How to Fight Anti-Semitism

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 How to Fight Anti-Semitism, by Bari Weiss

 This wound up being kind of timely; I'd just started reading it when the news about the Tennessee school board pulling Maus from the curriculum broke*, and then the whole Whoopi Goldberg/View/Holocaust thing happened, and so I wound up watching interviews with David Baddiel and reading think-pieces about it.**

The final part of this book is, indeed, about fighting anti-Semitism, but a good 60% of it comes first, and it's about explaining anti-Semitism for the twisty, sneaky, ever-morphing thing that it is.  

There's the Nazi version, which we can still see today in diatribes about Jews "replacing" people and attacks on synagogues.  Weiss actually opens the book with the story of the Tree of Life synagogue attack in October  2018, because that was her parents' own place of worship and community.

Then there's a quieter version, in which anti-Semitism is bad, sure, but not as bad as real racism, and very understandable, really, and don't they kind of bring it on themselves?   That's mostly what Weiss addresses, because it's more subtle, and a lot more widespread.  And then she tackles the third rail of anti-Semitism -- that found in extremist Islam.  The final part, how to fight it, prescribes Jewish pride.

I found it interesting that Weiss has a somewhat different opinion on the question of whether anti-Semitism is racism.  In the book I read last year, David Baddiel says yes, it is.  Weiss says not entirely; it's also a conspiracy theory.   So she's saying that it's not just that conspiracy theories so often seem to end up in anti-Semitism; it is, itself, a conspiracy theory about who is running the world and making us miserable for their own gain.

Fascinating book, definitely something to read, and turned out to be even more immediately relevant than I thought when I picked it up.



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*I'm sure you heard about it, but if not, read the transcript of the meeting for an interesting experience!  

**I'm sure you heard about that too, but here's a link to a short news piece/interview.

Comments

  1. Marian HFebruary 21, 2022 at 8:14 AM

    Glad it was a good read! I follow Weiss's blog on Substack and have seen this book around. It sounds pretty insightful. Sadly, I hear that conspiracy theory all too often... I find it is easily discredited, but when people get attached to an idea, it is hard to detach them from it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. BronaFebruary 22, 2022 at 2:15 PM

    I cannot believe we are still having these conversations; it makes me despair of the human race!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Nancy LeekFebruary 23, 2022 at 10:53 AM

    I read that transcrpit and now I have I'm Just Wild about Harry stuck in my head.

    ReplyDelete

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