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What we talk about when we talk about anti-Semitism

In summer 2014, Muslims attacked Jewish sites in Paris in connection to Israel’s bombing of Gaza. This month, the French Jews killed in Hyper Cacher were buried in Israel.
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January 21, 2015

In summer 2014, Muslims attacked Jewish sites in Paris in connection to Israel’s bombing of Gaza. This month, the French Jews killed in Hyper Cacher were buried in Israel.

What links these two events? Fear-based politics desperate to have us believe it’s still 1938 — a contravention of a modern society built on inclusion and common good.

Anti-Semitism has never made much etymological sense. It means “hostility or prejudice against Jews” but “Semitic” on its own refers to people descending from several groups speaking any number of “Afro-Asiatic” languages.

That’s a pretty big swath of humanity — Arabs and many Muslims, to pick just two. But Jews have been getting exclusive use of the term.

The Holocaust made sure of that, the traumatic culmination of centuries living as the Other in Christian lands. It’s now 70 years since the liberation of Auschwitz, but the way “anti-Semitism” continues to get tossed around shows how far we have to go before we are truly free.

“In Berlin, Jews are chased like it’s 1938,” Israel’s ambassador to Germany, Yakov Hadas-Handelsman, said when part of a largely Muslim protest here against Israel’s most recent war with Hamas turned into anti-Jewish vitriol.

For that to be true, I, as an active Jew in Berlin, am either extremely lucky or very naive. Or is it that those who choose to live as a victim of history simply find the sources of fear they’re looking for?

Jews are still targets, but it is on an individual level condemned by the collective. I have a hard time calling that anti-Semitism, which instinctively (and intentionally) conjures up scenes of systemic extermination by national decree, delivering the message: Jews, with the goyim, you will never be safe.

This is the instrumentalization of anti-Semitism — used for a divisive political agenda, it makes living together that much harder. Four French citizens get buried in a country for which they had neither passports nor voting rights, while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu does everything but proclaim himself prime minister of the Jews — no wonder some may see a Jewish person or site an extension of the Israeli policy they detest.

The deliberate blurring between Judaism and Israel is called solidarity when it is beneficial. When it gets Jews killed, it is called anti-Semitism.

Don’t let the events in Paris overshadow optimism: The world is more at peace, and we are more secure than ever — and Jews especially. Persisting dangers are much more a threat to communities of Sinti and Roma, Muslims and Arabs, refugees, and gays and the rest of the not-totally-hetero spectrum.

Jews are part of this diversity, nothing more, which should be cause for celebration. It’s what we’ve always wanted: normalization in the eyes of European society, no longer confined to the shtetl or ghetto. So it’s confounding when Jewish voices call to run back to the imagined safety of the very walls we waited 1,000 years to get out of.

Fear and division are exactly what white supremacists, Islamic terrorists and anti-Other movements such as PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West) all propagate. Each is anathema to free markets and open borders, flailing to hold back the surge of humanity undoing the ethnic or civil nation-state.

There is desperate need for a third way, one that neither strives to divide nor wants to be divided, but seeks to bring people together around something closer and more tangible: the cities we live in and share as our homes. It’s at this level we can influence crime, jobs, education, environment and good governance, issues that bind us far more than the foreign policies of nations that tear us apart.

“We are not soldiers standing against each other on the front. We are average people living in the same city,” said Armin Langer, a rabbinical student and co-founder of Salaam-Schalom, a grass-roots initiative here. “Maybe we can build up something more peaceful in Berlin.”

For there to be peace in the world, first there must be peace in our cities and among neighbors who see each other as that and not as tired labels creeping out of history’s shadows. Our lives here cannot be another casualty of war over there.


William Noah Glucroft is a photographer and translator living in Berlin. He is a founding board member of Freunde der Fraenkelufer (Friends of Fraenkelufer Synagogue), a pending nonprofit organization.

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