he speaks the Yiddish in which he has been immersed. But even this stark example of non-assimilationism is outdone by the Israeli ban on non-Jews marrying Jews (Gradstein, 2013). Ironically, in the UK most non-orthodox Jews can pass for white citizens, when wearing no identifying religious dress, having no obvious Jewish name, and having no skin colour difference.
Jews, Christians and Muslims all belong to the original Abrahamic tradition but huge conflicts exist between them. Jews are held by some as responsible for the death of Jesus, and particular tensions remain between Jews and Muslims, and Muslims and Christians. Among fundamentalists, some dietary beliefs, as well as insistence on the creationist story of the origins of life, appear to offer some unifying threads. Muslims appear to regard themselves as being as persecuted as Jews, the concept of Islamophobia now resembling anti-Semitism. From a certain atheist perspective, Judaism, Christianity and Islam are perceived as equally mistaken and backward, resisting as they do both scientific advances and socially liberal advances, and posing a threat to material progress. This view of the backwardness of orthodox Judaism has been endorsed by progressive Jews against some older, traditional Jews (Cohn-Sherbok, 2017) and one poll of Jewish people found that ultra-orthodox (Haredi) Jews caused more concern for a good future for Israel than did non-Jews in Israel (Rosner & Ruskay, 2017).
The Guardian ran a typical grievance story about the music business being dominated by old white men despite the well-known contributions of black musicians and producers (Forde, 2016). What the writer forgot to mention, or perhaps was even unaware of, was that those rich old white men cited in his article were virtually all old Jewish men. The Guardian’s moderator struck out some online comments along these lines, presumably on the grounds of inferred anti-Semitism. But why is it anti-Semitic to draw attention to the tendency of a disproportionate number of Jewish people to be good at amassing financial fortunes? And are Jews to be considered ‘white’ when it suits the agenda of Cultural Marxism but ‘oppressed’ and of Mediterranean origin when it doesn’t suit? Debates are even found about whether Jews are actually white or black (Russell,2010). Black and Jewish antagonisms (as in Jesse Jackson’s case) are often mutual (see Finkelstein, 2003), and erupt from time to time. Reggie Yates, whose parents were from Ghana, has been a popular television presenter and DJ in the UK for some years but in 2017 unguardedly opined that black grime artists should represent themselves instead of ‘some random fat Jewish guy from north west London’. He quickly apologised for his stereotyping and resigned from BBC’s Top of the Pops. Yates has not yet been vilified to the extent that Mel Gibson was following his anti-Semitic remarks in 2006.
Post-Holocaust reflection on anti-Semitism is almost certainly the primary engine for all later movements against perceived racism and xenophobia, not to mention political correctness in general. American Jews have, in MacDonald’s (2002) terms, operated from a kind of ‘parano-Semitism’; promoted an anti-Aryan monoculture; pushed an anti-homogeneity, ‘anti-restrictionist’ immigration and pro-diversity policy; made strategic alliances with other minority groups perceived as at risk; and used considerable financial resources to support these causes over many decades. George Soros, the Hungarian-American Jewish billionaire, has sponsored many minority causes and radical pro-immigration groups via his Open Society Foundations network, to the point where the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán accused him of pushing the EU into distributing immigrants throughout Europe (Waterfield, 2017). It is often difficult to know where to draw the line between conspiracy theory and reality. The extreme suffering of a minority is converted via appropriate anxiety into a kind of querulous paranoia, which SJWs draw on for perpetual campaigning.
A claim repeated a great deal around the time of Brexit is that many white Britons have felt emboldened to express their latent racism, leading not only to rising anti-Semitism and Islamophobia but to xenophobic sentiments generally. Occasional reports are made that the UK is slipping into a fascist state. A Guardian article (Sherwood, 2017a) voices the fears of a small number of remaining Holocaust survivors or their relatives that ‘Germany yesterday could so easily become Britain of tomorrow’. Reflecting on the importance of a proposed major Holocaust memorial in London, a spokesman said it would ‘underline what happens when society breaks down, when law, order, decency and tolerance, and empathy disappear’. Speculations are made about the likelihood of increasing Holocaust denial. The problem here is that with no particular evidence Jewish observers can make such damning and scaremongering pronouncements as if they are credible. This is due to the presumed moral authority of anyone with Holocaust-associated experience, and supposed historical wisdom and foresight. One can counterproductively overdo such warnings, sometimes referred to as ‘playing the Holocaust card’ (Eden, 2005). Such conflation of concern about mass immigration and the Holocaust goes back further. In response to Powell’s 1968 speech, prominent and sincere Labour MP Tony Benn declared that ‘the flag of racialism which has been hoisted in Wolverhampton is beginning to look like the one that fluttered 25 years ago over Dachau and Belsen’ (Butler & Pinto-Duschinsky, 1971).
‘We’ve been here before’ is in fact the title of a Guardian article (Karpf, 2002) that sums up the never-ending recriminations against Britain for purportedly not doing enough to help Jewish refugees in the 1930s and doing far too little for refugees today. Around 70,000 Jewish refugees were taken in by Britain but the record is mixed as to how they were perceived, welcomed and helped. Many commentators still complain that Jews were met with continuing anti-Semitism, ugly Daily Mail headlines, niggardly financial help, and were often obliged to work beneath their skills and qualifications. Nevertheless, many gradually thrived. Natasha Walter’s great-grandparents died in Treblinka but her parents escaped to Britain, and she herself became a writer, feminist, sociologist and founder of a charity for refugee women. But Walter (2017) and her daughter reacted badly to the Brexit decision, claiming that xenophobia is on the increase: ‘it is the xenophobia, once hidden under British politeness, which has become unapologetic’. In the same article, Britain is portrayed as possibly getting as bad as Nazi Germany, to the point where Walter and her daughter are applying for German citizenship. David Miliband, former UK Foreign Secretary but now New York resident and CEO of the International Rescue Committee, and whose own family contains refugees, is frequently critical of Brexit and Br
itish policy regarding refugees.
What these examples illustrate is that some refugees survive better than others, are affluent, well connected, able to obtain two or three passports, and international employment, or ready publishers for their memoirs, opinions and grievances. In many cases, although not all, their political allegiances are firmly left-wing, and what I refer to here as SJW in kind. But we overlook the vast chasm between such middle-class descendants of refugees and others. While associated with nomadic Jewish tradition, these are not poor ‘suitcase people’ but the new, influential cosmopolitan bourgeoisie whose lives are utterly removed from the working poor on low incomes who tend to live in one place and feel a transgenerational affinity with it (Goodhart, 2017). Nevertheless, the former group drive sociological analyses and policies that we may call Cultural Marxism, and that enfeeble the national fabric via constant criticism and guilt induction while promoting international socialism and relaxed borders. There is, however, no necessary and unseverable connection between Jewish identity and left-wing anti-nationalism, as Gottfried (2003) among other anti-multiculturalists shows.
Reflecting on Germany’s collective guilt for the Holocaust, Olick (2016) traces its growth as reported by Karl Jaspers through to Willy Brandt. ‘The progress is clear: from guilt, to shame, to responsibility’, says Olick, who then avers that ‘the problem of Judeocide belonged to all of humanity’. There has been much speculation about responsibility for the Holocaust, Goldhagen (2001) being noted for the claim that the events of the 1930s had a widespread anti-Semitic lineage; and Browning (2017) placing the blame on aspects of human nature such as group conformity and obedience to authority. There is probably a blend of these factors in operation, from the ancient exile of Jews through the crucifixion of Christ, Luther’s vicious attacks and Hitlerian hatred, to general human herd mentality. In this sense, perhaps all of humanity can be called ‘responsible’ for the Holocaust and similar events. But we also have to question the counterproductive long-term effects of national guilt.
Responsibility must fade after some generations, guilty memories will not persist, and nor should they. However, some descendants of the most well-known Nazis could not forget. Bettina Goering, for example, who was Hermann Goering’s great-niece, had herself sterilised in order to end the Goering line, and her brother did likewise. The great-niece of Heinrich Himmler, Katrin Himmler, used writing as a way of addressing her traumatic family associations (Himmler, 2007). The 2006 documentary film Inheritance also focuses on just such themes. Berlin’s Holocaust memorial was designed by Jewish American architect Peter Eisenman and opened in 2005. Eisenman said he wanted it to be ‘slightly unsettling’ but not guilt-inducing. ‘I would hope that this memorial, in its absence of guilt-making, is part of the process of getting over that guilt. You cannot live with guilt. If Germany did, then the whole country would have to go to an analyst’ (Spiegel Online, 9 May, 2005). Yet guilt persists, and the insistence that Germany should suffer. In 2017, the German art collective — Centre for Political Beauty — erected a replica of the Berlin memorial in a garden next to the house of Björn Höcke, a right-wing (AfD) politician who dared to call the original a ‘monument of shame’ that unhelpfully stirred up guilt (Agence France-Presse, 23 November, 2017). Their suggestion that he fall on his knees before it seems far from respectful of Jewish victims, and closer to political hatred and bullying.
I have argued before (Banks, 2017) that a kind of Post-Holocaust Guilt, Paranoia, Revenge and Conversion Syndrome appears to operate, which ripples out from direct culpable genocide to innocent millions with no actual links to the original heinous actions, but who feel they must make amends. Merkel may be an embodiment of German guilt and reparation which in turn became bullying of other EU nations to take in refugees (Hanson, 2016). The guilt of anti-Semitism affects us all in one way or another, but it also distortedly magnifies American guilt for slavery, British guilt for colonialism, and so on. Too often, like a patient in psychoanalysis for many years, we look to the past for guidance instead of addressing present-day situations. At least one among many German émigrés, however, would strongly disagree, insisting on the importance of learning from history (Frie, 2017). Perhaps the taste for revenge or justice for historical abuses can go too far. It has been argued that the UN Refugee Convention of 1951, constructed with the persecution of Jews in mind and also with those escaping USSR gulags, was never intended and is not suitable for the kind of mass asylum-seeking, conflated with economic migration, that we experience today (Goodhart, 2014).
Israel Zangwill, a British citizen of Latvian and Polish Jewish parents, and author of the seminal play The Melting Pot, wrote in 1923: ‘There is only one way to World Peace, and that is the absolute abolition of passports, visas, frontiers, customs houses, and all other devices that make of the population of our planet not a co-operating civilization but a mutual irritation society’. This sentiment stood in opposition to the American politics of restricted immigration in his day, and continues to drive the agenda of a borderless world. Benjamin Abtan, founder and president of the European Grassroots Antiracist Movement (EGAM), helps to promote the belief that racism including anti-Semitism and Romaphobia is dangerously active in Europe, that ‘far-right’ political parties like France’s Front National must be opposed at every turn, and that populism must be resisted. EGAM’s rhetoric includes phrases like ‘concern for the Other’ and ‘solidarity over selfishness’ (groupthink over independent thought?). Closely associated with the Simon Wiesenthal Network, EGAM and Abtan suggest that young people who are radicalised by both far-right and Islamist groups are primarily seeking meaning in life. However, Abtan’s pronouncements often appear to headline far-right extremists like Anders Breivik and Dylann Roof more than Islamist terrorists (Abtan, 2015; Graham-Harrison, 2017). One of Abtan’s projects has been the promotion of ‘universal Erasmus’ to encourage pan-European exchanges among young people. Zangwill’s prescription for peace through borderlessness may have anticipated the EU’s free movement rule and its Schengen Agreement. It is clear that such influential figures as Zangwill and Abtan have across decades regarded internationalism and universalism as crucial to the extinction of anti-Semitism and similar anti-immigrant movements. EGAM, like many associated organisations, is also dedicated to continuous Holocaust education. Among Jews who energetically promote anti-racist causes are Tim Wise and Barry Mehler. The former relentlessly publishes books attacking everything that can be accused of having racist elements, including the concept of post-racial colour-blindness (Wise, 2010). The latter created and sustains the Institute for the Study of Academic Racism which targets any academic suspected of promoting research and writing unfavourably on race themes.
Hitler’s extreme hatred of Jews was irrational but if he had not had the power to inflict his views on others he would have been merely an eccentric individual, or perhaps a lone wolf terrorist at worst. It is the development of shared theories of a pure Aryan race and a thousand year Reich that created the genocidal nightmare that followed. The ‘Aryan race’ concept that Hitler espoused was a corruption of a much older category of Indo-Aryan peoples, and centred on Nordic stock as the embodiment of superiority. A deep irony of the Nazi vision of a pure master race is that if you really wanted to design and facilitate such an entity, with hindsight you would learn from modern genetic studies. If Ashkenazi Jews have very high IQs, you would wish to preserve rather than exterminate that ethnic group, or bottle its genetic secrets. Studies of Jewish contributions to science, culture and the arts also bear this out (Elon, 2013). Similarly, in order to learn from black athletes like Jesse Owens — who, to Hitler’s consternation, won four gold medals in the Berlin Olympic Games in 1936 — you would want to discover how blacks had such superior athletic ability, which also involves genetic factors (Dutton & Lynn, 2015; Epstein, 2014). We could say that the key difference been the notions of the Jewish chosen people and the putative Germanic master race was the former’s emphasis on surviv
al and the latter’s on domination.
One of the most insightful of analyses of the Jewish question remains that of the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. In Anti-Semite and Jew, originally published in 1946, Sartre argues that the anti-Semitic opinions of mainly lower middle-class citizens do not honestly explain the depth of hateful feeling behind anti-Semitism (Sartre, 1995). Rather, the hatred against Jews for economic sloughs, indeed for all social ills, was projected in ‘bad faith’. Interestingly, Sartre also argues that much of Jewish identity is sustained by its very resistance to anti-Semitism. Both Jews and anti-Semites deny their freedom, Jews by their ‘long martyrdom’ and anti-Semites by blaming Jews. Sartre, unlike many commentators, does not sentimentalise minorities but regards them as inauthentic like everyone else under capitalism: eventually, under Marxism, Judaism like all group identities would become unnecessary and dissolve. Since we are all aware of being seen and judged by others, ‘hell is other people’, in Sartre’s famous phrase, yet this inevitability is only magnified in multicultural societies, as if in a hellish hall of accusing mirrors.
But anti-Semitism is probably not now the problem it once was. The modest but well established population of about 300,000 Jews in Britain helps to explain this. Most Jewish people are not visibly different, nor do they usually stand out for causing any trouble, being unemployed, or making onerous demands on the indigenous gentile population. Anti-Brexiters’ claims that anti-Semitism has been whipped up by the 2016 EU referendum result are almost certainly an exaggeration, in spite of the apparent rise of groups like National Action and their reported admiration for Oswald Mosley. Some would explain this as Muslims having replaced Jews and blacks as the right-wing scapegoat for socioeconomic ills. Some would agree that the Holocaust was a dreadful event that underlines absolutely the ugliness and impermissibility of anti-Semitism. And some are simply forgiving, or tolerant of extreme statements, such as this by Susan Sontag, the American Jewish writer: ‘the white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads’ (Sontag, 1967).
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