ILLUSTRATION; BRYAN GEE/THE GLOBE AND MAIL. SOURCES: GETTY IMAGES
Adam Gopnik is a staff writer at The New Yorker whose most recent books include All That Happiness Is: Some Words on What Matters and The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery. The following essay is an abbreviated version of the Irving Abella Lecture that he delivered at Massey College on Sept. 16.
One of my favourite French idioms, favoured by my late friend, the French-Jewish philosopher André Glucksmann, is simple: Nous sommes des adultes et peut compter jusqu’à deux. That is: Grown-ups should know how to count to two. Asserting one wrong doesn’t wipe away some other, and it is possible to unequivocally condemn one action without immediately excusing some other.
Canadians, I think, are good at counting to two: We count one, and see the nobility of our history in building a multicultural democracy that spans a continent. But we also recognize the brutality and cruelty of the crushing of First Nations that was inextricably linked – note, I do not say necessary – to build it. We always count to two … and then, us Jewish-Canadian folks count to two, and three, and four and all the way up, since our multiple consciousness and love of placing commentary upon commentary demands it. We want it darker, as our great bard said, not because we love the dark but because when you pile on multiple consciousnesses, the simple light of certitude recedes, and a certain healthy darkness – the darkness of the human condition, as it is – must obscure some of the easy light, for good or ill.
So, let me try to count to two – and to three and perhaps beyond. It takes no paranoia, merely a knowledge of history to recognize antisemitism – an irrational hatred of Jews – when it rises. And Jews feel it in the wake of Oct. 7. No Jew, however secularized, however universalist in outlook, can be indifferent to the story, painfully recited in the brilliant reportage of Lee Yaron, the Haaretz journalist whose new book, 10/7, recounts the massacre – of the elderly caught on a bus, unable to run away, and murdered, one by one, by Hamas terrorists exulting in their deaths. It brings to our minds only the imagery and memory of the Einsatzgruppen in their indiscriminate work of killing Jews on the Eastern Front – and also to the Jewish determination that Jews, having been murdered en masse, made up their minds never to be murdered en masse again. This decision somehow seems to shock their would-be murderers but also shocks their so-called friends. Nor does the effort to separate Jewish from Zionist behaviour have any real-world content. Aside from the tiniest of fringes on the religious right and the extreme left, all Jews are Zionists – highly critical and judgmental and dissatisfied Zionists, but Zionists in as much as they recognize the fragility of Jewish life over the centuries and the need for a safe, or safer, place in the world. Jews of all kinds, secular and religious, vehemently criticize the Israeli government for its misplaced wars and its self-evident failures. But no nation, or country, or tribe in human history has ever meekly accepted the murder of its elderly, the rape of its women, the kidnapping of its children – and then was told to see beyond to its own wrongdoing. Asking of Jews what one asks of no one else is antisemitism.
What I want to raise is a particular way in which antisemitism spills over as a template into a larger misconstrual of modernity. The tragedy of our time is that antisemitism rises equally from left and right. But then it always has: Hitler had hardly finished his hideous work when Stalin hatched the so-called “Doctors’ Plot,” the antisemitic conspiracy theory whose worst work was ended only by his death.
But if there is left antisemitism and right antisemitism – can we distinguish them? I’d say yes – that right-wing antisemitism tends toward historical conspiracy – it looks back – while left-wing antisemitism is contemporary – it looks around. Right-wing antisemitism is the antisemitism decrying the past plotting of the Jews: It is rooted, tragic as this is to say, in the New Testament tales in which the Jews are ever increasingly excluded from the community because of something they have done that cannot be forgiven. They may still be doing whatever it is they did, but their past crimes are enough to condemn them. The wandering Jew is the symbol of this ugly creed.
God knows, or doesn’t, that right-wing antisemitism remains intact. It not accidentally takes the form of historical negationism – obsessively rewriting history is its task. As with Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump’s favourite broadcaster, and his little friend, the audacious “popular historian” Darryl Cooper. The obsession with Holocaust denial is, sad to say, continuous with the original antisemitism of the Gospels: They did it to themselves.
Left-wing antisemitism takes the form of false awareness. It takes as its icon not the wandering Jew but the too-much-at-home Jew, as in the Doctors’ Plot. Left-wing antisemitism tends to be modern in outlook. Today it centres around Israel, and clusters around the need for anti-colonialist discourse in a postcolonial world – in the sense of placing as particularly Zionist all the features of classic European hatred of Jews: conspiracy, finance, outsiders, murderers.
Yet both left and right have something in common. Most racism is of a kind that assigns a sub-human role to the victim. We saw that clearly with the Donald Trump and J.D. Vance insistence that hard-working, immigrant Haitians were sub-human animals who ate what no one else would. But antisemitism is perhaps unique among the world’s persistent ills in ascribing not sub but super-human powers to the objects of its hatreds – they are too smart, too city-bound, too quick to mount up in the professions, too irrespirable. Black people and Indigenous nations are, in the racist imagination of hatred, near relations of the animals. Jews are especially close relatives of the angels – fallen angels, that is, Lucifer and Satan, who keep possession of super-human gifts of collaboration. Jews as insidious insiders, taking advantage of a meritocratic system that excludes the French people or the German volk. One of the key points in Irving Abella and Harold Troper’s great book on the shame of Canada’s immigration policy in the 1930s and early 40s, None is Too Many, is that, when Jewish refugees were kept out of Canada, the form antisemitism took was not simply a fear of the Other. No, it involved a mistrust of education, of the urban and the city-bound – of the danger an alien, educated elite posed to Canadian values.
This leads to a modern distortion, more insidious for being mostly unconscious, and that is the argument, very often made “innocently,” i.e. without any conscious intention of antisemitism, that the central crisis of our time is one between arrogant and unfeeling “elites” – defined simply as people who read and argue about their reading – and a common folk who, understandably, are outraged and enraged by the indifference, and turn to demagogues and authoritarians in revenge for their dispossession.
And so, we’re told that those really at fault in the rise of Mr. Trump, or the by-now indisputably catastrophic accession of Brexit in Great Britain, or the National Front, redubbed the National Rally, in France, are the Parisians or New Yorkers or Londoners, or for that matter Torontonians, who look past the alienation of the abandoned in their own comfort.
I am certain that some of this is well-intended, and even innocent. One sees variants of it in such impeccable friends of liberalism as David Brooks and Michael Sandel – even as one hears it relentlessly and more indecently from Mr. Vance. Yet it is pernicious because it speaks to, and derives from, the underlying cause of the specifically modern hatred of Jews – a hatred of modern cosmopolitanism.
In the 19th century, Jews arrived, before anyone else, at an understanding that, in the new world of modernity, competitive advancement – doing well on exams – would provide an alternative to advancement through bloodlines. Why the Jews did so well in societies that depended on some form of test-taking is a complicated historical question, though it may be as simple as that the tradition of Talmudic study could easily be “exapted,” as students of Darwin say, for the purpose – as feathers, evolved strictly for insulation in flightless reptiles, became valuable for flight as they became birds. The tradition of reading and studying became our feathers, and the new world where it mattered our form of flight.
So, I will make a belligerent – let us say Jewish – case. Any time you hear talk of elitism as the true impulse-maker of popular fascism or hear anyone calling the staunchest enemies of authoritarianism the authors of authoritarianism, any moment when we hear anyone blaming the educated and enlightened for the acts of the benighted and brutal … we are seeing a growth, inevitable as it is ugly, from the base template of antisemitism. If you had only been a bit less pushy; if you had only accepted a subsidiary role; if you had not forced yourself into institutions to the “exclusion” of the volk or the rural folk, then this would not have had to happen.
The whole point of social existence is to broaden our circles of compassion. The trap is that as we do go from our immediate family to our city or nation, we necessarily become enclosed in that same enlarging circle. This is the trap of the 19th-century liberal nationalism on which Canada is constructed, and which Theodor Herzl dreamed of for the Jews. We enlarge our circle – and fail to see the Indigenous people who lie outside it. The fight first to enlarge our circle of compassion, and then not to become entrapped in the enlargement, is exactly the fight of patriotism against nationalism.
Every person is a world in an agonizingly literal sense. Let’s recall that one of the few texts that passes complete from Jewish scripture to Islamic scripture is the injunction that “Whoever kills a soul, it is as if he had slain mankind entirely. And whoever saves one – it is as if he had saved mankind entirely.”
No matter how perfect our beliefs, we struggle to apply them universally, to count past two to three and four and, if we could, past that to one billion individuals who live on this planet. The persistence of antisemitism is an expression of the difficulty. Expanding those circles is the hardest work human beings do, and the most important.