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New anti-Semitism (case study: Michael Neumann)

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Introduction

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The purpose of this case study is to explicate the issues in the Wikipedia article new anti-Semitism, by examining a case study in detail. The subject was chosen for a variety of reasons (in order of importance):

  1. Michael Neumann writes in English. The majority of the writers being addressed write in French, Danish, Spanish, etc... By choosing a writer whose work is in English the English speaking readers of this encyclopedia can read the source materials for themselves and draw their own conclusions.
  2. That is there is a preexisting controversy as to whether Michael Neumann is a "new anti-Semiite" or not. Wiklipedia cannot be accused of having created the issue ex nihilo.
  3. Michael Neumann has addressed these issues directly. This creates a clear, public written record of his own claims about his own status.
  4. He represents a clear cut case, that is he is provably not a classical anti-Semite
    1. Michael Neumann is himself ethnically Jewish, and grew up in Jewish culture
    2. He has taken numerous public stances against racism and is genuinely repulsed by classical racists
    3. There are not even any claims of religious discrimination.
    4. The claims are based on a very strident anti-Zionism which some feel cross the line
  5. He has been careful to bring any of this work into his professional life. His anti-Israel activity is an avocation, and thus this discussion cannot have financial impact on him, unlike say ( Joseph Massad)

Source documents

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Neumann's online writings are focused on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. The following is an organization of his writings:

Neumann has written 3 books:

convert to wikipedia style ISBN references

Critiques of Neumann

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  • Ardeshir Mehta argues that Neumann fails 5 criteria of morality (like universality). The Spineless Left
  • Joseph Massad a well known Palestinian activist at Columbia argues that America's poor relations with the Arab world are primarily a result of anti democratic activities within individual countries, and thus would not be reversed by simply "changing sides" in the Jewish-Arab war for political control of Israeli territory.
  • Wikipedia's discussion of New anti-Semitism contains a section on Michael Neumann
  • Israel Shamir argues that Neumann's attempt to persuade American Jews will be unsuccessful and that the left should adopt a policy of orchestrating Jewish political isolation in the United states. Neumann does not seem to have either supported or repudiated this view.
  • Canadian Jewish Congress has charged that Neumann has been supportive of white power organizations though the evidence cited actually shows that white power organizations are supportive of him which is different. Neumann himself expands on this idea. Neumann's comments regarding CJC. The original article about Neumann was published in the Jewish Tribal Review
  • Canadian Jews News reports on possible student intimidation http://www.cjnews.com/viewarticle.asp?id=993

Criteria

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We use Ben Cohen's criteria [1]

Zionology: criteria use of soviet progaganda:

Nazi / Zionist collaboration (example document [2])
Jewish subversion of foreign policy (particularly when the people involved aren't even jews)
  1. "Neoconservative" subversion of Bush, Cheyney heads AEI group
  2. Labour MP Tam Dalyell told a Vanity Fair journalist that Blair's views on the Middle East had been subverted by a "Jewish cabal" that included, along with Lord Levy, Peter Mandelson, a key ally of the prime minister, and Jack Straw, the foreign secretary (both Mandelson and Straw have Jewish ancestry, but neither is Jewish).23
  3. comparison between jews and nazis [3]
  4. general discomfort with the notion of Israel as a Jewish polity.
Critics of Israel who object to its identity as a Jewish state are, for the most part, not exercised by the fact that Iran and Saudia Arabia define themselves as Islamic states. They may reject their governments as theocratic and reactionary, but they do not regard these countries as illegitimate. They do not, in general, have problems with the religiously based partition of the Indian subcontinent between Pakistan and India, which took place at the same time as the creation of Israel. The implementation of this partition was accompanied by intense political violence that produced hundreds of thousands of refugees on both sides, most of whom have never returned to their homes. Most significantly, they have no difficulty whatsoever with Arab states that purport to be both secular and Arab. They see these states as natural political frameworks for the national groups that constitute their populations. The obvious question, then, is why they have such difficulty with a country that provides for the political independence of a Jewish population. (all from [4])


  1. Jews are an illicit nation
  2. absorptionism : Marie-Adélaide de Clermont-Tonnerre provided a particularly clear formulation of this view of the Jew in a civic society in his "Speech on Religious Minorities and Questionable Professions" delivered to the French National Assembly on December 23, 1789.
::We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and accord everything to Jews as individuals. We must withdraw recognition from their judges; they should only have our judges. We must refuse legal protection to the maintenance of the so-called laws of their Judaic organization; they should not be allowed to form in the state either a political body or an order. They must be citizens individually. But, some will say to me, they do not want to be citizens. Well then! If they do not want to be citizens, they should say so, and then, we should banish them. It is repugnant to have in the state an association of non-citizens, and a nation within the nation.

(In effect both classical European liberalism and the revolutionary European left offered the Jews a secular version of the traditional Christian choice: either discard involvement with the Jewish people and achieve individual acceptance in a new liberated era or suffer stigmatization and marginalization as perverse holdouts against the mainstream. The choice expressly excluded the possibility of existing as a free nation among other nations.)

Not present in North America

The contrast between Europe and North America in this matter is clear. While by no means free of anti-Jewish prejudice, North America defines itself as an immigrant society in which ownership of the country is not the preserve of a single native group. Jews function like other immigrant communities, most of which have succeeded in developing hyphenated personae, easily combining their ethnic identities with their active presence in the mainstream of American life. It is not surprising, then, that public Jewish visibility and the notion of a Jewish polity seem to pose less difficulty in America than in Europe and the Middle East. [5]

The denial of victimhood to the Jews, the plundering of the Shoah to condemn Israel,35 the conspiratorial portrayal of Jewish power and the inherent illegitimacy of Jewish self-determination, are all constants.

Like other forms of anti-Semitism, left-wing anti-Semitism has survived by mutating; whereas once the Jewish question (or problem) was viewed through the prism of economics, now it belongs to the realm of politics. The orthodox Marxist notion2 that the Jews - as an economic agent - perform a distinctive function within a system designed for the extraction of surplus value has been replaced by the anticolonialist notion that the Jews - as a national collective - are integral to the maintenance of American hegemony on a global level.3 Accordingly, there has been a conceptual shift on the Left from the politics of class to the politics of identity; and, again accordingly, a practical alignment with those forces, most notably the Islamist movements, opposed to this hegemony.
As a result of this alignment, three points warrant consideration. First, visceral opposition not to Israel's security policies alone but to its very legitimacy means that, as in Islamist discourse, the terms "Jew," "Israel," and "Zionist" are increasingly interchangeable in contemporary left-wing discourse; second, this discourse has been standardized and globalized;4 third, this discourse is increasingly finding recognition outside the activist margins, for example, among politicians broadly described as "progressive," among prominent academics, and in liberal media outlets.

Given the principle of self-determination for nations, the Jewish people have a right to their own state, like everyone else. To deny that right, especially if this means singling Jews out, is anti-Semitic." [6]

counter argument
Within this book, it is true, there is a narrative about a people, Am Yisrael (the people of Israel) in a land, Eretz Yisrael (the land of Israel) or Tzion (Zion), from which they are exiled and to which they will eventually return. But traditionally, this was regarded as a sacred story, not as a political blueprint. Mainstream Zionism set out to modernize Judaism by politicizing it, nationalizing it, turning the Jewish people into the Jewish nation, in the nineteenth-century sense of that word. The idea was to put Israel, a political entity in the here and now, at the center of Jewish identity. This was a radical departure from the "old" Jewish idea of a Jew. The concept of "new anti-Semitism," to the extent that it is based on mainstream Zionist ideology, is just the other side of the coin, the obverse of this new idea of a Jew, the national Jew. Zuckerman and others of this cast of mind are arguing in a circle; for it is only anti-Semitic to reject his argument if you have already accepted it. (same source)

2. For a classic exegesis of this view, see Karl Marx, "On the Jewish Question," in Early Writings (London: Penguin, 1992). 3. The view that Zionist imperatives control U.S. policy in the Middle East is increasingly finding favor on the Left, as several scholars have noted. See, for example, Shlomo Lappin, "Israel and the New Anti-Semitism," Dissent, Spring 2003.


My summary cirtieria Thanks for pointing out WP:NPA. I wasn't aware of it and will reaffirm my resolve to edit WP rather than.... Back to the topic. Can anyone say why the following is not a useful beginning:

The meaning of the term New anti-Semitism is debated. Its meaning has changed since the first recorded use in 1902 in an Encyclopedia Britannica article.[1] At that time the term meant what some historians now call "modern anti-Semitism" (racial anti-Semitism, as opposed to pre-19th century anti-semitism which was mainly religious). The term was revived in 1971 in the New York Times Magazine[2] and in 1974[3]. The revival of the term sparked debate because etc etc

I can. You are getting into a great deal of complexity. Why would the first sentence or two address the fact that "new anti-semitism" used to mean racial anti-semitism as opposed to religious anti-semitism? Further I really question whether the term per say is debated. I think the debate is centered more on:
  1. does the phenomena described the term "new-antisemitism" exist?
  2. is the term deliberately biased and propagandistic? That is the phenomena may exist but not be "anti-semtic".
  3. Should the moral force of anti-semitism (attacks on a discriminated against jewish minority) be treated the same when addressing people in power. In other words are Jews in Western Europe and America entitled to the same level of deference?
Those IMHO are the actual debates. The meaning of the term is pretty clear cut: "attacks on Jews or Israel motivated at their core by denial of the legitimacy of Judaism of the Jewish nation." So for example there are many on this board who are openly anti-zionists, that is they disagree that jews are a nation at all and thus attacks on legitimacy of the Jewish nation are justified. But as far as I can tell they don't disagree they are denying that Jews are a nation they just don't think such opinions are "anti-semetic". Just as anti-semitism has nothing to do with Semites "new anti-semitism" has very little to do with the racial anti-semitism.
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  1. ^ Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition, pseudoscience definition, usage note: "1902 Encycl. Brit. XXV. 472/1 This was the pseudo-scientific note of the new anti-Semitism, the theory which differentiated it from the old religious Jew-hatred."
  2. ^ [7] "The Socialism of Fools," The New York Times Magazine (January 3, 1971)
  3. ^ Foster, Arnold. The New Anti-Semitism. McGraw-Hill, 1974. ISBN 0070216150
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