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What Jews can't afford to forget Progressive ideology is fundamentally antisemitic

Generational conflict. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times/Getty)

Generational conflict. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times/Getty)


October 5, 2024   4 mins

Some memories can be lethal to the psyche. Every reader of the Bible knows that Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt, the stuff of tears, when she turned to face the firestorm engulfing Sodom. Who can blame her for disregarding the angel’s warning: Get Out, Don’t Look Back? She must have been grieving the daughters she had left behind, whose husbands had laughed in disbelief when their father-in-law told them of God’s plan to destroy the city. These women wouldn’t be the last in the line of Abraham who perished because their families failed to appreciate the seriousness of their predicament.

It’s a risky business for a people to remember the grievous wounds they have suffered, especially when they are still raw and the evil that would destroy them rages on. But tomorrow, Israelis and diaspora Jews will be compelled to think about the mass murders, tortures, rapes, and kidnappings that 6,000 Gazan invaders perpetrated a year ago. On the liturgical anniversary of the deaths of 1,200 victims, relatives will say Yahrzeit prayers to commemorate them. And even secular Jews will pause to grieve an event that plunged Israel into a war on multiple fronts and ignited worldwide displays of antisemitism.

The Jews have more to forget about than any people in history: captivities and resettlements, expulsions, confiscations, pogroms, and genocide. Yet for three millennia, they’ve displayed a miraculous capacity to overcome hardships and begin anew. Their irrepressible life-force has repeatedly helped them forget the immediate past and rebuild shattered lives.

But the rising waters of forgetfulness can be as perilous as those of memory. Israeli leaders and security officials forgot the measureless hatred and viciousness of those running Gaza and Lebanon. Diaspora Jews, at least in Anglophone nations, foolishly convinced themselves that antisemitism was a thing of the past. Both groups, exemplified in this respect by the young doves who celebrated “friends, love and infinite freedom” at the Supernova music festival where 364 people were murdered, let their wish to live in peace and security be father to the thought that their goal was virtually at hand.

In the United States, many Jews on the Left implicitly forgot their faith when they embraced identitarian progressivism. Since the days of the prophet Isaiah, Judaism has emphasised care for the poor, the oppressed, the widow and the orphan. To many Jews, explanatory frameworks such as critical race theory and intersectionality seemed to advance these noble aims. During Obama’s presidency, social justice activism began to invade American synagogue services. But when the people these Jews had mistaken for allies vigorously supported Hamas after October 7, it became impossible to ignore the fact that progressive ideology is fundamentally antisemitic.

“Hamas’s barbaric attack was explicitly directed against Judaism as well as Jews.”

How does it feel for Jews to realise that their supposed friends effectively wish them ill? More or less, I’d say, like the survivor Simon Srebnik felt when he returned to Chelmno decades after the Nazis exterminated 400,000 Jews in that Polish village. In a scene in the epic Holocaust documentary Shoah, Srebnik is surrounded by old men and women who remember him walking in chains as a teenager and are “very pleased” to see him again. They are standing outside a church where Jews were imprisoned before being gassed. A woman states that the doomed Jews “called on Jesus and Mary and God” for salvation; a man says that, when “the Jews condemned the innocent Christ to death”, they cried out “Let his blood fall on our heads and on our sons’ heads”. Srebnik smiles stiffly as they justify the persecution he suffered as a Jew even as they express affection for him.

The explosion of antisemitism after October 7 bodes ill for everyone, not just the Jews. That’s because the fundamental Jewish values — biblical faith; a reverence for tradition; the preservation of the family; national solidarity; the protection of state borders; attachment to the land of one’s ancestors — are the basic values of Western civilisation. I’m reminded of the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s chilling prophecy, in his 1846 book Two Ages, that the late-modern phenomenon of levelling — the ongoing destruction of the organic communities which have sustained human beings for millennia — is “a demon that no individual can control”. He predicted that levelling will be a global phenomenon, driven by an ideological abstraction so extreme as to be utterly devoid of ethical and political content. “Not even national individuality will be able to halt it,” he wrote, “for the abstraction of levelling is related to a higher negativity: pure humanity.” It is this utterly vacuous concept — pure humanity, without respect for actually existing individuals and the thick bonds of family, congregation, locality, and peoplehood of which their lives are woven — that animates the angry mobs of atomised Westerners whose call to “globalise the intifada” expresses their implicit desire to destroy civilisation as such.

That nihilistic desire springs, in large part, from a failure to transmit the precious wisdom of our ancestors “from generation to generation” (l’dor vador in Hebrew). The result has been widespread cultural forgetfulness concerning the conditions of a decent human life. But Western antisemitism seems to be rooted in another kind of forgetfulness as well, one bordering on the psychological category of repression. We human beings perversely find it difficult to forgive others for the wrongs we’ve done them. Instead of paying our moral debts, we prefer to let them slip from memory while fabricating justifications for doing so. For some Europeans, the guilt of the Holocaust is assuaged by associating Israelis with Nazis and accusing them of genocide.

The Islamist enemies of Israel are consumed with bitterness and envy. Their goal, a demonic inversion of good and evil, is purely negative. They remember — and in a perverse manner observe — the Jewish holy days. The unspeakable atrocities of October 7 occurred on Simchat Torah, the celebration of the completion of the annual liturgical cycle of public Torah readings. Hamas’s barbaric attack was explicitly directed against Judaism as well as Jews.

What Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iran, and the other Islamist enemies of Israel have forgotten is that God chose the Jews to be a light unto the nations. Dispersed throughout the world, their light seems small and weak when times are good, but shines most brightly in the deepest darkness. The attacks of October 7 have stirred in the Jews — Hasidic and atheistic; Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, and Sephardic; Indian, Chinese, Australian, and American — what Lincoln called “the mystic chords of memory”. Today, in an existential crisis that may turn out to be the denouement of the central drama of Western civilisation, these unwilling protagonists — the whole people of Israel — are determined to defend themselves and the light they carry.


Jacob Howland is Provost and Dean of the Intellectual Foundations Program at the University of Austin.


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Josef Švejk
Josef Švejk
30 days ago

As a non-Jew I have yet to read an Islamist or Progressive argument that is as convincing as this article. The Jewish Tribe will win this war because their opponents don’t think of the future or the past but act on base motives and superstition.

Bill Siemers
Bill Siemers
30 days ago

Interesting. Thank you

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
30 days ago

“God chose the Jews to be a light unto the nations”
Maybe this sanctimonious, holier than thou attitude contributes to the negative attitudes many countries have towards Israel, combined with the way it happily butchers thousands of civilians in order to kill a few terrorists?
If one person hates me then f**k them, doesn’t worry me. If everybody hated me I’d start to question what I was doing for that to be the case. If the Jews are mistreated in every country (as this article claims) then perhaps they should look at themselves and ask why this is the case, rather than lazily blaming antisemitism

Juan P Lewis
Juan P Lewis
30 days ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

Billy Bobo blames the victim of the oldest racism. The war in Gaza has the lowest civilian:combatant ratio, so it’s actually many jihadists being killed, not just a few. Of course, when the same was being done to ISIS nobody complained, even though the ratio of civilian casualties was higher. Billy Bobo proves Bebel right about the dummen Kerle.

General Store
General Store
29 days ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

You are a piece of work. I don’t think I have ever seen such an openly Nazi comment. Illiterate and philistine to boot. Whilst you’re at it, why don’t you have a go at those damn women who were raped because they showed off such a fine pair of pins? Judaism has been a light to the nations. Not individual Jews – as any Jewish person will tell you. The Old Testament is a litany of repeated failure, apostasy, sin, corruption …just like all of human life. But every value that nourishes western civilization is rooted in that tradition.

Gordon Arta
Gordon Arta
29 days ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

The claim of ‘chosen people’, and the closed nature of Jewish clans and communities, no doubt contributed to their alienation, but the causes of hatred were stronger. The Catholic Church expressly condemned the Jews as the murderer of Jesus, and the early Muslims for supposed treason against their ‘prophet’. But throughout the ages Jews have been envied and hated for their success. Valuing knowledge and learning, literacy and numeracy, Jews were often selected as scribes, chroniclers, and accountants to emperors, kings, and even caliphs, putting them in powerful positions despite being ‘outsiders’. Their numeracy also elevated them into influential positions in ordinary towns and villages as eg moneylenders. There are also quirks of history. When the Great Plague swept into western Europe, groups of Jews who had been exposed to less virulent forms in east Asia before migrating or being driven westward, enjoyed a level of immunity. They were therefore blamed for starting or spreading the disease.

PEACE KABAREGA
PEACE KABAREGA
7 days ago
Reply to  Gordon Arta

..

Piece ks.
Piece ks.
7 days ago
Reply to  Gordon Arta

I didn’t know about the immunity during the plague, I always believed Jews died from the plague in less numbers because they washed their hands before eating. I mean you can’t underestimate how much you can survive in a pandemic by just washing your hands 3 times a day, it helps with ebola, cholera, the plague, covid,…..
Meanwhile everyone else was like “No water will touch my body this winter”.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
29 days ago

imagine calling Hamas invaders, in their own land, there is nothing more antisemitic than zionism

Bartholomew Whitheath
Bartholomew Whitheath
29 days ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

I dunno, mate. If one bloke stole a car from a second bloke and it turned out that the second bloke had actually stolen it from the first bloke, would you really feel sorry for the second bloke? On your antisemitic point, are you using Semite in its broadest term here? Too subtle for me I think.

Russell Sharpe
Russell Sharpe
29 days ago

In my experience it is better to forgo the word ‘antisemitism’ as there is always someone who will try to derail the conversation by solemnly explaining that antisemitism means hostility to Semites, so anyone sympathetic to Arabs cannot possibly be that. Much better to avoid that diversionary manoeuvre and say simply “Jew-hatred’.

James Twigg
James Twigg
28 days ago
Reply to  Russell Sharpe

Yes, I like to keep it simple and just call them ‘jew haters’.

Graham Stull
Graham Stull
29 days ago

Another article that purposefully confounds antisemitism and antizionism.
I’m not saying both don’t exist, but confounding the two causes them both to grow, while providing moral and poltical cover for atrocities committed by Zionists.

John Riordan
John Riordan
29 days ago
Reply to  Graham Stull

There is at this stage no useful distinction between the two things that isn’t merely a convenient cover for antiSemites.

Graham Stull
Graham Stull
29 days ago
Reply to  John Riordan

Let me try to make it as simple as possible:
“I don’t like Jews” – anti-Semitic
“I don’t like the philosophy that says Jews are a ‘Chosen People’ and therefore should enjoy rights others do not, especially territorial rights relating to the Levant.” – anti-Zionism.
Is that clear enough?

Russell Sharpe
Russell Sharpe
28 days ago
Reply to  Graham Stull

How about “I deplore Jews’ current ability to defend themselves against their current would-be exterminators, and advocate a reversion to the status quo ante Israel’s foundation, in which which they could be slaughtered with impunity wherever they happened to be living.”
Antisemitism or antizionism?

Graham Stull
Graham Stull
28 days ago
Reply to  Russell Sharpe

I mean, you’re using highly charged language here, but I take your point.
Again, there IS such a thing as ‘anti-Semitism’. It’s just that not everyone is actually anti-Semitic, and a lot of anti-Zionism is confounded as anti-Semitism.
Okay, I’m tired of repeating myself…

General Store
General Store
29 days ago
Reply to  Graham Stull

Because destroying the Jewish state would open the gates to a glorious new era of peaceful secular coexistence? I’m sure you would also be ‘pleased’ that a few survived the ‘unpleasantness’ that followed.

Graham Stull
Graham Stull
29 days ago
Reply to  General Store

This is what is known as a ‘straw man’. I don’t believe it is necessary to destroy Israel, but it may be necessary to reform Israel and to take serious steps to a better political solution between Israel and its neighbours.
This does not exclude that there are forces that would not be content with such a reasonable solution (i.e. actual anti-Semitism).

Russell Sharpe
Russell Sharpe
29 days ago

Good article, but I would just like to highlight the link it contains to this one, by the philosopher Edward Halper, which is also well worth reading: https://lawliberty.org/features/progressive-ideologys-antisemitic-core/

Kelly Madden
Kelly Madden
29 days ago
Reply to  Russell Sharpe

Yes. Harper makes the titular argument that Howland does not.

General Store
General Store
29 days ago

Best essay in Unherd this year. Progressives are basically anti-everything. Progressivism is iconoclasm and nihilism in glad rags. More of this guy please Unherd

Kelly Madden
Kelly Madden
29 days ago

“Every reader of the Bible knows that Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt…. She must have been grieving the daughters she had left behind….”

She did not leave her daughters behind. Read the story.
div > p:nth-of-type(4) > a”> div > p:nth-of-type(4) > a”>https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2019&version=NIV

I agree wholeheartedly about the importance right remembering. Start at home.

Stu Std
Stu Std
25 days ago
Reply to  Kelly Madden

Bingo! Good article nonetheless.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
28 days ago

13k children dead, and counting. South Africa will certainly win its case.

Piece ks.
Piece ks.
7 days ago

The enemy of the modern leftist is the white heterosexual male. Jews are white and mostly heterosexual, they are the left’s enemy just like everyone else and so they are labelled murdering colonialists.