The Anti-Capitalists Who Helped Create Modern Anti-Semitism

Since the early 19th century, anti-Semites have argued that the true beneficiaries of liberal democracy and market economies have been Jews, and that Jews were ultimately to blame for the dislocation and social ills that accompanied modernization and the industrial revolution. Thus, well before Karl Marx wrote “On the Jewish Question”—in which he declared that “money is the jealous God of Israel” and called for “the emancipation of society from Judaism”—some prominent early socialists saw Jews as the manifestation of the problem they were committed to solving. Michele Battini, in his recent The Socialism of Fools, traces the history of these strands of thinking in West European socialism from its roots until the present day. Although his book sheds much light on this important and often forgotten piece of history, Ben Cohen finds that it also ignores some essential things:

The elephant in the room here is Battini’s treatment of the relationship between the anti-Semitic texts and movements which he analyzes and today’s expressions of anti-Zionism. Readers hoping for a substantive probing of these connections are advised to look elsewhere, although that isn’t necessarily a criticism. Battini is a historian, and the value of his book lies in his thesis that anti-Semitism was a core pillar of the anti-democratic and illiberal thought that flourished in the 19th century on left and right. But he does also choose to address the subject in its contemporary form, and what he has to say is so unsatisfying that one questions why he felt the need to include it at all.

The problem here is not just Battini’s mandatory nod to the “ferociously unjust” policies of Israel toward the Palestinians. . . . It’s that his overall argument is hasty and weak. . . . He avoids any meaningful examination of the role of the New Left in promoting this “new-old anti-Semitism,” and does not even pause to consider the meaning of the anti-Semitic terrorism carried out by non-Arab groups like the Japanese Red Army and Germany’s Red Army Faction during the 1970s.

Battini is correct when he concludes that anti-Semitism in our time revolves around the notion that “‘Judaism’ is power because Israel is an actual political power and because the American Diaspora is a financial power.” Expressed like this, we can perceive the continuity between the anti-emancipatory anti-Semitism of early capitalism and that which has crystallized in its current, globalized form. Yet his claim that Israel’s “[provocations] against the Arab populations of Palestine” act as grist to the mill of today’s propagandists is a lazy and commonplace argument—all the more so as the overall thrust of his book makes it clear that there was little correspondence between anti-Semitic theorizing and the actual behavior of Jews.

Read more at Commentary

More about: Anti-Semitism, History & Ideas, Karl Marx, Socialism

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society