Review: Steven Beller. Antisemitism. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2007.
Guess we got lucky. Deputy Daughtry might have found a copy of Steven Beller’s book on antisemitism in Hamilton Hall, instead. Correction: might have pretended to have seized Beller’s book in occupied Hamilton Hall at Columbia University, instead of Terrorism, in the same series. Either way, this cop is telling a porky: the photo’s photoshopped, and crudely: in the Real World the books in the Oxford University Press series are half the size of what’s in the photo:
The real luck would have been if the cops had actually read Beller’s book, which, from my own experience, is the best single guide I know to—not for!—antisemitism. Or if the House of Reps, the President, etc., had read it.
For those of us who read, however, Beller’s book is the best short introduction I know to antisemitism. Beller’s book is so densely packed with concepts and ideas it’s hard to condense it further. Antisemitism consists of a series of brief elucidations of the concepts brought into play, with brief pointers to the theoretical issues involved. What follow’s not a review, more of a bare-bone synopsis; consider this a brief introduction to A Brief Introduction.
Among the concepts, the “building blocks” of antisemitism, the little nuggets of received truth that make for the big lies:
Anti-Judaism: traditional Christian doctrinal arguments about Judaism. [“The Jews killed Christ!]
Jew-hatred: schoolyard recycling of traditional Christian doctrinal arguments: [“You’re a are Christ-killer!”] The stuff that Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden and Andrew Cuomo are still trying to run from.
Racial anti-Semitism: what the Nazis cooked up in the nineteenth century.
Religious/spiritual antisemitism: “the Jews are too materialistic.”
Economic antisemitism: “the Jews run the world by controlling finances.”
The Jewish World Spirit: “there’s a single Jewish mind that runs our universities and culture.”
Cultural antisemitism: “Jews are responsible for the ‘loss of enchantment’ of the Modern World.”
There’s more like that, and some with which I don’t agree. Beller’s uncomfortable with the concept of Discursive antisemitism, “What we talk about when we talk about da Joos.” When it comes to Marx, or Wagner, Beller falls back on classifying them in that diffuse category of “guys who talk dirty about Jews.” Like so many other products of a liberal education he doesn’t get Marxism. Likewise, he thinks the solution to antisemitism is close at hand, with the “establishment of a truly global system of liberal pluralism” [p. 122]: how’s that working out for you?
On the other hand Beller has a few remarks in passing that make you think that maybe Officer Daughtry’s right to be concerned: that Israel is “a classic ethno-national state,” for instance [p. 117]; or again:
“To equate anti-Zionism and antisemitism is, however, far too simplistic, theoretically crass, and demeans the memory of those who suffered the horrendous consequences of real antisemitism.” [p. 111].
and
[left-wing anti-Zionism] “cannot in any proper sense be equated with antisemitism.” [p. 114].
Uh-oh. And is it an accident that the book is unavailable through the New York Public Library? Is the NYPL like the NYPD, worried that readers will take it for a how-to?
That’s it, for starters. There are a few other books I use for basic thought:
Zygmunt Bauman. Modernity and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992.
Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein. Race, nation, classe. Les identités ambiguës [Race, Nation, Class : Ambiguous Identities]. 2e éd. Paris : la Découverte, 1997.
Jean-Paul Sartre. Réflexions sur la question juive [Anti-Semite and Jew]. Paris: Gallimard, 1954.
If you need to learn more you can always have spent your high-school years dodging Nazis in the schoolyard, one of whom will become a major player in European politics; or you can find yourself thrown out of the land where you grew up, based on the hook of your nose, the curl of your hair and the “shifty look” in your eyes; or you can have lived seven years in Austria as a Jew, the Joseph of Jew-baiting. Because nothing beats experience.
Officer Daughtry knows all about beating; about experience, not so much, and never will. Never try to teach a pig to sing, the saying goes. You waste your time, and the pig gets annoyed.
WOID XXIII-02
May 4, 2024