Antisemitism and Bigotry: What Has Been Learned in the Twenty–Year Israel Crisis? Revisiting the U.S. Holocaust Detection

Then there is the double standard that’s so often applied to Jews. On college campuses, she noted, “when other groups say, ‘We are a victim,’ the default position is to believe them. When Jews say it, it is often a question about whether you caused it or whether your actions are not an example of bigotry.

Lipstadt was clear about what happened: a society never tolerates overt expressions of antisemitism and remains a democratic society. What to do? Governments alone, she said, can’t solve the problem.

She also pointed to academic fads of the past two decades, “narratives or ideologies that may not start out as antisemitic but end up painting the Jew as other, as a source of oppression instead of having been oppressed.” One of the narratives says that Jews are more powerful, richer, smarter and must therefore be stopped by any means necessary.

The antisemitic incidents in the US were reported by the Anti-Defamation League. In 2022, there were more than 3,700. The two weeks after the massacre of Hamas was a 400 percent increase in comparison to the year before. Last week Jewish students were warned not to enter M.I.T.’s front entrance due to a risk of their physical safety, according to a public letter. A Jewish school in Montreal has been struck by gunfire twice in a week.

I suggested that the difference between antisemitism and other types of hate was the fact that many of the people who call themselves anti-Zionists would deny that they are.

Lipstadt allowed that at least a few people have no idea what the chant means. A call for a purely Palestinian state without Jews is something many more do. She added, “You may want to redefine it, but what it has stood for, for decades, is quite clear.” (Yes, there are those who imagine Jews and Palestinians coexisting harmoniously in some future river-to-sea Palestine. Hamas murdered that fantasy and so much else on Oct. 7.

What about more specific anti-Zionist arguments, such as the view that the Jews displaced native inhabitants to create Israel? Or that Israel is a racist state that practices apartheid?

Dialogue with a Black Black Woman on the Ghetto-Zahiriya Crisis: The Right to Exist, Right To Live, or Right to Discriminate

I spoke about politics and social justice at the University of California at San Diego. Afterward, as I was signing books, a young Black woman approached my table and whispered a question, asking me what I thought about the horrors playing out in Gaza.

The older woman in the line was Jewish and told me to do whatever I could to change people’s opinions because they hated us now.

Both women had come to hear me speak, expressed their approval of my work in general and, I would assume, agreed with me on many issues. But on the political fallout from the war in Gaza, it seemed pretty clear that they had divergent views, but each assumed that I agreed with her point of view.

Taking a stance against the killing of civilians is relatively easy. It gets more difficult when considering support for or opposition to the prosecution of the war, including calls for a cease-fire. And when the aperture is widened from the particulars of the current violence to the history of the broader conflict, the divergence of opinions becomes even more stark and complicated.

He not only believes that you can be a harsh critic of the Israeli government without being anti-Zionist; he also says that he, like many others, supports Palestinian identity and Palestinian nationalism while also being a Zionist.

The dispute over definitions can be seen as a way for people on one side of the issue to be seen as being against the other side’s beliefs and values.

For instance, there are several forms of Zionism, and people in these debates rarely seem to be explicit about which form they are for or against. Political Zionism? Cultural Zionism? Religious Zionism? Some combination of them? Does it matter?

The human rights organization accuses Israel of operating an “apartheid regime” and says that Palestinians are treated as an inferior racial group.

When I told Greenblatt that none of my interviewees gave a direct “yes” to the right-to-exist question, he said that was “almost indescribably offensive” because he connects any hesitation on the question to historical antisemitism and a denial of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination.

But Greenblatt and Hill do agree on a narrower point: that there is discrimination against Arabs in Israel. “There’s definitely discrimination there,” Greenblatt said.

I come out from these discussions with a sense of whiplash, aware that the dispute is having an effect on Jewish, Muslim and Arab communities in this country.

It’s hard to accept that smart people who seem to want to do the right thing can’t find some common understanding on these issues, find more points of agreement and pull out of a descending cycle of recriminations.