Condemning antisemitism and related ideologies on the political right is a decades-old liberal reflex. Schumer boldly focused on the rot in his own side. “Many of the people who have expressed these sentiments in America aren’t neo-Nazis, or card-carrying Klan members, or Islamist extremists,” Schumer said. “They are in many cases people that most liberal Jewish Americans felt previously were their ideological fellow travelers.”
The link between anti-Israel sentiment and antisemitism is legitimately contested, and Schumer was careful to give the subjects of his criticism the benefit of the doubt: “I believe there are plenty of people who chant ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ not because they hate Jewish people, but because they support a better future for Palestinians,” he said.
But, he warned, “Antisemites are taking advantage of the pro-Palestinian movement to espouse hatred and bigotry towards Jewish people.” In some progressive precincts, the indifference — or worse — toward Hamas’s Oct. 7 slaughter of Israeli Jews has been unmistakable.
Schumer’s basic account of left-wing resentment of Jews was concise and accurate: “Because some Jewish people have done well in America, because Israel has increased its power and territory, there are people who feel that Jewish Americans are not vulnerable, that we have the strength and security to overcome prejudice and bigotry, that we have, to quote the language of some, become the ‘oppressors.’”
This is where the frailty of Schumer’s program — call it progressive anti-antisemitism — becomes clear. Declaring a group an oppressor is one of the gravest charges in the progressive lexicon. How to counter it? Schumer’s speech implored Americans to recognize that “the Jewish people have been humiliated, ostracized, expelled, enslaved and massacred for millennia.”
Left-wing antisemites, his speech suggested, are putting Jews in the wrong box. Jews belong in the oppressed box — not the oppressor box. Fix this mistake, caused by a failure of historical literacy, and antisemitism on the left will be ameliorated. But wait a minute. If Jews don’t belong in the oppressor box, who deserves that stigma instead? If some identity groups have too little power, it follows that other groups have too much power. This explains the progressive focus on concepts such as “white supremacy” and “the patriarchy.”
Schumer noted accurately that antisemitism pits “what successes the Jewish people have achieved against them, and against their fellow countrymen.” But resentment of successful groups is inculcated by identity politics in general. Dividing groups of people into categories of oppressed and oppressor is a poisonous way to conduct politics in a liberal multiethnic republic. But it’s precisely the way the progressive vanguard believes politics must be conducted to achieve social justice.
For Schumer, the politics of social justice implies reciprocity between groups struggling against oppression. “Not long ago,” he said “many of us marched together for Black and Brown lives, we stood against anti-Asian hatred, we protested bigotry against the LGBTQ community, we fought for reproductive justice out of the recognition that injustice against one oppressed group is injustice against all. But apparently … in the eyes of some, that principle does not extend to the Jewish people.”
If progressives were true to their principles, Schumer is arguing, they would show more sympathy with Jewish suffering. Perhaps. But what if the indifference Schumer has observed is because progressives are being true to their principles? Identity politics ideology teaches that group-based power differences are the motor of human affairs. Progressives have identified Jews, at least today, as beneficiaries of power in Israel, in the United States or in both countries. Violence by the “powerless” is quite predictably looked upon more forgivingly as a result, while violence by the powerful is looked upon with more conspiracism and rage.
I’m loath to criticize Schumer’s speech. Not only was it a rare incident of an influential partisan leader looking squarely at his own side’s excesses in a time of polarization — it was also a particularly careful piece of political rhetoric that sought to persuade more than condemn. Nor am I under the illusion that identity politics can be banished from either American political party. Group interests will always express themselves politically, for better and worse.
But it’s also necessary to challenge liberal Jews, like Schumer, who have been alarmed by some of the post-Oct. 7 political trends they have observed. The left in America has taken a sharply identitarian turn in the past decade, encouraged by well-funded activist groups and bureaucracies in academia and government. Liberal Jews are deluding themselves if they think antisemitism can be allayed simply by reminding their copartisans of their group’s historical suffering. The Manichean progressive fixation on identity and oppression must itself be confronted.
Credit: Source link
