 |
|
Nov. 6, 2009
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How
to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Nov. 5, 2009
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking
Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker
With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater?
With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change
With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 30, 2009
Oct. 29, 2009
JWisdom.com We Must Revamp our
Religious Vocabulary With Gavriel Aryeh Sanders ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 28, 2009
JWisdom.com Why what we wear
impacts who we are
With Rabbis Mordechai Becher, Menachem Golberger and Aliza Bulow ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 27, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The United Nations Is Outraged Again, Or: Department of Mideast Static
JWisdom.com The Science of Love
With Rabbi Jonathan Rietti ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 26, 2009
JWisdom.com Wisdom and Wonks
With Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 23, 2009
JWisdom.com Watermark and oneness
with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 4 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick Stop using limited powers in a way that expands our enemies' advantages over us
Oct. 22, 2009
JWisdom.com No More More Family Fights --- Really?
By Sarah Chana Radcliffe ( 5 minutes)
Oct. 21, 2009
Tonya Alanez: Holocaust denier sues survivor, calling Auschwitz memoir 'vicious lies'
JWisdom.com Meditating Jewishly: A
Panacea for Success by Sarah Yoheved Rigler ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 20, 2009
Dennis Prager: Obama and Dalai Lama: Why Israel Worries about U.S. President
JWisdom.com Abraham was not religious
By Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer ( 6 minutes)
Oct. 19, 2009
JWisdom.comWhy Good People Do Bad Things
By Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 16, 2009
JWisdom.com Hearing Voices
By Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 5 minutes)
Oct. 15, 2009
JWisdom.com: Former MTV producer and stand-up comedian Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff: Taming a Control Freak (A VERY fast 15 minutes)
|
| |
Jewish World Review
Dec. 8, 2003
/ 13 Kislev, 5764
An ancient contagion thrives
By Suzanne Fields
Stereotypes and the appeal to hate
http://www.jewishworldreview.com |
Stereotypes have their grim uses. Stereotypes galvanize hostility by dehumanizing a person or group, with no appeal to thinking. At best, in the hands of political cartoonists and satirists, stereotypes illuminate political and cultural observation with wit and insight. At worst, stereotypes appeal to man's capacity to hate, to direct terror against the innocent.
The Nazis used stereotypes of Jews to rally the storm troopers and led in a direct line to the concentration camps as whole nations (with a few honorable exceptions) turned their backs on the Jews. Although the Jewish stereotypes through history have see-sawed between Jewish helplessness and Jewish wealth and power, the Nazis successfully drew on both images, marking as targets both the unwashed orthodox of the ghetto and the "greedy bankers and businessmen" who — so they thought — had been successfully assimilated.
Stereotypes of other races and tribes have come and gone, borne on the tides of history, but Jews have never eliminated irrational resentment toward the sons and daughters of the diaspora. Hannah Arendt, the political philosopher, speculated that of all the 20th century social diseases, anti-Semitism would continue beyond the national, political and religious connections of geography. Current events suggest that she may be right.
JWR columnist Barbara Amiel, writing in the London Daily Telegraph, demonstrates how anti-Semitism has been revived among her countrymen. She quotes a European aristocrat during World War II: "I can't wait for this war to end, so a gentleman can be an anti-Semite again." The war ended, and the gentleman once again settled into his anti-Semitism.
"Modern anti-Semitism sits well with this anecdote," she writes. No honorable Brits would parade their anti-Semitism when the country was at war with the Third Reich, but with Hitler safely out of the way they could retreat to their salons to sneer, joined by the intellectual elites and their friends in the media. The editors of the left-leaning London Independent felt no compunction publishing a cartoon of Ariel Sharon, naked, eating a Palestinian infant, an insidious update of the blood libel dating from the Middle Ages, that Jews kill Christian babies for the blood to use in Satanic rituals. The blood libel, rendered an absurd curiosity of history in the West, is a staple of print and conversation in the Middle East, where Jews are frequently said to murder children for their blood as an ingredient in bread.
Egypt's newspapers typically print cartoons depicting Jews, with exaggerated hooked noses, devouring Palestinians. The BBC defends the depictions as "political" but not anti-Semitic because the authors are without "any historical hatred of Jews as a race." It's merely coincidence, of course, that the Israelis of our time bear a strong resemblance to the Jews depicted in the Nazi newspapers of the 1930s.
A cartoon in an Egyptian newspaper depicts an ugly Jew with the requisite enormous nose, in a yarmulke, throwing daggers at a child with angel wings, tied to a stake. Blood drips from the child's wounds and puddles at her feet. A Jordanian cartoon depicts a ravenous Jew at a table with knife and fork at the ready, eager to devour a tasty human dish on a silver platter about to be set before him by Uncle Sam.
In the history of anti-Semitism, stereotypes extend to protectors of Jews, as the Uncle Sam cartoon suggests. The anti-Semitism of the British and European elites quickly leads to hatred of America because democratic America supports democratic Israel. France and England should logically cherish Israel, too, as the lonely democracy in the Middle East, the only redoubt of free speech, free religion and the freedom to have no religion in that miserable corner of the world. But logic dies in resentment and hatred.
Anti-Semitism is nurtured by the left on our own campuses, sometimes disguised as merely anti-Israel sentiment. Sometimes Jews themselves lend cover. Marches against the war in Iraq in support of Palestine are fueled with anti-Semitic smears. At San Francisco State University, Jews marching in support of Israel were greeted with cries and posters warning that "Hitler did not finish the job."
Criticism of U.S. policy in the Middle East and criticism of Israel, even harsh criticism, is fair enough. It's not fair enough to draw on racist stereotypes. It's one of the sadder ironies of our time that the Jews established a home of their own in Israel as an inoculation against anti-Semitism only to discover that the ancient disease is alive, well, thriving — and threatening.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in Washington and in the media consider "must reading." Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
Comment on JWR contributor Suzanne Fields' column by clicking here.
Suzanne Fields Archives
© 2003, TMS
|
