Introduction: Racism and Antisemitism

Roger Berkowitz

One day before the 2019 Hannah Arendt Center Conference on “Racism and Antisemitism,” a gunman in Germany tried to storm a synagogue where Jews were praying. It was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the year for Jews. Foiled by security, he killed two people outside. Like the gunman who attacked two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, the German gunman livestreamed his attack. He “identified himself as Anon, denied the Holocaust, denounced feminists and immigrants, then declared: ‘The root of all these problems is the Jew.’”1

The shooting of Jews in Germany on Yom Kippur barely registered. And no wonder. Hateful attacks on Jews, Muslims, blacks, gays, trans people, refugees, and other minorities are rising. The list of unarmed black men and women killed by police continues to grow, including Michael Brown, Dontre Hamilton, Eric Garner, John Crawford, Ezell Ford, Dante Parker, Tanisha Anderson, Tamir Rice, and Botham Jean, who was killed in his own apartment by an allegedly confused off-duty white police officer in Dallas. Here is a partial list of targeted racist mass killings in the last few years:

• Twenty-two people were killed and twenty-four injured in a mass shooting in El Paso targeting Mexicans and the so-called Hispanic invasion of Texas.2 • One woman and three others were injured at the shooting inside the

Chabad Synagogue in Poway, California, by a gunman who blamed

Jews for a white genocide, a common conspiracy theory; he published a rant in which he wrote, “Every Jew is responsible for the meticulously planned genocide of the European race.”3 • Fifty-one people were killed and forty-nine injured in attacks at the Al

Noor Mosque and the Linwood Islamic Center in Christchurch, New

Zealand. The gunman streamed his attack on Facebook after issuing a 74-page manifesto titled “The Great Replacement,” a reference to the

“Great Replacement” conspiracy theory discussed in the essays by Adam

Shatz, Marc Weitzmann, and Thomas Chatterton Williams in this volume. • Two people were killed and five wounded at an attack on a yoga studio in Tallahassee, Florida, by a gunman who openly expressed his hatred of women and wrote about rape, torture, and murder in his journals. • Eleven people were killed and seven injured inside the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh during Shabbat services. The gunman blamed immigrants and migrant caravans from Central America; he posted

online shortly before the attack that “HIAS [a Jewish American nonprofit that provides humanitarian aid and assistance to refugees] likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.” He later told police, “All these Jews need to die.” • Six worshippers were killed and nineteen others injured in the Quebec

City mosque shooting by a gunman with white nationalist and anti-

Muslim beliefs. • Forty-nine people were killed at a Latino gay nightclub, Pulse, in

Orlando in 2016.4 • A counterprotester at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville was killed when a former teacher “fascinated by Nazism and Hitler” accelerated his car into a crowd of marchers.5 • Nine African American parishioners were murdered in 2015 by white supremacist Dylann Roof in the Charleston church massacre.6

The FBI Hate Crimes Report for 2017 lists 900 crimes targeting Jews and Jewish institutions, which is a 37 percent increase in antisemitic hate crimes. There were 2,013 hate crimes against African Americans, representing a 16 percent increase.7 Closer to home in New York City, in the week leading up to the Arendt Center Conference, the NYPD published a report showing the city recorded 323 hate crimes from 1 January 2019 through 6 October 2019, up 33 percent from 243 incidents in the same period in 2018.

In New York City, antisemitic incidents are the most common hate crimes, having increased 53 percent in 2019, to 170 from 111 incidents in the same period in 2018. Hate crimes against black people rose 7 percent, to 31 incidents so far this year, compared with 29 incidents in the same period in 2018. And hate crimes motivated by victims’ sexual orientation rose 8 percent, to 42 incidents so far in 2019, compared with 39 incidents in the same period last year. There were also 25 crimes motivated by animus against white people, a 92 percent increase from 13 incidents in the same period last year.8

How are we to make sense of these atrocities? Are these simply the latest in a never-ending string of hateful acts? History is filled with examples of religiously and racially motivated killings, expulsions, and mass murders. The hatred of foreigners is nothing new. And yet we must not become numb to these racially and religiously motivated killings. As Hannah Arendt wrote,

The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces. Comprehension does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing the unprecedented by precedents, or by explaining phenomena by such analogies and generalities that the impact of realty and the shock of experience are no longer felt.9

We must allow ourselves to be shocked by our current moment. But being shocked does not leave us helpless. Shocked and awed by the outrageousness of our present, we must nevertheless seek to understand the present on its own terms. Such an understanding means “the unpremeditated, attentive facing up, and resisting of, reality.”10

The Arendt Center Conference in fall 2019 happened on the heels of a string of racist, antisemitic, and homophobic incidents at Bard College and its sister school Simon’s Rock. In September, antisemitic and racist graffiti was found at Simon’s Rock after an African American woman claimed to have been attacked. Members of the Patriot Front, a white nationalist group, were found on campus at Bard placing stickers on campus buildings, and some people from a neighboring community were apprehended after driving though campus shouting racial and homophobic slurs at students. Thankfully, they were apprehended.

We know now that the alleged racial attack at Simon’s Rock did not happen. After multiple investigations by Simon’s Rock, Bard College, and the Berkshire County District Attorney, and a second independent investigation by outside attorneys, the investigators all agreed that, in the words of the outside investigative report, the claim of a racist attack against a female student was probably “staged in order to provoke further conversation on campus about racism.”11 In other words, the young woman who claimed she was attacked and beaten in a racist assault fabricated the assault in order to push the campus to address problems of racism on campus.

“Why would anyone fake a hate crime?”12

That is the question Wilfred Reilly asks in his book Hate Crime Hoax. Reilly, who is a professor of political science at Kentucky State University and who calls himself a “proud Black man,”13 compiled a data set of what he labels “409 confirmed cases of fake hate crimes.”14 Reilly argues that in the period of his study from 2013 to 2017, “literally hundreds of major hate crime hoaxes have taken place on American university campuses.”15 While most of these fake hate crimes are like the one at Simon’s Rock—where minority students fabricate a racial attack to provoke discussion of racism—it is also a “fact that hate crime hoaxes are increasingly being perpetrated by white members of the alt-right, with the explicit goal of making Black people and leftist causes look bad.”16 For Reilly, fake claims of hate crimes are dangerous. They foster “real hostility between the races, which could lead to violence in the future.”17 Fake hate crimes can make racial violence appear normal, and can become a “precursor to real atrocities.”18 And yet, Reilly argues that “false hate crime allegations have value because they provide support for the metanarrative of majority group bigotry.”19

What is more, even fake claims of racist attacks can work. At Simon’s Rock, the response by the college went out of its way to acknowledge that even if the

specific incident was made up, the atmosphere of racism it sought to publicize was real:

This outcome will impact people in different ways. Even as we bring this matter and investigation to a close, we cannot close our eyes or minds to the reality of racial injustice or our responsibility to those most vulnerable to hate. We want to assure you that our commitment to building a more equitable, inclusive, and safe community remains steadfast and ongoing.

Our Council for Equity and Inclusion will be working with colleagues at Bard’s Council for Inclusive Excellence to develop departmental strategic plans for diversity, equity, and inclusion.20

It is understandable for the college to want to downplay the fact of the fake report. We are living through a boorish and polarized political climate. The messages of intolerance and prejudice by political leaders has given license to expressions of hostility and hate on social media and spread fear that reaches to undergraduate campuses such as Simon’s Rock and Bard.

The Arendt Center Conference is one way to respond to and resist that atmosphere of fear. It is an effort to do what we in the liberal arts do best, to think deeply, meaningfully, and provocatively about the most important issues facing our world. The inspiration for this conference was Hannah Arendt’s work on racism and antisemitism.

Most people think that antisemitism and racism are rooted in the hatred of Jews and blacks. But the key insight in Arendt’s unorthodox approach to thinking about antisemitism and racism is her original distinction between Jew hatred and antisemitism, that the hatred of Jews and blacks is not the same as antisemitism and racism. It is the intense dislike of Jews that underlies the long and painful history of anti-Jewish sentiments and medieval superstitions. When such hatred presented Jews as eyesores, rootless foreigners, traitors, or dirty animals, it was hard for Jews to maintain their dignity, and it was easy to see Jews as vermin. Such hatred can lead to conflicts, discrimination, ghettoization, dehumanization, crusades, and pogroms.

Radical in Arendt’s approach is her argument that Jew hatred is not the sole cause of antisemitism or the Holocaust. Antisemitism is largely divorced from the concrete experience of and dislike of Jews. Instead, it is a secular ideology. Ideologies treat a complicated historical process according to a simplified idea; literally, an ideology is “the logic of an idea.”21

The main ideologies Arendt discusses are antisemitism, racism, Darwinism, and Communism. Communism is the simplified idea that all of world history can be understood according to laws of class struggle; the coming victory of the proletariat is an expression of pseudoscientific historical laws. Similarly, antisemitism and Darwinism are variants of racist ideologies. As an ideology,

racism makes the “logical” claim that race is the key to our social problems. It asserts that one group of people is the cause of all that is wrong in the world: if the Jews could simply be eliminated or African Americans enslaved, economic and political difficulties would fade away. For racists, the “struggle between the races for world domination” dominates world history.22 The Darwinist idea that society is a struggle between the weaker and the stronger in which the stronger and more fit win out—“survival of the fittest”—is what connects some versions of ideological Darwinism to racist ideologies.23 That antisemitism is a racism and is distinguished from the hatred of Jews has always struck me as capturing something right. In his book Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racism in America,” Ibram Kendi makes a similar point: he argues that racism does not begin in hate and ignorance but in the need to rationalize economic and political policies that lead to racial discrimination.24 Fed by the need to justify discrimination, racist ideas have led to a racial imaginary that leads all people to think something is wrong with black people. And these racialized ideas and justifications are then mobilized repeatedly in political projects of racial hegemony.

Kendi agrees with Arendt is his view that racism does not emerge from hatred. Just as Arendt thinks Jew Hatred is distinct from antisemitism, Kendi argues that racial hatred is not the source of racism. For both Arendt and Kendi, racism emerges in the ideologies and justifications that seek to rationalize political and economic oppression.

While Kendi agrees with Arendt that racism is a political use of an ideological fantasy, he offers a program of antiracism that, I believe, would differ from Arendt’s. Since racism will only end when racial discrimination ends, antiracism requires that we stamp out racial discrimination and create racial equality as a fact. Antiracism means taking seriously the root of racism as an ideology produced to justify the fact of politically enforced discrimination.

Arendt’s thinking on antisemitism and racism is valuable because she insists that we understand that bigotry and racial prejudices, while they are often ugly and harmful and can in certain circumstances lead to horrific political acts of racism, are in the end deeply human and part of life. This does not mean we should simply give in to prejudice. But it does mean that the goal of antiracism cannot be to eradicate all prejudice and discrimination.

Arendt argues that all humans hold prejudices, which are simply prejudgments that we share and take to be self-evident. For Arendt, “whole battalions of enlightened orators and entire libraries of brochures will achieve nothing” in the fight to end prejudice. She argues that prejudice can be fought only through politics, the effort over time to reveal the truth and the falsity that lies within the prejudice. “That is why in all times and places it is the task of politics to shed light upon and dispel prejudices, which is not to say that its task is to train people to be unprejudiced or that those who work toward such enlightenment are themselves free of prejudice.”25

What Arendt has taught me about racism is that racism has many different meanings, and that resisting racism must begin with trying to understand it. There is ideological racism like antisemitism and antiblack racism used to justify slavery in the United States, where racism is a system of thought “based upon a single opinion that proved strong enough to attract and persuade a majority of people.”26

Racism can also mean racial prejudice, understood as a deeply held attitude or belief about people based on their race, ethnicity, religion, or gender. If we can acknowledge our prejudices and inform them with considered judgments, we have a chance, as individuals and as a society, to grow, and through that growth make society more ample, more possible: a shared world in which “tolerance” can be replaced by community, and hate by mutual respect. It is when prejudices coalesce into rigid ideologies—when we insist, in spite of evidence to the contrary, that prejudice is more true than the present moment— that prejudices come to justify other manifestations of racism, discrimination, and systematic racism; that we lose ourselves, and we lose the ambitions of democracy in the reality of demagoguery.

The actuality of a racist society begins with the passivity of individuals unwilling to see the roots of this failure in themselves. And it is here that racism risks becoming ideological and even systematic racism, the measurable differential discrimination based on racial criteria but not observably or measurably traceable to intentional racial prejudices. In other words, Arendt has made me see racism as much more complicated and hydra like. Her work has not offered me answers to the question of how to respond to racism and antisemitism, but it has made me rethink the questions I ask.

The essays in this collection, like the talks at the Arendt Center Conference, profess many different ideas of what it means to be an antiracist or to oppose antisemitism or other racisms. Many of these opinions will be new. Some will provoke you and others may shock you. But I hope they will make you think.

Hannah Arendt says that thinking has no worldly usefulness. Thinking is a conversation with yourself; as a dialogue with oneself, thinking generally has no impact on the world. There is, however, one exception; thinking matters in the world, Arendt argues, when the thinker stands opposed to the mob. In times of crisis, when everyone else is swept away and caught up with movements and ideologies, doing what everyone else is doing, the thinker, insofar as he or she thinks, separates herself from the crowd, stops, holds herself apart. Thinking—by that very act of asking questions, and being different, and being thoughtful—serves as an example to other people that they too can and should reflect critically and independently on what they are doing.

1. Melissa Eddy, Rick Gladstone, and Tiffany Hsu, “Assailant Live-Streamed Attempted Attack on German Synagogue,” New York Times, 21 February 2020. 2. Ed Lavandera and Jason Hannam, “El Paso Suspect Told Police He Was Targeting

Mexicans, Affadavit Says,” CNN, 9 August 2019. 3. Allison Kaplan Sommer and Danielle Ziri, “Gunman Opens Fire at San Diego Synagogue;

One Killed, Three Wounded,” Associated Press, 28 April 2019. 4. Ashley Frantz, Faith Karimi, and Eliott C. McLaughlin, “Orlando Shooting: 49 Killed,

Shooter Pledged ISIS Allegiance,” CNN, 13 June 2016. 5. Minyvonne Burke and Marianna Sotomayor, “James Alex Fields Found Guilty of Killing

Heather Heyer during Violent Charlottesville White Nationalist Rally,” NBC News, 7

December 2018. 6. Emily Shapiro, “Key Moments in Charleston Church Shooting Case as Dylann Roof Pleads

Guilty to State Charges,” ABC News, 10 April 2017. 7. US Department of Justice, “2017 Hate Crime Statistics”; available at ucr.fbi.gov/ hate-crime/2017. 8. Ben Chapman and Katie Honan, “New York City Sees Surge in Hate Crimes,” Wall Street

Journal, 8 October 2019. 9. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), viii. 10.Ibid. 11.Letter from Simon’s Rock to the Campus Community, 23 December 2019; available at docs.google.com/document/d/1C31eaOomQOtPV_eJ-6x-jCgIv8_8BoqllLPOy5eahdA/edit. 12.Wilfred Reilly, Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left Is Selling a Fake Race War (Washington, D.C.:

Regnery Publishing, 2019), 1. 13.Ibid., xiii. 14.Ibid., xxii. 15.Ibid., 7. 16.Ibid. 17.Ibid. 18.Ibid., 6. 19.Ibid., 5. 20.Letter, Simon’s Rock to the Campus Community. 21.Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 469. 22.Ibid., 470. 23.Ibid., 463. 24.Ibram Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racism (New York: Bold

Type Books, 2016). 25.Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (Schocken: United States, 2005), 99–100. 26.Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 159.