Looking for an Enemy: 8 Essays on Antisemitism
Antisemitism has been on the rise for the past 10 years in Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere. Looking for an Enemy addresses the immediate causes while digging for their roots. The consensus among the eight essayists is that antisemitism is sewn into the fabric of Western Civilization, with Jews as the original Other, always accused of conspiring across national boundaries. The American right’s obsession with George Soros is cut from an old pattern of allegations that Jews seek nothing short of world domination. And the web is full of old tales concerning Jews murdering Gentile children in unholy rituals.
American readers will be especially interested in the essay by Jill Jacobs, executive director of T’ruah, an organization promoting human rights in the U.S. as well as the Palestinian territories. Jacobs titles her essay “A License to Hate” and focuses on the curious case of Donald Trump. His daughter married an Orthodox Jew and converted—and yet Trump told Fox News that Joe Biden is controlled by “people that are in the dark shadows.” He was dog whistling to antisemites and their long-held anxiety over covert Jewish influence that has spanned the political spectrum from Hitler to Stalin. In Trump’s hands, condemnation of “globalists” sounds suspiciously like “longstanding antisemitic conspiracy theories depicting Jews as a secret global power structure attempting to undermine the world order.”
Trump’s “pro-Israel” stance? At a 2020 rally in Wisconsin, he told the MAGA mob: “We moved the capital of Israel to Jerusalem. That’s for the evangelicals.” He refers to the evangelical notion the Jews (though hell-bound if they refuse Christianity) must solidify their hold on the Holy Land before the second coming of Christ can occur.
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In his essay, Tom Segev examines antisemitism from an Israeli perspective. As one of that country’s great historians and essayists, Segev is critical of past and present Israeli policies, including manipulating the Holocaust for “political purposes,” a factor that plays into the hands of left-wing Boycott antisemites in the West. And yet he fully understands the enduring trauma of Israel’s Jews and their anxiety of insecurity. “Often,” he writes, Israelis could be “described as a paranoid people on the run from real enemies.”
