Surveying some of the worst recent cases of extreme hatred of Israel manifesting itself as naked anti-Semitism, David L. Bernstein notes that—often after pressure from Jewish leaders—institutions and politicians reacted as one might hope. The University of California, Berkeley, for instance, threatened campus groups with consequences if they pursued their recently adopted policies of banning Zionists. Yet, argues Bernstein, these are tactical, not strategic, victories:
While the Jewish community is playing the short game, doing what it’s always done to win the moment, radical social-justice warriors are playing the long game—what activists call “the long march through institutions”—in inculcating a stark ideological worldview that portrays anyone with power or success (success is a function of power, in this worldview)—America, Israel, Jews, Asians, men, etc.—as oppressors. Schools are teaching students to see people’s identities as markers of privilege and power and to “recognize and resist systems of oppression.” The problem is that the ideologues who are driving the agenda define the oppressor as anyone perceived to be powerful and successful, and the oppressed as anyone they deem powerless and, hence, unsuccessful. It’s a highly simplistic, binary worldview.
For Jewish organizations effectively to counter the long-term threat, they must come to terms with the underlying ideology that powers progressive anti-Semitism. They cannot, on the one hand, pretend to support this oppressor/oppressed binary, as many did in the California Ethnic Studies controversy, and, on the other, hope and pray that such a stance doesn’t ultimately manifest in the portrayal of Jews and Israel as oppressors. So long as radical social-justice ideologues are experiencing success pushing a program that simplistically divides the world into oppressed and oppressors and condemns anyone who doesn’t agree with them, we are going to have major anti-Semitism problems, in ever greater frequency and intensity.
Read more on Jewish Journal: https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/352128/mainstream-jewish-organizations-dont-have-leftwing-antisemitism-under-control/