Fighting Jew-hatred
Meetings for teens, parents, and adults at Kaplen JCC will examine origins and impacts
The world has changed around us as antisemitism — a force most of us had not confronted directly, although we’d heard friend-of-a-friend kinds of stories — became more visible but still largely ignorable since 2016, and then exploded since October 7.
As frequently happens, something that’s hard on all of us is harder for parents of kids who are old enough to understand what’s going on and young enough still to look to their fathers and mothers for explanations.
So — what is going on? How do we explain it? How do we cope with it?
The Kaplen JCC on the Palisades in Tenafly is joining with many local sponsors to offer “Taking Action: Responding to the Rise in Antisemitism” this Sunday evening. It will follow “What Is Jew-Hatred and How Do I Understand What Is Happening in Israel?,” a program for teenagers and their parents. (See below.)
Both programs will feature Rachel Fish, a young academic and activist whose clear-eyed and clearly stated understanding of antisemitism and how to fight it has made her a star in that ever-growing corner of the Jewish world.
The first session, from 3 to 4 p.m., for parents and their 12- to 18-year-olds — that is, for pre bar- and bat-mitzvah kids to high-school seniors — “is a space to allow the students and their parents to ask real questions,” Dr. Fish said. “Questions like what is Jew-hatred? How do I understand it? What do I do when I encounter it? How do I know the difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism?
“The program also is meant to help parents navigate these issues,” she continued. Because “they grew up in a different time, they often don’t know what to say. They are challenged by what their own children are facing. Sometimes, the parents don’t even know what their children are seeing, because they don’t have the same algorithms on social media. So this program is a way to help give the parents some knowledge, some skills, some language, and some confidence.”
The evening session, for adults, will feature a panel made up of Dr. Fish, Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, and two members of Congress. They are Josh Gottheimer, the Jewish Democrat who represents New Jersey’s Fifth District, which includes most of Bergen County, including Tenafly, and Mike Lawler, the Republican who represents New York’s 17th District, which includes Rockland County as well as Putnam and portions of Westchester and Dutchess counties. (Both men are running for reelection in November; Mr. Lawler’s seat is considered to be among this Congress’s least secure.)
Mr. Gottheimer and Mr. Lawler, along with another Democrat, Jared Moskowitz, and another Republican, Max Miller, introduced the bipartisan Antisemitism Awareness Act, and they have been working together on this and other projects.
It’s important to have representatives from both sides of the aisle, Dr. Fish said, because “you can’t look at only one side of the political spectrum.” Not only is that unwise because there rarely are problems coming only from one side — we now face antisemitism from both the far right and the far left — but because “we also know that when there are challenges within a particular political party, the people who are best suited to address that political challenge come from within that party.”
Dr. Fish has the credentials to do this work. Her doctorate, in Israeli history and Zionist thought, from Brandeis, seemed to move her logically and inexorably to the study of antisemitism as it exists now. She’s a special adviser to the Brandeis University Presidential Initiative to Counter Antisemitism in Higher Education, an associate research professor at the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, and a visiting professor of educational leadership at George Washington University. She’s also a co-creator of Boundless; according to the group’s website, boundlessisrael.org, describes itself as a “think-action tank partnering with community leaders across North America to revitalize Israel education and take bold collective action to combat Jew-hatred.”
Although the speeches that former president Donald Trump gave to the Israeli American Council and to a group spearheaded by Miriam Adelson and at an event called “Fighting Antisemitism” are outside the scope of her planned talks for the panel, Dr. Fish addressed them in the interview. (At the Adelson-sponsored talk he said: “I will put it to you very simply and gently. I really haven’t been treated right, but you haven’t been treated right, because you’re putting yourself in great danger, and the United States hasn’t been treated right. The Jewish people would have a lot to do with the loss if I’m at 40%. Think of it, that means 60% are voting for Kamala.”)
“We should not be surprised by much of what former President Trump said, because he often speaks in a way that seeks to exacerbate tensions between communities, and in this case, we need to understand that this also portrays the Jew as being the one who has influence outside the political campaign,” Dr. Fish said. “This is a dangerous position and a dangerous perception of the Jewish community.
“Members of the Republican political camp need to address this openly. They need to be very clear that no political outcome is the fault of the Jews.”
Leaving the impression that any political outcome could be the fault of the Jews is not only factually incorrect, but “lends itself to exacerbate beliefs in the Jews exerting outsize influence.” Remember, she said, that Jews are only two percent of the U.S. population. “And that plays into the conspiracy theory that we call Jew-hatred.
That once again brings up the blunt, hideously ugly, entirely clear phrase “Jew-hatred.” What exactly is it, where did it come from, and why does Dr. Fish use it?
Until 1879, Germans used the straightforward term Judenhass, which is literal Jew-hatred, but that year “a man comes forward and says that we need to change it because it’s kind of crass and not politically palatable,” she said. “This man, Wilhelm Marr, coined the term antisemitism” — it was in German, but a literal translation of the English word that means being against a broad, vaguely defined group of Semites, whoever they might be.
Marr was not an academic, studying antisemitism; he was an active Jew-hater. “Ultimately, he organized a group called the League of Antisemitism,” Dr. Fish said.
“In the 19th century, you began to see the racialization of Jews,” she continued. “Before then, you just hated them for their religious beliefs” — to be clear, the “you” here is not you, the reader, but you, a very fine 19th-century Christian German — “but now you started to hate them because you think they are the Other in your society. Not only do they have this other religion, Judaism, but they are racially different from the Aryans. They cannot convert away from Judaism, because their DNA is immutable.
“Then you begin to see the Jew referred to in Europe as the Easterner, the Oriental, and the Semite. So if you are antisemitic, you are anti-the-Jew.
“But in the 21st century, it is a confusing term to most people. For one thing, they ask, what is a Semite?” And also, Dr. Fish explained, if to be antihomophobic is to be against homophobes, if to be antiracist is to be against racists, if to be anti-Islamophobic is to be against Islamophobes, then, of course, logically, to be antisemitic is to be against Semites. Which means to be against Jews.
That is why she uses the term Jew-hatred instead of antisemitism, Dr. Fish said, and she recommends that other Jews also make that linguistic switch. It’s not hard for young people to talk about Jew-hatred, she added, but “the older you are, the more discomfort you are likely to have with it.
“We did some research on this, and we found that if you ask an older member of the Jewish community, they tend to say that term is really crass. Really direct. ‘I don’t like it.’ And my response is that I am glad that it is crass. That is why it is direct. And you have to use it.”
The panel on Sunday night will offer some advice in dealing with Jew-hatred, she said. “We have to have spaces in our community for internal education, where we can talk to the Jewish community about these issues. And we also have to think thoughtfully and strategically about who in the non-Jewish community we have to be engaging with, cultivating relationships with, and educating. We have to decide who in these communities should be the messengers in their own identity groups, because we’re not the right people to deliver the message.
“And when we engage with the non-Jewish community, we also have to be open to talk about the hard issues within our community and other people’s communities, rather than sidestepping those hard questions and avoiding them at all costs.
“That’s what we did for a very long time, particularly when it was related to Israel.
“I also would argue that we have to have our educators in every educational setting, from middle school through high school and then beyond, talking about contemporary manifestations of Jew-hatred. They have to talk about it. We can’t talk only about the Holocaust.
“I would suggest that we need our government to move forward with urgency to pass the Antisemitism Awareness Act. And in addition to that, I would argue that we need our government to create a domestic position that is focused on confronting Jew-hatred.” That job, as she sees it, would be the domestic version of the historian and public intellectual Deborah Lipstadt’s; Dr. Lipstadt’s title is Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, and that job carries the rank of ambassador.
“And then we need our Jewish communal institutions to actually put aside their egos, their funding, and territorialism to coordinate and collaborate.” Jewish organizations must act together, understand where there are gaps in service and where there are duplications, and work to overcome them.
“And then we need to do an audit within the Jewish community to understand how much money has been invested and what is the impact of those investments.”
All that work would lead to the creation of groups more likely to be agile, responsive, and better up to identifying and countering the challenges posed by an age-old hatred as it survives into a new generation, Dr. Fish suggested.
This might sound daunting, but it’s not at all impossible, she said; it’s just necessary to acknowledge the need, and to get to work.
A good place to start might be at the Kaplen JCC on the Palisades in Tenafly this Sunday.
Who: The Kaplen JCC on the Palisades in Tenafly
What: Presents two meetings
FIRST
What: “What Is Jew-Hatred and How Do I Understand What Is Happening in Israel?”
When: On Sunday, September 29, from 3 to 4 p.m.
For whom: 13- to 18-year-olds and their parents
SECOND:
What: “Taking Action: Responding to the Rise in Antisemitism”
When: Also on Sunday, September 29, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.
For whom: Adults; teens also are welcome
BOTH:
They’re sponsored by the Kaplen JCC as well as the ADL, the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey, the Israeli-American Council, Jewish Family & Children’s Services of Northern New Jersey, the Jewish Home Family, Congregation Beth Sholom of Teaneck, Kehilat Kesher of Englewood, Temple Sinai of Tenafly, and
Temple Emanu-El Closter.
For more information and reservations: Go to jccotp.org or call (201) 569-7900
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