A French Scholar Tries, and Fails, to Understand Anti-Semitism in America

Feb. 16 2024

Pierre Birnbaum’s Tears of History: The Rise of Political Antisemitism in the United States, was published in English last summer, after first appearing in French in 2022, so it can be forgiven for the fact that the picture it paints of anti-Semitism in the U.S. looks very different from the picture that has come into focus after October 7. Yet the distinguished historian of French anti-Semitism makes errors of analysis that are less excusable, beginning with his theory that the presence of Jews in prominent positions in the Obama administration—like, in his view, the presence of Jews in Franklin Roosevelt’s administration—has been a major catalyst for political anti-Semitism in America. Allan Arkush writes in his review:

That the right wing of the 2010s branded Obama’s administration as a tool of the Jews just as thoroughly as its predecessors had branded FDR’s is, it seems to me, something that Birnbaum asserts but fails to substantiate. He does not really engage in a detailed comparison that would warrant such a conclusion, and the evidence he does provide is sometimes dubious.

Enough time has now passed to answer Birnbaum’s question as to whether Biden’s appointment of many Jews to high positions in his administration would rejuvenate an American version of [the French reactionary] Édouard Drumont’s anti-Semitic and antidemocratic “myth of the Jewish Republic.” It has not.

But for Arkush what rankles most is not Birnbaum’s misapprehension of the American political scene, but his apparent prescription that Jews ought to “stay on the sidelines” of politics to preserve their safety—a prescription perhaps best articulated by the doomed Austrian Jewish writer Stefan Zweig during the Nazi rise to power. Arkush writes:

Speaking for myself, I am glad that I live in a country where a leader of the majority party could make a speech like the one Chuck Schumer delivered on the Senate floor in November. Many of the new anti-Semites in America, he declared in his remarkable address, “aren’t neo-Nazis, or card-carrying Klan members, or Islamist extremists.” They were, instead, leftists whom liberal Jews such as himself had generally regarded as political allies. . . .

If taking part in the democratic system on all levels entails certain risks—and I don’t think that they are by any means as great as Birnbaum supposes—then our leaders, like Senator Schumer, will have to ignore the message of Stefan Zweig and continue to take them.

Read more at Jewish Review of Books

More about: American Jewish History, Anti-Semitism, Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Stefan Zweig

American Middle East Policy Should Focus Less on Stability and More on Weakening Enemies

Feb. 10 2025

To Elliott Abrams, Donald Trump’s plan to remove the entire population of Gaza while the Strip is rebuilt is “unworkable,” at least “as a concrete proposal.” But it is welcome insofar as “its sheer iconoclasm might lead to a healthy rethinking of U.S. strategy and perhaps of Arab and Israeli policies as well.” The U.S., writes Abrams, must not only move beyond the failed approach to Gaza, but also must reject other assumptions that have failed time and again. One is the commitment to an illusory stability:

For two decades, what American policymakers have called “stability” has meant the preservation of the situation in which Gaza was entirely under Hamas control, Hizballah dominated Lebanon, and Iran’s nuclear program advanced. A better term for that situation would have been “erosion,” as U.S. influence steadily slipped away and Washington’s allies became less secure. Now, the United States has a chance to stop that process and aim instead for “reinforcement”: bolstering its interests and allies and actively weakening its adversaries. The result would be a region where threats diminish and U.S. alliances grow stronger.

Such an approach must be applied above all to the greatest threat in today’s Middle East, that of a nuclear Iran:

Trump clearly remains open to the possibility (however small) that an aging [Iranian supreme leader Ali] Khamenei, after witnessing the collapse of [his regional proxies], mulling the possibility of brutal economic sanctions, and being fully aware of the restiveness of his own population, would accept an agreement that stops the nuclear-weapons program and halts payments and arms shipments to Iran’s proxies. But Trump should be equally aware of the trap Khamenei might be setting for him: a phony new negotiation meant to ensnare Washington in talks for years, with Tehran’s negotiators leading Trump on with the mirage of a successful deal and a Nobel Peace Prize at the end of the road while the Iranian nuclear-weapons program grows in the shadows.

Read more at Foreign Affairs

More about: Iran, Middle East, U.S. Foreign policy