06 February, 2014

A crossroads for antisemitism? | OUPblog

A crossroads for antisemitism? | OUPblog: The main difficulty in combating antisemitism is that the two main strategies for doing so are increasingly at cross purposes.

The first sees antisemitism from the perspective of Jewish nationalism (Zionism), for which the answer to antisemitism is Israel, as the political expression of the Jewish people’s right to national self-determination. From this perspective attacks on Israel are against the national rights of the Jewish people and hence are antisemitic because anti-Zionist. This linking of antisemitism with anti-Zionism, conceptualized most recently in the theory of “the new antisemitism”, has garnered strong support in the world’s Jewish communities, and is also written into the European Union’s working definition of antisemitism. If we approach antisemitism as a Jewish problem alone, this has a certain sense.