How to Fight Anti-Semitism

Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies. While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when "the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream" and Jews have been forced to become "a people apart." With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the "casual racism" of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items--individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.--to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. "Call it out," she writes. "Especially when it's hard." At the core of the text is the author's concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone "who loves freedom and seeks to protect it" to join with her in vigorous activism. A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.

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September 9, 2019
Weiss, a staff editor and writer for the New York Times opinion section, investigates the global resurgence of anti-Semitism and offers helpful tactics to prevent its spread in this impassioned wake-up call. She begins with the 2018 mass shooting at Tree of Life synagogue in her hometown of Pittsburgh, an event that “marked the before and the after” in her awareness that anti-Semitism is not a thing of the past. She then traces the history of “the Jew-hating disease” from Egypt in 300 BCE to 21st-century America, where President Trump’s “dog whistling” draws conspiracy theorists, white supremacists, and anti-Semites to his banner. But Weiss argues that anti-Semitism is “more insidious and perhaps more existentially dangerous” when it originates on the political left, because “it pretends to be the opposite of what it actually is.” She notes that liberal college campuses are hotbeds of anti-Zionism, where many Jews report “preemptively censoring themselves.” Weiss outlines the best practices for Jews and their allies to fight back, including denouncing anti-Semitic ideas vocally, especially when they’re espoused by progressives, and resisting “hierarchical identity politics” that rank groups on the degree to which they’re oppressed. Weiss’s refreshingly forthright opinions and remarkably thorough yet concise history lessons make this a must-read for anyone seeking to understand and stop the rise of a pernicious ideology.