Philosophers Worth Reading
There are several authors and philosophers who I have found deeply influential in understanding ideology and antisemitism in our current world. One is the postwar philosopher Hannah Arendt, particularly her works on totalitarianism. Another is the contemporary author Dara Horn and her work "People Love Dead Jews." And a third is another postwar philosopher, Leo Strauss, and his “sociology of knowledge,” as he calls it in his “Persecution and the Art of Writing,” regarding how to find the true meaning of written ideas through the absences those writings contain, in light of how those ideas deviate from the surrounding regime.
Arendt's collective works are desperately needed in our time. In fact, I would argue that all of the immediate postwar philosophers, regardless of their personal politics - Leo Strauss, George Orwell, Hannah Arendt - are needed more than ever. The "lesson" that they took from the Holocaust was not the current Disneyfied version of "never again." It was not a universalist moral lesson about the absolutes of right and wrong, as we often see coming from the political left today. It was a deep analysis and distrust of groupthink, a recognition of the power of language, dehumanization, and hiding.
Arendt saw "ideology" as a deeply modern form of politic, its own category in the same genre as feudalism, tyranny, democracy, and other governing structures. But "ideology" is new: the existence of modern technology and organizational structures allows politics to become totalizing. Ideology destroys nuance, destroys the bonds between neighbors and between family. When everything is reduced to a right and a wrong as per the ideology, mass hatred and dehumanization flourishes. I wonder what Arendt would write today if she could see social media.
Today, part of the "totalizing" aspect of ideology is how no one material or social problem can be approached outside of an ideological lens. In the binary of American politics, if you support one cause from within one ideological box, you must support all of the other causes in that box. For example, in the American right, if you support policies to strengthen the family, you must be against abortion. On the left, if you support politics about police reform, you must denounce Israel as an "apartheid state." Thankfully, not every person has been quite so swallowed up by ideology that they have lost all ability to distinguish issue from ideological lens. Unfortunately, the number of people who can think outside of ideology is small and dwindling. Of particular concern, many of those who cannot process information outside of ideology are in positions of widespread influence: people in journalism, academia, and on social media.
The Holocaust is not a Universalist Message on Hate, it is a Particularist Culmination of Antisemitism
Dara Horn's, "People Love Dead Jews," is precisely about the moralizing of dead Jews as a universal lesson, a story devoid of the particularities of Judaism and antisemitism. People love dead Jews for how Jewish deaths serve the non-Jewish observer. However, many of the non-Jewish observers who enjoy the lessons of dead Jews hate living Jews. Nearly everyone can name a concentration camp. Nearly no one can name a Yiddish novelist. The basal state of society, contends Horn, is to hate Jews. The basal state is to ignore Jewish voices, to disdain our differences, to hate our successes and our misfortunes equally, to desire the erasure of our culture and our biological existence.
I saw Dara Horn speak once at a Jewish writer's conference. She spoke about the difference between "Purim Antisemitism," which she calls the antisemitism of desiring physical death to the Jews, and "Chanukah Antisemitism," which she calls the antisemitism of desiring cultural death to the Jews. I used to think that the far-right harbored the Purim antisemites and the not-so-far left harbored the Chanukah antisemites. But I was wrong. As evidenced on a wide scale in recent weeks, growing numbers of the left are themselves enablers and supporters of Purim Antisemitism.
Horn and the postwar philosophers, particular Leo Strauss, emphasize the nature of hiding. Our intellectual output always belies a certain level of hiding our true thoughts, our true experiences. To be Jewish in a hostile world, which is simply the world at large, is to hide.
“Jews are Foreigners who Do Not Belong. They are Agents of Foreign Governments, While Paradoxically, Controlling those Foreign Governments. They are Bloodthirsy and Powerful. It is Morally Correct to Remove Them.”
The leftist rhetoric around Israel is frightening because it is a repackaging of the historical structure of antisemitism. "Jews are aliens who do not belong in this land and ruin its purity, they are also agents of a foreign government and, paradoxically, control those governments. They are bloodthirsty for non-Jewish blood, and care for nothing but money and power. It would be better if we got rid of them." This has been the trope for countries that took in Jewish refugees of the inquisitions. This was the trope once Napoleon granted citizenship to Jews in Berlin and Vienna. This was the trope of Germans about the Jews during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. And this is the trope by the contemporary political left about Jews in Israel.
I see a lot of blatantly false information from people who do not know the history of Jews nor the history of the region they speak about, but who speak from a place of zealous, righteous certainty. They epitomize Arendt's takes on ideology. They try to apply their self-serving universalist Lessons of Dead Jews, a la Dara Horn, to justify their Arendtian ideology, even to go so far as to call Israel the "real Nazis" (which in itself, is taken from the Hamas charter).
Nobody thinks of themselves as an antisemite. People who are dangerously bigoted rarely are the Disney villain, reveling in their hatred, acknowledging with pride that they are the bad guy. They simply believe that their framing of the situation is morally correct. Antisemites do not see themselves as antisemites, they see themselves as champions of justice.
To today’s most vocal left, the 20th century genocide of Jews was not a particularized culmination from centuries of a sense of moral certainty that Jews are the problem. Instead, to today’s left, our genocide was merely a "lesson" about the universal dangers of hatred, to be applied whenever one wants to prove that their zealotry is morally correct. And as per the Hamas charter, the left will even apply the de-Judenfied version of “never again” specifically to target Jews.
The left today forces many of us who are Jewish to retreat into our Straussian linguistic caves, hiding carefully, deep precision and restraint to our words, as others on the left continue to chant, "no tone policing," and "believe the experiences of minorities." You see, as per the title of another famous book, Jews Don't Count.
Facts? Unnecessary. In Identitarian Liberalism, Ideology Provides the Answers on Israel
And so, I look on in horror and disgust as I see people I know either glaringly silent, or outright, "yes, but..." ing the horrors unfolding. I am tempted to fight back with facts. For example, the blockade against the Gaza Strip is jointly upheld by Israel and Egypt, but my leftist friends only mention Israel in decrying the blockade. I want to point out that Israel did disengage from Gaza in 2005 and Gaze held elections, whereby they voted in the terrorist organization of Hamas, who never never allowed elections again, and began immediately firing rockets into Israel. I want to explain the decisions many neighboring countries made for why they themselves refuse to take in Palestinian refugees, such as after the early Jordanian and Lebanese experiences in doing so. I want to explain why many of the countries of the Middle East have specifically been against Palestinian statehood. I want to point out the fact that antisemitism flourishes across much of the Middle East, having taken on its current form after Arab leaders of last century met with Hitler. I want to point out that today, a number of countries in the middle east distribute reprints of Mein Kampf, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the International Jew, including in cartoon form for children. I want to point out that the leftist rhetoric of "Hamas was backed into a corner, they are just resisting," is ludicrous when Hamas does not want peace - their charter specifically calls for killing all Jews, for rejecting any peace treaties, references by name the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and blames Jews for all historical and current political instability, from the French Revolution to World War II. I want to point out that Hamas is and always has been an Iranian puppet authoritarian regime.
The amount of unilateral blaming of Israel for what is a multinational catastrophe between multiple factions with their own agency is antisemitic. Furthermore, exclusively blaming the situation in Gaza on Israel, leaving out both Palestinian governance itself and the numerous other nations in the region who have helped create this situation, is a form of"noble savage" racism. If your solution for Palestinian poverty is, "I don't care what happens to Israel and as oppressors, they deserve it" your "solution" sounds awfully like the Final Solution.
I'm tempted to fight back with facts. But what good would it do? The people with these views do not care about facts, they are deeply embedded in a totalizing ideology. In Western identity-focused liberalism, the actions of those claiming to represent Palestine can be held to a much lower standard due to their noble savage status in the identitarian liberal mind, and the Jews of Israel can be placed into the “white” category of oppressor, despite the majority of Israel being Mizrahi. Facts do not matter, only ideology. And thus, the Venn Diagram of the historical trope of antisemitism and identitarian oppressor politics happens to be a full circle.
Ideological Language and its Limitations: Limitations are a Feature, not a Weakness
Jewish history does not fit neatly into the current language of identitarian liberal ideology. Our reality does not conform to the popular language of race, religion, gender, or global south politics. Our history does not conform to analysis via the nation-state and idigeneity. But language is not reality, it is a man-made descriptor at best, and a force of ideology at worse.
Our postwar philosophers understood the limitations of language and the power that came from those limitations. Under totalitarianism and the new regime of ideology, limitations of language were not a weakness, but a feature. Thus, it is time to revive the true lessons of the Holocaust that the postwar philosophers understood. We must divest ourselves of ideology and find the gaps in our language. We must find truth in the silence, as Strauss would urge, in the spaces where language does not reach. And we must recognize current liberal adaptation of the Holocaust for what it is - a gross distortion of a tragedy that views dead Jews as a useful analogy to reinforce the very force - ideology and totalitarianism - that the postwar philosophers warned us about. For anyone who claims to care about the welfare of Palestinians and fighting for justice for the oppressed, if you remain entrenched in ideology, your goals are not for peace, but for extermination.