The Rise of Antisemitism
My first experience of antisemitism was when I was eight years old, sat on the carpet at primary school, while a Christian supply teacher called Priscilla taught a lesson about Jesus. Having a Jewish father, I knew that Jesus was Jewish. When I mentioned this, Priscilla said “And do you know who killed the Jesus? The Jews”. I was shocked but not hugely distressed. Being blonde and white, how others understood my cultural heritage had never threatened me before, except through my understanding of Jewish history.
Antisemitism worried me more in secondary school. Attending Stoke Newington School, a school close to a large Hasidic community, hostility against their difference was common, and occasionally directed at me (“Is your dad Jewish? I beat up a Jew the other day”). Later, getting into radical left politics, I noticed antisemitism was sometimes dismissed, ignored, or just not taken that seriously.
The first incident I remember would have been around 1996, not an era known for rampant antisemitism, nor the demographic: I was brought up in the liberal multicultural population of London.
Since my childhood, antisemitism has increased, along with racism, islamophobia and xenophobia. Many Jewish people in the UK experience appalling levels of hostility and violence, of a whole different order to the aggression that has been directed at me. Antisemitic incidents have been increasing since at least 2012, more than doubling between 2012 (650 incidents) and 2017 (1,382 incidents). Assaults on Jewish people show a similar pattern, increasing from 67 in 2012 to 145 in 2017. Examples include attacks on synagogues, Jewish schools, and throwing stones at a Jewish man and his son.
So, we should take seriously accusations of antisemitism against anyone, including Jeremy Corbyn, the parliamentary Labour party, and the members of the Labour party. We also need to take seriously antisemitism in general.
This means asking the questions: why are people antisemitic? Why is antisemitism on the increase? How do we tackle antisemitism? These are the really important questions, they allow people to get to the root of the issue. To answer them well also requires empathy: antisemitism should always be challenged, and so should the conditions that shape it.
In the rest of this article I want to explain why I think a rise in antisemitism is partly driven by social conditions where people feel anxious and threatened in their daily lives and within their own communities. To tackle antisemitism therefore requires economic policy that prioritises equality, and supporting institutions and individuals to behave compassionately.
Some have understood antisemitism through the motivations of the elite: Jewish people are another scapegoat used by those in power. The people with real control of government, finance and the media whip up hatred at a scheming racket of sinister Jews who they portray as having power and money. Populations start seething at Jews, who are wrongly identified as the elite, while those really in control gain support for providing protection against sinister Jews. Like a magician, those actually in power have an interest in getting people to look the wrong way. Unlike a magician, they do not seek to entertain, they want to keep and strengthen their own power.
I think this view is correct, but limited. It explains why the rich and powerful have an interest in spreading antisemitism but why would anyone believe them? To believe something, don’t we have to think there are reasons to believe it?
I believe that the stories told by the powerful have widespread appeal only when they help people make sense of their everyday reality, and chime with people’s emotional experiences. So, I think we need to understand the emotional reality that enables antisemitism to be a useful way for people to make sense of their lives and their world. To do this, I want to look both at what Jewish people are meant to represent, and what everyday lives feel like.
Antisemitic Attitudes Emerge with Generalised Anxiety
Jewish people represent the outsider in our midst. They are there, but they are hard to discern. They are foreign figures within our community. An indecipherable threat to our wellbeing as individuals and groups.
The feeling that this symbol expresses is one of anxiety. It comes with an experience of uncertainty, an uncertainty filled with a sense of dread, where the world is experienced as hostile, but it is hard to place exactly where the threat is coming from.
How do I get here? By going back to the central image of Jewish people. The scheming manipulator, who controls and disempowers us. The emotions involved in this image are fear and bewilderment.
But I also get here by thinking about history. The Holocaust starts in Germany, a place where Jewish people were fairly integrated. They were not obvious outsiders, in fact they had integrated into German society. When the Holocaust happens, Jewish people in Germany were made to wear a Star of David badge, so that they could be identified. To work out who was Jewish, the Nazies also measured people faces. The Nazis were obsessed with it. And the lengths they went to demonstrate that it wasn’t immediately obvious who was Jewish and who wasn’t. The combination of a wider narrative of the manipulative outsider in our midst with the sense that we cannot easily identify who the outsider is, emerge with the feeling of an elusive threat.
The Economic and Psychological Conditions that Enable the Spread of Antisemitism
What is the life we have to lead for the caricature of The Jew to become prominent? It is one where we feel under threat from dangers we can’t easily identify. This is the world many of us live in at the moment. And this is how many of us feel.
While the price of living rises in the UK, benefits are rationed and witheld, and sick and disabled people are declared fit to work before they die. People are getting poorer, their working conditions are precarious, and many are underemployed and underpaid. Public organisations are understaffed and underfunded, leading to incredible stressful working conditions for employees, and the destruction of health and social care for service-users. A climate crisis looms. The stress is continual, social media works us into a frenzy, and politicians and the media lie, evade and get away with it.
There is the flip side of antisemitism, and any racism, which isn’t just about people’s worries but also about their desire for status and power. Here, too, I think we can be empathetic: the desire for status and power can become stronger when people feel threatened, anxious, and/or doesn’t feel loved and accepted for who they are. Power and status are a way to gain control and act as some kind of substitute for love. If this is the case, then desires for power and status are likely to be increased when your life feels out of control, and/or feelings of low self-worth are pervasive. (James Baldwin and Toni Morrison say similar things about anti-black racism.)
Threats to our wellbeing are woven into our everyday experience. It is no wonder that people feel anxious. It is no wonder that people feel anxious and worthless, that they feel their wellbeing is threatened and they do not know where to locate the threat. That is because, for many people in the UK, threats to our wellbeing and self-esteem are pervasive, complicated and multiple.
This is not to excuse antisemitism. People should be held accountable for antisemitism by drawing attention the harm these prejudices cause, and the way they fail to recognise the dignity and magnificence of all people. My argument is that in addition to holding people accountable for their views and behaviour, we should think about the material and psychological conditions that make people more likely to be antisemitic.
Antisemitism takes root not only because the powerful have an interest in it, but also because it gives us an explanation as to why our lives are the way they are. Additionally, it provides us with an action to keep us safe in a world where we feel disorientated and downtrodden: to preserve and increase our wellbeing, we have to identify the strangers amongst us and harm or expel them.
To create a society where people simply have no reason for believing antisemitism, because they feel no threat within their lives and communities, we need to change what it is like to live in the UK.
Creating Conditions where Antisemitism doesn’t make Sense
The answer to antisemitism is not only holding people to account for their antisemitism, it is also the transformation of society: paying people fairly; distributing wealth and power equally; funding and improving health care, education and social services; and creating an environment where people communicate compassionately and treat each other with respect. In a society like this, people will still get anxious, there will still be times in our lives where we feel threatened and confused, but these will be moments in our lives rather the background hum of our daily existence.
You want to take antisemitism seriously? Then support the projects that lay the conditions for a vibrant and loving society where everyone is valued, and vote for the party that you feel is most likely to help create those conditions.
