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History As It Happens
What Is Antisemitism?
00:53:23
The Trump administration says it will deny entry to immigrants for "suspected antisemitic activity." It is attacking prestigious universities over the antiwar protests that roiled campuses last year. It is snatching and jailing foreign students who...
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- [00:01]
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Martin DeCaro
History as it happens April 15, 2025 what is antisemitism?
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Unknown Speaker
Free people.
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Martin DeCaro
Who have entered the camp.
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Omer Bartov
And now the administration has announced that it will begin immediately screening immigrants. Social media posts for any signs of anti Semitism.
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GoDaddy Representative
Any anti Semitic activity as grounds for denying immigration.
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Advertiser
People's anti Semitic pun online could be grounds for denying them entry.
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Omer Bartov
How about the visas of dozens of.
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Martin DeCaro
International students making them ineligible to remain.
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Omer Bartov
Here in the US and finish their studies?
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Unknown Speaker
You tell us that the reason why you're coming to the United States is not just because you want to write op eds, but because you want to participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus. We're not going to give you a visa.
- [01:23]
Martin DeCaro
It is known as the world's oldest hatred. Anti Semitism is on the rise again. And so are allegations of anti Semitism antisemitism to silence criticism of Israel's government weaponized by the Trump administration as it goes after students and universities. What is antisemitism? What does it really look like in America today? That's next as we report history as it happens. I'm Martin DeCaro.
- [01:48]
Omer Bartov
Anti Semitism is a very old insidious phenomenon. In some ways it's quite interesting because it goes back so long. It actually predates Christianity, anti Judeophobia already in the ancient world, in the Roman world. So one can talk a great deal about all kinds of antisemitism that had to do with the kind of social antisemitism that you are describing. That was quite common in the United States and it's common now.
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Martin DeCaro
What is antisemitism? Well, if you're a foreign student here in the US On a visa, the only definition that matters right now is the one Secretary of State Marco Rubio makes up.
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Unknown Speaker
It hides behind geopolitics. It embeds itself in international organizations, in the curriculums of our colleges and universities, in the voices of some who hide in social media and even openly espouse this ancient poison.
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Martin DeCaro
The administration's dishonest use of anti antisemitism follows a pattern from last year when Republican members of Congress grilled university presidents about the anti war protests on their campuses. I am asking specifically calling for the genocide of Jews. Does that constitute bullying or harassment?
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Advertiser
If it is directed and severe or pervasive, it is harassment.
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Martin DeCaro
So the answer is yes.
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Advertiser
It is a context dependent decision like.
- [03:15]
Martin DeCaro
Other buzzwords of late. Fascism, Zionism, Intifada the real definition of antisemitism is being distorted to serve a political purpose, in this case to protect Israel's reputation. And that's too bad, because antisemitism in the us, Europe and the Arab world is a real problem. According to a report by the Program on Extremism at George Washington University released in January this year, antisemitism is experiencing a worldwide revival, with the events of October 7, 2023 and the resulting Israel Hamas war serving as an impetus to major spikes in hateful rhetoric and violent action. Antisemitic incidents are already at historic highs. They have increased further, the report goes on to say. In the Arab world, antisemitism has evolved to become a broader cultural and political symbol, often representing opposition to Israel, the United States and Western civilization. This evolution is reflected in the portrayal of Jews as symbols of evil and global control, a stereotype similar to those found in other regions, including Europe. The report says political and religious factions within Arab societies have exploited these anti Semitic images to further their own agendas, using them to criticize and undermine their rivals. And I will share a link to this report in my weekly newsletter. You can sign up@historyasithappens.com the newsletter will arrive in your inbox every Friday. So when it comes to groups like Hamas or Hezbollah, their violent resistance to Israel is motivated in good part by Jew hatred intertwined with their refusal recognize the Jewish state. Here is Meyer Litvak in a short video lecture. You can find this on YouTube for Yad Vashem, which is Israel's official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust.
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Meyer Litvak
Hamas, as an Islamic movement, framed the conflict as a religious conflict between Islam and Judaism, between Muslims and Jews. Framing the conflict as a religious one creates an unbridgeable dichotomy between absolute good and absolute evil. Hamas and other Islamic movements describe the conflict as one carried out between the party of God, HIZB Allah, which are the Muslims, or the Islamic movements, and the party of Satan, HIZB al Shaytan, which are the Jews.
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Martin DeCaro
So what about the campus protesters in the US last year? Did they gather together in the thousands because they hate Jews or because they were outraged by Israel's destruction of Gaza what about the far right in this country? In a book review for the New York Times, Princeton's Gary Bass notes that in 2023, Elon Musk endorsed as the actual truth the anti Semitic online post that blamed Jewish communities for pushing dialectical hatred against whites and flooding Western countries with hordes of minorities. Earlier this year, Musk took time out from his new role as a powerful advisor to President Trump to tell an AfD rally that would be the far right alternative for Deutschland Germany as too much of a focus on past guilt. Gary Bass goes on to say Trump won his second term as president despite having dinner at his Florida estate with Kanye west, an outspoken anti Semite, and Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist and Holocaust denier. So in this episode I hope to define what antisemitism is and is not. And although this problem's been around for thousands of years, the Jewish Virtual Library online says the term antisemite was coined only in 1879 in Germany by Wilhelm Marr to refer to the anti Jewish manifestations of his period and to give Jew hatred a more scientific sounding name. Historian Omer Bartov is the Dean's professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, and he has a new essay in the New York Review related to the debate over antisemitism. The title is Infinite License. The sub headline reads. The memory of the Holocaust has perversely been enlisted to justify both the eradication of Gaza and the extraordinary silence with which that violence has been met. Our conversation next History is defined by.
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- [07:56]
Martin DeCaro
Omer Bartov, welcome back to the show.
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Omer Bartov
Thanks for having me.
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Martin DeCaro
We always pick the most pleasant and uplifting subjects to discuss, don't we? So in a New York Times op ed, Wesleyan University President Mike Michael Roth said, as the first Jewish president of a formerly Methodist university, I find no comfort in the Trump administration's embrace of my people on college campuses or elsewhere. Jew hatred is real, he says, but today's anti antisemitism is not a legitimate effort to fight it. It's a cover for a wide range of agendas that have nothing to do with the welfare of Jewish people. Do you agree?
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Omer Bartov
I do, yeah. And I've been thinking along the same lines. That the way arguments about antisemitism, which unfortunately did not begin with the Trump administration, but were already being used, especially in spring 2024, so still under the Biden administration, were actually doing something else. They were trying to shut down speech under the COVID of claiming that they were protecting Jews from antisemitism. I would think that there are two issues involved here. One is what do you mean when you say antisemitism? And that's a complicated question. One person's antisemitism may be another person's political opinion. The second question is, what is this term being used for? Is it being instrumentalized in a way that has totally different goals? I would say the way antisemitism has been used since October 7, increasingly in response to the protests by students on. On university campuses, was a misuse of the term by arguing that opposition to Israeli policies, including anti Zionism, was equivalent to antisemitism. And that as such, I think is false. So this is one problem. The second problem is why is it being used at all? And here I would say there is, as the op ed you mentioned hints at, there's a use of anti. Anti Semitism or the. The argument as a kind of new. And that's more under the Trump administration as a kind of new McCarthyism. It's not about Jews. It's about shutting down any liberal speech or any speech that one finds objectionable.
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Martin DeCaro
On those college campuses. Many of the protesters were Jewish. You were born in Israel. You're Jewish. As far as I know, you fought for the idf. You're a historian now. You have been saying that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. You're not anti Semitic, as far as I know. So here's a headline from Jewish Insider, and this will address your point. The Department of Homeland Security says immigration applications will be screened for suspected anti Semitic activity. A spokesperson for DHS said, anyone who thinks they can come to America and hide behind the First Amendment to advocate for anti Semitic violence and terrorism, think again.
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Omer Bartov
And as I said, this actually was also endorsed in spring of 2024, unfortunately by the Biden administration. That is, there was a rather successful attempt by the administration and by many university administrations to shut down protests on campuses in the name of protecting Jewish students. While, as you rightly say, many of the protesters were Jewish students. What is more troubling now, of course, is that antisemitism is increasingly being used simply for the administration to be able to enforce particular kinds of speech and to criminalize other kinds of speech. And what I find most troubling about this is that of course there is antisemitism. Antisemitism is alive and kicking. In fact, it's rising both in the United States and in Europe. And this kind of policy, and that's what the op ed you mentioned actually also mentions, and I completely agree with that. That kind of policy, that kind of attempt to control speech by arguing that it's done in defense of Jews is the best way to incite antisemitism. And we know that the current administration has a variety of characters who themselves have pretty solid anti Semitic roots. And so they're not really interested at all in the safety of Jews. They're interested in using that argument to enforce a kind of new control over speech in the United States.
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Martin DeCaro
Sometimes the ways the students express themselves can certainly sound like they're being rather harsh or even hateful of Jews. The chants, the slogans, the signage, and also just the vehemence right in their opposition, not just to the war, although I do think the protests were broadly about the war. There would have been no protests had there not been a war. But there's also opposition to the State of Israel, its current government, and the actions of the current government, but also the State of Israel, generally speaking, because of the way it was founded, the initial injustice to the Palestinians who were expelled or fled, and then, of course, what happened again in 1967. Is it possible that some of this vehement anti Israel sentiment can be anti Semitic too? I mean, how do we separate those two things?
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Omer Bartov
The State of Israel has spent a huge amount of political capital and treasure and a great deal of effort trying to argue that criticism of Israeli politics or policies is anti Semitic, using a particular definition of anti Semitism, the IHRA definition, the International Holocaust remembrance alliance definition, goes back to 2006, if I remember correctly. So part of what you see, and it's important to understand that is a policy that has been pushed by obviously all these Netanyahu administrations trying to shut down any criticism of Israeli occupation policies by saying that criticism of Israel is anti Semitic. That's, of course false. It's obviously false. And there are many Israelis who are Zionists who live there and who oppose the policies of that government. I wish there were more, but there are many who oppose those policies, and they're not anti Semitic. They're not even anti Zionist. Secondly, people can make very objectionable statements. They can be anti Zionist. They can even be against the right of Jews. To self determination. They can say that Zionism is a movement, a political ideology that they vehemently oppose. They can say that Zionism is a settler colonial movement. They can say all kinds of things which you, I or many other people might find objectionable. But those on the face of it are not anti Semitic statements. I'll give you an example. There are hundreds of thousands of Jews in the world called Haredim or ultra religious Jews who are either non Zionist or vehemently anti Zionist. They're actually ultra orthodox members of the Israeli cabinet who are not Zionists. They're against Zionism because Zionism for this more ultra version of Judaism is hastening the arrival of the Messiah. You should not establish a Jewish state before the Messiah arrives. And therefore they oppose Zionism. But they see themselves, and we have no right to object to that. They see themselves as paradigms of what being Jewish is. So they're obviously not anti Semitic, they're anti Zionist. The largest political movement among European Jews or Jews everywhere before the Holocaust was the Bund was a socialist workers movement in Europe for Jews. That movement was strongly anti Zionist, but it was obviously not anti Semitic. It was a movement for socialism for Jewish workers. So this argument that you can make an equivalence between anti Zionism and antisemitism or opposition to Israeli policies and antisemitism is completely false. That doesn't mean that there are not, and there may have been some people in these protests who did actually express anti Semitic opinions. And we can define what's the difference between an anti Semitic opinion and anti Israeli, anti Zionist or an opinion critical of Israeli policies.
- [16:57]
Martin DeCaro
Sometimes it's not always easy to make that determination. I mean, I did see a few fringe online. I saw some fringe groups, videos of these small demonstrations or protests where people actually were there demonstrating in favor of Hamas. But I think that's just a very small number of people, at least among the students who are on the campuses. But the way that some students so vehemently denounce Israel for what is happening in Gaza does lead some people to say, well, this goes beyond just being against the war. This level of vehemence shows you must have some hostility towards Israel itself, which is a Jewish state. I mean, it describes itself as a Jewish state.
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Omer Bartov
I say two things on this opposition to Israel's war in Gaza, which is not even a war anymore. There is no war there. There's just a constant destruction of property and of people.
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Martin DeCaro
Agreed.
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Omer Bartov
There's hardly any opposition. Opposition to that is the most natural thing that you can expect from anyone who has some simply human decency. And certainly young people, students, Jewish or not, who are appalled by what they see and who know that much of what is being done is done with the help of the American taxpayer, that these are American made bombs that are being dropped on Gaza. So in many ways non opposition to that indifference to that which in some ways has now been accomplished because of the clampdown on these protests is much worse than opposition, even if it's vibrant and sometimes aggressive and loud. Because what is happening there is far, far worse than a few students encamping on a lovely lawn in an Ivy League university. So that's the first thing I would say. The second look, there were clearly Jewish students on campuses that felt threatened by these protests. And we have to take that seriously. When people feel threatened, you can't just tell them, yeah, but they're not really threatening you. They felt threatened. But you do have to ask, what was it that they felt threatened by? What did they perceive as a threat or as they thought, an anti Semitic threat? And what they usually saw was people wearing keffiyehs, was people waving Palestinian flags, was people saying that Palestine should be free from the Jordan to the sea. None of these statements are anti Semitic. But many young Jews, and not so young Jews as well, were raised in homes and went to schools and to clubs and to movements that taught them a love for Israel. And that did not enable them to think critically about the history of that country. The way they were educated was that any assertion that there is a Palestinian people, that there is an oppression of Palestinians, that the occupation is illegitimate, that Israel is using illegitimate force and oppression against Palestinians, all of that appears to them as threatening. And that sets up a very disturbing balance between two things. That you can feel threatened by people who oppose oppression, that you feel self righteous in defending a state of the Jews. And there's every reason to defend that state. But you are defending not only that state, you are defending policies of oppression and of violence in the name in a sort of self righteous assertion. And that is extremely disturbing, that you are using arguments of feeling that you are exposed to antisemitism by people who are saying, why is that country, why is the state of Israel killing so many tens of thousands of Palestinians, so many babies, so many children, That's a conundrum, that's a terrible situation to create and we have to talk about it rather than simply shut people up.
- [21:11]
Martin DeCaro
There were no war, there would have been no protests. One last thing about this in the campuses and then we'll move on to the definition of antisemitism. And that is, you know, you mentioned Zionism before. The very early Zionists in the late 19th century in Russia, Eastern Europe, they wanted to create or have a, a Jewish homeland, a place where Jewish people could be safe. Because the idea was no matter what we do in Europe, no matter if we assimilate or not, we're always going to be susceptible to anti Semitic violence and programs. We'll never fit in here. A Jewish homeland is not necessarily a Jewish state, but that is what it became for people who are on, say, the pro Israel side of this debate when they hear people on campuses or wherever denouncing Israel for what it is doing or even saying from the river to the sea, there should be a single binational state where all people, Jews and Arabs, have equal rights and is no longer a Jewish state or a Jewish supremacy state. When the pro Israel side hears that, their response sometimes is, well, then we're right back to where we started. Jews will be at the mercy of their enemies. And that is why we need to have a Jewish state to protect the interests of Jews.
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Omer Bartov
Well, look, I mean, there's history to all this. Where we stand now is that there's 7 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians living between the Jordan and the sea. The 7 million Jews have democratic rule, although it is actually being challenged right now by their own government. And there's a very rapid erosion of democracy even for Jewish Israeli citizens. The other 7 million, 2 million of them are Israeli citizens, but they don't have the same rights. Officially they do, but in reality they don't. 3 million live in the west bank and they have no rights at all. And 2 million live in Gaza and they're living in total hell right now. And they certainly have no rights. Not that they had too many rights under Hamas either, but before Hamas was Israeli occupation and they had no rights under that too. So how did we get there? This is a long story. There was a point in the past. There were several points in the past where two states could have been created in that territory. That was already suggested in 1937 by the Pew Commission. That was suggested by the UN in 1947.
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Unknown Speaker
Partition of Palestine ends. Seven months of deliberation by the United nations and 2,000 years of political homelessness for the Jews. Tense vote on this way of settling immemorial strife between Jews and Arabs of the Holy Land is preceded by bitter debates. The Arab delegates declare boycott as the final roll call has begun. Afghanistan? No. Argentina. Argentina. Abstention. Soviet Union. Yes.
- [24:11]
Omer Bartov
United Kingdom, the leadership of the Palestinians and of Arab states in 1947 rejected the petition proposed by the UN and went to war with Israel. Israel won that war, took over much more territory than had been allotted to it in the partition, kicked out the vast majority of the Palestinians who were on that territory, refused to let them come back, and then in 1967, took over the rest of those territories of Mandatory Palestine. And it has been there ever since, that is, for almost six decades. At the time, there was talk of using those territories as a card for creating two states for a territorial compromise, but that was never implemented. It was not implemented in large part because Israelis got used to having a larger territory and got used to occupying the population living there. And so by now we are in a situation where it is very difficult to envision two states simply because there's so many settlements in the west bank that it's not clear how two states could be created. And a binational state, yes, that right now flies in the face not only of Zionism or Jewish nationalism. And the Zionists wanted to create the Jewish majority state, but also in the face of Palestinian nationalism, because Palestinians want state of their own. And if there were a binational state now, then the preponderance of economic, political, military power on the Jewish side would be such that the Palestinian population in that state, unless there's some other political arrangements, would remain the underdog in that society. So right now one has to face up to the fact that there is no easy solution to this. There has to be serious thinking about changing the political paradigm. The way the direction of things right now is the creation of a full blown apartheid state in Israel that already exists in the west bank and that is expanding now into Gaza. Whatever would be left of Gaza at the end of this process, it's creeping into the Palestinian population, of citizens, of Israeli citizens, and it's eroding democracy among Israeli Jews as well. And that's a process that has to be stopped. There are not enough political forces inside the country to stop it. And right now the international community seems completely uninterested in doing anything about it.
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Martin DeCaro
The settler movement and members, far right members, nationalists and religious fanatics really, in Netanyahu's government have never supported a two state solution really. And they certainly don't support one now or going forward. We're talking about Smotrich, Itamar, Ben gvir, the Kahanists. I encourage people listening to this to look up these people online and look at some of the statements they've made. Now and in the past, and you'll see what I mean. So, antisemitism. My first exposure to antisemitism, although I probably did not understand it at the time, is when I attended Catholic parochial school. As a child, I was taught the Jews killed Jesus Christ. And I guess I was also among my friends in high school exposed to what you might call casual antisemitism stereotypes. Every single racial group gets stereotyped. It seems that Jewish stereotypes are all in the negative. Jews are cheap. Jews had big noses. They're just a bunch of lawyers and bankers. They run Hollywood. All these ideas were floating around in when I was a kid in the 1980s and 1990s. I guess that's one form of antisemitism, Christian antisemitism, though the first one I alluded to there about the Jewish guilt for killing Jesus. That's an ancient problem, but that's not really the problem we're dealing with now, is it?
- [28:23]
Omer Bartov
Yeah, it's interesting what you say also because you went to school already after Vatican ii, which actually did away with. In your school. Apparently Vatican II had not quite been adopted.
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Martin DeCaro
It's funny you mentioned that. You're right. I did go to school after Vatican ii, but I still grew up with the understanding that it was the Jews who got rid of Jesus. But all right, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.
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Omer Bartov
I mean, this theology and this tradition, look, yes. I mean, anti Semitism is a very old insidious phenomenon. In some ways it's quite interesting because it goes back so long, it actually predates Christianity. There was anti Judeophobia already in the ancient world, in the Roman world. So one can talk a great deal about all kinds of antisemitism that had to do with the kind of social antisemitism that you are describing that was quite common in the United States, and it's common now exists now in the United States, but still in the 1940s into the 1950s, included also restrictions on Jews joining particular clubs, golf clubs and so forth, you know, hotels. That gradually disappeared, but remains as a sentiment among I don't know exactly what portion of the population, but part of the population for sure. And that has always existed. But there was, of course, a much deeper and more violent type of antisemitism. Part of it was theological antisemitism that people then internalized because they were exposed to their priests, their churches or schools in which they imbibed this kind of sentiment. And there was a more demonic kind of antisemitism that had to do with the belief that Jews were actually associated with the devil, with demons. That Jews needed Christian blood. So the whole notion of blood libel that goes back to the 12th century and remained alive into the 20th century.
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Martin DeCaro
Always these wild conspiracy theories in anti Semitism. Maybe other forms of discrimination are like that, but I don't know. Anti black racism wasn't really based on conspiracy theories. Or maybe it was. I mean, I'm not aware of that. But when it came to Jews. I just finished reading a book about the Nazis and that was racial antisemitism. I know I kind of interjected there in the middle of your thought. But always crazy conspiracy theories about all powerful Jews. Jews, they're responsible for everything that's bad.
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Omer Bartov
To simplify it, there were two elements in anti Jewish sentiments in Christian society. It's quite different in Muslim societies were actually anti Jewish animals was much weaker than in Christian societies. One was theological. As you said, the Jews crucified Christ or handed Christ over to be crucified. That also preserved Jews within Christian society in the Middle Ages because they were the witnesses of the crucifixion as well. So they needed to be there as witnesses. So that was a deep theological element. The second was socioeconomic. Jews lived under different conditions within Christian society for centuries. There were particular restrictions on them. And there were particular things that they could do and Christians couldn't because Christians were not allowed to do them, such as to lend money. And Jews tried to preserve themselves as much as they could from Christian society. There were restrictions within Jewish society not to mix with Gentiles, just as there were by Gentiles not to mix with Jews. So there was resentment, there was jealousy, there was a sentiment of otherness toward Jews which had to do really with socioeconomic as well as with religious theological factors. But what is important when we say antisemitism is that modern antisemitism is a bit different from all of that. It includes all these elements. But then it becomes something else as well. And it has to do in fact with Jewish emancipation, with the fact that Jews at different times in different places. But between the late 18th century and the late 19th century, Jews were emancipated. Jews for the first time in European history, got equal rights before the law. And that enabled them to leave the ghettos or to leave whatever quarters and areas that they were restricted to and join the mainstream of Christian society, European and American society. And as they did so, they started looking like everybody else and behaving like everybody else. And that was actually the core of what you're talking about. This Kind of conspiratorial fantasies about Jews. That behind those Jews who are becoming like everybody else, who are assimilating into mainstream society, there lurks something else which came to be known because of a forgery created in Russia in the late 19th century. The protocols of the Elders of Zion. These Elders of Zion who are plotting to take over the world. And you add to that scientific racism which the Nazis then took in, that is that the Jews are a different race. And not just a different race, say like Africans or like Asians. They are an anti race. They're particularly insidious race. They're a race that may destroy our own races. They're not just different, they're out to destroy us. That that sentiment got scientific, sanctioned by scientists at the time, creates an explosive kind of combination.
- [34:16]
Martin DeCaro
And the Nazis believed that the mere existence of a single Jewish person was a threat to their race. Which explains why the Nazis were so brutal to children. Jewish children, babies, pregnant women, all had to be killed in the Nazi worldview. Racial antisemitism, or what we're discussing here is the pseudoscientific antisemitism. Jews as a race, as a blood. So there's nothing you could do. You could convert to Catholicism and you're still Jewish. That's a 19th, late 19th century thing. It certainly wasn't invented by the Nazis. But its origins are in Eastern Europe, is that right?
- [34:52]
Omer Bartov
Well, its origins are in racism, so called scientific racism. And scientific racism is not just in Germany. In fact, there's a great deal of scientific racism in the United States, in Britain, in France. This idea that people are divided by race, and much of it in truth, has to do also with colonialism, has to do with the encounter of Europeans when they go to the rest of the world, take it over, subject it to their rule, and feel that they are superior to those other races that they're ruling because they have better technology with which to rule and oppress themselves. And that, as you know, Hannah Arendt has written about, that comes as a kind of boomerang effect back to Europe. This kind of racism that develops in the colonies and then is sanctioned by scientists who people think of as we think of scientists today. They think scientists tell you the truth, right? They're using objective criteria. That comes back to Europe. In Europe, it's latched onto older anti Jewish sentiments that we talked about before, both theological and sort of traditional and socioeconomic. And now we know what it is, because the Jews are actually a race. Ironically, of course, part of this racial rhetoric about Jews is that They're Semites, right? That's what the word antisemitism comes from. Now, much of that racism comes from linguistics. When you say the Indo European languages, there are Semitic languages, there are Turko Mongolian languages, and then you associate language with race, which is not at all always the case. But because Jews are considered to be Semites, then they are considered to be not part of Europe. They come from the Middle East. And that creates a very strange phenomenon whereby the best way to deal with the Jews is that they would go back to where they came from. That is, there is an anti Semitic type of Zionism. And you hear in anti Semitic movements in Germany and Poland, people saying to Jews, go to Palestine. That is, go to where you belong. So that kind of racism, ironically and in kind of sinister manner also feeds into Zionist arguments that the Jews should actually go back to the ancestral homeland.
- [37:13]
Martin DeCaro
What explains the fear in antisemitism? It's not just a dislike of Jews. It's this existential fear.
- [37:22]
Omer Bartov
It's true that it's a complex phenomenon. As I said, part of it, there is a demonic view of Jews. If you go, for instance, you know, I traveled in Poland and Ukraine and you go to parish churches.
- [37:37]
Martin DeCaro
When was this in.
- [37:39]
Omer Bartov
In the 2000s.
- [37:40]
Martin DeCaro
Okay, so recently.
- [37:41]
Omer Bartov
And you go to churches in Poland now less so. But in Ukraine still, you'll see a lot of the just simple churches and they have murals. And on the murals you see the same images that you would have seen in the Middle Ages, that is that, say, people are lining up to go to hell. And who is first in line? It's the Jews. There is an association of Jews with the devil. There is in Central Europe, in Germany, there's a motif of the Judenzau, the Jew sau. And Jews are riding this pig, sucking its milk and are eating its excrement. And it's a very bizarre kind of phenomenon that was everywhere in Central Europe. What became Germany, knowing the Jews, of course, should not be next to pigs, right? Jews are not allowed to eat pork. And they're usually there in the company of the devil. So there is something going on in European society in the Middle Ages that remains as a kind of demonic image. One part of it, one explanation of it is the Jews. One of the roles they played in European society economically was that they linked between towns and peasants. They would go from the town to remote villages and collect whatever the villagers produced. Eggs or meat or. Or dairy. And they would bring it to the markets, right, and sell it on the market. So for the population in the countryside, the Jews would come from nowhere. They were seen as those who were crucial to maintain the economy. But at the same time, there was something strange about them, something demonic about them. And if you combine that with the kind of imagery that was being presented to simple people, to peasants in those villages, by their own parish priests, about the Jews, then you begin to see how a culture develops over centuries of fear of something strange and demonic about a group of people who live in our midst.
- [39:51]
Martin DeCaro
That mural you mentioned in Germany, is that still up today?
- [39:55]
Omer Bartov
There is one still up now. There's a sort of plaque. There was a big debate over it, whether to remove it or not, but it was said to be historically important. But there's a plaque under it explaining that, of course, we don't endorse this anymore. But it was everywhere. It was in Stuttgart, in Frankfurt, it was in many cities, often over the city gate.
- [40:19]
Martin DeCaro
My gosh. Is there a difference today between left wing or right wing antisemitism?
- [40:26]
Omer Bartov
There was always a difference. And there was always a tendency by conservatives who were not themselves necessarily antisemitic, to attribute antisemitism to the left. You know, antisemitism as a sentiment, widespread sentiment, even among people who may deny it, can be both on the left and on the right as a general sentiment of dislike of Jews or something people internalize in their childhood that may not even be entirely aware. Aware of, but somehow exhibit, but as an ideology. Anti Semitism is an ideology of the right and of fascism. And if you simply count up the numbers who killed Jews, who persecuted Jews, who expelled Jews, it was the right, it was fascism. And before that, of course, it was church authorities, it was monarchies. Those were the people who acted violently against Jews. And. And at times they would then mobilize the people who may have had all kinds of resentment against their own rulers, against the Jews as scapegoats, the forces.
- [41:38]
Martin DeCaro
Of reaction, monarchs, the Catholic Church, etc. So your essay here in New York Review, title Infinite License, the memory of the Holocaust, has perversely been enlisted to justify both the eradication of Gaza and the extraordinary silence with which that violence has been met. We touched on this a little bit at the top of our conversation. We'll circle back and wrap up with this and I'll make sure I share a link to your essay in my weekly newsletter for everybody as well. It's a book review, but it's also some of your original insights because you just went to Israel again fairly recently and saw how the people there are processing what's Going on in Gaza. You cite a passage from one of the books you reviewed, Moral Abdication, how the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza by Didier Fasset, if that's how you pronounce his name. The destruction of Gaza and part of its population, this is what Fassin wrote was essentially a lesser evil for the sake of eliminating a greater one, namely the destruction of the Jewish state on which Hamas was intent in these circumstances. To speak of crimes being committed by the Israelis attested to the most suspect form of racism, anti Semitism in Israel. Do Israeli Jews use this? Do they say if you criticize what our government is doing, you're being anti Semitic?
- [43:01]
Omer Bartov
Yes, large numbers.
- [43:03]
Martin DeCaro
So it's not just in the United States then?
- [43:05]
Omer Bartov
No, as I said, I mean, this is an argument made in Israel, not in the United States or in Germany or in France. It is part of Israeli hasbara, first of all, Israeli propaganda.
- [43:16]
Martin DeCaro
Well, I know that the Netanyahu government says this all the time. I mean, they say they're fighting Nazis. I didn't know if, if ordinary citizens are also saying this.
- [43:25]
Omer Bartov
So look, mainstream Israeli media is totally supportive of this notion to an extraordinary extent. This is not government controlled media. This is media that voluntarily was arguing, say last spring that all these demonstrations on American campuses were anti Semitic. How much of the public buys into that? I would say the large parts of the public. Obviously there are people who know that that's not the case. But it has been endorsed by, not only by the populace. But you find this argument being made in parts of academe, certainly leadership of universities that have been strongly opposed to these kind of critical comments about what Israel is doing in Gaza. And I would say that part of it is a more general argument is criticism of Israel anti Semitic. I'd say on that more general issue, until October 7, there would have been a fair number of people who said, no, that's nonsense. You know, we don't buy that. That's Netanyahu and his goons are saying that after October 7, when it came in the form of saying Israeli soldiers are carrying out crimes, far larger numbers of people would respond either with, we don't want to hear about it, it's not true, or it's just anti Semitic. Anti Israeli, anti Zionist, anti Semitic. And in part it's because of the horror of what happened on October 7th. In part it's because so many of Israeli citizens, children, grandchildren, husbands, wives are soldiers. It's so hard for those people to accept that their own. These are not only crimes being Carried out in their name. It's carried out by their own families, by their own children. And I think that has enabled the government to keep selling this notion that even if you oppose the war now, even if you think the war should stop, this kind of criticism coming from the outside world is illegitimate because it's anti Semitic.
- [45:37]
Martin DeCaro
You know, when I hear somebody criticizing the US Government, when I criticize the US Government, no one accuses me of hating Americans. Well, they might say, I hate America. Remember criticism of the Iraq war, you're anti American, et cetera, et cetera. It is different, though, because Israel is a self described Jewish state. And you know, I did read your essay twice, Omer, but apparently I forgot that you did say right after this, this is the way most Israelis see things today. But I want you to explain what you mean by the following paragraph. You write, by uncritically accepting that argument, meaning this is antisemitism, and assenting to the eradication of Gaza, the governments of the US and Western Europe have also accepted and employed a false memory of the Holocaust and a distorted understanding of its lessons for the present. What do you mean by false memory of the Holocaust?
- [46:29]
Omer Bartov
Yeah, and this is, by the way, the argument that DTF Assad makes this author, you Citus, if you accept the fact after the Holocaust, the international community, whatever it was at the time, agreed on the notion of never again and then passed over some years a whole set of international laws that were meant to prevent such horror from ever happening again. Now, it didn't, of course, there were many genocides after 1945 and many war crimes, but at least some regime of international law was created whose goal explicitly was to prevent that or to punish those who do carry out such crimes. And if you then buy into the argument, the state of Israel as it sees itself and as it's seen by the rest of the world was the Jewish answer to the Holocaust, as you said at the beginning, right. The Holocaust proved. That's a line in the Israeli Declaration of Independence, proved finally that the Jews needed a state of their own to protect them as a refuge. So you accept that there were two outcomes to what occurred in the Holocaust. One was the creation of an international edifice of international law to prevent that from ever happening again. And secondly, a Jewish state was created so the Jews had a home where they would be protected. Right. That's the kind of logic. And then you say the attack on Israel, the threat to Israel's existence, and certainly the attack of October 7th was a genocidal attack. Its goal was to destroy the state of Israel and to destroy it because of hatred. To destroy it because those people were the same as the Nazis, because their ideology was just like Nazi ideology. That was their goal. And so what is your conclusion from that? Your conclusion is that Israel has the right to destroy those who try to destroy it. And that right is derived from what occurred in the Holocaust. And it overrides the entire edifice of international law that was supposed to prevent any country from carrying out genocidal actions. So Israel's war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocidal actions in Gaza are above that law because of what happened to the Jews. And in that sense, you're saying, well, genocide justifies genocide. That is a completely false understanding of how we should look at the lessons of the Holocaust. The Holocaust was not supposed to teach us. And quite a number of Holocaust survivors who spoke about that in the aftermath of World War II said exactly that. The answer to genocide is not genocide. The answer to genocide is to try and prevent it. And that cannot only be about never again a genocide of the Jews. It must be never again genocide of anyone.
- [49:36]
Martin DeCaro
Last question. Has your life gotten more difficult because of your outspoken criticism of Israel's government? And you teach at an Ivy League university which are being targeted by the current administration right now? Maybe you don't want to answer that one.
- [49:56]
Omer Bartov
No, look, I mean, my life has become intense, like this conversation that we're having. I mean, that's not what I used to do regularly before October 7th. I've put myself out, and I do it because I feel a duty to do that. I don't see myself as anti Israeli. I'm. I'm not anti Zionist. I'm an Israeli citizen. But I think that the country that I come from and the country that I'm now also a citizen of the United States are involved in something that I very deeply object to, and I think it's destructive of the state of Israel. Yeah, I mean, it's become interesting now Brown is under investigation, and we'll see where that goes.
- [50:41]
Martin DeCaro
What you just said there is really the most. Well, not the most, but one of the most important points, as when I stopped supporting the war in Iraq some 20 years ago and I finally woke up and was enraged by what was happening and criticized my government. It was because it wasn't in US Interests either. It wasn't just horrible for the Iraqis. What's happening today is not in Israel's interest either.
- [51:05]
Omer Bartov
Absolutely. Absolutely. This is really the point that US Support to what Israel is doing now And German support as well is not helping Israel is actually helping the worst forces in Israeli society whose goal is to destroy Israeli society as we know it. They are eroding democracy, they're eroding liberalism, they're eroding the rule of law. They are in the process of getting rid of the Attorney General, of greatly weakening the Supreme Court. All of this is being done in the name of protecting, protecting Israel. And the way to protect Israel from its, its worst enemies who are inside Israel itself. The way to protect it is to help those who oppose these policies, is to help guide Israel in a different direction. Unfortunately, the opposite is happening. The United States, Germany, Britain, France are in large part complicit in what Israel is doing right now. And they will, of course, bear the stain of that. But most of all, it'll be Israel for generations to come. And quite apart from the horde that is being visited on tens of thousands of millions of Palestinians, not only in Gaza, but now in the west bank too. Israel will take generations to recover from this atrocity that it is now carrying out.
- [52:30]
Unknown Speaker
But the Palestinian people's right to self determination, their right to justice, must also be recognized. And put yourself in their shoes. Look at the world through their eyes. It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of their own, living their entire lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements, not just of those young people, but their parents, their grandparents every single day. It's not just when settler violence against Palestinians goes unpunished. It's not right to prevent Palestinians from farming their lands or restricting a student's ability to move around the west bank or displace Palestinian families from their homes. Neither occupation nor expulsion is the answer.
- [53:48]
Martin DeCaro
On the next episode of History As It Happens. The origins of a train war. Sure, President Trump's tariff proposals are economically ruinous. But the idea that other countries are mistreating the United States by closing off their markets to our exports, or that free trade had some serious negative consequences, those ideas are not new. We'll get into that next as we report History as it Happens. New episodes every Tuesday and Friday. My newsletter every Friday. Sign up@historyasithappens.com.