What’s with the antisemitism?

In Harvard-Harris poll, 67% of American youth identify Jews as oppressors

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Jan 09, 2024

I’m pleased to welcome Brian Henry making his third appearance as a guest writer at Canadian Zionist Forum. Today’s article looks at the ideology that seems to have created a fertile ground for the spike in antisemitism that we are seeing right now.

After October 7, the worst anti-Jewish atrocity since the Holocaust, decent people might have expected to see worldwide revulsion. And we have. But we’ve also seen a worldwide explosion in antisemitism, including in Canada. (See here for starters.)

Why?

In part it’s because a majority of young people have been taught and have accepted an antisemitic belief system. In December, a Harvard-Harris Poll asked: “Do you think Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors or is that a false ideology?”

About three-quarters of Americans (73%) answered it’s a false ideology. But among young people, aged 18–24, two-thirds (67%) said Jews are indeed oppressors and should be treated as oppressors (here).

**Image: Answers from Harvard Harris poll: Do you think Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors or is that a false ideology?**

The phrasing of the question was slightly soft – “Jews as a class,” rather than just “Jews.” This suggests that being too obviously antisemitic might still be a problem; young people may not be ready to label individual Jews as oppressors or not every Jew, but it seems a large majority of American youth consider the Jews, as a group, as a problem.

The results in Canada would likely be similar, because as in the U.S., young Canadians learn antisemitic ideas in school. Antisemitic ideas are frequently incorporated in the teaching of Critical Theory, which includes Critical Race Theory and Anti-Colonial Theory. This is the philosophy backstopping the notion of equity (as opposed to equality) that dominates universities and seeps into high schools and even grade schools.

Dr. Ayelet Kuper of the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine (TFOM) provides this précis of Critical Theory:

At TFOM we teach our medical students in their first-year lectures about race as a social (not biological) construct that has been set up as an act of power, to locate and maintain power within certain groups of people while oppressing or dehumanizing other groups of people. Like many medical educators, we specifically talk about whiteness as being about power.
– From “Reflections on addressing antisemitism in a Canadian faculty of medicine” in Canadian Medical Journal, here.

That is, white people as a class have conspired to oppress and dehumanize everyone else. Dr. Kuper doesn’t include Jews as white people; she includes them as part of the oppressed. But in this, she discovered, she’s a lonely voice. At the U of T’s medical school and other places where Critical Theory dominates, students learn that Jews are white oppressors.

Indeed, Jews are seen as hyper-oppressors, because (so students are told) Jews have colonized Palestine and oppress the indigenous Palestinian people.

None of this is true. Jews come in all colours and don’t identify as a race – white or otherwise. Jews have been in the Land of Israel for 4,000 years. You can’t get more indigenous than that. Jews created the State of Israel as our national homeland, not as a colonial outpost for any empire.

Clearly anti-Jewish ideology caught hold for reasons other than facts or logic. I’d suggest for starters, that since most self-described progressives are white, an anti-white racism lacks emotional appeal. Jews, on the other hand, while theoretically white, are also obviously not white; they’re an outgroup and as such can be hated with gusto.

Plus, anti-Jewish ideas are always present in our culture. We’ve inherited Europe’s age-old suspicion that Jews are up to no good, the Muslim world’s own long history of antisemitism, which has been especially virulent for the past century, and perhaps most relevantly, the Soviet Union’s invention of anti-Zionism as an updated version of antisemitism.

It was the Soviets, for example, who invented the slander of Jews as the new Nazis and, as part of this, the slander that Israel commits genocide. This is a lie that’s now so ubiquitous that you hear it at every pro-Hamas rally.

However, we shouldn’t imagine that two-thirds of young Americans or Canadians are full-on Jew haters. They’ve adopted an abstract belief. Fortunately, that doesn’t imply an emotional commitment.

We do have a core of committed Jew-haters, people who rejoice in Hamas’s mass murder, rape, and hostage-taking. Beyond that there are widening circles of lesser virulence providing a deep cushion of support.

Few young people are marching in the streets or shouting slogans at children visiting a shopping mall Santa. Few young people are trying to shut down Jewish businesses or calling someone a baby-killer because he’s wearing a kippah, but the people (young and older) who are doing such things can rest easy, knowing they have a deep cushion of millions of young people who have been taught that Jews (as a class) are a problem.

I found it extraordinary that 4,000 writers, artists and academics in Canada openly signed a letter endorsing Hamas’s terrorism (see here.) But this was just me being naïve. Why not sign such a letter? Doubtless everyone the signatories know agrees or thinks maybe Hamas’s terrorism is exaggerated or there’s some excuse for it. And academics were quick to supply such excuses.

On October 7, the morning after Hamas’s terrorist attacks, while Israeli citizens were still being raped and tortured, killed or abducted, Uahikea Maile, a professor of Indigenous politics at the University of Toronto, called Hamas terrorism “anticolonial resistance.” He wrote on X:

As Hawaiians wake up to the news of Palestinian anticolonial resistance in Gaza to Israeli settler colonialism, remember that – from Hawaiʻi to Palestine – occupation is a crime. A lāhui [a nation or people] that stands for decolonization and deoccupation should also stand behind freedom for Palestine (here).

Maile wasn’t the only professor pushing the idea that Hamas was engaged in anticolonial resistance. On the Internet, the claim: “This is what de-colonization looks like” took off (see here).

Doubtless, many young people were left thinking, maybe mass murder is what decolonization looks like, and decolonization is good, isn’t it?

Indeed, according to the Harvard-Harris Poll, 60% of Americans age 18–24 believe Hamas’s atrocities were justified (compared to 73% of Americans overall who still have a moral compass and believe the attack cannot be justified).

As Jews and as a society, we’re in a dangerous place.

I believe the first step towards safety is for everyone to take notice that the movement which variously disguises itself as “anti-racist” or “anti-colonial,” as promoting “equity” (rather than equality) or as “progressive” – that this movement is the opposite of what most of us think of as progressive.

On the contrary, they’ve endorsed horrendous atrocities and mass murder. It’s a movement that doesn’t define good and bad according to actions and intentions. Instead, they take “identity” as their guiding light, and Jews, they’ve decided, are bad.

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Canadian Zionist Forum

What’s with the antisemitism?

In Harvard-Harris poll, 67% of American youth identify Jews as oppressors

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