What Sam Kriss Gets Wrong About Allegations of Antisemitism
As a Jewish woman with a stake in this subjet matter, I read the recent op-ed, The Cudgel of Antisemitism, written by British Jewish journalist Sam Kriss, published by Glenn Greenwald, asking, "Is there a crisis of hatred against Western Jews, or are they just another causality in the game of victimhood politics?" with great interest. I am someone who is always willing to hear a point of view that might cause me to think about an issue with a new perspective.
This piece did not change my mind. In fact, it solidified my resolve to not allow overt antisemitism to thrive just because the accusation of it has been used as a cudgel in some circumstances, often for political purposes.
When the author writes, "I do not want a world in which everyone who deploys some kind of antisemitic trope is swiftly punished for their opinions; I want a world in which I do not have to care," that's a nice fantasy, but it's simply not a reality. We don't live in that world.
While Mr. Kriss and I don't live in impoverished neighborhoods, or in places where synagogues are shot up by Jew haters (well, they are where I live in Los Angeles, California), millions of other Jews do live in those places and under those conditions. And isn't it our responsibility to care about them as much as we do our own political sensibilities?
I am a Jewish woman who has faced ugly antisemitism in my life, not just nasty social media slurs (though I have experienced my fair share of those, as well, and they are always quite disturbing). I could have told my own personal story in the play, Jews. In Their Own Words, referenced and dismissed in the piece as "deeply weird and unsettling because something is obviously wrong with" the stories that were told by the participants. (His emphasis.) Since I was not interviewed for that play, let me tell one of those stories here.
When I was a teenager, I successfully gathered signatures and petitioned to start a pom-pom squad for the 9th-grade sports teams. It was a great source of pride for me that I was able to pull off what other girls had asked for many times over the years but were never able to accomplish. And I was honored to have been voted by my teammates to be a co-captain of the squad.
It was 1976, and on the news one morning, we learned that the United Nations had taken a vote and overwhelmingly declared that Zionism was racism.
As a Mid-Western Jewish family who still believed in the promise of Israel as a safe haven for our fellow Jews, and not armed with the knowledge we have today about the atrocities against the Arab Palestinians it is committing, we were quite devastated.
Jews around the world started wearing black armbands as a sign of mourning, and I wanted to participate as a show of solidarity. My mother was a seamstress as a hobby and had some black fabric from which she cut a strip to tie around my upper arm. I brought the remaining fabric with me to school that day so that I could share it with any of my friends who wanted to join me, which many did, including several of my teammates.
This was not a game day, but the squad had to be in uniform because we were having our team photo taken for the yearbook.
At some point during the school day, I was approached by the vice principal and asked what my intentions were regarding wearing the armbands in the photo. Realizing in that moment that it would, in fact, be inappropriate, I assured him that they would not be visible, and asked if hiding them under our long sleeves at the cuff, hidden behind the pom-poms would be acceptable, which he agreed was a perfect compromise.
That should have been the end of it, but, unfortunately, it wasn't. At the beginning of my next class, a student from one of our team's teacher-sponsors (one who had been solicited by other girls who were helping me gather signatures to form the squad in the beginning) came to my class to escort me to that teacher's class because she wanted to talk to me about something.
When I got there, she didn't talk to me, she SCREAMED at me in front of her entire class from across the room as soon as I entered the door, demanding that I "take that damn thing off and throw it in the trash immediately."
Shaking, I turned and left without so much as a word, and returned to my own class. My teacher could see that I was quite visibly upset and asked me why. I explained what his colleague had just done to me. He responded by asking if I had any more of that fabric to make him an armband, had me cut one for him, put it on him, and he marched into her room to shove it in her face while pretending to want to borrow some test tubes, making sure she knew to never mess with one of his students like that again.
However, that didn't stop her rampage against me in the least. At the photo shoot later that day, the photographer approached me to let me know he was ready to begin, and asked me to get the attention of my team to gather together and to "remove" the armbands. So I got the other girls' attention and reminded everyone wearing an armband to either remove it or hide it under their sleeve as agreed to by the vice principal.
Then I heard my name SCREAMED across the auditorium by this deranged teacher, and she proceeded to read me the riot act in front of my team and demanded I sit on the bleachers and keep my mouth shut, which, of course I had no option but to do.
But my abuse at this woman's hands wasn't quite over just because the day was. Not long after that, I had an "unexcused" absence from a rehearsal. It had been OKed by my fellow captain, seeing as how I helped choreograph it and needed the time to study for a maths exam that was happening the next day. But it had not been approved by either of the team's two teacher-sponsors.
Because of this lapse made by a 14-year-old girl, I was promptly kicked off the squad by the abusive teacher.
My mother called for a meeting with the teacher and the vice principal to understand the motivation for this drastic of a response, and to perhaps see if there were any way to reverse the decision.
To my mother and the also-Jewish vice principal, this teacher said that she had kicked me off my squad "because she's a goddamn Jew, and I hate her."
Yes, that's an exact quote.
So, kicked off I stayed, humiliated in front of my entire school for the duration of the school year. This same teacher vowed to ensure I'd never be admitted onto any cheer or pom-pom team at the high school I'd be attending the following year (the 9th grade was housed with the junior high at that time), and she made good on that promise.
Meanwhile, nobody with any authority did anything to protect me from this woman's hateful wrath ― not the team's other teacher-sponsor who actually disagreed with this decision, not the vice principal, and not even my parents. I just had to live with the consequences of this unfounded hatred of me by an unhinged antisemite.
Was it really Earth shattering that a white girl from a fairly affluent neighborhood with a large Jewish community couldn't be a pom-pom girl dancing at halftime during football and basketball games? It's not like I lost a career, my livelihood, or my life.
But the long-term effects that experience had on my psyche have been profound. I have trust issues to this day, and I'm 61 years old. It made me realize that anything that I had could be taken away on a whim by someone who hated me just because I was born Jewish.
Even my life.
Just ask Heather Heyer, Joyce Fienberg, Jerry Rabinowitz, Daniel Stein, Richard Gottfried, Cecil Rosenthal, David Rosenthal, Melvin Wax, Rose Mallinger, Bernice Simon, Sylvan Simon, Irving Younger, or Lori Gilbert-Kaye.
But you can't — they're dead at the hands of antisemites.
Today, modern-day Nazis are on a rampage in Ukraine, spreading vicious and ugly anti-Jewish hatred and mass killing thousands. Their movement is growing and spreading outside of Ukraine with plans to expand into Turkey, Poland, and Britain according to their leaders.
The Nation magazine reported in February 2019, "Neo-Nazis and the Far Right Are On the March in Ukraine":
"Five years after the Maidan uprising, anti-Semitism and fascist-inflected ultranationalism are rampant. …
"Today, increasing reports of far-right violence, ultranationalism, and erosion of basic freedoms are giving the lie to the West’s initial euphoria. There are neo-Nazi pogroms against the Roma, rampant attacks on feminists and LGBT groups, book bans, and state-sponsored glorification of Nazi collaborators.
"These stories of Ukraine’s dark nationalism aren’t coming out of Moscow; they’re being filed by Western media, including US-funded Radio Free Europe (RFE); Jewish organizations such as the World Jewish Congress and the Simon Wiesenthal Center; and watchdogs like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Freedom House, which issued a joint report warning that Kiev is losing the monopoly on the use of force in the country as far-right gangs operate with impunity."
"The C14 Nazi terror gang signed an agreement with the Kiev municipal government to patrol its streets. This footage taken just a few months later in 2018 shows them carrying out a pogrom against a Romani camp."
Nazis have been incorporated into Ukraine's armed forces (no longer a militia) including the Azov Battalion. One of their leaders, a neo-nazi named Andriy Biletsky, said in an interview with The Telegraph, "The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival … a crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen." Untermenschen means "sub-humans," for those unfamiliar with the term.
Here, just this year, Ukrainian paratroopers sing the praises of WWII-era Nazi and Hitler collaborator Stepan Bandera, responsible for the mass murder of more than 100,000 Jews and Poles during the war.
Here, also recently, the "Klichko Faction at Kiev City Council Sing Song In Honour Of Nazi Collaborator 'Our Father Is Bandera' and chant 'Glory to Ukraine ... Glory to the Nazi's ... Ukraine Above All Others'"
Here, a 2017 BBC video report about the Azov Nazis shows city hall in Cherkasy, Ukraine, surrounded by security forces because a previous council saw Nazis holding city council hostage until they voted for the mayor's budget. According to Deputy Oleksander Radutskyl, "Cherkasy is now a training ground for a military coup in Ukraine," and that "this sort of thing can't exist in Ukraine without the Interior Ministry's approval." Interior Minister Arsen Avakov's ties to Azov Nazis is well known according to the documentary report. "He's put their fighters on the payroll of his ministry, and appointed one of their commanders, Vadim Toryan, as his deputy."
These are fraught and frightening times for many Jews around the world. And while I'm with Mr. Kriss in his observation about the weaponization of antisemitism, I believe we have an obligation ― at least to those more vulnerable than we are ― to condemn the language that is used as a very real weapon that puts our lives at risk everywhere in the world, and to hold accountable those spreading actual — not politically invented — antisemitic tropes and Holocause-denialism, like the three gentlemen (a term I use reluctantly, given their obvious unfounded disdain for me) who sparked this latest controversy: Ye (the musician formerly known as Kanye West), Kyrie Irving, and Dave Chappelle (whose artistry, athletic skill, and comedy I am otherwise a fan of).
Of course Mr. Kriss is correct in that not every bad thing directed at Jewish people is antisemitic in its intent. I was among the first to defend United States Congresswoman Ilhan Omar against allegations of antisemitism when she pointed out quite correctly that the Israel lobby is "all about the Benjamins." Any honest observer knows that money is a driving force in all lobbying, and saying so about the Jewish lobby doesn't make someone an antisemite.
But when you have celebrities repeating and propagating actual antisemitic tropes about Jews having outsized control of our institutions, feeding the hatred of us that is held by White Supremacists who are using these false notions as a reason to kill us, I would hope we wouldn't ricochet so far in the "let's not call every bad thing directed at Jews antisemitism" plea, that we cease to call it out when it's actually there.
And it is there in these instances. Let me remind you that the movie being promoted by these men is based on a book which asserts that "many famous, high-ranking Jews" have "admitted" to satan worship and falsely suggests that the Talmud teaches that Blacks are "cursed with their skin color," which "established the base for Black racism even before the KKK." Not to mention invoking the deeply antisemitic hoax, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
This is dangerous stuff that does nothing but instill hatred of the Jewish people. And hatred is what gets us killed.
Letting antisemitism off the hook simply because alleging it is overused in other cases can pose a real danger to people in ways we may never be able to see in our own privileged worlds.
How about we condemn its weaponization when it isn't warranted, but also condemn it when it's real, taking the opportunity to educate, not necessarily to cancel.
After all, nobody canceled the teacher who abused me because I am a Jew.
Jill Klausen
This piece did not change my mind. In fact, it solidified my resolve to not allow overt antisemitism to thrive just because the accusation of it has been used as a cudgel in some circumstances, often for political purposes.
When the author writes, "I do not want a world in which everyone who deploys some kind of antisemitic trope is swiftly punished for their opinions; I want a world in which I do not have to care," that's a nice fantasy, but it's simply not a reality. We don't live in that world.
While Mr. Kriss and I don't live in impoverished neighborhoods, or in places where synagogues are shot up by Jew haters (well, they are where I live in Los Angeles, California), millions of other Jews do live in those places and under those conditions. And isn't it our responsibility to care about them as much as we do our own political sensibilities?
I am a Jewish woman who has faced ugly antisemitism in my life, not just nasty social media slurs (though I have experienced my fair share of those, as well, and they are always quite disturbing). I could have told my own personal story in the play, Jews. In Their Own Words, referenced and dismissed in the piece as "deeply weird and unsettling because something is obviously wrong with" the stories that were told by the participants. (His emphasis.) Since I was not interviewed for that play, let me tell one of those stories here.
When I was a teenager, I successfully gathered signatures and petitioned to start a pom-pom squad for the 9th-grade sports teams. It was a great source of pride for me that I was able to pull off what other girls had asked for many times over the years but were never able to accomplish. And I was honored to have been voted by my teammates to be a co-captain of the squad.
It was 1976, and on the news one morning, we learned that the United Nations had taken a vote and overwhelmingly declared that Zionism was racism.
As a Mid-Western Jewish family who still believed in the promise of Israel as a safe haven for our fellow Jews, and not armed with the knowledge we have today about the atrocities against the Arab Palestinians it is committing, we were quite devastated.
Jews around the world started wearing black armbands as a sign of mourning, and I wanted to participate as a show of solidarity. My mother was a seamstress as a hobby and had some black fabric from which she cut a strip to tie around my upper arm. I brought the remaining fabric with me to school that day so that I could share it with any of my friends who wanted to join me, which many did, including several of my teammates.
This was not a game day, but the squad had to be in uniform because we were having our team photo taken for the yearbook.
At some point during the school day, I was approached by the vice principal and asked what my intentions were regarding wearing the armbands in the photo. Realizing in that moment that it would, in fact, be inappropriate, I assured him that they would not be visible, and asked if hiding them under our long sleeves at the cuff, hidden behind the pom-poms would be acceptable, which he agreed was a perfect compromise.
That should have been the end of it, but, unfortunately, it wasn't. At the beginning of my next class, a student from one of our team's teacher-sponsors (one who had been solicited by other girls who were helping me gather signatures to form the squad in the beginning) came to my class to escort me to that teacher's class because she wanted to talk to me about something.
When I got there, she didn't talk to me, she SCREAMED at me in front of her entire class from across the room as soon as I entered the door, demanding that I "take that damn thing off and throw it in the trash immediately."
Shaking, I turned and left without so much as a word, and returned to my own class. My teacher could see that I was quite visibly upset and asked me why. I explained what his colleague had just done to me. He responded by asking if I had any more of that fabric to make him an armband, had me cut one for him, put it on him, and he marched into her room to shove it in her face while pretending to want to borrow some test tubes, making sure she knew to never mess with one of his students like that again.
However, that didn't stop her rampage against me in the least. At the photo shoot later that day, the photographer approached me to let me know he was ready to begin, and asked me to get the attention of my team to gather together and to "remove" the armbands. So I got the other girls' attention and reminded everyone wearing an armband to either remove it or hide it under their sleeve as agreed to by the vice principal.
Then I heard my name SCREAMED across the auditorium by this deranged teacher, and she proceeded to read me the riot act in front of my team and demanded I sit on the bleachers and keep my mouth shut, which, of course I had no option but to do.
But my abuse at this woman's hands wasn't quite over just because the day was. Not long after that, I had an "unexcused" absence from a rehearsal. It had been OKed by my fellow captain, seeing as how I helped choreograph it and needed the time to study for a maths exam that was happening the next day. But it had not been approved by either of the team's two teacher-sponsors.
Because of this lapse made by a 14-year-old girl, I was promptly kicked off the squad by the abusive teacher.
My mother called for a meeting with the teacher and the vice principal to understand the motivation for this drastic of a response, and to perhaps see if there were any way to reverse the decision.
To my mother and the also-Jewish vice principal, this teacher said that she had kicked me off my squad "because she's a goddamn Jew, and I hate her."
Yes, that's an exact quote.
So, kicked off I stayed, humiliated in front of my entire school for the duration of the school year. This same teacher vowed to ensure I'd never be admitted onto any cheer or pom-pom team at the high school I'd be attending the following year (the 9th grade was housed with the junior high at that time), and she made good on that promise.
Meanwhile, nobody with any authority did anything to protect me from this woman's hateful wrath ― not the team's other teacher-sponsor who actually disagreed with this decision, not the vice principal, and not even my parents. I just had to live with the consequences of this unfounded hatred of me by an unhinged antisemite.
Was it really Earth shattering that a white girl from a fairly affluent neighborhood with a large Jewish community couldn't be a pom-pom girl dancing at halftime during football and basketball games? It's not like I lost a career, my livelihood, or my life.
But the long-term effects that experience had on my psyche have been profound. I have trust issues to this day, and I'm 61 years old. It made me realize that anything that I had could be taken away on a whim by someone who hated me just because I was born Jewish.
Even my life.
Just ask Heather Heyer, Joyce Fienberg, Jerry Rabinowitz, Daniel Stein, Richard Gottfried, Cecil Rosenthal, David Rosenthal, Melvin Wax, Rose Mallinger, Bernice Simon, Sylvan Simon, Irving Younger, or Lori Gilbert-Kaye.
But you can't — they're dead at the hands of antisemites.
Today, modern-day Nazis are on a rampage in Ukraine, spreading vicious and ugly anti-Jewish hatred and mass killing thousands. Their movement is growing and spreading outside of Ukraine with plans to expand into Turkey, Poland, and Britain according to their leaders.
The Nation magazine reported in February 2019, "Neo-Nazis and the Far Right Are On the March in Ukraine":
"Five years after the Maidan uprising, anti-Semitism and fascist-inflected ultranationalism are rampant. …
"Today, increasing reports of far-right violence, ultranationalism, and erosion of basic freedoms are giving the lie to the West’s initial euphoria. There are neo-Nazi pogroms against the Roma, rampant attacks on feminists and LGBT groups, book bans, and state-sponsored glorification of Nazi collaborators.
"These stories of Ukraine’s dark nationalism aren’t coming out of Moscow; they’re being filed by Western media, including US-funded Radio Free Europe (RFE); Jewish organizations such as the World Jewish Congress and the Simon Wiesenthal Center; and watchdogs like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Freedom House, which issued a joint report warning that Kiev is losing the monopoly on the use of force in the country as far-right gangs operate with impunity."
"The C14 Nazi terror gang signed an agreement with the Kiev municipal government to patrol its streets. This footage taken just a few months later in 2018 shows them carrying out a pogrom against a Romani camp."
Nazis have been incorporated into Ukraine's armed forces (no longer a militia) including the Azov Battalion. One of their leaders, a neo-nazi named Andriy Biletsky, said in an interview with The Telegraph, "The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival … a crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen." Untermenschen means "sub-humans," for those unfamiliar with the term.
Here, just this year, Ukrainian paratroopers sing the praises of WWII-era Nazi and Hitler collaborator Stepan Bandera, responsible for the mass murder of more than 100,000 Jews and Poles during the war.
Here, also recently, the "Klichko Faction at Kiev City Council Sing Song In Honour Of Nazi Collaborator 'Our Father Is Bandera' and chant 'Glory to Ukraine ... Glory to the Nazi's ... Ukraine Above All Others'"
Here, a 2017 BBC video report about the Azov Nazis shows city hall in Cherkasy, Ukraine, surrounded by security forces because a previous council saw Nazis holding city council hostage until they voted for the mayor's budget. According to Deputy Oleksander Radutskyl, "Cherkasy is now a training ground for a military coup in Ukraine," and that "this sort of thing can't exist in Ukraine without the Interior Ministry's approval." Interior Minister Arsen Avakov's ties to Azov Nazis is well known according to the documentary report. "He's put their fighters on the payroll of his ministry, and appointed one of their commanders, Vadim Toryan, as his deputy."
These are fraught and frightening times for many Jews around the world. And while I'm with Mr. Kriss in his observation about the weaponization of antisemitism, I believe we have an obligation ― at least to those more vulnerable than we are ― to condemn the language that is used as a very real weapon that puts our lives at risk everywhere in the world, and to hold accountable those spreading actual — not politically invented — antisemitic tropes and Holocause-denialism, like the three gentlemen (a term I use reluctantly, given their obvious unfounded disdain for me) who sparked this latest controversy: Ye (the musician formerly known as Kanye West), Kyrie Irving, and Dave Chappelle (whose artistry, athletic skill, and comedy I am otherwise a fan of).
Of course Mr. Kriss is correct in that not every bad thing directed at Jewish people is antisemitic in its intent. I was among the first to defend United States Congresswoman Ilhan Omar against allegations of antisemitism when she pointed out quite correctly that the Israel lobby is "all about the Benjamins." Any honest observer knows that money is a driving force in all lobbying, and saying so about the Jewish lobby doesn't make someone an antisemite.
But when you have celebrities repeating and propagating actual antisemitic tropes about Jews having outsized control of our institutions, feeding the hatred of us that is held by White Supremacists who are using these false notions as a reason to kill us, I would hope we wouldn't ricochet so far in the "let's not call every bad thing directed at Jews antisemitism" plea, that we cease to call it out when it's actually there.
And it is there in these instances. Let me remind you that the movie being promoted by these men is based on a book which asserts that "many famous, high-ranking Jews" have "admitted" to satan worship and falsely suggests that the Talmud teaches that Blacks are "cursed with their skin color," which "established the base for Black racism even before the KKK." Not to mention invoking the deeply antisemitic hoax, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
This is dangerous stuff that does nothing but instill hatred of the Jewish people. And hatred is what gets us killed.
Letting antisemitism off the hook simply because alleging it is overused in other cases can pose a real danger to people in ways we may never be able to see in our own privileged worlds.
How about we condemn its weaponization when it isn't warranted, but also condemn it when it's real, taking the opportunity to educate, not necessarily to cancel.
After all, nobody canceled the teacher who abused me because I am a Jew.
Jill Klausen
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