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A scholar sees a common root for antisemitism and racism: ‘Christian supremacy’
(JTA) — Magda Teter’s new book, “Christian Supremacy,” begins in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Aug. 11, 2017. Hundreds of white nationalist neo-Nazis who ostensibly gathered to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee from a local park broke into a chant: “Jews will not replace us.”
Other writers and scholars would note how antisemitism shaped white nationalism. But Teter, professor of history and the Shvidler Chair of Judaic Studies at Fordham University, saw something else: how centuries of Christian thought and practice fed the twin evils of antisemitism and racism.
“The ideology espoused by white supremacists in the US and in Europe is rooted in Christian ideas of social and religious hierarchy,” she writes. “These ideas developed, gradually, first in the Mediterranean and Europe in respect to Jews and then in respect to people of color in European colonies and in the US, before returning transformed back to Europe.”
In the book, subtitled “Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism,” she traces this idea from the writings of the early church fathers like Paul the Apostle, though centuries of Catholic and Protestant debates over the status of Jews in Europe, to the hardening of racist attitudes with the rise of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Antisemitic laws and theology, she argues, developed within Christianity a “mental habit” of exclusion and dominance that would eventually be applied to people of color up to and including modern times.
Teter is careful to acknowledge the different forms antisemitism and racism have taken, distinguishing between the Jews’ experience of social and legal exclusion and near annihilation, and the enslavement, displacement and ongoing persecution of Black people. And yet, she writes, “that story began with Christianity’s theological relation with Jews and Judaism.”
Teter is previously the author of “Blood Libel: On The Trail of an Antisemitic Myth,” winner of the 2020 National Jewish Book Award. At Fordham, the Catholic university in the Bronx, she is helping assemble what may be the largest repository of artifacts and literature dedicated to the Jewish history of the borough.
We spoke Thursday about how groups like the Proud Boys embrace centuries-old notions of Christian superiority, how “whiteness” became a thing and how she, as a non-Jew raised in Poland, became a Jewish studies scholar.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Your book was conceived and written during the COVID lockdown. Where did the idea for the book come from?
It’s an accidental project. I’ve been teaching the history of antisemitism for years, and I live in Harlem so questions of race and racism are very stark in my daily life. And since I grew up in Poland, and American history was not something we were taught or studied, I’ve never been satisfied with the various explanations for the strength of antisemitism and history of racism. And as I mentioned in my prologue, I watched the Raoul Peck documentary, “I Am Not Your Negro,” which has a clip with James Baldwin saying that white people have to figure out why they invented the idea of the N-word and must “embrace this stranger that they have maligned so long.” You could also say that the European Christians created the idea of “the Jew” and that sort of caricature had absolutely nothing to do with flesh and blood Jews. I kept noticing these parallels, as an outsider, reading American and African-American history.
I was also thinking about this idea of servitude that was attached to Jews in Christian theology, and then in law.
You write in your book that “Over time, white European Christians branded both Jews and people of color with ‘badges of servitude’ and inferiority.” What do you mean by servitude in this context?
In Christian theology, from the earliest Christian texts, the idea of servitude and slavery is attached to the concept of Jews and Judaism. Paul does it in his Epistles. He uses this quote from the book of Genesis that “the elder shall serve the younger,” which becomes really embedded in Christian theology. It is the Jews, the elder people, who should serve the Christians, the younger people. Later on in medieval theology and canon law, Jews are in a servile position, consigned for their sin of rejecting Jesus to perpetual servitude. So even though Jews were free people and could live mostly where they wanted to live, marry whoever they wanted to marry — nobody was sold and some even had slaves — that idea of Jews as confined to perpetual servitude to Christians created a habit of thinking of Jews as having an inferior social status.
That language became secularized in modern times, and we see the development of the [antisemitic] trope of Jewish power: that they are in places where they shouldn’t be. I worked on fleshing out the parallels between the idea and then legal status of Jewish servitude and the conceptual perception of Black people in servile and inferior positions.
Magda Teter’s new book explores how “white European Christians branded both Jews and people of color with ‘badges of servitude’ and inferiority.” (Chuck Fishman)
What other kinds of parallels did you find between racism and antisemitism?
In the Christian theology, Black people, like Jews, will be seen as cursed by God. Jews were [portrayed as] lazy because they didn’t work physically — they made money and exploited Christians. Black people were [portrayed as] lazy because they were trying to avoid physical labor at the expense of white men. Both people were seen as carnal, both as sexually dangerous, and so on.
I was struck by the fact that the racist turn of Christian supremacy — justifying the enslavement of Black people on theological grounds — is a fairly late development, taking hold in the early modern period when Europeans established slaveholding empires.
That’s right. In the summer of 2020, the summer of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, we were all thinking about these issues of race and racism and America. And as I was in the middle of writing the article that became the book, I felt that there was a deeper history that needed to be told, and that slavery is not bound by color until the enslavement of Black Africans by Europeans during the colonial expansion of Europe.
After the French Revolution, when Jews were offered “emancipation” in much of Europe, there were deep debates about whether they could be citizens and be entitled to the same rights and protections as Christian citizens of France and England and other countries. How was that debate informed by Christianity?
In pre-modern Europe, there was obviously both a religious and legal framework under which Jews existed. They had their place in a social hierarchy. After the French Revolution, people are creating a new political reality. The idea of equality obviously challenged the social hierarchies that existed, including the idea that Christians were the superior religion. And that begins to play a role on two levels. One is the level of, well, “how can you be equal and be our judges and make decisions about us?” It’s fear of power — political power and political equality. That challenges the habit of thinking that sees Jews as inferior, in servitude and otherwise insolent and arrogant.
The other level comes from Enlightenment scholars who begin to place Jews in the Middle East and in the Holy Land, in Palestine. Jews are no longer seen as European. They are seen as “Oriental,” and they are compared to the non-European religions and practices that these Enlightenment scholars have been studying. Their differences are now also racialized. “They are not like us, they can’t assimilate. They can never be Frenchmen, they can never be Germans.”
And I guess it’s a short step from that to regarding people with dark skin as inferior and subordinate.
That’s right. Enlightenment scholars are also trying to to understand why it is justified to enslave Black Africans and they do it through “scientific” and other means. They classify Africans as inferior intellectually and they create this idea of race.
I began to think about these European politicians and intellectuals in terms of creating their identities, and what I ended up arguing is what we saw in Charlottesville, what we’re seeing in Europe. It’s not necessarily just about hate, but it’s about exclusion and rejection of Jews and people of color from equality, from citizenship.
And the common thread here is that whiteness and Christianity become inseparable. You write that “freedom and liberty now came to be linked not only to Christianity, but to whiteness, and servitude and enslavement to blackness.”
That’s right. White Christian “liberty” becomes embedded and embodied in law.
Did you see any pitfalls in drawing parallels between the Black and Jewish experiences? I am thinking of those in either community who might say, “How dare you compare our suffering to theirs!”
Yes, I was tempered. I think what some call “comparative victimhood” has paralyzed conversations about this subject, and I kept it in my mind all the time. What I hope comes through is that there’s incredible value in a comparative approach. Coming from Jewish studies as my primary field, the comparison with the Black experience gave me clarity on the nature of antisemitism as well as on the nature of the Jewish experience, and vice versa: The Jewish experience can also give clarity to some of the aspects of anti-Black racism.
What’s an example?
So, for instance, questions like, “Are Jews white? Are they not white? When did they become white?” That’s a whole genre of scholarship. And when you look at it through the lens of law and ideology, you begin to see that from a legal perspective, Jews were considered white in the United States because they could immigrate and they could be naturalized according to law. They did not have to go to court to become American. Their rights to vote were not challenged. There was discrimination, they couldn’t stay in hotels and in some places they couldn’t find employment, but by law, they were considered citizens. The debate about the whiteness of Jews is creating a fog of misunderstanding.
Black Americans were targeted by specific legal statutes from the very beginning in the Constitution and then in naturalization law and so on. And then there was the backlash even after the Civil War to the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments [aimed at establishing political equality for Americans of all races].
Statues at the Strasbourg Cathedral depict Ecclesia and Synagoga, representing the triumph of the church, at left, and the servitude of Judaism, which is represented by a blindfolded figure, drooping and carrying a broken lance. (Edelseider/Wikimedia Commons)
How much do modern-day white supremacists, like the Oath Keepers or the Proud Boys, see themselves as Christian? Or is this a kind of white supremacy that doesn’t name itself Christian but doesn’t even realize how many of its ideas are based in theology?
I think they might not be conscious of this legacy, but neo-Nazis take from the legacy of the Nazis who themselves were not thinking of themselves as Christian necessarily. But what I argue in the book is that white Christian supremacy becomes white supremacy. It never discards the Christian sense of domination and superiority that emerges from its early relationship with Jews and Judaism.
In the United States, Black people serve as contrast figures to whiteness, in the law and in the culture. You cannot have whiteness without Blackness. For Christians, Jews serve as that contrast figure. Consciously or unconsciously, the Proud Boys are embracing that. They talk of “God-given” freedoms for white people. That is the Christian legacy.
You said that the Nazis didn’t necessarily see themselves as a Christian movement. But I must ask, even though it is not the scope of your book, was the Holocaust a culmination of white Christian supremacy? Because I think many Christian theologians would want to say that Nazism was godless, and a perversion of the true faith.
I’ll say that when exclusionary ideology is coupled with the power of the state, that’s where it can lead.
In the years since the Holocaust especially, there have been many efforts by Christian leaders to address the ideological failings of the past. You write about Nostra Aetate, the 1965 declaration by the Catholic Church absolving Jews of collective guilt in the death of Jesus and some Protestant documents of contrition. But I got the feeling you were disappointed that many denominations haven’t gone far enough in reckoning with the past.
There was a sort of a moral sense that something needs to be addressed after the Holocaust. But then it is not fully addressed. I don’t think anybody has addressed the issue of power — the roots of hate, yes, but not the dynamics of power. We’ll see where the book goes, but maybe theologians will begin to grapple with this legacy of superiority and domination, and the way hierarchical habits of thinking have been developed through theology and through religious culture.
What other impact do you hope the book may have?
White supremacy is very much in the air. We need to speak up against it, and make connections and allyships. I hope that maybe because the book deals with law and power, it may create bridges among people who care about “We the People” as a vision of people who are diverse, respectful and equal, and not the exclusionary vision offered by white and Christian supremacy.
A cross burns at a Ku Klux Klan rally on Aug. 8, 1925. (National Photo Company Collection)
I’d love to talk about your background. You’re not Jewish but you are chair of Jewish Studies at Fordham, a Catholic university. What drew you to the study of Judaism and the Jews?
I grew up in Poland with a father who from the time I was a little girl would point out to me that there had been Jews in Poland. We would drive through the countryside, and he’d say, “This used to be a Jewish town and there used to be a synagogue and there was the Jewish cemetery.” I grew up being very conscious of the past’s presence and this kind of stark absence of Jews in Poland, where in the 1970s when I grew up Jewish history was taboo.
As soon as Jewish books on Jewish subjects began to be published, including those that dealt with antisemitism, we would read it together. We would talk about it. He wouldn’t just shift the destruction and murder of Jews in Poland on to the Nazis.
There was no Jewish studies program in Poland when I was applying to universities, so I studied Hebrew in Israel, and then studied Yiddish in New York at YIVO. I came to Columbia University to get my PhD in Jewish history and my career went in the direction it did. I was a professor of history and director of the Jewish and Israel studies program at Wesleyan University. I came to Fordham eight years ago and created a program in Jewish studies.
Your previous book was about the blood libel, the historic canard that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood. This one’s about antisemitism. I don’t want to presume, but is your interest in these subjects in any way an act of contrition?
I grew up in a very secular household. I did not grow up Catholic. But I think growing up in Poland made me very, very aware of antisemitism and the history of antisemitism. I got my PhD from Columbia University in Jewish history, which did not emphasize Jewish suffering, but Jewish life, and I have studied Jewish life and teach about Jewish life — not just about Jewish suffering.
However, in the last few years, antisemitism has certainly been on the minds of many of us. I also am committed to the idea of shared history, and therefore all my scholarship, as much as it is about Jews, it is also about the church and Poland and the law. Jews are an integral part of that history and culture. And, as such, I’m committed to that, to teaching about the vibrancy of Jewish life as much as the dynamics of what made that life difficult over the centuries.
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The post A scholar sees a common root for antisemitism and racism: ‘Christian supremacy’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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The most important thing I’ll take away from 11 years at the Forward
In September 2015, I arrived at the Forward’s Manhattan office for my first day as an intern on the culture desk. I was 22 years old. I wore a blue dress that didn’t really fit, and was awed and slightly terrified by my bevy of talented, perceptive, funny new colleagues.
Now I’m 33. I’ve spent not just my whole career at the Forward, but also, effectively, my whole adult life. I’ve learned to respond to smart, fascinating people with interest, rather than fear. I’ve learned to wear a belt correctly, which wouldn’t have salvaged the blue dress, but might at least have helped. Just shy of 11 years after my first encounter with the savviest, scrappiest Jewish newsroom in the business, I’m moving onto a new chapter. Today is my last day as a member of this one-of-a-kind staff.
I’ve thought a lot, in the last several weeks, about what the point of these years has been. The Forward has given me so much, most of it good. As solid an education in journalism as anyone could hope for. An unfiltered and sometimes painful view of the community of which I am a grateful part. An inbox full of correspondents my loved ones sometimes don’t believe are real. (Consider the case of Gayle Kirshenbaum and Gayle Kirschenbaum, two entirely separate writers who sent me pitches for op-eds within 45 minutes of one another one day this spring.)
I’ve written nearly 1,000 pieces. I’ve edited something like double that amount. I’ve had moments of pride, most recently winning my first New York Press Club Award for a feature on the operatic adaptation of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. And I’ve had times of dismay — more of them in the last three years than I care to recount.
Above all, I’ve had friends.
In 2021, I went to my former colleague Aiden Pink‘s wedding. It was the first moment when the world felt almost normal after the COVID pandemic. Several Forward alumni traveled to Minneapolis — at one point a surprising candidate for most common Forward staffer hometown — to celebrate. We had a weekend-long sleepover at Ari Feldman‘s mother’s house. We watched Mamma Mia! We piled into a photobooth to take tipsy pictures at a pizzeria. Jenny Singer and I danced in a fluorescent-lit hallway while guarding the room in which Aiden and his wife, Aniko, were having their first quiet moments together as a married couple. In the last moments of the reception, Molly Boigon performed a flabbergastingly good version of the worm.
When we got back to Ari’s house, the power was out. We lit candles on the dining room table, and had the sort of exhausted, giddy conversation I once associated with a certain kind of night in high school. I am largely against the use of superlatives in writing, as anyone I’ve edited will tell you. But that night was magical.
When I think about my time at the Forward, I think about that weekend in the Twin Cities. I think about the editor who hired me, Adam Langer, who over the years went from boss to pal. I think about PJ Grisar, who was the first person to show up to a party I threw last fall celebrating my 10-year anniversary in New York. I think about my predecessor as opinion editor, Laura Adkins, sending me chicken soup one winter when I averaged more than one cold per month. I think about the glorious era when we used to have weekly in-office parties on Wednesday evenings, during which our onetime art director, Kurt Hoffman, used to break out his ukulele and serenade us all in French.
When new people learned about my job here, they tended to focus first on the parts of it that they correctly thought might be hard. It’s a tough time to be a Jew. I know a lot about all the places where swastikas have shown up recently. Once, someone in the comments of a story poetically referred to me as a “Sharia fascist.”
I’ve been called a kapo more times than I can count. And as I’ve helmed our opinion section over the past two and a half years, I’ve been on the receiving end of a lot of anguish and ire — much of it well-earned, but some symptomatic of willful blindness or excessive ideological allegiance.
All of that is part of life at the Forward. But I’m always surprised when strangers act like my job must be in some way a burden. Truthfully, working here has always been a joy. Because through bad times in the news — and bad times in the business — I’ve always gotten to work with the most remarkable people.
People who will kick into gear as soon as there’s breaking news, no matter where they are or what they’re doing, then spend an idle lunchtime hour discussing the Muppets to whom we feel most spiritually akin. People who have the sharpest insights on what’s really plaguing the Jewish world; the most surprising perspectives on the movies everyone is talking about; and the greatest appetite for bizarre story ideas, like the time I profiled Sen. Jon Ossoff based exclusively on his time at an elite high school ultimate frisbee team.
I have grown up in this newsroom, and I’ve been shaped by it and the glorious, brilliant, offbeat people to whom it’s introduced me. Seeing the world with the particular gaze the Forward fosters — one that’s skeptical of authority, interested in both tradition and its limitations, highly cultural and wryly funny — has taught me how to think, read and write. It’s taught me how to be the kind of Jew I want to be. I was never a Jewish camp kid; Hillel did nothing for me; the Forward is the only real Jewish community I’ve known.
I can’t yet share details on what’s next for me. (If you’re curious, I’ll share the news on Bluesky once it’s time.) One thing I know for sure is that no matter how fabulous my future colleagues might be, nothing will ever displace the Forward in my heart. It hasn’t just been my workplace. It’s really been my home.
The post The most important thing I’ll take away from 11 years at the Forward appeared first on The Forward.
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Dangerous denialism about the realities of Hamas points to an American moral collapse
A terrible mutation afflicts American politics. What began as fury over Israel’s conduct of the Gaza war has evolved, in significant parts of the progressive left, into a pathological hostility toward Israel that has become a driver of political identity and debate. The genocide accusation is increasingly treated not as a contested claim but as settled truth; opposition to Zionism as evidence of virtue; and even Hamas and “armed resistance” can be romanticized or excused.
This week’s victory by Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s Democratic primary for the Senate, alongside the popularity of voices such as Hasan Piker, suggests this is no longer simply the rhetoric of campus radicals. Israel is being cast as such a singular evil that opposing it can seem almost a prerequisite for occupying the moral high ground.
Which is why what happened to Douglas Murray’s recent book is so interesting. On Democracies and Death Cults confronts precisely this mutation: the extraordinary difficulty much of the Western left now seems to have in distinguishing between a deeply flawed democracy and a murderous Islamist movement committed to its destruction. Yet despite Murray’s prominence and the book’s commercial success, much of the mainstream review culture simply ignored it. In the political climate of August 2026, that silence looks less like an oversight than part of the story.
Douglas Murray has never lacked critics. That is the inevitable consequence of writing about immigration, identity politics and the West’s growing loss of confidence in itself. His earlier books, The Strange Death of Europe and The War on the West, provoked fierce disagreement, but they were treated as books that demanded engagement — reviewed, debated and rebutted.
On Democracies and Death Cults, published last year, received something different.
I believe the reason is plain. This was the first Murray book whose principal purpose was not simply to criticize fashionable ideas in the West but to defend Israel during the most contentious conflict of our time.
Had he written 250 pages arguing that Israel’s campaign in Gaza was criminal, reviews would almost certainly have followed. Instead, he argued that Hamas is a death cult, that Israel is confronting an enemy unlike any conventional military adversary, and that much of the Western left has become morally incapable of distinguishing between a liberal democracy from an organization that celebrates the murder of civilians, including on its own side.
The media appears to prefer to ignore those arguments. And I consider that unfortunate, because I believe Murray is substantially right. If I were still with the mainstream media, where I spent decades of my career, I’m pretty sure I would be swimming against the tide on this, and getting called nasty names.
The most remarkable thing about this book is that it exists at all. Its central proposition ought to be among the least controversial statements in modern politics: Hamas is evil. The fact that an accomplished writer felt compelled to devote an entire book to persuading educated Western readers of that proposition — and that this is controversial — says volumes about what our society has mutated into.
Murray’s achievement is not merely to condemn Hamas but to explain it. He rejects the comforting fiction that it is simply another national liberation movement employing regrettable tactics. Barbarism, he argues, is not incidental to Hamas. It is intrinsic to its worldview.
Hamas does not merely accept death as the price of war. It glorifies death, sanctifies martyrdom and exploits the deaths of its own people as readily as those of its enemies. Its objective is not a negotiated peace or a two-state solution. It has repeatedly opposed such outcomes because it does not seek coexistence with Israel but Israel’s destruction. Unless one regards Israel’s very existence as an occupation to be liberated, Hamas’s own stated aims are impossible to misunderstand.
Murray demonstrates this not through slogans but through reporting.
He describes an organization that — together with its fellow traveler and Iran proxy, Hezbollah in Lebanon — systematically embeds itself within civilian life: storing weapons in homes, schools and places of worship, digging tunnels beneath residential neighborhoods and turning civilian suffering into a strategic asset. He recounts Hamas gunmen hiding behind civilians apparently attempting to surrender before opening fire, the abuse of ambulances that inevitably casts suspicion on legitimate ones, and the recruitment of fake journalists and even teachers employed by UN schools. None of this is an aberration. It is the strategy itself.
Murray also describes in excruciatingly graphic detail the evidence he collected of the cruel, vicious murders on Oct. 7, in the rural communities invaded by Hamas and at the Nova music festivals — girls shot in the head as they begged for mercy, boys’ heads bashed in with hammers, grenades lobbed at people cowering. It is unbearable and leaves no doubt about the evil at work.
Nor is Hamas’s contempt for life reserved for Israelis.
One of Murray’s most chilling stories concerns Yahya Sinwar during his years in Israeli prison. Discovering that the sister of a fellow prisoner had allegedly dishonored the family through an affair, Sinwar arranged from prison for her murder in the name of family honor. The anecdote is horrifying not simply because of its brutality but because it reveals a worldview in which individual human life carries almost no value beside ideological or tribal imperatives. The same mentality that celebrates the murder of Israeli civilians is perfectly capable of consuming its own.
Murray’s point is not that Israel is morally perfect. Israel has extremists of its own, including some whose politics deserve unequivocal criticism. But there remains an immense moral gulf between a democracy whose institutions regard civilian deaths as tragedies and an organization that celebrates death itself.
The distinction is visible not merely in military conduct but in culture. When General Gadi Eisenkot, now running for prime minister, lost his son fighting in Gaza, Israel mourned with him. When Ismail Haniyeh’s sons were killed, Haniyeh publicly celebrated their martyrdom. One response grieved the loss of life. The other glorified it. That is not merely a political distinction. It is a civilizational one.
Power of observation
Murray also did something that commentators often do not — he went. He entered Gaza. He entered southern Lebanon. He documented Hezbollah’s tunnel systems intended to facilitate an invasion of northern Israel. He described children’s bedrooms converted into weapons depots and the suffocating grip Hezbollah exerts over the Shiite communities it claims to defend. One may dispute some of his conclusions. It is considerably harder to dismiss his observations.
Yet the most unsettling chapters are not really about Hamas or Hezbollah.
They are about us. Murray argues that large parts of the contemporary Western left have become incapable of recognizing jihadist movements for what they are because they increasingly interpret every conflict through a single moral framework: oppressor and oppressed. Once Israelis are cast as oppressors and Palestinians as oppressed, every other moral consideration recedes. Terrorism becomes “resistance,” massacres become contextual, and universal moral standards give way to political tribalism.
That, he argues, explains not only why so much of the world glosses over Hamas’s obvious evil, but why so many people seemed incapable of extending even the most basic sympathy to the victims of Oct. 7. Why were posters of kidnapped children, elderly civilians and Holocaust survivors torn down on Western campuses? Why was the instinct not to mourn, but to explain away, relativize or even celebrate?
He also asks why the outrage is so selective.
Do those denouncing Israel know that while more than half a million Arabs were displaced during the 1948-49 war, an even greater number of Jews were driven from or compelled to flee Arab countries, most of them finding refuge in Israel as citizens? Do they know that Palestinian refugee status — in neighboring Arab countries culturally and ethnically practically indistinguishable from the Palestinians! — has been uniquely preserved and inherited across generations, while other refugee crises have generally been resolved through resettlement and integration?
Do they know how many Muslims are dying today in Sudan and elsewhere in Africa with scarcely a fraction of the attention devoted to Israel? Do they know that, at roughly the same time as the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, the Partition of India uprooted many millions of people — Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs — in one of history’s largest and bloodiest population exchanges?
Why does none of this provoke anything resembling the same moral fervor?
Israel is a tiny country, scarcely larger than New Jersey even including the Negev Desert, and closer in populated area to Rhode Island. It is fighting organizations openly committed to its destruction. Yet it has become the singular obsession of the activist left.
Is this extraordinary fixation simply the product of ignorance? Do many of those chanting Hamas slogans know little of the history they claim to invoke? Or is something darker at work? Is Israel judged by standards applied to no other nation because it is the world’s only Jewish state? Is it actually antisemitism??
One need not answer that question categorically to recognize that it cannot simply be dismissed. The sheer selectivity of the outrage demands an explanation. Pretending it does not is no answer at all. And yet the world’s media has ignored the main and probably only book written by an outsider that tries to set the record straight, despite his status as a celebrity public intellectual.
An uncomfortable place
Admiration for Murray does not require agreement with all of his conclusions. Indeed, it is here that I part company with him. His diagnosis of the contemporary progressive left is penetrating and absolutely correct. His political prescription is considerably less persuasive, to me.
Somewhere along the way, Murray’s entirely justified alarm at progressive illiberalism appears to have led him into an accommodation with a populist right that embodies many of the very habits he has spent years criticizing. His tolerance of Benjamin Netanyahu sits uneasily beside his insistence that democracies should be held to the highest standards. More troubling still is his increasing willingness to excuse or support Donald Trump.
I cannot follow him there.
Donald Trump is no defender of the civilization Murray wishes to preserve. Contempt for expertise, hostility toward science, casual and colossal corruption, attacks on independent institutions and the elevation of personal loyalty above constitutional principle are not expressions of the Western tradition. They are threats to it.
Many of us now occupy an uncomfortable place. We believe Hamas is evil and that Israel has every right to defend itself against organizations committed to its destruction. We believe Western civilization, for all its undeniable failures, deserves defending because it produced constitutional government, scientific inquiry, individual liberty and the very tradition of self-criticism that allows us to acknowledge its mistakes.
At the same time, we believe in climate science, vaccination, expertise, the rule of law, sensible gun regulation and a robust social safety net. We reject identity politics that reduces history to oppression, but we reject populism that dismisses knowledge, institutions and liberal norms just as firmly.
And we know Netanyahu is a vile and venal schemer who cannot be trusted. We also know the West Bank occupation is not sustainable and plain wrong – even if the Palestinians twice rejected fair offers for a partition and a state.
Twenty years ago, those views would have described a fairly conventional liberal. Today they seem to describe almost no political constituency at all.
You do not have to agree with everything Murray says or believes or does to understand that On Democracies and Death Cults deserves engagement.
The lack of engagement with On Democracies and Death Cults is almost more revealing than the book itself. Murray’s central claim, that Hamas is a murderous, nihilistic organization whose ideology glorifies death, and which helps the Palestinians not at all, ought not to require elaborate demonstration. It should be self-evident to anyone with any information and minimal intelligence.
Yet much of the mainstream intellectual and media establishment simply chose not to grapple with the argument. That silence reflects a profound unseriousness. Institutions that pride themselves on intellectual openness inadvertently reinforced Murray’s broader thesis: that important parts of the Western intellectual establishment have become unable — or unwilling — to make moral distinctions that once lay at the heart of liberal civilization.
If that diagnosis is even partly correct, we face a genuine crisis. The populist right, with its contempt for expertise, institutions and often for truth itself, cannot be the answer. But neither can a left that increasingly struggles to recognize reality.
I am not prepared to believe that this battle for liberalism has already been lost. Perhaps liberals can beat back the progressive challenge. But it is a battle that must be fought. If the political right continues its descent into populist illiberalism while important parts of the left continue to abandon the moral clarity that once defined liberal democracy, then we are in very deep trouble indeed.
The post Dangerous denialism about the realities of Hamas points to an American moral collapse appeared first on The Forward.
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A Minnesota reggae band gave this Midwestern Jewish teenager the greatest gift of all
It’s late summer. Twelfth grade is starting in two weeks, and I — moody guy that I am — am in a particularly foul one when my friend Blair, who I’ve known since our mothers toted us around in strollers, calls me and tells me there’s a reggae band playing at the Lake Harriet bandshell in a few hours.
“Get your lazy butt outta bed,” he says.
Blair isn’t moody by nature. In fact, he’s happy most of the time, which is one of the reasons I’ve stayed friends with him so long. Seeing a reggae band does sound mildly appealing, even if it means I’ll have to get up and get dressed. An hour later, we’re at the bandshell, and my bad mood is threatening to become a thing of the past.
The sun is dropping fast, and the lake is exhaling mosquitoes, dark clouds of them lifting off the surface and drifting into a sky of pale green. There’s been a tornado watch all afternoon, the radio has been issuing steady warnings, but nobody seems to care. When Shangoya takes the stage, the world narrows to rhythm alone. When the band kicks in, the bass lands in my chest like a second heart. A brake shoe clangs, metal on metal, time being hammered into place. The singer, Aldrich Peter Nelson moves as if nothing in the world has ever resisted him. The music lifts me upward, presses me back down, pins me to the ground, then sends me into the air again.
For a moment, something in me lines up. Not control. Attention. A sense that if I don’t look away, I might be allowed to remain inside the feeling a little longer.
I could do that, I think. I should be up there blowing people away.
After the show, Blair tells me he needs to hightail it home before his 10:30 curfew. “Gimme a couple minutes,” I say. I spot the bass player, a fit-looking dude, around 35, rolling up his cables and wiping down a black Fender jazz bass.
“Hey, how ya doin’?” I say as I walk up to him. “I had a great time listening to you guys. I’m a guitarist, and I think you’d be a lot better with me up there. I could kick some ass, actually.”
He laughs. “How old are you den?”
“I’m seventeen,” I say.
“Me name’s Lloyd. And if ya tink you dat good, maybe I outta take ya numbah jus’ now. Shangoya’s been tinkin’ ’bout a second guitarist.”
I give him my number. I already had it written out.
Six months later, there’s a note on our kitchen table:
Babe, a guy named Roy with an accent called this afternoon and wants you to try out for his band.
Love, Mom
Given the malaise I’d been experiencing since my early graduation and my sentence working in the warehouse at Pickwick, the distribution center for every Musicland record store in the U.S., this news felt like manna from heaven. I wasn’t particularly concerned about the audition either. Since that night I saw Shangoya playing at the bandshell, the image of me up there on stage with them had stayed vivid in my mind. Becoming part of the band felt like a technicality.
On the night of the audition, there are at least a dozen players waiting in the living room of Aldrich Peter Nelson’s small house in South Minneapolis. Most of these guys are in their mid- to late 20s; a couple look like they might be pushing 40. They’re holding expensive guitars and sitting on first-rate amplifiers.
I’m here with the solid-state Kustom Challenger I bought four years earlier with my bar mitzvah money. It’s not exactly a youth model, but it’s certainly no first choice for any pro.
The sound is coming up from the basement. I can hear each player as he auditions.
The first guy is using the same Mu-Tron funk box Andre Cymone was killing me with last year, playing bass with Prince, at the New Year’s Eve show downtown — except this guy’s overusing it. He has no sense of perspective, and instead of adding color, it sounds murky and redundant.
The next player has incredible dexterity. No doubt he’s been woodshedding. For a second, I get a little concerned. After a minute, I relax. What he’s accomplished in speed and fluency, he fucks up with a complete lack of regard for the music itself. He’s stepping all over everything, coming in when he should lay out, drowning out Aldrich Peter Nelson when he’s in the middle of a verse. Instead of making music, this chump is just auditioning his chops.
Shangoya may not be made up of the best studio cats in the world, but they’re way too sensitive and soulful to fall for this.
The next guy heads downstairs. No worries here either. He seems nice enough, but he’s a prog-rocker. His stuff might work for a Genesis cover band, but it makes no sense in reggae or calypso.
Then someone calls up from the basement: “Petah, you ready?”
I pick up my Les Paul and my Challenger and head down.
It’s hot and cramped. The band is clearly in need of a break. Aldrich Peter Nelson smiles, but he’s tired.
“Can you play reggae, mon?” he asks.
“Hell yeah I can,” I say.
Carlos Roque, the drummer, counts off with four clicks of his sticks.
They start a slow groove in A minor. Good tempo. Just right for me.
I’ve never been a shredder. I like to make each note count. I don’t come in right away. I give myself space. I need air around the notes I’m about to release.
When I need some heat, I flick the Les Paul’s toggle to the rear pickup — that fat sound. Then I turn around and twist the Challenger’s volume knob all the way up. I won’t use all that gas, not yet, but I want it in reserve.
I start in with a stream of long Santana-esque notes, let them hang, then travel the neck.
I’m not messing around this evening, not making slick noise. I’m playing things that mean something — sounds that tell the story of a soul in exile. I feel like I’m homing in on an echo, a burgeoning need to return to center, to find bliss, to fly. I want out of the past months, out of the emptiness weighing me down. I’m not auditioning anymore. I’m doing this for myself.
When I need more volume, I take it. The Challenger wasn’t built for this. It sounds like it’s about to blow apart. I hope it does. Right here in this basement, while I imagine the other guys upstairs are quivering, helpless in fear.
When the music stops, Aldrich Peter Nelson smiles — and this time the smile stays.
“What ya tink you can bring to de band if we hire you all jus’ now?” he asks.
I grab a paper towel and wipe my face.
“You see that little amplifier?” I say, pointing to the Challenger. “When I’m onstage with you guys — and I will be — it’s gonna shoot flames.”
The whole band laughs.
I’m not offended. I know what they’re thinking. I’d think the same thing. Who is this 17-year-old white Jewish prick? They can’t control themselves. I get it. It’s overwhelming to witness a true believer.
I played with Shangoya for a little over a year. At that age, a year felt like a long time. The Challenger didn’t shoot flames, not exactly. But it amplified a lot of my guitar playing on stages across Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa. I even got to perform a few of my original reggae songs, “Get a Grip” being one of them. It became the B-side of Shangoya’s first single.
To this day, that experience — not just the musical one, but the experience of being accepted into a culture far from my own — remains an incredible gift. Aside from being one of the few Americans, a Jew no less, invited to feel in my bones the rhythms of the Caribbean, I was also, as a young man, embraced warmly by these people, these lifelong friends.
This has meant everything to me.
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