I WANT TO TALK ABOUT THIS
With 2 million followers on Instagram, Matt Bernstein (mattxiv) is one of the largest (if not the largest) political influencers who also happens to be Jewish. It’s unfortunate that he sometimes uses his platform to downplay antisemitism when it comes from the political left or from the free Palestine movement.
Bernstein was born in 1998. The greatest surge of antisemitism in his lifetime happened on October 7th, 2023, when 1,200 human beings were murdered, the majority of them Jewish, in the deadliest attack on the Jewish community since the Holocaust. The “cause” of the October 7th massacre was – per the perpetrators’ own words, livestreamed as they carried out their atrocities – a religious war on the Jews.
Bernstein’s claim is not only ignorant and disrespectful to the victims and survivors of October 7, but also...well, it’s nothing new.
A JEWISH FEAR DATING TO ANTIQUITY
One of the “side effects” of three millennia of antisemitic persecution, so to speak, is that antisemitism has conditioned Jews to keep our heads down. Claiming rights that are rightfully ours – like the right to self-determination, enshrined in international law and applicable to all nations – is seen as a “provocation,” something that will make antisemitism “worse.”
From the Hellenized Jews during the Greek occupation of Judea, to Jewish-owned studios in early Hollywood, to the Yevsektsiya in the Soviet Union, generation after generation of Jews were convinced that downplaying or entirely rejecting important aspects of Jewish identity was the key to Jewish safety.
Time and time again, they were proven wrong, because antisemitism actually has nothing to do with the Jew and everything to do with the antisemite.
THE ORIGINAL ANTI-ZIONIST ARGUMENT
Besides opposition to Zionism on religious grounds (i.e. the belief that a Jewish state shouldn’t be established prior to the coming of the Messiah), the fear that Jewish sovereignty would “worsen” antisemitism was the original anti-Zionist Jewish argument. This at a time when pogroms were devastating Jewish communities by the hundreds of thousands in the Russian Empire.
Some important historical context: Zionism emerged as a modern political movement at the tail end of the Haskalah, or the Jewish Enlightenment, and the emancipation of European Jewry (the first European country to emancipate Jews was France in 1791; the last was Norway in 1891).
During the Haskalah, Jewish intellectuals advocated for the integration of Jews into European society, with many believing that this would be the answer to antisemitism. Zionism argued the opposite: the answer to antisemitism was Jewish sovereignty.
After the Holocaust, the Jewish community almost universally concluded that the Zionists had “won” the argument: assimilation and integration did not, in fact, keep Jews safe.
EVEN DURING THE HOLOCAUST
Though Adolf Hitler denounced Zionism in Mein Kampf and in one of his earliest speeches, titled “Why Are We Antisemites?” (1920), Nazi antisemitism generally had little to do with anti-Zionism and much more to do with hatred of Jews on a racial basis. Even so, before the Holocaust, during the Holocaust, and even in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, some prominent anti-Zionist Jews blamed Zionists for the Nazis’ policy of annihilation (to be clear, this was not the position of most anti-Zionist Jews, but that of a very vocal minority). For example:
- The Association of German National Jews, which announced its support of the Nazi regime in 1933, accused German Zionist Jews of being a threat to Jewish integration into German society. They claimed that Zionist Jews gave the Third Reich a reason to persecute Jews on charges of dual loyalty (worth noting that dual loyalty is an antisemitic conspiracy dating back thousands of years).
- In 1946, the anti-Zionist Jewish publisher of The New York Times claimed that Zionist Jews were the reason “thousands” of European Jews were dead because the Zionists had put too much “emphasis on statehood.”
"[The Jewish refugee crisis during the Holocaust was] a manageable, social and economic problem…The [Zionist] clamor for statehood introduced an insoluble political element…[If the Zionists had put] less emphasis on statehood thousands dead might now be alive."
Arthur Hays Sulzberger, 1946
Like Bernstein, the Jewish publisher of The New York Times during the Holocaust also deflected from the responsibility of the perpetrators of the “greatest surge of antisemitism” during his lifetime — that is, the Nazis — and blamed Zionists instead.
Sulzberger claimed to oppose Nazism, yet he intentionally hid reports of the Nazi persecution of Jews in the back pages of his newspaper.
FOR THE MILLIONTH TIME, A PSA
I cannot emphasize this enough:
Antisemites – and no one else – are responsible for antisemitism.
Repeat after me:
Antisemites – and no one else – are responsible for antisemitism.
Again:
Antisemites – and no one else – are responsible for antisemitism.
In this context, it actually does not matter what Israel does or doesn’t do or what Zionism is or isn’t. You – and no one else – are responsible for your own behavior. It is your responsibility not to be a bigot. It really is that simple. Anti-Asian racists don’t get a pass on anti-Asian racism because of China. Anti-Black racists don’t get a pass on anti-Black racism because of Sudan or the Congo. Antisemites don’t get a pass on antisemitism because of Israel or Zionism.
BTW, THIS IS A PATTERN
I can’t help but note that this is hardly the first time Bernstein mirrors the rhetoric of problematic, bigoted Jews of previous generations.
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