Can Anti-Antisemitism be Rescued?
Antisemitism is to be fought against. Recognized as an origin of one of the worst genocides in living memory, antisemitism is measured, screened, and statistically assessed; it is a “root-evil,” the battle against which occupies a multitude of individuals and institutions across the political spectrum. In the fight against antisemitism, as the main thesis of Towards a Non-Carceral Anti-Antisemitism argues, the state’s primary tools are punitive and repressive: carceral. As if antisemitism was a virus to be combated through the administration of mandatory vaccinations, antisemitism is combated by “outlawing” it. However, according to the authors, carceral measures not only fail to effectively reach their declared aim, but to the contrary, endanger minoritized populations, Jews among them.
In the following, I will engage the authors’ call for a non-carceral, alternative anti-antisemitism by pointing at the functions and effects of the current, carceral discourse on antisemitism. My main question is if anti-antisemitism, at this point, can be “improved,” or if one could attempt to subvert and reject its underlying premises to begin with.
1: Antisemitism and the Valorization of Racial Discomfort
In his book Rechte Gefühle (Right-Wing Feelings), Simon Strick describes the New Right’s successful operations on the “metapolitical” level of everyday sentiments and affects. “Atmospheric shells,” so Strick, “begin to surround objects, images, events and terms.”1 Antisemitism, I’d venture, is one such metapolitical stimulus word surrounded by an atmospheric shell of anxiety-inducing images, events, concepts — and people. Antisemitism is potentially everywhere (atmospheric), and it is contagious and mutating (“secondary antisemitism,” “tertiary antisemitism” etc.). It is extremely flexible, fuzzy, and broad, and demands our attention by declaring: “Here is a problem, a suspicion, a verdict.” And it is precisely through this fuzzy broadness, that antisemitism can give a name to diverse, incoherent, and everyday experiences of racial discomfort:2 “I am uncomfortable with Muslims not because I am a racist, but because Muslims are antisemites and come from cultural backgrounds ignorant to the evilness of antisemitism.” “I feel alienated by gender-studies, postcolonial studies and human rights activists not because I have no clue about these fields, but because these milieus are antisemitic.” “Antisemitism” indicates discomfort as broadly as possible and positively values this state of being: “I am not a racist, but defend Jews.”3 “Anti-antisemitism,” in short, renders plausibility, legitimation and positive valor to feelings of racial discomfort.
2: The State as a Persecuted Minority
The discourse of antisemitism produces and disseminates narratives, positions, and affects in which subjects can recognize themselves as affected by antisemitism. Even though the fight against antisemitism is a foundational, extensively funded beacon of the post-1989 state, the Jews and non-Jews involved in this fight understand and present themselves as a marginalized and precarious species threatened with extinction.4
Anti-antisemitism, in other words, enables majorities to feel like subalterns at risk.5 And more: Anti-antisemitism lets the state itself speak in the name of a persecuted subject. When mimicking the idiom of a persecuted subject, the state’s carceral measures become acts of self-defense against antisemitism.
In an astonishing reversal, the flagships of the post-war order — the rule of law, asylum, human rights, pluralism etc. — can be identified as that which endangers a persecuted minority — just that this minority now is the state and its institutions. The fight against antisemitism speaks in the language of a victim, while being perfectly aligned with the New Right and post-democratic, authoritarian state structures, institutions and logics. It may not be an exaggeration to suggest that over the course of the past decade, the fight against antisemitism turned into the key that opened the door for authoritarian, anti-democratic, and new-right politics to enter the mainstream of political life. As such, the fight against antisemitism is politically and affectively aligned not with the fight against racism and the protection of minorities etc., but the erosion of democratic rights, the negotiability of international law, and the racial marking of persons as antisemites: Shalom Mahmoud.
3: Self-Denunciation
In as much as the fight against antisemitism uses the idiom of victimhood, it is a project that is carried by, and is connectable to, the left. Especially in Germany, for many people identifying, however broadly, as part of a left and liberal mainstream, the fight against antisemitism is an important part of their political subjectification.6 As a result, a lot of efforts run into the attempt to improve the fight against antisemitism and to salvage it from its weaponization (such as the manifold attempts to produce and implement an alternative definition of antisemitism next to the IHRA, or to produce “nuanced and non-discriminatory” empirical data on antisemitism in migrant communities).
The assumption underlying these approaches is that antisemitism is sustainable only as long as it is hidden, or somehow unacknowledged. Based on the premise that antisemitism is denied by democratic liberal crowds and that exposing it would therefore be a significant political act that can end it, antisemitism is to be rendered visible and combated via education, rather than carceral measures. This assumption, however, fails to notice that current anti-antisemitism was established and nourished for decades by educational institutions, and at least partly so by those that originate in non-statist, civil society contexts. It fails to notice, too, that the fight against antisemitism’s current substantial aim is not necessarily the protection of Jews.
Consider one of the central mottos of this fight in a German context: “Gegen jeden Antisemitismus” (Against all/every kind of antisemitism). This motto’s surface is in and of itself banal: Of course, all forms of antisemitism are to be rejected. On a meta level, however, “against all antisemitism” suggests that some people legitimize some forms of antisemitism. A discussion of the plausibility of this accusation is beside the point, because the aim of “against all antisemitism” is the (self-)denunciation of political opponents: this motto creates an aura, in which specific milieus (“the international art-scene”), concepts (“postcolonial studies,” “intersectional feminism,” “postmodern theory”) and terms (“apartheid,” “one-state solution”), as well as localities (“Sonnenallee”) and ethnicities (“Palestinians”), are marked as suspicious or, if need be, straightforwardly as “Hamas-lovers.” In light of this function of the current discourse of anti-antisemitism, it seems to me that an “improvement” of the fight against antisemitism will not do. I am asking myself, rather, if this discourse can be undermined to begin with.
4: A Possible Reversal
The basic assumption underlying the current fight against antisemitism does not address political settings in which this fight becomes an affirmative element of majoritarian political culture. If a sense of aversion to antisemitism is part of the construction of democratic, modern personhood, then does not also a belonging to and longing for antisemitism become integral to self-identity? If the fight against antisemitism constitutes a central part of people’s political subjectivation, then should we not think of the antisemitism in the “fight against antisemitism” as something that is not in conflict with the self but rather as something whose loss may actually threaten the self and its agentive repertoire? If anti-antisemitism is not “only” carceral and punishing, but productive — it makes certain things and subjectivities flourish! — can we think of antisemitism in terms of desire rather than combat? Analytically, it seems to me worthwhile to tackle the following questions, as starting points:
1. In as much as victimhood is a source of political agency, how far and in what instances does a desire to be a victim of antisemitism, to re-enact or re-feel victimhood, permeate the discourse of antisemitism? (See, for example, “reenactments” of October 7 taking place in “Nova exhibitions,” Holocaust museums, or also statistics of antisemitic incidents. Or more farcical, in the case of Gil Ofarim or the case of the police as a primary victim of antisemitism?)
2. Does a desire for antisemitism underly preemptive decisions that a person, a movement, an event, is antisemitic? (See, for example, the “pogrom of Amsterdam,” or again, the Ofarim case)
3. In how far does the fight against antisemitism depend on the production of antisemitism? How can the interdependence of anti-antisemitism and antisemitism be conceptualized, and what are the material effects of this interdependence?
4. In what ways does the self-conceptualization of the state of Israel as a moral player and victim depend on the production of antisemitism? (See, for example, the marking of international law and humanitarian organizations as antisemitic)
5. Is joy, or desire, enmeshed in fantasizing about harm done to Jews, is there joy produced in the gaze at harm done to Jews?
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- “Es bilden sich atmosphärische Hüllen um Dinge, Bilder, Ereignisse, Begriffe” (Simon Strick, Rechte Gefühle. Affekte und Strukturen des digitalen Faschismus. Bielefeld: transcript 2021, S. 81). Strick uses the term “climate zone” to capture the affective, pre-ideological, and everyday quality of new right agitation. ↩︎
- I use the expression “racial discomfort” because I think that this dynamic is not well captured by “hatred of foreigners” or explicit ideologies of racial supremacy. “Racial discomfort” can structure also relations between Jews, Black Germans, and Muslims, who were and are actively participating in the making of carceral anti-antisemitism. ↩︎
- Compare also Strick, S. 81. An important piece of this dynamic, that I am not outlining here, is the identification of the figure of the Jew as a German alter ego. Without such identification, the dynamic of anti-antisemitism would not be possible. For more on this see Hannah Tzuberi und Patricia Piberger, “Desiring Victimhood: German Self-Formation and the Moralization of Political Conflict” in: From Opferkonkurrenz to Solidarity: a Round Table with Manuela Bauche and Sébastien Tremblay and Hannah Tzuberi und Patricia Piberger, ‘Sprechen im Bildraum der Vergangenheit. Die “Jüdische Stimme” in Debatten über Antisemitismusdefinitionen’, in: Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung ↩︎
- See, for example, the (self-)stylization of Karoline Preisler as a lonely, courageous resistance-fighter. ↩︎
- Note the correlation between the expansive nature of antisemitism (to secondary and tertiary antisemitism) and the expansion of the conceptualization of victimhood to secondary and tertiary victimhood. ↩︎
- The formation of political subjectivities via (anti-)antisemitism is a larger, important question beyond the scope of this short response. Jews, for example, negotiate through anti-antisemitism – also via the critique of anti-antisemitism – their own political positions regarding the state of Israel. These positions are then framed as “Jewish identities” – hence, a certain desire in some milieus for “critical Jews” and the related accusation that anti-antisemitism itself would be antisemitic, as it targets Jews too. ↩︎