I Am This Jew

Checking my email before seeing Hamilton(!), I saw message titled "Are you this Jew? If not please ignore the email and my apologies."

Truly, the politest antisemite. I'm genuinely touched by his concern: he'd hate to trouble an innocent bystander.

Alas, I was the Jew he was looking for, as I was the Jew who authored the Tablet piece decrying the Israeli teen who apparently called in many of the bomb threats as antisemitic. It's been picked up at various alt-righty sites (Steve Sailer, Ron Unz, and so on), though fortunately I've gotten more of a trickle of messages along these lines rather than a flood.

I'm somewhat confused as to why antisemites would actually have a problem with that piece -- after all, the whole point is that a Jew who does this is equally (if not more) contemptible than a non-Jew (equally antisemitic, but with the added dose of betrayal). And I even gave a callout to the (still-undemonstrated, but now sadly at least somewhat more plausible) possibility that the caller's motive was to smear Trump and his supporters -- "If he did this because he wanted to discredit Donald Trump and the American political right, he is an anti-Semite who also did a grave injustice to President Trump and his supporters."

I mean, when I say I'm confused, I'm not actually. Many antisemites want to believe that this whole thing was a Jewish plot -- that is, not by an individual but by all of us. They want to believe that I -- me, personally, here in California -- was in on it from the start. And so when I condemn the attacker, they interpret that as an attempt at concealing my own complicity.

Other antisemites are motivated by the belief that Jews excuse their coreligionists' bad behavior. Confronted with a rather vitriolic denunciation, then, these persons are deeply invested in believing (against all evidence) that I couldn't have meant what I said, that somehow I'm still excusing it.

If it seems impossible to convince them otherwise, you're probably not mistaken. I'm reminded of those who rote-repeat "where are the Muslims condemning ISIS", aggressively oblivious to the many, many, many Muslims who have done so loudly and clearly. They say that they want to hear Muslims condemn ISIS, but what they actually want is to keep on believing that Muslims never condemn ISIS (so they can continue to berate them for allegedly not doing it). Ditto "all lives matter" knuckleheads who are emphatic that black people "don't care" about so-called "black-on-black crime" (as if they're really listening in to conversations at barber and beauty shops on the south side). The ignorance isn't just incidental, it's a desired, motivated ignorance. Likewise declarations that Arabs as a whole "aren't interested in peace", likewise insistences that Zionists in toto "never criticize Israel."

In any event, I stand entirely by what I wrote. Jews who call in bomb threats on Jewish community centers are antisemitic. It doesn't matter what their motives are. It doesn't matter what their political orientation is. There is no playing favorites when it comes to antisemitic acts.