Bari Weiss: There’s Anti-Semitism on the Left, Too

I met this amazing guy last night who we were talking about. He grew up in Egypt. Hussein Abu Bakr is his name. He's really incredible. Grew up in Egypt and he was like, I was swimming in anti-Semitism. I just didn't even know it wasn't normal. Like the mosque I went to, the school I went to, it was like the Jews were this super villain. And the whole message was like become a superhero and go and kill and defeat the Jews. And he was like, I went to a normal mosque, normal school. This is what I was taught. I've never met a Jew in my life. And he gets arrested during the Arab Spring because he starts learning Hebrew online. He's really curious about who the Jews are and he gets arrested. I think they're suspicious that he's a Zionist spy. Anyway, he ends up getting asylum. He lives here in LA. He got arrested for learning Hebrew? Oh yeah. Whoa. Oh yeah. You think I can like just go visit Egypt? I mean, no, these are... So if you wanted to visit the pyramids, you'd be fucked. I don't know. Well, I might specifically be fucked because I have like a public profile as a Jew. You don't want to go looking online for my name in some of these forums. It's like really scary. But... Do you look at it? No. No. There are people who look at it for me and tell me what I need to like be aware of. And you know, like every synagogue I speak to, it's like people don't realize that I went to a synagogue Friday night in LA. There's armed guards at every synagogue and Jewish function that I go to now. It's like going through TSA to go to... Like imagine that if most Americans had to do that when they went into church. Like we would think that's insane, but that is the state of affairs for Jews. And Jews that I know hide evidence of their identity everywhere they go. There was a woman who wrote me who was reading my book on the subway in New York and was like, I'm nervous to be seen reading a book with this title in public and like hit it. Jesus. But I understand why because it's become so regular and everyone else just is living their normal life and we're like sounding the alarm here. Because if there's one thing the Jews have gotten really good at, it's like we have an instinct for danger. Like that is something that we have cultivated over years of being discriminated against, persecuted against, nearly wiped off the map in Europe. Like we understand and we smell danger sometimes before other people. Do you think that antisemitism is more prominent on the East Coast than the West Coast? I think that's a good question. There are just more Jews on the East Coast than the West Coast. There's a lot of Jews out here. There are. Yeah, there are. I don't know. I don't live out here, so I'm not sure. I also think it's different, right? Like there are different kinds of antisemitism. Like the kind that we've talked about that comes on the far right expresses itself one way. And there's also antisemitism that comes smuggled into the mainstream through the political left that comes cloaked in language that is very seductive, like the language of social justice and progress. And if the right claims that the Jews are, you know, fake white people, the far left claims that the Jews are handmaidens to white supremacy. So whiteness plays like a really, really key role in the way that antisemitism functions. Right. And here, let me explain it this way. Antisemitism is a shape-shifting conspiracy theory, except that. Right. And that is how under Nazism, Jews are the race contaminators, how under communism, we are the arch capitalists, right? How under the idea of white supremacy, we are these fake white people, right? We appear to be white people, but we're actually doing the bidding of these groups who white supremacists view to be lesser than black people, brown people, Muslims, immigrants. And how on the far left, the Jews are seen as sort of the great, what is the greatest evil right now to the far left, whiteness and white privilege. And Jews are seen as sort of handmaidens to that. Why? Because of our success, because many of us are of Eastern European descent, 85% of American Jews are of Ashkenazi, which is of Eastern European descent. So we pass as white, so we have white privilege. And so in the intersectional view of the world, right, which reverses the caste system that we've been living in until now, where you have someone like Jon Hamm at the very top and black transgender disabled people at the very bottom, well, the intersectional worldview comes around and reverses that and says, no, Jon Hamm and cisgendered white men like Joe Rogan are now at the very bottom. And at the very top are the transgender black disabled person. And so where are the Jews in that new intersectional caste system of the world? We're kind of like right above Jon Hamm. We're right near him because we have, we enjoy all of the sort of privileges that he enjoys. It's a crazy thing, but that's sort of where we are. The handmaidens to white privilege or white supremacy is very strange. That's a very strange one. And the anti is really sentiment. Do you see it though? Yes. Yeah. Well, I see it with people where they openly express disdain for Jewish people. I've seen it from a lot of people that you would call activists, you know, of varying religious identities. You mean left-wing activists? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, I think of it very crudely. If racism is the sin that's sort of acceptable on the far right, hating Jews is the sin that's acceptable on the far left. The far left, because of support for Israel, they believe that Israel is dominating power in Palestine and that Hezbollah is misunderstood. And then there's all these different sentiments that get expressed openly in these left circles. Mm-hmm. That's right. And they're telling, you know, they're basically propagating, they're repeating without even realizing it, this Soviet propaganda line, which is that Zionism is racism, which is an unbelievable thing to say. Because the majority of Jews who live in Israel are Jews of North African and Middle Eastern descent. They are non-white people. They are Arabs. They are Arab Jews. And yet you have the far left basically exporting parochial domestic American racial politics onto a foreign conflict in place that they know absolutely nothing about. You know, these people are delusional. They think that, like, all of the conflict in the Middle East would be resolved if only we took care of this one tiny conflict between this tiny group of people and their neighbors, where in fact it's like a tiny local conflict in this huge drama of the Middle East of which there are a zillion players. And you know, the Jews of Israel are only one tiny part of it.