THE CLUELESS ANTISEMITE

Dear Deborah:

Thanks for these explanations. I think the following story will introduce yet another category of antisemite.

I was having lunch with a colleague who is Jewish. After hearing about our exchange of letters, she told me a story about her sister Sandra. Sandra had just completed an intense graduate program in New York and had gone out for a celebratory lunch with a small group of fellow students with whom she had become close during the program. Most of them came from cities in which there was a very small Jewish population. She was the only Jew at the table. The four other women had been to her parents’ home for more than a few Shabbat dinners and Passover Seders. Most had never really interacted with Jews before and had a great time learning about Jewish customs with Sandra’s welcoming family. During lunch, one of the women described an unadvertised sale at a store nearby. When she finished, she turned to Sandra and said, with great excitement, “I’m really looking forward to seeing what they have. You’re going, of course, aren’t you, Sandra? Can I come along with you? I just know you’ll know a bargain when you see one.” When Sandra stared at her, flabbergasted, the woman became flustered. Sandra took a deep breath and said with a small smile, “I don’t think Jews are the only people predisposed to find great ways to save money. Personally, I do most of my shopping online.” The woman stammered out an apology, which Sandra graciously accepted.

What would you have said in that situation?

Regards,

Joe

Dear Professor Lipstadt:

I just read Professor Wilson’s last letter. I could share with you far too many similar examples. So many of my dorm mates or sorority sisters have said to me, “Abigail, you are going to want to hear about this sale (or bargain or other money-saving opportunity).” I always want to ask them, “Why me, specifically?” But I don’t. I feel that there is some clever thing I should say in reply that would convey how insulted I am, but I can never think of what it should be. Are these people aware that what they are saying is antisemitic, however subtle it may be?

Yours,

Abigail

Dear Joe and Abigail:

These are perhaps the saddest and most personally hurtful manifestations of antisemitism. The clueless antisemite is an otherwise nice and well-meaning person who is completely unaware that she has internalized antisemitic stereotypes and is perpetuating them. The only proper response, however hard it may be for you, is to politely tell this person that what she said comes under the category of an insidious and insulting ethnic stereotype.

It’s so easy to internalize these prejudices. A number of years ago, I was co-teaching a course on film and the Holocaust. We were discussing the Nazi claim that Jews used their nefarious skills to control world economies. A student raised her hand and said, “But all the German bankers were Jews, weren’t they?” I immediately began to flood her with details and statistics demonstrating that this was simply not true. My co-instructor, a film specialist, interrupted my flow of facts and figures, turned to the student and quietly said, “So what?” Then, after a pause, she continued: “They actually weren’t, but what if they had been? Would that have been a legitimate reason to hate all Jews and attempt to annihilate an entire people from the face of the earth?” Her “So what?” and not my fact-laden jumble, was the correct response. The student had asked a question that was rooted in a false premise: that all the major German banks were owned by Jews, and that one can learn from this that Jews, as a people, aimed to control the world’s economies. By citing facts and figures, I had responded to an irrational question in a rational fashion, thereby giving the claim in her question the gravitas it did not deserve. The answer from my colleague (who happened to be a non-Jew, and a former nun, at that) exposed its fundamental irrationality.

There are of course also Jews who—intentionally or unintentionally—traffic in antisemitic stereotypes. When this seeps into the larger culture, it signals that it’s okay for non-Jews to do likewise. The Jewish American Princess, or JAP, entered popular culture in the decades after World War II in the works of Jewish novelists (Herman Wouk, Philip Roth), comedians (Joan Rivers, David Steinberg), and filmmakers (Mel Brooks, Woody Allen).1 The anthropologist Riv-Ellen Prell describes her as a materialistic, conniving, self-centered, and sexually withholding Jewish woman, the product of wealthy, indulgent, and smothering Jewish parents.2

Are there Jewish women who fit this stereotype? Certainly, but there are Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, and Asian women who do so as well. Not to mention the fact that there are more than a few men—both Jewish and non-Jewish—who could also be characterized as “spoiled, whiny, selfish, money-grubbing, conniving, and malicious.”3 But there’s something about the JAP that just won’t let her vanish into pop culture history, regardless of how many notable Jewish women nowadays proudly defy this stereotype (Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Elena Kagan, and Gal Gadot are three who immediately spring to mind). Jews like to laugh at themselves, and JAP jokes are, unfortunately, a part of that. But as Abe Foxman—the former national director of the Anti-Defamation League and a vigorous critic of antisemitism—points out, JAP jokes started as something Jews told one another but then they got “away from us” and ultimately “took on a life of their own.”4 When groups that have been subjected to discrimination and prejudice denigrate themselves, they do more than internalize a negative self-perception. They give license to others to do likewise. This is not harmless humor. It belittles Jews and women. The fact that it has its roots among Jews makes it no less debilitating.5 Whether coming from Jews or non-Jews, this manifestation of latent antisemitism spreads hateful and hurtful tropes and ideas.

Well, that’s quite a taxonomy we’ve assembled: the extremist, the enabler, the dinner party, and the clueless antisemite. Sometimes the categories blend into one another. We’ve also seen that sometimes the most harm can be done, not by the violent, in-your-face, self-professed Jew-hater, but by ordinary people who have acquired these views almost through cultural osmosis.

A recent careful and well conducted study in Great Britain found that only 2.4 percent of the British public “open[ly] dislike[d] Jews.” These people had a set of “developed negative ideas” about Jews and their characteristics. They “readily and confidently” express antisemitic views. Another 3 percent hold multiple antisemitic attitudes, though they are less pronounced about them. While this total of 5.4 percent is quite small, approximately 30 percent subscribed to or agreed with a few stereotypical antisemitic ideas. Though the members of this larger group are not “committed political antisemites,” they do disseminate antisemitic ideas into the broader public sphere.6 More than the extremists, they keep antisemitism alive and flourishing, and pass it on to future generations.

Though I started with a description of the most virulent type of antisemite and concluded with the person who may not even know she is expressing antisemitism, they all invoke, in one form or another and to one degree or another, the standard antisemitic themes: money, power, and conspiratorial control.

Be well,

DEL