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 on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/american-jewry/15470/stuck-in-the-middle/