opinion
Antisemitism: Back to Square One?
BY BEN COHEN
M onitoring and analyzing contemporary
antisemitism, which I do rather frequently, is
most of the time a frustrating experience, but no
more so than now.

For all the ink that has been spilled in elucidat-
ing the resurgence of Jew-hatred in the last 20
years in myriad different countries and contexts,
it’s tempting to conclude that the Jewish commu-
nity has made no progress at all in explaining how
to even identify antisemitism, let alone combat it.

Some readers might say that I’m exaggerating
our predicament; after all, an entire transnational
infrastructure has been created to counter the
problem. In the United States, we have a State
Department position at the ambassadorial level
dedicated to combating antisemitism, while govern-
ments in Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom
have created similar positions in those countries.

Whereas 20 years ago, elected politicians
barely gave a thought to antisemitism, now hardly
a week goes by without a condemnation from
a parliamentarian or a cabinet minister. “There
is no vaccine for antisemitism and xenophobia,”
observed the U.N. Secretary-General António
Guterres in January 2021, in comments on the
antisemitic conspiracy theories that raged at the
height of the COVID-19 pandemic. “But our best
weapon remains the truth.”
Yet seemingly intelligent, rational and consid-
ered people are finding it supremely difficult to
grasp the most basic aspects of that truth. Nearly
80 years after the Holocaust, with countless mov-
ies, documentaries and books on the market and
Holocaust memorial museums springing up in
provincial towns as well as big cities, one might
think that caricatures of Jews with hooked noses
and sleazy facial expressions, or comments about
the “Jews” owning and controlling a particular
activity or sector, would be rapidly and unprob-
lematically identified as antisemitic.

Nope. Sadly, there are plenty of examples with which
to illustrate my point, so I will pick two of the most
recent ones. First, in Germany, the city of Kassel
is currently hosting the 15th edition of the pres-
tigious Documenta festival of modern art; this
year’s theme is the “Global South” and its curator
is an artistic collective from Indonesia called ruan-
grupa. During the build-up to the festival in the
first six months of this year, there was significant
concern over ruangrupa’s endorsement of the
16 AUGUST 11, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
anti-Zionist BDS campaign that seeks to quaran-
tine Israel from the international community.

But once the festival opened, those concerns
soon gave way to the much starker realization that
Nazi-style antisemitism was on display. A large
mural that was mounted in the center of Kassel,
titled “People’s Justice,” depicted a rogues gal-
lery of characters ostensibly associated with the
Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia, among them an
Orthodox Jew with a hooked nose and a fedora
hat embossed with the letters “SS,” and an Israeli
soldier with the face of a pig and a helmet marked
with the word “Mossad.” About two weeks after
the scandal over the mural, a visitor to the exhi-
bition discovered similarly antisemitic caricatures
in a brochure celebrating the solidarity with the
Palestinians among women in Algeria.

Subtle? About as subtle as my second example,
which involves Miloon Kothari, a member of the
insultingly named U.N. “Independent International
Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian
Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel,”
who opined in a late July interview with a viscer-
ally anti-Zionist website that negative reaction on
social media to the commission was the result of
the ownership and control of social-media plat-
forms by the “Jewish lobby.”
Just as the mural on display in Germany didn’t
take the extra step of coding its antisemitism,
neither did Kothari waste time with euphemisms
like “Zionists” or “powerful pro-Israel interests”
in making a point about Jews. And just as the
management team behind Documenta agonized
theatrically about how to acknowledge the hurt
and fury of Germany’s Jewish community without
alienating their Indonesian colleagues, resulting
in apologies so qualified that they weren’t really
apologies, Kothari’s own somewhat pompous
expressions of regret last week can be judged in
similar fashion.

Asked about the mural, Sabine Schormann —
the director of the Documenta festival who shortly
after resigned under the weight of the scan-
dal — recognized its offensiveness to Jews but
pleaded for understanding for its creators, who
felt that they “were under general suspicion and
defamed and sometimes threatened, because of
their origin, their skin color, their religion or their
sexual orientation.” Kothari, meanwhile, penned
a lengthy letter to the chair of the U.N. Human
Rights Council in which he expressed regret for
his choice of words without ever recognizing that
these words were antisemitic. They were “incor-
rect, inappropriate and insensitive,” he said, but
the really meaningful step — identifying these
words as a faithful representation of the age-old
antisemitic trope of “Jewish power” — was never
taken. For Documenta and Kothari alike, recogni-
tion that both were trading in unvarnished, dan-
gerous antisemitic stereotypes remained elusive.

Yes, of course, there has been widespread
condemnation of both Documenta and Kothari,
much of it from non-Jews. But as welcome as
that chorus is, it doesn’t change the fact that the
Documenta festival is still exhibiting, and that no
one has been charged with antisemitic incite-
ment under Germany’s stringent laws, while the
U.N. commission remains in operation despite
numerous calls for it to be shut down. All that
has changed is that these days, condemnation
of antisemitism is more widespread and more
frequent — but then again, there are plenty of
incidents out there to condemn.

If we can’t create a watertight consensus around
the fact that caricatures of Jews with hooked
noses are not just antisemitic, but impregnated
with the potential for the violence of the Nazi era,
or that casual references to the “Jewish lobby”
revive those same tendencies, then we are never
going to be successful when it comes to the
more coded expressions of antisemitism. Jewish
educators, unfortunately, now need to focus on
drawing out the intimate links between the antise-
mitic caricatures of the last century and those in
this one. We can no longer assume that basic
knowledge of the Holocaust plays an immunizing
role, especially as the Nazi extermination program
fades further and further into history.

Just as the fight against racism starts with iden-
tifying and isolating its ugliest and most dishonest
claims (Black men as “natural” sexual predators,
Roma and Sinti gypsies as “natural” thieves and
so forth) so it is with antisemitism (Jews as
“natural” exploiters who cynically damage other
people’s interests as they pursue their own). As
hard as it is to admit, we still need basic educa-
tion about how to identify and correctly respond
to the transparent, uncomplicated antisemitism
seen at the Documenta exhibition and in Miloon
Kothari’s comments. Until we pull that basic task
off, all the ambassadors and envoys and members
of parliament lining up to condemn antisemitism
are in danger of being written off as just so much
window dressing. JE
Ben Cohen is a New York City-based journalist
and author who writes a weekly column on Jewish
and international affairs for JNS.