Man Torn Between Far-Right Jew-Hatred, Far-Left Jew-Hatred

“Do I hate Jews because I identify with the oppressed nonwhite, or do I hate Jews because I want to defend my white heritage from them?”

Berkeley, January 17 – A local man attracted to antisemitic and anti-Israel rhetoric is unable to decide whether the radical right antisemites or the radical left antisemites put forth a more convincing case, local sources reported today.

Holden Forth, 22, a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, has spent the last two years wrestling with competing visions for his hatred of Jews, alternating between those who see Jews as oppressive fascist Westerners subjugating the nonwhite indigenous inhabitants of Palestine and those who see Jews as sinister anti-white, Communist anti-Americans.

“I used to sit pretty squarely in the Jews-are-white-European-colonialist-oppressors school,” recalls Forth, who is pursuing a Master’s in sociology. “That’s more or less how I saw things when I first got here as an undergraduate. But since then I’ve encountered a good but of compelling propaganda from the opposite end of the political spectrum, to the effect that Jews are anything but representatives of Europe, which, after all, gave us the values of the Enlightenment – instead, Jews are a cancer on the values that have made Western civilization the powerhouse of intellectual achievement that it became, attempting to undermine that achievement at every turn so as to take over the world.”

“Basically I’ve been going back and forth between the two, and it’s a real challenge,” he confessed. “My work is suffering, because I need to be consistent in my intellectual approach if ‘m going to get anything out of this education and activism.”

Observers note that Forth’s dilemma occasionally surfaces among self-aware academic intellectuals. “At a certain point an intellectually honest Jew-hater has to decide why he hates Jews, and follow that path,” says commentator Norman Finkelstein. “Do I hate Jews because I identify with the oppressed nonwhite, or do I hate Jews because I want to defend my white heritage from them? For the antisemite with any sense of clarity, these questions can tear you apart.”

The problem is especially acute, says Finkelstein, when forging alliances against Israel. “Many of the pro-Palestinian forces would be right at home in Nazi Germany in terms of their racial attitudes, with some minor adjustments in the identities of the übermenschen and untermenschen variables,” he explained. “That puts the progressive in the unpleasant situation of having to decide which values are more sacred: does antisemitism trump other liberal considerations, making it OK to make common cause with bona fide right-wing Palestinian nationalists and Islamic fundamentalists, or must the progressive reserve his anti-Jewish venom only for clear-cut cases of Jews as enemies of progressiveness?”

Forth surmised that in the end he will probably adopt the same stance as many other progressives, which effectively denies the volition and moral agency of non-whites. “Only if Israel alone is to blame can I hold on to my cherished antisemitism from either perspective,” he allowed. “If I can find a synthesis that at once sees Jews as a threat to the liberal West, yet preserves the decidedly non-liberal notion that Arabs are not fully human in their ability to make choices, and therefore not to blame, I’ll be happy.”

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