The definitions of what’s crazy, what’s malicious, what’s polite, normal, and respectable all lost some of their force.
The definitions of what’s crazy, what’s malicious, what’s polite, normal, and respectable all lost some of their force.
E very political trend and tendency has characteristic faults. And in a populist age, we should expect and be on guard for conspiracy theories, social scapegoating, racism, and antisemitism. Each speaks to the impulses in populism, the felt impotence of mass politics, or zero-sum, us-versus-them thinking, and envy and hatred of the successful.
But I don’t think the rise of populist politics since roughly 2015, or the backlash against “wokism,” is enough to explain what seems like a huge spike in antisemitism. Populism was initially driven by fear of Islamic violence, not Jewish preeminence. Donald Trump is outwardly pro-Israel, and though he indulges in stereotypes about every ethnicity, he tends to show special respect to his own Jewish son-in-law and Jewish people around him. Many of the populist movements in Europe have taken a philo-semitic turn. And wokism itself is often allied to a third-worldist sentiment that casts Israel as a settler-colonial villain.
We know that the pandemic was the occasion for a great unraveling of social trust in our public health institutions, and in the medical field itself. Some of this was on the way, built into existing social trends. But I believe that the withdrawal from social life drained the authority and force not just out of institutions like health boards, schools, and churches (none of which have fully recovered), but also out of long-developed taboos and social expectations. The definitions of what’s crazy, what’s malicious, what’s polite, normal, and respectable all lost some of their force. Again, this built on an existing trend to shift socialization online. But considered this way, the rise of antisemitism would be connected to other trends the pandemic supercharged, like our low fertility, the sex recession, and the general surge of loneliness.
I cannot point to any special set of studies, or any formal chain of causation, but what Bill Buckley once called “the structure of prevailing taboos,” including the taboo against antisemitism, is obviously weaker now. It makes sense that the whole world of social authority lost power as we started socializing less than ever before. One early study during the pandemic said that antisemitic acts were being suppressed along with the general level of social activity during the pandemic, but that they were being replaced and replicated with a surge of online antisemitism.
The current vintage of antisemitism, particularly as it has been expressed alongside a left-wing critique of Zionism, has another peculiar quality: It is like a suicidal person’s envy of the vivacious. As targets of antisemitism, Jews tended to be blamed for contradictory crimes: They’re too clannish, they’re too cosmopolitan, they’re dedicated to a backward religion, they’re a force for secularization, etc., etc. Modern Israel stands out for not overprivileging a suicidal impulse in its rhetoric, and for in some ways excising it from its social life. Israel has an above-replacement birth rate. It defends its existence, surrounded by hostile powers, with zest and real self-belief. To perhaps dangle myself over the abyss of political incorrectness or risk romanticizing a foreign nation, it is as if the pandemic has turned many gentiles into Theodor Herzl’s caricature of self-hating Jews. The pandemic had us physically bent over our devices, scrolling neurotically, indulging in persecution fantasies, whereas Israelis — targets of real extinction-level violence — find themselves standing ramrod, facing their enemies with confidence, and wit. Maybe a civilization that let death and risk reign over it so abjectly is driven to disgrace and madness by an example of heroism and moral courage in the face of danger.