More on Counting Anti-Semites

A few months ago in this Blog (in “Europe’s Toxic Anti-Semitism Problem,” July 10), I used a somewhat misleading headline debate between Manfred Gerstenfeld, author of “Demonizing Israel and the Jews,” and Robert Wistrich, in my view the world’s leading authority on the history of anti-Semitism. According to the headlines, Gerstenfeld used polling data to estimate that “there are well over 150 million European anti-Semites,” while Wistrich countered that the existence of 150 million idiots does not necessarily equate with the existence of 150 million anti-Semites.

In fact, Gerstenfeld and Wistrich agree on the grim fundamentals with Daniel Goldhagen’s “The Devil That Never Dies: The Rise and Threat of Global Antisemitism” (2013): that the fusion of old-style anti-Semitism(s) with more recent Israel hatred has created “a new anti-Semitism” lethally potent in Europe as well as the Arab and Muslim world. They would probably also agree that the U.S. is an outlier, a point dramatized by a new ADL poll showing a decline of “hard core” American anti-Semites to 12 percent today, compared to 15 percent in 2011. Actually, the ADL results should be read with care. Today’s decline is really just a return to the 2009 poll results that only partly reflected the upward blip in anti-Jewish conspiracy theories stimulated by the global financial crisis.

America, arguably, is different—or at least has been regarding anti-Semitism since the end of World War II. Hopefully, it will remain so. Yet there are those such as Jerome A. Chanes who seem to have a vested interest in exaggerating the degree of difference in order to minimize what they dislike as “parochially Jewish” arguments to the contrary. Chanes’ contribution to “Antisemitism in America Today” (1995) trumpeted the death of American Jew hatred just as the four-decade decline in anti-Jewish attitudes was ending and a small but significant uptick in anti-Semitism in America, as measured in the polls, was beginning.

In 2004, in a review essay—“What’s ‘New’—and What’s Not About the New Antisemitism?”—published in the “Jewish Political Studies Review,” Chanes reacted to the virulent new global wave of in Jew hatred as well as Israel hatred associated with the Second Intifadah. Rather than retreat from his thesis about America, he expanded it globally to argue as best he could that “Israelphobia” among Quran-quoting mullahs and European intellectuals decrying ‘The Jewish Lobby” did not necessarily have anything to do with anti-Semitism.

Now, at Berlin’s Jewish Museum, where a Conference on anti-Semitism seventy-five years after Kristallnacht was held on the Jewish Sabbath, coincidentally preventing any Orthodox Jews from attending, the keynote podium was given to anti-Israel ideologue Brian Klug who reiterated his thesis—first published in “The Nation” in 2004—that any supposed new “war against the Jews” was “as much a figment of the imagination as its mirror image: a Jewish conspiracy against the world.” Ten years ago, Klug’s thesis was a more extreme version of Leon Wieseltier’s dismissal in “The New Republic” at the time of Jewish concerns about “a new anti-Semitism” as “ethnic panic.” Wieseltier no longer makes such arguments—but Klug continues to do so, having learned nothing in the interim.

Klug and Company may think they know better than the 50 per cent of Jews in Belgium, France, and Hungary who have recently considered emigrating because the threat of “the new anti-Semitism”—but it’s doubtful they are going to convince many Jews in either Europe or Israel that the threat is merely a product of their own paranoia.