Joel Schalit

The European Question

Given the enormity of the losses suffered by European Jewry between 1933 and 1945, the deterioration of Israeli-European relations after the Six-Day War may seem like a quaint afterthought. Or, at the very least, an event that one would expect to have originated in Jewish instead of European circles. After all, Jewry had more than its fair share of reasons to reject European civilization in toto given the tragedy that had just befallen it. As many critical, scholarly analyses of European culture since the Second World War have demonstrated, the Nazi genocide was a perverse by-product of the same historical and social developments that helped define what it means to be Western.

Anti-Semitism was not a foreign import, but European through and through. And it wasn’t backward, a residue of pre-modern Europe, either. No, the racism expressed towards the Jews from the nineteenth century onward, even as it mobilized earlier forms of anti-Semitism, went hand in hand with the outwardly rational forces of modernity. The problem for European Jews, particularly in Western Europe, is that they typically identified with these forces as well, going out of their way to convince themselves that anti-Semitism was the antithesis of modernity.

This conviction added to the difficulty of disidentifying with Europe, even after the Holocaust had demonstrated once and for all that Jews could never hope to be fully assimilated in Gentile society, however modern it seemed.  From Theodore Herzl’s Der Judenstaat (“The Jewish State”) onward, Zionist ideology has always regarded Jewish national identity as being culturally European. What “European” meant in this context, however, was complicated. Summing up Herzl’s position in the Socialist Register in 1970, Belgian Jewish Marxist Marcel Liebman argued that Herzl envisioned his Israel-to-come as a European outpost, both for practical purposes – protection from its neighbors – and for ideological reasons.

- Excerpted from Israel vs. Utopia

American Studies

American defense concerns have always given weapons names that fit their function. For example, fighters such as the F-15, F-16 and F-18 were appropriately given names such as ‘Eagle’, ‘Fighting Falcon,’ and ‘Hornet,’ while the black-painted, radar-evading F-117 stealth bomber was dubbed the ‘Nighthawk‘.

As silly as these names can get, (Why not a Dayhawk? When is the Chickenhawk coming? etc..) you can see the cultural logic behind their specificity. They’re meant to convey that such war machines embody the fierce, agile, even predatory qualities that define the brave birds that the aircraft were named after.

Hence the curious naming of the new ‘Masada‘ assault rifle by it’s manufacturer, Magpul Industries. Named after one of the first recorded incidents of mass suicide (in which 960 Jews besieged by Roman troops took their lives) the complexity of the rifle’s title represents a fairly serious break with convention.

As though anticipating criticisms over having chosen such a potentially controversial name, in a PDF brochure for the weapon posted to Wikipedia, Magpul maintains that the company is  neither “Jewish or Israeli backed,” but that it has always found the story of Masada to be “a bold example of defiance.”

If you want to get a sense of what informs so many American estimations of Israeli military prowess, you won’t find a more revealing signifier. One people’s loss is another’s defiance. Or, one could conjecture that such takes on Israelis say more about American desires than what they think about Jewry.

In January, the Masada was licensed to the larger American arms manufacturer Bushmaster, who have since retitled it the Adaptive Combat Rifle.

Left Anti-Semitism: Excerpt

Attributed to progressives sympathetic to Islamist criticisms of Israel and Zionism, this genre of anti-Semitism is the least understood form of prejudice against Jewry. Viewed as opportunist in its support of Islamic and right-wing Arab views of Jews and Zionism, as a means of disguising racism as anti-colonialism, left-wing anti-Semites are treated almost as though they are false progressives, who don the multicultural mantle of the left in order to be openly prejudiced.

Jews are incited against not because they profess an inferior culture or religion, but because the object of their faith is a state that discriminates against non-Jews, specifically, Muslims. Because their concept of the state is so integral to their religious identity, Jews are viewed as being inherently biased against non-Jews. Whether they are Diaspora or Israeli Jews, the foundational importance of the Zionist state, as an exclusively Jewish state, is supposed to be similarly viewed by progressives and by Islamists as an iconographic instance of the core politics of Jewish identity.

In short, Judaism is a synonym for racism because behind it hides Israel. Progressives aren’t supposed to like Judaism, first, because Israel stands for the indivisibility of religion and state, and second, in the form of the Israeli state, for the official practice of discrimination against Palestinians on the basis of their ethnicity. Though Judaism is found to be deeply problematic, both historically and theologically, the notion of returning to the promised land that Zionism prescribes is less important than how it is understood to function as a cultural cover for the West’s theft of Arab lands.

- From an article I’m currently working on