In Benjamin Ginsberg’s latest book, “The New American Anti-Semitism: The Left, The Right, and The Jews”, he urges Jews to “wake up” to the threat posed by left-wing antisemitism in the United States.
Ginsberg is the David Bernstein Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Center for Advanced Governmental Studies at Johns Hopkins University and the author, coauthor, or editor of 36 books.
The Jewish Light spoke to him in advance of his appearance at the St. Louis Jewish Book Festival at 1 p.m. Nov. 7. Some of the conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What is the new American antisemitism you explore in your book?
“Most Jews are accustomed to right-wing antisemites, going back to the Nazis and the antisemitism of the right in Europe. What’s new for Americans – and I don’t think American Jews have quite wrapped their heads around this – is that the main antisemitic threat today comes from the left. We see thousands of students and some non-students screaming about Zionism in the streets of New York and Philadelphia and other cities. And I was horrified when I watched the testimony of the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT – let’s call them ‘The Three Stooges.’ They were not willing to say whether students running around screaming ‘death to the Jews’ are in violation of their campus speech code, and the reason for that is that they’re afraid of liberal forces on their campuses. I thought, ‘This is sort of the end of things as we know them.’ We are at a point in American history where people can be openly antisemitic, certainly on college campuses and some elements of the news media. It’s become possible once again – it hadn’t been for decades – to publicly criticize the Jews. So we need to rethink our position in the United States, and think about who our friends are and who our enemies are, before it’s too late.”
You argue that Jews in the U.S. should forge alliances with evangelical Christians and other Christian Zionists who vocally support Israel. Why are those alliances important?
“When I say to Jewish friends, ‘You should take seriously the Christian Zionists,’ they say, ‘Oh, no, they just want to convert us.’ I talked one couple into going to a little convention where you had Jewish leaders and Christian Zionist leaders. They came away amazed and said, ‘You know, these people do have some strange ideas, but basically they are incredibly supportive of Israel.’ And that’s right. We need people who support Israel; doctrinal differences we can argue about later. Liberal, well-educated Americans sneer at this, but it’s not to be sneered at: There are millions of Bible-believing Christians who view the creation of Israel – and the astonishing victory by Israel over its foes in the 1967 Israel-Arab war – as things that were predicted in the Bible. And they’ve put pressure on the U.S. government (to support Israel). I think Jews are always reluctant to shift their alliances, to realize that their friends of yesterday aren’t their friends today.”
You’d finished writing this book before the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and had to make last-minute revisions to address the attacks. Since Oct. 7 we’ve seen a surge in the kind of antisemitism chronicled in your book, particularly on college campuses. How did we reach this point?
“The critical force that brought antisemitism to American colleges was Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). In American colleges, they joined the left-liberal intersectional alliance. Intersectionality is the theory that all oppressed people can struggle together against the ‘oppressors,’ even if their particular goals are different. This is how you get groups like ‘Queers for Palestine.’ If you tell them, ‘If you go to Palestine, they’ll kill you,’ they reject that because they’re part of an intersectional alliance with other anti-Zionist students. So SJP made themselves part of the intersectional alliance on campus after campus and as a result, anti-Zionism became another rallying cry for students and faculty on the political left. From there it marched forward through portions of the media, and it’s now an important force within the Democratic Party. In her writings, Hannah Arendt said that Jews, once they attach themselves to a particular political party, can’t figure out that it might be the wrong alliance, that maybe they should change. And that’s something that we see in the U.S. today with the ‘anti-Zionist’ alliance. I use the term anti-Zionist in quotes because in my view there is no difference whatsoever between anti-Zionism and antisemitism in the real world. Kids in school don’t learn to be anti-Zionist. They learn to hate the Jews.”
How does the exclusion of Jews we’re seeing on some campuses compare to Jews’ previous experiences with antisemitism in higher education?
“I would say we have a new quota system. It’s Jewish kids saying, ‘I don’t want to go to Penn [because of antisemitism], maybe I’ll go to Wake Forest,’ so it’s self-imposed. But it’s still an exclusion because Jewish kids and their parents have to decide if they are willing to put up with antisemitic activity on their campus. Antisemitic activity tolerated by the university administration is as much of an instrument of exclusion as was the old quota system. This system encourages Jews to exclude themselves. It took us two generations to get into those schools. Now they want to kick us out.”
You write that resentment of Jewish success has often led societies to persecute Jews. How is that resentment manifesting itself in the U.S. today?
“Given an opportunity Jews will be more successful than anyone else, and that breeds resentment. In a number of institutions there are people who would like to kind of push the Jews aside and take their places. This is true in the universities, in big law firms and in corporations. There is, not far below the surface, a politics of resentment. And in the appropriate political configuration of forces, that resentment can bubble up very quickly. Even where Jews seem very well-integrated into society, it can turn out to be less fully integrated than they realize. I confess I am paranoid because I was born in a refugee camp in Germany [in 1947]. All of this is, in a way, not new to me. But we paranoids are very often right.”
Benjamin Ginsberg will discuss how a culture of separateness and high achievement makes Jews vulnerable to political pathologies in a Nov. 7 talk at the St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum, 36 Millstone Campus Dr., at 1 p.m. General admission tickets can be purchased for $25 on the St. Louis Jewish Book Festival’s event ticketing page.
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