New York Times reporter and controversialist Jonathan Weisman made the front page of Monday’s New York Times with “Is Anti-Zionism Always Antisemitic? A Fraught Question for the Moment.” Weisman approached the sensitive matter with his trademark politically corrupted cynicism: In Weisman’s world, no matter the gravity of the issue at hand, Republicans are invariably being partisan hacks when they address it.
The brutal shedding of Jewish blood on Oct. 7, followed by Israel’s relentless military assault on Gaza, has brought a fraught question to the fore in a moment of surging bigotry and domestic political gamesmanship: Is anti-Zionism by definition antisemitism?
The question deeply divided congressional Democrats last week when Republican leaders, seeking to drive a wedge between American Jews and the political party that three-quarters of them call their own, put it to a vote in the House.
….
For Republicans, the issue is simple and convenient. The raising of anti-Zionism in the debate over antisemitism amid the Israel-Hamas war pushes aside the presence of white-nationalist bigots on the fringes of the Republican coalition -- like Nick Fuentes, the avowed neo-Nazi who dined with Kanye West and former President Donald J. Trump last year -- and instead forces Democrats to defend the pro-Hamas demonstrators on their own coalition’s fringes.
Weisman has a controversial history regarding his treatment of Jewish-related stories (or rather, trying to make news stories Jewish-related, like an offensive chart that accompanied a 2015 Times article that included a graphic on Jews in the U.S. Congress that labeled Democratic lawmakers against the Obama administration's controversial nuclear deal with Iran as "Jewish?" or not (the "Jewish?" column was removed from the online version after outcry). Weisman is also notorious for never seeing anti-Semitism on the left, only the right.
He quoted Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler:
“Folks, this isn’t complicated: MOST antizionism -- the type that calls for Israel’s destruction, denying its right to exist -- is antisemitic….”
…then smugly suggested Nadler, who is Jewish, was wrong about anti-Semitism. Weisman adopted his best “actually” tone:
In fact, it is complicated. Jonathan Jacoby, the director of the Nexus Task Force, a group of academics and Jewish activists affiliated with the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, said the group had wrestled with the issue for several years now, seeking a definition of antisemitism that captures when anti-Zionism crosses from political belief to bigotry. He warned that shouting down any political action directed against Israel as antisemitic made it harder for Jews to call out actual antisemitism, while stifling honest conversation about Israel’s government and U.S. policy toward it.
Weisman callously dismissed the importance of historically persecuted Jews having a state of their own.
To the young Jewish activists of left-wing groups like IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace, which have themselves been accused of antisemitism, the search for a Jewish identity unrooted in the land has not been complicated. Jews, after all, survived without a state for nearly 2,000 years after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem and scattered the inhabitants of the Holy Land to the four corners of the earth.
He quoted one Eva Borgwardt, the 27-year-old political director of IfNotNow, who rambled about, in Weisman’s paraphrase, “a ‘diasporic’ chicken farm, queer Talmudic studies,” and “the securing of equal rights and protections for Palestinians.”
Mr. Greenblatt, of the Anti-Defamation League, reacted angrily to that argument.
“Please don’t tell me my grandfather, whose entire family was incinerated in Auschwitz, wanted to go back to the diaspora,” he said.
To which younger, leftier Jews might respond by asking what it even means to suggest that American politics should be focused on securing a safe haven for Jews abroad when the First Amendment ensures that the United States is such a safe haven.
