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The political diversity of anti-Semitism

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https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-com...i-semitism

EXCERPT: . . . The staggering large-scale defeat of Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party had many causes, but the toxin of anti-Semitism within Labour was clearly one of them. It led many longtime Jewish Labour stalwarts to quit the Party, and it was italicized by instances of Corbyn tolerating acts or statements indifferent to or hostile to Jews, and by his pettish refusal to offer an apology that was not self-evidently forced and reluctant.

[...] This was, to be sure, a different kind of anti-Semitism, one rooted in a hatred of the injustices seen to be inflicted by the Jewish state of Israel more than in classic European anti-Semitism. But it is a form of anti-Zionism that passes beyond the boundaries of acceptable—indeed, essential—criticism of Israel to become a kind of mono-causal paranoia. (A tell-ale sign is that other countries equally guilty of oppressive or inequitable behavior are passed over, as Israel becomes the primary target of, in this case, left-wing anger. Injustice in Israel is real; it is also so far from unique that it merely confirms the truth that Jews are no different from other people.)

The progressive vision of countless generations of Labour activists lies in ruins this week, along with the equally noble dream of Britain playing a leading role in what Gladstone once called “the concert of Europe,” and anti-Semitism played a tragically and improbably large role in making it all happen.

Any Francophile would recognize, meanwhile, that the plague continues to inflict France. Last week, on the Paris Metro, an Israeli Jew was assaulted merely for speaking Hebrew on his cell phone. Elsewhere in France, a mere week earlier, more than a hundred Jewish graves in a rural cemetery were desecrated. Indeed, the assault in Jersey City brought to a cross-referencing mind an attack on a kosher grocery in Paris, in 2015, carried out in connection with the shooting at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

[...] In Jersey City, where a horrific attack in a kosher market ended with six people shot dead, it seemed at first likely that the murders had been committed by someone possessed by the demons of the “alt-right” [...] Then it was revealed that one of the two suspects in the Jersey City attack appeared to be linked to a black fringe group. But, in the end, the shooters seem to have been stranded on a deranged island of their own—isolated, perhaps, but forming one more stop in the anti-Semitic archipelago [...] (MORE)
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