Ruthie Blum: Vilifying Jews
Likening anti-Semitism to pollution, Manfred Gerstenfeld makes a distinction between that "which comes out of a chimney and spreads over a huge area," and that "which comes from the exhaust pipes of millions of cars, each one contributing its little bit."
The former, he says, was characteristic of the Nazi era - with its "boss," Adolf Hitler, as the central smokestack the world over.
The latter, he claims, describes today's post-modern form of the phenomenon: global, but fragmented, with no single leader or source - and primarily aimed at the Jewish state.
The academic area Gerstenfeld - chairman of the Board of Fellows of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA) - has spent the last few years researching is one he feels has been given short shrift precisely among those most immediately and directly threatened by it.
It is what he sees as the gradual mushrooming of anti-Israel bias on campuses across the world, culminating in this year's effort on the part of British academics to boycott Israeli universities.
To illustrate that academic anti-Semitism is "structural," rather than haphazard or negligible, Gerstenfeld and the JCPA have just published Academics against Israel and the Jews, a collection of essays detailing this defamation campaign and placing it in a larger context.
Gerstenfeld, 70, a modern Orthodox Jew who was born in Vienna, raised in Amsterdam and made aliya from Paris in 1968, is no stranger either to academia (he has a PhD in environmental studies and a degree in chemistry from Amsterdam University, has studied economics at Amsterdam and Rotterdam universities and holds a high-school teaching degree from the Dutch Jewish Seminary) or to anti-Semitism.
He has published 12 books, including Europe's Crumbling Myths: The Post-Holocaust Origins of Today's Anti-Semitism (2003) and European-Israeli Relations: Between Confusion and Change? (2006), as well as hundreds of articles at home and abroad - among them in these pages. In addition, throughout his professional life, he served as a business strategist to leading companies.
"We have to take actions which cost little but give high returns," he asserts, using the language of corporate strategy to explain how, even with few resources, it is possible to "wreak havoc on the endeavors of your enemies."
In an hour-long interview at his home in Jerusalem earlier this month, Gerstenfeld sums up the task at hand for genuine freethinkers in general and Jews in particular to combat demonization: "As we are small, we have to be smart."
What your book appears to be describing is a climate in which Israel and the Jews are being vilified by the intellectual community. Is this reminiscent of the atmosphere prior to World War II?
It is absolutely a climate. But whether it is parallel to that of the 1930s has to be examined a little better.
There have been three stages of anti-Semitism. The first was religious anti-Semitism, initially Christian and now overshadowed by religious Muslim anti-Semitism. The second stage was nationalist-ethnic-racist anti-Semitism. And the third - the latest one - is anti-Israelism, against the collective Jew, the State of Israel.
Each of these has three characteristic phases. The first is demonization; the second is exclusion; and the third is expulsion or destruction. We see elements of all three phases today, directed against the collective Jew. Demonization - whereby Israelis are called the Nazis of today, citizens of an apartheid or colonialist state.
None of this is true, of course. Colonialists pulled money out of countries they came to; the Jews put money into Israel. The Jews were a nationalist movement, not a colonizing movement. Nor do the Israelis practice apartheid against the Palestinians.
Apartheid is a phenomenon specific to South Africa. And the anti-apartheid movement used violence as a last resort, whereas the Palestinian movements use it as a prime one. Furthermore, the Jews offered them a state twice. So, it's all false, but that is why it constitutes demonizing.
Then there's exclusion. Boycotts are a typical case of exclusion. Finally, there is expulsion or destruction. That is the Hamas version of the Palestinian state, or [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad's goals.
But is today like the 1930s? Well, there is one major difference. During that period, anti-Semitism was centralized. Then there was one guy who was the boss of anti-Semitism - Hitler. He wasn't the only one, but he was a single, major actor, who garnered international support from many people outside the confines of the Nazi Party in Germany.
That was the centralized anti-Semitism of the modern era. We are now in the post-modern era, in which anti-Semitism is fragmented, with no single dominant source.
It's like with pollution. There is pollution which comes out of a chimney and spreads over a huge area; and there is pollution which comes from the exhaust pipes of millions of cars, each one contributing its little bit. So, to answer your question, the times are like the 1930s and also different from the 1930s....
Read entire article at FrontpageMag.com & Jerusalem Post
The former, he says, was characteristic of the Nazi era - with its "boss," Adolf Hitler, as the central smokestack the world over.
The latter, he claims, describes today's post-modern form of the phenomenon: global, but fragmented, with no single leader or source - and primarily aimed at the Jewish state.
The academic area Gerstenfeld - chairman of the Board of Fellows of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA) - has spent the last few years researching is one he feels has been given short shrift precisely among those most immediately and directly threatened by it.
It is what he sees as the gradual mushrooming of anti-Israel bias on campuses across the world, culminating in this year's effort on the part of British academics to boycott Israeli universities.
To illustrate that academic anti-Semitism is "structural," rather than haphazard or negligible, Gerstenfeld and the JCPA have just published Academics against Israel and the Jews, a collection of essays detailing this defamation campaign and placing it in a larger context.
Gerstenfeld, 70, a modern Orthodox Jew who was born in Vienna, raised in Amsterdam and made aliya from Paris in 1968, is no stranger either to academia (he has a PhD in environmental studies and a degree in chemistry from Amsterdam University, has studied economics at Amsterdam and Rotterdam universities and holds a high-school teaching degree from the Dutch Jewish Seminary) or to anti-Semitism.
He has published 12 books, including Europe's Crumbling Myths: The Post-Holocaust Origins of Today's Anti-Semitism (2003) and European-Israeli Relations: Between Confusion and Change? (2006), as well as hundreds of articles at home and abroad - among them in these pages. In addition, throughout his professional life, he served as a business strategist to leading companies.
"We have to take actions which cost little but give high returns," he asserts, using the language of corporate strategy to explain how, even with few resources, it is possible to "wreak havoc on the endeavors of your enemies."
In an hour-long interview at his home in Jerusalem earlier this month, Gerstenfeld sums up the task at hand for genuine freethinkers in general and Jews in particular to combat demonization: "As we are small, we have to be smart."
What your book appears to be describing is a climate in which Israel and the Jews are being vilified by the intellectual community. Is this reminiscent of the atmosphere prior to World War II?
It is absolutely a climate. But whether it is parallel to that of the 1930s has to be examined a little better.
There have been three stages of anti-Semitism. The first was religious anti-Semitism, initially Christian and now overshadowed by religious Muslim anti-Semitism. The second stage was nationalist-ethnic-racist anti-Semitism. And the third - the latest one - is anti-Israelism, against the collective Jew, the State of Israel.
Each of these has three characteristic phases. The first is demonization; the second is exclusion; and the third is expulsion or destruction. We see elements of all three phases today, directed against the collective Jew. Demonization - whereby Israelis are called the Nazis of today, citizens of an apartheid or colonialist state.
None of this is true, of course. Colonialists pulled money out of countries they came to; the Jews put money into Israel. The Jews were a nationalist movement, not a colonizing movement. Nor do the Israelis practice apartheid against the Palestinians.
Apartheid is a phenomenon specific to South Africa. And the anti-apartheid movement used violence as a last resort, whereas the Palestinian movements use it as a prime one. Furthermore, the Jews offered them a state twice. So, it's all false, but that is why it constitutes demonizing.
Then there's exclusion. Boycotts are a typical case of exclusion. Finally, there is expulsion or destruction. That is the Hamas version of the Palestinian state, or [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad's goals.
But is today like the 1930s? Well, there is one major difference. During that period, anti-Semitism was centralized. Then there was one guy who was the boss of anti-Semitism - Hitler. He wasn't the only one, but he was a single, major actor, who garnered international support from many people outside the confines of the Nazi Party in Germany.
That was the centralized anti-Semitism of the modern era. We are now in the post-modern era, in which anti-Semitism is fragmented, with no single dominant source.
It's like with pollution. There is pollution which comes out of a chimney and spreads over a huge area; and there is pollution which comes from the exhaust pipes of millions of cars, each one contributing its little bit. So, to answer your question, the times are like the 1930s and also different from the 1930s....