A Pasionaria Against Progressive Anti-Semitism

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The New York Sun

Which is worse — anti-Zionism or anti-Semitism? That question, which we’ve been mulling for weeks, was brilliantly embroidered in a speech in Manhattan this week by the Jewish pasionaria Bari Weiss. She had started her newspaper career at the Sun and is now the newest star columnist at the New York Times, where she’s emerged in the van against anti-Semitism not just on the right but also on the left.

This couldn’t be a hotter topic. Britain’s Labor Party is seething with hostility. The president of the French Fifth Republic has just gone before his country’s Jewish community to acknowledge publicly that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. America’s Democratic Party is failing to purge from its own ranks agitators against the Jews. It’s even elevating them to important committees.

Ms. Weiss quoted the novelist Dara Horn as dividing the hatred into two forms — “Purim anti-Semitism and Hannukah anti-Semitism.” The former, Ms. Horn suggests, is exemplified by the “Persian genocidal decrees in the biblical book of Esther, as well as by more recent ideologies like Nazism and today’s many versions of radical Islam.” The “regime’s goal is unambiguous: Kill all the Jews.”

The Hannukah version stems from the Seleucid regime that two centuries before the common era criminalized all expressions of Judaism. Now, as then, this version, as Ms. Weiss puts it, “asks the Jews to take part in their own destruction.” Ms. Weiss quoted Ms. Horn as suggesting the Hannukah version of anti-Semitism appearing from the Inquisition in Spain and to the Soviet Union to our own time.

Ms. Weiss told her audience that she doesn’t know what is in President Trump’s heart, but faulted him for rhetoric that attracts the ilk of David Duke (who would be a remnant of Persian anti-Semtism). Ms. Weiss noted that the killer who struck her home-town synagogue in Pittsburgh thought Mr. Trump was too much of a globalist, but the murderer also railed against the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.

Yet the Timeswoman, who at the Sun covered anti-Semitism at Columbia University, was particularly pointed when she wheeled on the Left over Hannukah anti-Semitism. “Alas for the Jews, we don’t get to choose who hates us,” quoth she. She suggested the progressives’ modus operandi is a “siren song to American Jews” who pride themselves for being in the van against racism and for justice.

“Some of the most fashionable, high-profile progressives in the country at the moment — the leaders of the Women’s March, groundbreaking politicians celebrated for shattering glass ceilings — are the ones who hold deeply disturbing views about the biggest ‘Jew’ today in the demonology of modern anti-Semitism: Israel,” is the way Ms. Weiss marked it Monday at Manhattan.

“Left-wing anti-Semitism,” Ms. Weiss reckoned, “is less physically threatening” but “because of the easy way it can be smuggled into the mainstream, and because of the way it can manipulate us, it is perhaps more existentially dangerous.” Ms. Weiss underlined the point in an onstage conversation with the editor of Tablet, Alana Newhouse, who has been scooping the secular press on this beat.

It’s newsworthy that the point is being made with such brio by a columnist of the Times. We are in the early stages of an election where anti-Semitism is likely to emerge as one of the issues, lest the Democratic Party be suborned as the Labor Party has been in Britain. It will be a time to remember that those who say they’re merely against Israel are the more dangerous lot.


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