The New Anti-semitism: The Current Crisis and What We Must Do About it [Hardcover]

In an old, rueful joke, one Jew sends another a telegram. "Start worrying," it commands. "Details to follow." To understand why such fatalism strikes a deep communal chord among Jews, one might consider the dramatic resurgence of anti–Semitism in the past three years. By midsummer of 2000, Jews in America and abroad seemed to have achieved unprecedented acceptance and safety. A Jewish senator, Joseph Lieberman, had been named to the Democratic presidential ticket, instantly adding 15 points to Al Gore′s standing in the polls. Israel and the Palestinian Authority stood closer than ever to negotiating a two–state solution. On a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Pope John Paul II had paid homage at the Holocaust museum of Yad Vashem and introduced himself to a Jewish audience as "your brother."
When the Al–Aksa Intifada erupted that September, however, it did more than just shatter the peace process. It restored the public respectability of Jew–hating, particularly if conducted under the rubric of "anti–Zionism." Since then, Egypt has broadcast a 40–part television series based in part on the notorious forgery "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." Protesters at San Francisco State University, invoking the medieval blood libel, have passed out posters depicting a can of "Palestinian Children Meat" that was "made in Israel" according to "Jewish rites." European scholars have banned Israeli academics, even those of impeccably dovish politics, from conferences and journals.
So one can well understand the forces that drove Phyllis Chesler to produce The New Anti–Semitism, her combination cri de coeur and J′accuse. Chesler′s outrage is especially genuine and credible because she is not one of the Jewish community′s professional watchdogs, paid to howl about bias anywhere and everywhere. Married to an Afghan in the 1960s, she experienced "enormous kindness, humor, good–naturedness among Muslims." She built her own speaking and writing career around feminist issues and even sued the Israeli government to force it to reform its policy of not allowing women to hold worship services at the Western Wall. "But my heart is broken," she puts it early in this book, "by the cunning and purposeful silence of progressives and academics on the subject of anti–Semitism and terrorism."
Indeed, Chesler′s thesis rests largely on her perception of anti–Semitism flourishing among elites. "What′s new about the new anti–Semitism," she contends, "is that acts of violence against Jews and anti–Semitic words and deeds are being uttered and performed by politically correct people in the name of anti–imperialism, anti–racism, and pacifism. Old–time anti–Semitism was expressed in the name of ethnic, Aryan, white purity, superiority, and nationalism . . . . The new anti–Semite cannot, by definition, be an anti–Semite racist because she speaks out on behalf of oppressed people."
More specifically, the new anti–Semite inflicts the language of the Holocaust on its targets. The Irish poet Tom Paulin, she points out, termed the Israeli military the "Zionist SS." Nobel laureate Jose Saramago declared that "the Jews endlessly scratch their own wound to keep it bleeding, to make it incurable, and they show it to the world as if it were a banner." Neither author′s career, it might be added, has notably suffered as a result.
Yet one can subscribe to Chesler′s premise while lamenting how little she has done with it. The New Anti–Semitism is a book with important things to say and a maddeningly sloppy way of saying them. Signs of haste mar this text –– not haste in the sense of alacrity and urgency, but in the sense of messy execution. Now, it may well be that for some readers, even many readers, Chesler′s book validates itself simply by compiling so many egregious episodes of anti–Semitism in one place; for them, it should serve well as a fact sheet, a manual, a primer. Surely Chesler herself, though, would want her work judged in part on its writerly merits, and on those it falters severely.
In a book with more than enough disturbing information, Chesler nonetheless layers on hyperbole and absolutism. Not content to argue correctly that anti–Semitism pervades Islam today, she makes the completely unsupported assertion that "Not a Friday goes by when hatred of Jews, Israelis, America and the West is not preached in Arabic in every mosque on earth." Appalling as the violence against Jews already is, she insists on raising it to the level of an incipient Holocaust, asking, "Will six million more have to die before the bloodletting stops?"
Chesler duplicates certain anecdotes in consecutive pages, even paragraphs. She twice uses the same extended quotation from columnist Charles Krauthammer. She even repeats a joke about some disputatious Jews shipwrecked on a desert island. These gaffes betray an author who wrote in such a hurry that she lost track of her material, and they implicate an editor who failed to bring the most basic kind of order to a manuscript.
Having rightly perceived the contours of a new kind of anti–Semitism, Chesler rarely stops to analyze its development. How and why did it become part of the anti–globalism movement? How and when did Muslims begin adopting anti–Semitic tracts and myths created in Europe? When did Holocaust imagery start being used to attack Jews? What factors –– Muslim immigration to the West? cable television? the Internet? –– allowed the Al–Aksa Intifada to be internationalized in a way that the first intifada was not? And what has made the United States, despite some offensive incidents on college campuses, largely resistant to anti–Semitic propaganda?
To make such analyses is not to rationalize anti–Semitism; it is to help effectively fight against it. As a Jew and a Zionist, I want so much to be on Phyllis Chesler′s side. As a reader and an author, however, I can only wish she had served our common cause in a more lucid and penetrating fashion. —Samuel G. Freedman, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author most recently of "Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry." (The Washington Post, Sunday, August 3, 2003)

"Her book is a passionate polemic...Chesler offers insightful analysis into the psychology of the phenomenon." (Library Journal,September 15, 2003)

Phyllis Chesler, a well–known feminist and the author of Women and Madness, has written an impassioned response to what she calls "the new anti–Semitism." Part polemic, part history, her book posits Sept. 11 as the moment when an unprecedented form of anti–Semitism gained "respectability" among a wide spectrum of opponents of the state of Israel.
Unfortunately, the phenomena Chesler writes about began forming long before Sept. 11, and the author only adds to the misconceptions surrounding the terrorist attack on the United States when she writes that "always it begins with the Jews. Osama bin Laden... explained that the twin towers had fallen because of American support for Israel." This view continues to have wide currency on the Internet, although most scholars agree that the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was Bin Laden′s response to America′s support for the Saudi royal family and the Mubarek government in Egypt.
I cite Chesler′s misreading of Sept. 11 because it is symptomatic of the loose manner in which she uses her sources. Nevertheless, despite flaws in methodology, her book correctly defines the essence of "the new anti–Semitism."
What is new about the new anti–Semitism, Chesler argues, is that it has "metamorphosed into the most virulent anti–Zionism, which in turn has increasingly held the Jewish people everywhere... accountable for the military policies of the Israeli government." Nowhere, Chesler writes, is this more prominent than among the left, including her comrades in the feminist movement, where anti–Semitism masquerades as antiracism and anticolonialism.
Chesler argues that it has become politically and psychologically acceptable to be anti–Semitic. Opposition to Israeli policy is used to justify not only anti–Jewish violence – such as the burning of synagogues and the vandalizing of cemeteries in Europe – but also intellectuals′ silence regarding suicide bombings in ...

"...the book is highly passionate and personal." (Publishers Weekly, June 23, 2003)

"Her book is a passionate polemic...Chesler offers insightful analysis into the psychology of the phenomenon." (Library Journal,September 15, 2003)

“…impassioned and highly readable…” (Sunday Telegraph, 5 October 2003)

A dangerous, worldwide coalition of Islamic terrorists, well–intentioned but profoundly misinformed students, right wing fascists, left–wing ideologues, pious academics, feminists, opportunistic European politicians, and sensation–seeking international media have joined together to once again blame the Jews and the Jewish state for the current world crisis. Today, lethal activism against the Jews often takes the form of anti–Zionism. Osama Bin Laden, for example, blamed the 9/11 World Trade Center attack on U.S. government support for Israel. Since then, hundreds of synagogues have been burned, cemeteries and destroyed, and Jews threatened, boycotted, beaten, and killed. Jews have been blamed for huge stock market losses and for the decline of the world economy. The long–ago disproven Protocols of Zion, which accuse the Jews of an alleged world–conspiracy to conquer and control the world, have been revived and promulgated in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East.

So what must we do? "Fight against the Big Lies," Chesler says. (No, the Jews do not control the world′s money and media, and the Jews did not kill Christ.) Avoid rigid, dogmatic ideologies. Focus on the world′s real problems (disease, poverty, illiteracy, violence) instead of scapegoating the Jews and demonizing the Jewish state. Be fair to Israel. Form Jewish–Christian, Jewish–Muslim, and Jewish–Palestinian alliances. Restore campus civility and above all, Jews must stop fighting among themselves.