Trump, "Antisemitism," and the Jews
Are Jews responsible for what Trump is doing in our name? Yes.
This latest column (about the Trump administration using Jewish safety as an excuse to attack higher education and abduct foreign-born critics of Israel) was tricky to write, both presenting the dire facts straightforwardly and getting the tone right. I don’t particularly like the jeremiad style of political writing, nor the self-lacerating call to action. (“We can do better! We must do better!”) In the writing of leftist Jews in particular — and here I’m implicating myself — there is a certain idiom of anguished moral beseeching, usually alluding to our sorry history of suffering, which comes off as too precious and, frankly, narcissistic on the page.
Recognition of a shared experience with oppression can be a starting point for solidarity. But too often, I find, if there is not first an acknowledgement of who has power and what sort, the result is not solidarity but solipsism, a play for moral absolution rather than implication or risk-taking. People who have been oppressed are not natural experts on the oppression experienced by others. Far from it. Harm begets harm; victims become victimizers every day. The assumption otherwise has created a great deal of suffering and license in the world. (The history of the state of Israel is, alas, case in point.)
The problem is, in the case of Trump’s putative war on antisemitism, progressive Jews want simultaneously to insist “It’s a ruse; this is not really about us!” and “This will eventually make us less safe too!” In other words, we are not implicated in the gruesome actions undertaken for our sake AND, actually, when you think about it, we’re the real victims. This is an evasion. And, again, vanity. We are implicated, and we are not the victims. Insofar as we allow the administration to undertake its crackdown on our behalf — without speaking out vociferously against it — we are worse than bystanders; we are collaborators.
In the column, I write:
The plain fact is that our discourse about antisemitism is broken, divorced from reality, at once pedantic and illogical, a vehicle for smallness, moral narcissism, and confusion. Or else, perhaps, it is working exactly as designed. The concept of antisemitism in American political life now exists to demonize critics of Israel; it is what it does. And what it is doing is fueling authoritarianism.
I am sometimes astonished to observe how often people’s political arguments and ideologies are built on the need to avoid shame. It astonishes me because I am constantly ashamed. When something bad happens, my first assumption is usually: this is my fault. What have I done wrong? What could I have done differently? This is a form of narcissism too, of course. Neurotic, obviously, as well. But as a consequence, I have learned to dwell in shame without immediately looking for a way to abdicate responsibility, recriminate, or act out.
What if it is your fault? What if you owe others more than you can possibly fathom? What if our responsibility to act morally is without limit — and when we make apologies for ourselves and others, as we inevitably will, we should do so with shame, because the alternative, to err shamelessly, is necessarily a step toward cheapening, changing, or betraying our principles?
In a recent argument (on X.com) about these matters, someone accused me of making “special demands” on the Jews — and thereby engaging in antisemitism. Why should the Jews be any more moral than anyone else? Why should we shoulder the blame? My response: special moral burdens on the Jews?? Heaven forbid. Imagine if someone made a whole religion based on that idea!
Chag Sameach!
I have been puzzling over the psychological differences between people on this matter, while watching some people who are Jewish go one way on it, and other people go the opposite way on it. And it is so surprising because a lot of these people were raised in what seem like similar ways (sometimes they are in the same family), and yet this divergence opens up that’s pretty wide. It looks like such a large gulf in a person’s understanding of the world and one’s place in it—it seems like it clearly has something to do with a person’s conception of themselves. It comes from a very deep place in people. But what accounts for it? Why do some people accept this shame, and other people don’t?
Maybe we can’t fully explain it. To empathize with the people who are making what looks to be a grave moral mistake one thing I notice is that part of it might start out from something that looks benign, which is a person’s desire for safety, and how they conceive of their worthiness for safety, and what kind of world they imagine will make them safe. Some people doubt that they will be safe in the world if they embrace the shame, or embrace some of what we might call the features of the human condition that seem to come with shame, one of which is our basic human vulnerability/fallibility—and to them that feels amplified if you say everyone counts the same, none of us are so important, we’re weak and fragile and there isn’t anything special about us in the grand scheme even if we all have value. Meanwhile, we’re preferring ourselves all the time, and making ourselves the center of the universe in a certain respect. Some people respond with *oh cringe, look at my absurd hubris I better get off my high horse and acknowledge the value of everyone else* and other people respond with *no I am extra special, a very important person…somehow…oh, it’s that my group founded civilization or my nation-state kicks everyone’s ass and maybe sometimes even it is my group has suffered more than any other group in the history of humanity.* But whatever the story for different groups it comes down to—*we are so amazing —look at my amazingness, amplified through the amazingness of this larger group.*
You can of course say ‘sure we’re cool in such-and-such ways but those things are morally irrelevant in terms of how much people count when it comes to brass tacks.’ Giving up the idea of extra special worthiness doesn’t mean giving up all admiration for whatever things about yourself you appreciate or the things that come from your group that you appreciate. But it will be a loss to you if you lose that little frisson of extra-specialness, even in just in the narrative sense—of seeing yourself as part of the march of human history or whatever. There’s a sense you don’t get lost in the crowd.
So I wonder if, for some people, seeing themselves as extra special is important to making them feel safe. This is a mistake because everyone should be safe and they deny safety to others (and this can ultimately make everyone less safe) but perhaps that is why making people fearful can make them more inclined to denying the value of others in order to inflate their own worth—they don’t trust that they’ll be safe unless they have this extra golden ticket. Telling people you are giving them the extra golden safety ticket (and they’re a Gold Card Member of humanity generally) seems a great way to manipulate and control them over time.
Confronting people with the idea they are not so important that their welfare should completely dominate can feel like an existential psychic threat because who are they if they are not so extra special? This feels like an attack on what they fundamentally are. It can also feel like a physical threat if they are primed to believe the extra specialness is needed to guarantee their safety. It gets even more intense if you combine that with a moral criticism—because some moral criticisms can feel very threatening, even if you aren’t a narcissist. And they can even BE threatening because a certain kind of blame *does* come with a justification of retaliation.
If the idea ‘participating in injustice merits retaliation’ you’re probably going to go to great lengths to deny you participated in injustice. But most people who experience injustice, even really terrible injustice, DON’T retaliate once the injustice is over and they aren’t threatened (and sometimes even before). Even when they could. It’s fascinating! We should give up the idea of retaliation in general but also—we should notice that retaliation is about wielding power—it’s not justice. People who suffer injustice want to live in just conditions first and foremost.
None of this is to defend people who got into Gold Card Member of Humanity thinking on the basis of their racial or ethnic or national identity—hell no. I am just trying to understand why they seem to freak out so hard. The whole thing is incredibly dangerous and the very idea of Gold Card Members of Humanity should be attacked until we get rid of that idea since it’s a constant stepping stone to dehumanize other people.
Tl; dr—Yes, it’s narcissism. But it might be very complicated how people acquire it through their circumstances, and how it is maintained in people.
As an aside—a few of your thoughts sound so Catholic, LOL. Your podcasting friend may be rubbing off on you. I kid but the idea of owing to others what you cannot possibly fathom—that’s just an idea I was raised with. There’s a way of seeing one’s responsibility as enormous can be hubris too—but that’s just another painful thing about our powerlessness as beings. We learn these attitudes so early though—we might struggle to re-write any of these scripts in our head so I don’t know how responsible we are for them.
Hi Sam,
I left a critical comment yesterday and then deleted it because it felt kind of dick-ish.
I do agree with the emotional truth of your essay and empathize with much of your piece but disagree with the dynamics as you describe them.
I am sure you may have seen it already but most of my disagreements with your piece are put better (and more graciously) than I ever could in Jon-Danforth-Appell’s recent essay in JC:
https://jewishcurrents.org/against-zionist-realism
Even though I disagree with your take I do appreciate you contributing to what is clearly a necessary conversation.