This recent headline caught my attention, not because of how outrageous it is – how could a benefit concert for the victims of antisemitic violence be canceled because of more antisemitism? – but because of how disappointingly familiar it feels.
This is a pattern. From the Holocaust to the Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting to even the stories in the Torah, Jews have been both simultaneously stripped of our humanness and erased from the stories of our own experiences, both good and bad.
NOT A PEOPLE, BUT A VEHICLE
Jews have always represented a tiny proportion of the world population but have, for two millennia, taken up disproportionate space in the non-Jewish imagination.
It was thanks to the Roman Empire’s adoption of Christianity in the 4th century that most of the planet today even knows what a Jew is. But do they actually know who we are?
Through Jesus, the masses were introduced to the Jew not as a human being with their own human experience but as a vehicle through which they could atone themselves of their sins. I do not say this to insinuate that all Christians perceive Jews through this lens – we do have many genuine Christian allies – but rather, to help you understand where implicit biases may form at a global, societal, and institutional scale.
From the Tanakh to the Holocaust, Jewish stories today are often reformulated as moral lessons for all of humanity. When this happens, we are then simultaneously stripped of ownership over our own experiences.
JEWS AS A MIRROR
"Antisemitism is always a means rather than an end; it is a measure of the contradictions yet to be resolved. It is a mirror for the failings of individuals, social structures, and State systems. Tell me what you accuse Jews of—I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of." - Vasily Grossman
"If the Jew did not exist, the antisemite would invent him." - Jean-Paul Sartre
When the global perception of Jews strips us of all the qualities that make us inherently human, and instead we are perceived as vehicles for everyone else’s morality, we are no longer understood as individuals, with all of the faults, virtues, and messiness that that entails. Instead, we become a mirror onto which different individuals and societies project whatever they most dislike – about themselves, or about others. Our story and our very identity becomes public property for this purpose.
IS THE TANAKH OURS?
The Tanakh, or the Hebrew Bible, was written as the tribal national charter of the Nation of Israel, an amalgamation of ancient Israelite (and later, Judahite) law, ancestry, history, and mythology.
With the widespread adoption of Christianity, and later, Islam, the Tanakh became the moral foundation for a whole host of people who do not share in Israelite ancestry. In other words, the Tanakh, written by the ancestors of today’s Jewish people, telling the stories of the ancestors of today’s Jewish people, has been adapted by billions of people of unrelated family histories. The stories of our ancestors thus became their stories.
But here’s the thing. The Tanakh, as it was written, never intended to serve as a moral guideline for all of humanity, even though it’s since long been interpreted as such, through a quirk of fate or history. Instead, it was written by Israelites (and Judahites) for Israelites (and Judahites) as something not unlike an ancient national constitution. That’s not to say that the Tanakh does not teach universal values, because it does. But, at its core, that’s not what it was ever meant to be.
WHEN THE HOLOCAUST NO LONGER BELONGS TO JEWS
The Holocaust presents the clearest contemporary example of the manner in which much of the world has systematically stripped the Jewishness from inherently Jewish stories.
The efforts to decouple the Holocaust from the Jewish people predate the end of World War II. The Soviet Union, itself hostile to its own Jewish minority, produced propaganda framing all Soviets, as well as communists, as the principal victims of the Nazis. When the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which had raised $34 million dollars for the Soviet war effort, began documenting the Nazis’ crimes against the Jews, Stalin had them arrested.
After the Allied Powers beat the Nazis, Jewish survivors, eager to be heard, rarely objected to the appropriation of their story, in which the Nazis became not the destroyers of the Jews, specifically, but the destroyers of all mankind. By the 1970s, survivor and Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal invented the fictitious 11 million figure – 6 million Jews and 5 million others – thinking that in de-emphasizing the Holocaust’s antisemitic nature, the world would start to care.
THE HOLOCAUST AS A MORAL BENCHMARK
Just about everything the Nazis did can be traced back to their virulent antisemitism – even their persecution of other groups. For example, the Nazis believed that homosexuality was one of the “evils” that characterized the “Jewish race.” Meanwhile, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, and their persecution of communists and Slavic ethnic groups, was rooted in antisemitic conspiracies of Jewish-Bolshevism.
Even so, in systematically relegating Jews to the background of the story of the Holocaust, the genocide of 6 million Jews – then 67% of Europe’s Jewish population – has been transformed into public property and a moral benchmark for all of humanity, stripping Jews of our own experience.
Instead of a Jewish tragedy, the Holocaust is now a measuring stick: is this atrocity or war or genocide better than the Holocaust? Worse? Is so and so better than a Nazi, just like a Nazi, or worse than a Nazi? Meanwhile, Jews, and, most importantly, Holocaust survivors, are rendered invisible in the discussion.
JEWISH SUFFERING AS A VEHICLE TO PROMOTE OTHER CAUSES
I distinctly remember the liberal and left-wing social media response to the 2018 Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting. As the American Jewish community reeled, and even though the perpetrator was a white supremacist – their “right” kind of antisemite – I hardly heard the words “antisemitism” or “Jewish” in any non-Jewish discussions of the attack. Instead, the attack was used as an opportunity to advocate for gun control. But when violence is ideologically motivated, as is the case with antisemitism, gun control alone can’t be the only solution.
We see much of the same in the way that the Holocaust is not treated as a horrific crime that befell the Jewish people, but as a platform through which to promote the Palestinian cause.
There is nothing inherently wrong with finding parallels between Jewish and other causes. Jews, after all, also share in many different identities and hold universal values. But when other causes are promoted on the back of Jewish suffering, while Jews are simultaneously erased from our own story, we clearly have a problem.
WHERE BONDI COMES IN
Amidst accusations that the Bondi Beach Massacre was a “false flag” or a natural response to Israel’s behavior, there were condolences, often coupled with demands for gun control (even though Australia has some of the strictest gun laws in the world) and warnings not to partake in Islamophobia (some statements never mentioned antisemitism at all).
Very quickly, the largest massacre in Australia in nearly 30 years was decoupled from the very antisemitism that caused it.
Is it any surprise, then, that an Australian choir would refuse to perform alongside a Jewish choir in a memorial ceremony honoring dead Jews?
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