ANTISEMITISMS

Examining the “fragmentary and divisive antagonism against Jews, even by Jews.”

Gilman, a professor emeritus at Emory University, is one of America’s most prolific scholars of Jewish history and identity. Here, he posits that there is no single, historical hatred of Jews, irrespective of culture and context. Instead, he says, “antisemitisms” depend on moments in history and on the particular kinds of Jews addressed. He argues that the vast range of modern Judaism—from secular Americans and ultra-Orthodox Israelis to anti-Zionist political activists—makes it impossible to think of a single, unified object of prejudice. Furthermore, there may be no stable Jewish sense of self over the life of an individual. “I take seriously the claims of an individual’s identity as a Jew, understanding that such identity can shift over time and place,” he writes. The most recent catalyst for such shifts has been Hamas’ deadly attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. After the 1950s, the author writes, “All Jews, no matter how defined, came to be enveloped in a new global community, demarcated now by the symbolic role that the State of Israel had taken in defining ‘Jewishness’.” For some, the 2023 attack has enabled a support of Palestinian rights that may echo a psychological “identification with the oppressor” and may even morph into “Jewish self-hatred.” But in the U.S., he writes, “The charge of antisemitisms during the period after 2023 became a cudgel, as in Imperial Germany, to attack any and all institutions or individuals seen…as the ‘foe’. The second Trump administration used it to suspend grants to medical research institutions, which had no relationship whatsoever to antisemitisms, as well as to demand the firing of members of academic Jewish studies departments whose views they found unacceptable.” We are all, now, Gilman writes, “caught in the web of our need to define those whom we feel as not only different but dangerous.” The line between the antisemite and the Jew, never truly sharp, is now, perhaps, irrevocably blurred.

A confrontational but always lucid view of Jewish identity and hatred of Jews.