This is exactly the nature of antisemitism: it’s cyclical. After the last pogrom or the last mass expulsion of Jews, eventually, memories fade, some Jews start to re-assimilate (how lucky for us to be assimilated, to the extent that we even can be!) and Jewish oppression appears to be “over.” A small minority of Jews are able to move up the ranks socially and economically (often to be used as front-facing middlemen by the ruling class), and then when popular discontent reaches a critical point and the ruling class needs a scapegoat, we are massacred. Rinse and repeat.
A great zine that explains these issues, and calls for integrating awareness of antisemitism and mechanisms to combat antisemitism into leftist organizations, is the past didn’t go anywhere.
It’s very accessible, a wonderful primer. Some representative excerpts:
Antisemitism’s job is to make ruling classes invisible. It protects ruling class power structures, diverting anger at injustice toward Jews instead. But it doesn’t have to be planned out at the top. It serves the same ends, whether enshrined in law or institutionalized only in our minds; whether it’s state policy, popular ‘common sense,’ or acts of grassroots movements like our own.
Anti-Jewish oppression has been around a long time - it became government practice in Christian society about 1,700 years ago and only stopped having official Vatican approval in 1965. But when anti-Jewish oppression isn’t at its most brutal, it can be really hard to see. How come this oppression can seem so invisible?
Partly it’s that it allows Jews success. Many oppressions rely on keeping a targeted group of people poor, uneducated, designated non-white, or otherwise ‘at the bottom.’ Anti-Jewish oppression doesn’t depend on that. Although at many times it has kept Jews in poverty or designated non-white, these have been “optional” features. Because the point of anti-Jewish oppression is to keep a Jewish face in front, so that Jews, instead of ruling classes, become the target for peoples’ rage, it works even more smoothly when Jews are allowed some success, and can be perceived as the ones “in charge” by other oppressed groups.
Partly it’s that it moves in cycles. Because it can allow Jews to ‘move up,’ antisemitism is cyclical: Attacks come in waves; but each time things calm down and Jews are able to blend in or succeed in society again, it gives the appearance that antisemitism is ‘over.’ In some of the most famous examples of anti-Jewish expulsion and mass murder (ie, medieval Spain or modern Germany), just prior to the attacks, Jews appeared to be one of society’s most successful, comfortable, well-integrated minorities.
Some other excerpts I’m shamelessly grabbing from this post (where I first learned of this zine from):
And frankly, most leftists don’t even want to have this conversation. I bring up antisemitism with your average leftist, and y’all immediately get your backs up, and start derailing to talk about Israel/Zionism/AIPAC, or to talk about that famous/celebrity Jew you’ve seen on TV, or the derivation of the word “antisemitism,” or you just come right out and say “Jews aren’t oppressed anymore, just like how Irish people in the US used to not count as white people but now they do UwU.”
If you laughed at Jews did WTC at any time within the last 16 years (hey, me too) please, please reblog this post or reblog this post sharing the same information.
And thank you to everyone who shared my angrypost about getting banned from that antisemitic communist discord, which was very heartwarming, sorry to harp on this again but this is way more important information, heh.
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