(Jewish Group) How to Fight Anti-Semitism review - Bari Weiss's elegy for Pittsburgh

[Behind the Aegis]

(THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP! RESPECT!!)

After decades in the wings, antisemitism is center stage all over the western world. What’s more, some of the same leaders who terrify Jews at home loudly proclaim devotion to the Jewish state in the Middle East, to the seeming delight of the current government in Jerusalem. What is going on?

Bari Weiss, columnist and editor at the New York Times, has some ideas. Her childhood synagogue in Pittsburgh was the site of last year’s Shabbat morning massacre. This passionate, vividly written, regularly insightful book is her pained, fighting elegy.

--snip--

What’s more, Weiss notes, antisemitism “turns Jews into the symbol of whatever a given civilization defines as its most sinister and threatening qualities” – be it atheism, fundamentalism, cosmopolitanism, tribalism or all of them at once. Yes, Jews can be found among all those camps and more. But the antisemitic move is to tie them all together and thus explain everything.

---snip---

In the US, Jews play a peculiar role in racial politics. For some, shape-shifting Jews can be white America’s fifth column, quislings working for the black and brown hordes. For others, they are deceptively smiling enforcers of white supremacy. And when it comes to jihadist terror, too many are cowed into silence by fear of seeming Islamophobic.

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I have just started this book, but so far, it's not too bad. Like Lipstadt, she makes some relevant points about the unique nature of anti-Semitism and how it is allowed to become whatever it needs in order to fit the moment.