Antisemitism Is An Inferiority Complex

Follow me on Instagram: @michaeldavidmodern

It’s in the news everyday: antisemitism is on an appalling rise worldwide.  If this is to be stopped, the most important question we have to answer is, “Why?”.

In these last seventy-plus years since the defeat of the Nazis and the establishment of Israel, there has been a strong movement in the Jewish community to combat antisemitism wherever it rears its head, but yet, in the 21st century, when so many boundaries of bigotry are truly beginning to crack, antisemitism is instead getting worse. 

Globalization is a new phenomenon in human affairs. You could trace back centuries to early cross-continental trade but modern globalization is really only about fifty years old, no time in the grand scheme. Along with all change comes anxiety, and the primary anxiety that comes with globalization is the fear of outsiders. Look around the world: Americans are worried about Latino immigrants and the changing demographics of the country—fear of outsiders. Europeans are worried about Middle Eastern and African refugees—fear of outsiders. Americans are worried about the loss of jobs to China, while the Chinese are worried about the loss of their culture to an influx of foreign corporate power—fear of outsiders. Poor developing countries, while they want food and clean water, are worried that their culture will be lost in translation—fear of outsiders. 

Jews make the perfect scapegoat for the fear of outsiders. Their numbers are small but they are socially prominent. That means you can get more bang for your buck in the political blame game. Piss off Blacks or Latinos, you’re pissing of tens of millions of the electorate. Go against workers, you’re dividing the country in half. Jews are a tiny minority that most people already don’t like anyway (or think they don’t like) so they come right from central casting for the role of social and political scapegoat. 

In these times, what the fear of outsiders actually represents is the fear of a world with NO outsiders, because that is what the vision of globalism is really about. A global society was the dream of intelligent, educated people for centuries until we arrived at the cusp of it and realized that our social and political institutions are not up to completing this task in a fair and equitable way. 

One of the common sideways antisemitic slurs is that Jews are “the globalists”. Like a lot of antisemitic tropes, it falls in the category of “mostly true, but not bad”. Jewish people do tend to be more global thinkers. A big part of that is Jewish culture’s emphasis on education, which usually goes hand in hand with a broader worldview. But it is also due to the status of Jews as effectively a fugitive people for so many centuries. You had to know what was going on in the world to know where the safe landing spots were when the next Torquemada or Hitler showed up. And it wasn’t like Jews decided to scatter themselves around the planet!

For years, I was bothered by the term antisemitism because my perception was that Jews were, on the whole, privileged, so much so that they had their own word for racism against them. A lot of Black people feel this way. But as I began to spend more and more time thinking about and studying issues that concern the Jewish community, I began to recognize that there is a critical fundamental difference between antisemitism and other forms of racism. We really should handle all forms of racism as individual concepts, since the relationship between Blacks and Whites is different from the relationship between Blacks and Latinos, or Whites and Latinos, or Whites and Asians. Hell, racism against east Asians is different from racism against south Asians. 

Antisemitism is a different beast from all of these, however, because antisemitism is an inferiority complex. Most forms of racism are rooted in one group’s perception that it is meaningfully superior to the other group in some way. But you can’t attack Jews along any of the fronts where racial wars are fought: you can’t say Jews are stupid. You can’t say Jews are lazy. These statements just flat-out sound farcical. You can try to say Jews are evil but you have a hard time coming up with more than isolated examples that pale in comparison to the bad deeds of any other people. But yet, what every antisemite knows, even if they can’t admit it to themselves, is that Jews have made remarkable and important contributions to their society. Antisemitism is the ultimate form of cutting off your nose to spite your face. 

Yuri Slezkine wrote a book entitled “The Jewish Century”. I haven’t actually read it, but it’s on my list, and anyway, I already know. The book argues that the modern age is the Jewish age and the Twentieth century is the Jewish century. Yuri’s right. Look, without the Jewish contributions to physics and filmmaking, just those two disciplines alone, it would be a dramatically different world.  A worse one. 

Where the level of antisemitism in our culture meets with the physical appearance-based nature of most racism in our culture, an interesting phenomenon occurs. To put it in the simplest terms, Jews get it coming and going. Because a lot of Jews don’t look much different from White people, White people usurp them as one of their own when it comes to building a record of accomplishment. I wonder what percentage of Americans would say Einstein was White? And lots of our favorite movie stars are generally thought of as White, like say...Scarlett Johansson. It’s funny how often I hear Black people lump Jews in with White people when it comes to racial oppression, despite the fact that Jews have been an underclass like us for most of American history, and Jews played a pivotal role in fighting to free Black people from racism. I doubt there were too many Jewish slaveholders, if any at all, but when Blacks see a rich Jew, we paint them with that same brush, even though their parents or grandparents might have been murdered in concentration camps while we were worried about drinking fountains and lunch counter seats. 

Americans don’t even realize that the Manhattan Project, source of America’s post-war global dominance, was a mostly Jewish project. If Jews had a goal of global dominance, all they had to do was tell the US government the atomic bomb didn’t work and sit tight until Israel was established. All the most important Manhattan Project scientists were Jewish except Enrico Fermi...and his wife was Jewish. 

So a lot of Jewish achievements have been lumped in with White achievements because the Jews in question didn’t look like Woody Allen or didn’t bother to say “Hey, I’m a Jew”, likely because if you pick a random point in history over the last two thousand years, being Jewish could get you killed. 

So Jews often don’t advertise their own achievements. But yet, if a Jew does something bad, you can guarantee that their being Jewish will be mentioned. So it creates this false reality, a vague idea that being Jewish is something bad when there is no evidence to support that, and to the contrary, most Gentiles know from the bits and pieces of what they’ve learned, that Jews are actually good people. 

So what is the solution?  We had decades of “Never Forget”. Simon Weisenthal hunted down just about every Nazi leader. Jewish people continue to make important contributions to the societies in which they live as they have always done. But yet the problem of antisemitism won’t go away and it’s getting worse. I imagine this must be a source of grave anxiety for Jewish people. Right now, today, America might seem to be a pleasant and comfortable environment for Jews in many respects, but it is part of the Jewish cultural memory that Germany and Spain were once comfortable as well...I can imagine the Jewish person feeling, “Here we go again, and its like there’s NOTHING we can do about it!”

As an outsider, I have a two-part strategy for fighting antisemitism. The first part is, we have to change the battleground. We spend too much time talking about and arguing with antisemites while trying to defend Jews. Arguing against a negative from the middle will still leave a negative result. I’m not suggesting that antisemitism should be ignored. Never that. But the percentage of the conversation dedicated to combatting antisemitism should be reduced in favor of promoting...philosemitism. It is telling that spellcheck doesn’t recognize that word. 

But the problem is, in our culture, it is taboo for Jews themselves to say what the truth is: Jews are awesome. We have this whole fake humility thing in American culture where you aren’t supposed to extol your own virtues. And there aren’t too many non-Jews who will do it on behalf of the Jewish community because...well...most American Gentiles are antisemitic. Its a sad fact and its not even entirely their own fault. In America, antisemitism is in the air everywhere. Lately, as I’ve been giving thought to the possibility of marrying a Jewish girl, I’ve been shocked as I’ve been noticing the amount of casual antisemitism that is permissible in every day discourse in America. While it is becoming less and less acceptable to say demeaning things about Blacks, or Latinos or the disabled or LGBTQ people, it seems more acceptable than ever to casually say insulting things about Jews. I’ve started trying to do my part to fight this by saying “Hey, I like Jewish people...”. And I’ve been noticing how often I have to say that, especially in jail where being racist is regarded as a virtue (you read that right and its true). 

The fact is, there are too few Jews for them to have any chance of winning a fight against antisemitism on their own. Those of us who know better have to speak up more. And we have to do more than say “Jews aren’t bad”. We have to make and defend the argument that Jews are awesome. And it is an easy argument to make because its true. Then we can put the antisemites on the run, because the record of Jewish contributions to human civilization is clear and unassailable. It is the one battleground antisemites dread to enter, which is why they stay focused on moldy debunked century-old conspiracy theories. 

But that isn’t all. We have to do more than talk. We have to support Jewish organizations and causes, and make a point to stay abreast of issues that affect the communities we care about ALL the time, not just when something happens. Subscribe to Jewish journals, attend Jewish events. It is probably not safe to do until we’ve beaten this antisemitic wave back, but Jewish community centers are awesome places that should welcome the Gentile public to see what the rest of us can learn about how to have well-functioning communities, which Gentiles by and large don’t. 

That is one part. But there is a second part to this plan, and this is something Jews must do themselves: The Jewish community needs to do a better job of making friends. 

Given our history as Gentiles, the Jewish community is right not to trust us easily. But this is the hard step that has to be taken. I believe it is the only step to ensure Jewish security and prosperity for the future, and human security and prosperity for the future. 

I’m not talking about lines of rabbis on the street shaking hands and kissing babies. I mean something different. 

I think Jews need to become evangelical. I actually have a theory that this is what Jesus was actually trying to achieve. The theological and historical backing for that will have to wait. But I’m not talking about trying to get people to convert to the Judaism, and obviously ethnic conversions aren’t possible (yet).  I think Jews need to start recruiting people to live by Jewish cultural values and in so doing openly align themselves with the Jewish community. I’m talking about an official declaration that a Gentile would issue and make a covenant to uphold that they will rise and fall with the Jewish community. I would go first. 

Now, because there happen to be a lot of prosperous Jews in the world right now, we don’t want every heretofore antisemite lining up to make a false conversion because they think its going to get them a good job in banking or media. These people who are going to choose to align with the Jewish community should be selected from the group that the Jewish community feels they can trust, and by being kept closer to the community, that trust will be strengthened.  Jews have made spectacular contributions to our world, but they’ve never really invited us into theirs, with good reason: Pharaoh, Alexander, Caesar, countless popes and kings, the inquisition, Hitler...The Jewish community has kept itself at a certain distance from the rest of us as an act of self-preservation. 

I believe the modern antisemite, the intelligent dangerous ones, have given up on the idea of exterminating Jewish bodies.  That sort of thing is a one-shot deal, and the shot failed...just barely. Their goal now isn’t an assault on Jewish lives, but an assault on Jewish culture that gets so intense, no one will want to identify as Jewish, no one will want to carry on Jewish traditions, religious OR cultural. There will still be Jews, but they won’t be Jewish anymore. We can’t let that happen. 

What is most important about Jewish culture is that we must learn to understand what has permitted such a small group of people to have such a sustained positive impact on human civilization for so long, and we must preserve it forever. 

There are only about fifteen million Jews in the world. A big city’s worth. That’s it. This makes the contributions of Jewish people, given their small number, even more spectacular, and the horror of the Holocaust even more terrible when you stop to contemplate, “How many Einsteins might we have killed?”

When the Nazis of the present and the future look at the social landscape in the search for scapegoats that fascism requires, its easy to say, “What about the Jews? There are only a few of them.”. But if they know they’ll have to fight the Jews AND the friends of the Jews, against the Jews and the people who knows how important and special the Jewish community is, that’s another calculation entirely. 

It’s a lonely planet for Jewish people. There are nearly five hundred of us for every one of them, most of our heads filled with loony antisemitic garbage. When you’re lonely, you need a friend, and the Jewish community needs friends now more than ever. 

Follow me on Instagram: @michaeldavidmodern