How to Stop Antisemitism

Antisemitism in America and across the world is taking on frightening strength as a movement alongside the mainstream. The stink and stupidity of its proponents are still prominent, but seem to have lost their deterrent power for American conservatives. Republican leaders seem to share Trump’s feeling that there are good people among Holocaust deniers and white supremacists. The message to the American public, specifically the white evangelical Christian public, that antisemitism is justified and honorable is as wide as the reach of FOX News.

There needs to be more than agonizing about how camera-ready verbal antisemitism leads to newsworthy antisemitic violence. We need to do more than promote diversity and teach the Holocaust. We need to make fundamental changes in American life. Here are my suggestions from a lifetime of dealing with and studying antisemitism.

Don’t vote for Republicans. I don’t just mean, don’t vote for vocally antisemitic Republicans. I mean, don’t vote for any Republicans.

What about those nice Republicans from New York, who grew up with Jews, who decry any form of antisemitism, who say that George Santos is not one of them, because he falsely claimed to be a descendant of a Holocaust survivor? He is one of them. Just like him, they voted for Kevin McCarthy as Speaker and put Marjorie Taylor Greene on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability. They voted to kick Omar off the Foreign Affairs Committee for her remarks about Jews, but say nothing about the antisemitic rot taking over the Republican Party. Ron Desantis’ tweet about the “Soros-backed” DA Alvin Bragg’s indictment of Trump demonstrates that opposition to Trump does not yet mean rejection of his antisemitism.

The fastest way to move the Republican Party away from the promotion of antisemitism is to make them lose elections. If you don’t stand with Greene and Boebert and Gaetz, then don’t vote for their Party at all. Electoral defeat is the only thing that can move Republicans away from racism.

Don’t watch FOX. I don’t mean just Carlson and Hannity and the other liars. The antisemitism surrounding Carlson has been known for a long time. I mean, don’t tune into any FOX broadcast.

I watch a lot of sports on FOX. I’m giving that up. The embarrassing revelations about what FOX News personalities “really” thought about the Trump lies they were broadcasting every day were driven by their concern for audience. If they don’t worry at all about the truth, but only about whether people will turn them off, then turn them off. Demonstrate that Goebbels’ claim that repeating lies often enough ensures their success won’t work any more.

Don’t buy from FOX sponsors. Those companies can sponsor whomever they wish. We can buy from whomever we wish, using whatever criteria we cherish. Don’t buy cars from Chevrolet, cosmetics from Proctor & Gamble, batteries from Energizer, insurance from Farmers, or ketchup from Heinz. None of them offer anything you can’t get elsewhere. Get out of your shopping rut for one year, say it’s about fighting antisemitism at the roots, and see what happens.

None of that will get rid of antisemitism. In every Christian society, antisemitism has deep roots. The historical lies, fantastic accusations, and Biblical calumnies will endure forever. But we, the American public, can fight the casual opportunist antisemitism that conservatives use to drum up votes by not giving them votes, by not supporting their business models.

Antisemitism in Europe and America no longer depends on physical coercion. Antisemites wield words and slogans, ancient fears and contemporary grievances, websites, code words, and memes. They depend on toleration as they violate it. If certain broad American publics, the conservative-voting public, the fundamentalist Christian public, and the rural public did not close their noses to the stench of antisemitism emanating from the Republican Party, FOX, and many lesser promoters of hatred, the smell might dissipate.

If we don’t act, we don’t care enough.

Steve Hochstadt

Steve Hochstadt is Professor of History Emeritus at Illinois College, and author of many books on the Holocaust.

Black Men Teach

My mother-in-law’s Christmas present from my daughter and son-in-law was a donation to Black Men Teach, a Minnesota organization. The name and purpose of Black Men Teach cut to the heart of the diversity and equality arguments that divide American liberals and conservatives.

The mission of Black Men Teach is “to recruit, prepare, place and retain Black male teachers in elementary schools.” Conservatives believe that such an organization should not exist. They claim that right-thinking people are color-blind and gender-blind. The attempt to specifically recruit Black men as teachers is thus typical of the discriminatory inclinations of liberals, who pervert education with political messages that themselves are racist and sexist. That viewpoint animates Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ views on affirmative action.

 Conservatives are right – they are blind to the facts of color and gender, although those facts stare us in the face every day. They are not unable, but unwilling to see the meaning of hiring Black male teachers in today’s America.

In a long career as a small-college historian, I participated in several hirings of Black men and women to all-white departments. Color had enormous significance. Experiences in life and school, approaches to and emotions about American history, and classroom encounters with mostly white students were very different in ways difficult for whites to fully understand.

“Color blindness” is claimed as a virtue by conservative white people. Black Americans don’t believe it. More than any other ethnicity, Blacks vote for Democrats, an estimated 87% in the presidential election of 2020.

Exit polls in November showed that 86% of Blacks voted for Democrats. Even a Black Republican candidate can’t attract Black votes: a survey showed that Raphael Warnock won 90% of Black votes in Georgia in November against Herschel Walker.

Black Lives Matter is a banal truism. But when white American society was daily confronted with public protest against the fact that in America black lives mattered less, conservatives attacked the BLM truism as itself objectionable. New slogans were devised to counteract the idea that political change might make Black lives matter more. The ubiquitous evidence that Black lives are more at risk is dismissed, because conservative social policy is not evidence-based, but ideologically comfortable. Seeing color is frightening to Republican voters, so is anathema to Republican politicians.

Color blindness comes in many forms. It is mostly inherited, and is much more common among males. The Ishihara color test can diagnose the type and severity, and accommodations can be made. There is no cure.

Conservative color blindness has no biological source – it is an ideological affliction. It does not conform well or adapt to the actual colors of our social context. Its defense mechanism is cleverly chosen. Conservatives argue that any attempt to think about the differences color makes is “racist”. They claim to stand fully behind the modern emphasis on equality across ethnicity and gender, despite their history, and so are better than “phony liberals”. Color blindness is the real non-discrimination.

All forms of color blindness represent inability to discriminate when the differences are obvious. What would happen if the conservative form of color blindness were tested? How much do conservatives actually notice color? What feelings arise from seeing color?

Here’s what I hypothesize those tests would show: most cases of so-called conservative color blindness are false positives. They don’t want to admit what they see, feel, and do, so they claim that what we see doesn’t exist. Those who are offended by Black Men Teach, and every other social action which recognizes and reduces color differences, willfully stagger through our daily realm, bumping into people and things of value, which they say they can’t see.

Conservative color blindness is an occupational affliction, debilitating especially to public personalities. Claims to be suffering from this disability come mainly from people who need to justify their behavior to some public. Their symptoms usually include the loud assertion “I Am Not A Racist.” A classic example of how attention to color can coexist with claims of color blindness came from Trump himself in his final debate against Biden in 2020. Conservatives had found the most outrageous thing anyone connected with BLM had ever said, and repeated it incessantly. This allowed Trump to say both that BLM is “a horrible thing” and “I am the least racist person in this room.”

I wish Black Men Teach success in helping to staff Twin Cities schools “with racially and culturally diverse teachers and leaders”. Elementary school students will see the Black teachers and learn more about the real meaning of color. At that age, they won’t have developed ideological diseases like conservative color blindness.

Steve Hochstadt

Springbrook, WI

December 31, 2022