Words of the Week

“There is no other ethno-cultural minority in America targeted with such ferocity from the left and the right. No other group is simultaneously branded as complicit in white supremacy and as false assimilators who threaten white ascendancy. And there is little that is new here; one need only look at late nineteenth-century political discourse to see how Europe’s Jews were simultaneously attacked by the communists as exploiters of the proletariat and by the proto-fascists who warned of the coming racial war between Aryan and Jew. The Zionists who emerged in this context believed that Jewish statehood would end anti-Semitism; that the Jews would henceforth be a ‘normal people’ with a homeland, a flag, a language, and a destiny. They were wrong. If anything, the Jewish state has compounded the ways in which anti-Semitism is articulated today. The Alt-Right’s ‘Jews will not replace us’ and Steven Salaita’s ‘there’s not enough space in the world for both Zionism and Palestinians’ could have been articulated a century ago with little revision.”

Source: Jarrod Tanny, “The Loneliness of the Liberal Zionist” (Forward)