opinion
We Must Beware of the
Normalization of Antisemitism
By Hen Mazzig
T wenty years ago, the phrase “Never Again”
still meant something, at least in the United
States. Yet awareness of the Holocaust and the 6
million European Jews murdered — the culmination
of 2,000 years of brutality toward the stateless
Jewish people — has fallen among the youngest
generations of Americans.

A 2018 survey by the Conference on Jewish
Material Claims Against Germany found that 31%
of Americans and 41% of millennial and Gen Z
respondents believe that two million or fewer
Jews were killed in the Holocaust. A further 41% of
Americans and 66% of millennials cannot say what
Auschwitz was. No fewer than 11% of millennial
and Gen Z respondents believe Jews caused the
Holocaust, including 19% of the 18-39-year-old
subsample from the state of New York. Something
has certainly gone wrong when American public
education doesn’t provide basic historical literacy.

Is it any coincidence that the Anti-Defamation
League reported an all-time high of 2,107 anti-Jew-
ish hate crimes in 2020? This figure then increased
by 34% to a mind-blowing new high of 2,717
incidents of assault, harassment and vandalism
reported to the ADL in 2021 — more than seven
such incidents per day.

One study found that, based on data from 2018,
Jews per capita were by far the targeted group in
the U.S. and the most likely to suffer from hate
crimes. That’s 2.7 times more likely than Blacks
and 2.2 times more likely than Muslims. Yet often
the villains who commit these crimes go entirely
unpunished, with one shocking scoop finding that
“of the hundreds of hate crimes committed against
Jews in [New York City] since 2018, many of them
documented on camera, only a single perpetrator
has served even one day in prison.”
If violent crime against Jews has no discernible
deterrent, can anyone really feign surprise that
ugly speech toward Jews is increasingly normalized
in certain quarters? Many took note when Kanye
West, now calling himself Ye, one of the country’s
most popular musical artists, went on a weeks-
long social media attack on Jews generally. Among
other things, he threatened to “go death con 3 on
Jewish people” while saying it was not antisemitic
for him to say so because “black people are actually
Jew also.”
Of course, lowbrow antisemites have embraced
this amplification of their hateful rhetoric, as a
banner reading “Kanye is right about the Jews”
was hung over a busy Los Angeles freeway. That
16 DECEMBER 8, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
same message was mysteriously displayed on
an electronic video board at TIAA Bank Field in
Jacksonville, Florida, following a college football
game between the University of Florida and the
University of Georgia. More recently, a Jewish
cemetery in suburban Chicago was vandalized on
Nov. 14 with swastikas and the misspelled phrase
“Kanye was Rite” spray-painted on Jewish tomb-
stones. This would be troubling enough without the
support that West and his hateful message have
received from more highly placed and celebrated
figures. Tucker Carlson, the most-watched cable
news host in U.S. history, gave West a prime-
time interview that was heavily edited to conceal
antisemitic claims from the artist, including that
the Jewish holiday of Chanukah involves “financial
It has long
been argued that
manifestations of
anti-Jewish hate are
a “canary in the
coal mine.”
engineering” and “the 12 lost tribes of Judah, the
blood of Christ, [are] who the people known as
the race Black really are.” The Washington Post
reported that “Carlson mostly nodded along with
Ye’s commentary [with] no obvious effort to ques-
tion Ye’s assertions.”
Notably, Carlson himself has indulged in the
antisemitic “Great Replacement” theory, a claim
that originated with neo-Nazis and alleges a Jewish
conspiracy to replace America’s white majority with
groups from other countries by promoting immi-
gration and interracial marriage.

West was briefly removed from Twitter, but
returned days later to support the Brooklyn Nets’
Kyrie Irving’s promotion of a film that accuses
Jews of worshipping Satan, masterminding the
trans-Atlantic slave trade and controlling the
media and other industries — literally quoting from
the famous antisemitic hoax “The Protocols of the
Elders of Zion,” a forgery by Tsarist Russia’s secret
police that purports to describe the Jewish plan for
global domination.

West’s claims were further legitimized by famed
comedian Dave Chappelle in a “Saturday Night
Live” monologue, in which he alluded to tropes of
Jewish secrecy and illicit power, saying, “I’ve been to
Hollywood. … It’s a lot of Jews. Like a lot.” Chappelle
continued, “You could maybe adopt the delusion
that Jews run show business. It’s not a crazy thing
to think. But it’s a crazy thing to say out loud in a
climate like this.” ADL head Jonathan Greenblatt
tweeted that it was “disturbing to see [‘SNL’] not just
normalize but popularize #antisemitism.”
Why are Jewish sensitivities denied or dimin-
ished at almost every turn? Why does our trauma
trigger applause? As Yair Rosenberg put it in The
Atlantic, “The problem … is that as anti-Semitism
and related conspiracy theories become more
normalized in our discourse, laughing about them
becomes harder, because you never know who
might not get the joke.”
But perhaps it’s also the difficulty of understand-
ing antisemitism for what it is. It’s not racism, but
a different sort of hatred. As Hannah Arendt clearly
described it, antisemitism, unlike other forms of
bigotry, does not seek to enslave the Jewish peo-
ple. Instead, “antisemitism’s end goal is genocide.”
There are many vectors for the rising Jew-hatred
in America, including far-right neo-Nazis, white
supremacists, far-left anti-Israel voices, radical
Islamists and increasingly high rates of antisemi-
tism among some racial minority groups.

It has long been argued that manifestations of
anti-Jewish hate are a “canary in the coal mine,”
indicating that tolerance and democracy itself
are in severe distress. Now is the time for lead-
ers from all sectors of American society to stand
shoulder-to-shoulder in solidarity with Jews and
against hateful speech and violence, wherever they
originate. If society, heaven forbid, crosses a tipping point
into mass violence against Jews, history shows
that it will not stop with them. While the present
wave of intolerance promises catastrophe for the
American Jewish community if left unchecked, it is
a dire threat to us all. JE
Hen Mazzig serves as a senior fellow at the Tel Aviv
Institute and is the host of the podcast Fresh Look.

This was originally published by Jewish Journal.




Various screenshots via YouTube; photos courtesy; design by Jackie Hajdenberg via JTA.org
feature story
As antisemitism spends months in the pop culture spotlight,
Jewish comedians tackle the hate onstage and on social media.

Deeply Jewish Comedy Is Having a
Moment, Even as Antisemitism
Rocks Pop Culture
JACKIE HAJDENBERG | JTA.org
T wo weeks after a Trump-supporting
heckler threw a beer can at Ariel Elias at
a club in New Jersey over her politics, the
Jewish comedian’s fortunes took a turn for the better.

A video of the incident went viral and she made her
network television debut on Jimmy Kimmel’s late-
night talk show.

She spent most of her fi ve-minute set talking about
her Jewish identity and how it clashed with parts of
her upbringing in Kentucky.

“I’m Jewish from Kentucky, which is insane, it’s an
insane origin story,” she said last month before getting
to jokes about how Southerners mispronounce her
name and how badly her parents want her to date Jews.

Even though the crowd found it funny, Elias’ tight
fi ve wasn’t particularly groundbreaking. In the world
of standup comedy, discussing one’s Jewish identity
in a deep way has become increasingly common on
the mainstream stage over the past several years.

Jewish comedians are going beyond the bagel and
anxiety jokes, discussing everything from religiosity
and traditions (and breaking with those traditions) to
how their Jewishness has left them prone to awkward
situations and even antisemitism.

Ari Shaffi r calls his most recent special, which
was released in November and titled “Jew” — and
racked up close to 4 million views on YouTube in two
weeks — “a love letter to the culture and religion that
raised [him].” In his recent one-man show “Just For
Us” — which drew widespread acclaim and a slew
of celebrity audience members, from Jerry Seinfeld
to Stephen Colbert to Drew Barrymore — Alex
Edelman discussed the details of growing up Modern
Orthodox (and infi ltrating a group of white national-
ists). In 2019, Tiff any Haddish released a Netfl ix spe-
cial called “Black Mitzvah,” in which she talks about
learning about her Jewish heritage.

At the same time, the current uptick in public
displays of antisemitism — punctuated by a series of
celebrity antisemitism scandals and comedian Dave
Chappelle’s controversial response to them — is
complicating the moment for comedians who get into
Jewish topics. Jewish comics are even debating what
kinds of jokes about Jews are acceptable and which
cross a line.

“I fi nd it ironic that at a time where more Jewish come-
dians feel comfortable expressing their Judaism (i.e.

wearing a yarmulke, making Jewish-oriented content)
and not hiding it (by changing their name for example),
we also see an up-swelling of outright antisemitism,”
said Jacob Scheer, a New York-based comedian. “I don’t
think — and hope — those two things are not related,
but I fi nd it really interesting and sad.”
Th e two phenomena could be related. Antisemitic
incidents nationwide reached an all-time high in
2021, with a total of 2,717 incidents, according to an
April 2022 audit from the Anti-Defamation League.

Th ose incidents range from vandalism of buildings to
harassment and assault against individuals.

“Now that [antisemitism is] a headline, it actually
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM 17