Antisemitism

"[the chant] from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free [as] an antisemitic slogan [and] rallying cry (that) has long been used by anti-Israel voices, including supporters of terrorist organizations such as Hamas."

"Criticism of the policies of Israeli governments is not necessarily antisemitic. For instance, anyone is free to reject or criticise the political decisions of Israeli governments concerning the Palestinian territories – this is not uncommon in Israel itself. However, denying the State of Israel’s right to exist does constitute antisemitism."

"It should not be hard to shut down hatred and antisemitism where we see it"

"Political antisemitism developed because the Jews were a separate body, while social discrimination arose because of the growing equality of Jews with all other groups."

"A terrifying scene: a mob charges the tarmac at a Russian airport after a flight from Tel Aviv arrives. This is not a protest. This is an antisemitic hunt for Jews."

"Der Antisemitismus ist der Sozialismus der dummen Kerle."

"Today, Jewish families worried about being targeted in school, wearing symbols of their faith walking down the street, or going out about their daily lives...We can’t stand by and stand silent when this happens. We must, without equivocation, denounce antisemitism. We must also, without equivocation, denounce Islamophobia."

"I know you hesitate to appoint the man I recommended because he is a Jew. Who do you think you are, Harvard?"

"Anti-Zionism is not inherently antisemitic – and claiming it is uses Jewish suffering to erase the Palestinian experience. Yes, antisemitism is growing. Yes, world leaders must fight it fiercely. But in the words of a great Zionist thinker, “This is not the way”."

"Even when they’re lying and smearing and libeling and killing, they’re victims. Is anyone buying this shit anymore?"

"Conservatives and fascist ideologies adapted the notion that Jews were alien to the national community to a cultural critique that attributed the inauthenticity of contemporary mass culture to Jewish influence. Jews, not having a fixed location, could not share in cultures rooted in the community of blood or soil and were therefore reduced to the imitation of other cultures, to artifice."

"Dozens of Judensaus... intersect with the portrayal of the Jew as a Christ killer. Various illustrations of the murder of Simon of Trent blended images of Judensau, the devil, the murder of little Simon himself, and the Crucifixion. In the seventeenth-century engraving from Frankfurt … a well-dressed, very contemporary-looking Jew has mounted the sow backward and holds her tail, while a second Jew sucks at her milk and a third eats her feces. The horned devil, himself wearing a Jewish badge, looks on and the butchered Simon, splayed as if on a cross, appears on a panel above."

"There has been no tragedy in modern times equal in its awful effects to the fight on the Jew in Germany. It is an attack on civilization, comparable only to such horrors as the and the African slave trade. It has set civilization back a hundred years, and in particular has it made the settlement and understanding of race problems more difficult and more doubtful. It is widely believed by many that the Jewish problem in Germany was episodic, and is already passing. Visitor to the Olympic Games are apt to have gotten that impression. They saw no Jewish oppression. Just as Northern visitors to Mississippi see no Negro oppression."

"So why did National Socialism take up the Jewish question in its programme already during the period of the party’s struggle? The Jewish population had in percentage terms relative to the rest of the population a disproportionately high share in the management of the economy, in the free professions, in the press, in the radio, in the theatre, etc. So the enmity between host people and guests, between the Jewish part and the non-Jewish part of the population grew to such an extent that this would have doubtless led at some point to an explosion. That was why the leadership was concerned to reduce the tension in an orderly, normal and legal way. This enmity had been present already for a long time in the German population, because the Jews had been able to enrich themselves with brutality and violence, and to let the German people starve. Especially during the period of hyperinflation dramatic events had arisen and the Jews themselves partially admit that they had enriched themselves at the expense of the German people, their host people."

"Antisemites carry with them an imagined version of the Jew. It might be a renaissance painting of Judas Iscariot, his purse bulging with silver, or it could be the supposed string-pullers of the house of Rothschild. It might be Shakespeare’s miser Shylock or Dickens' miser Fagin. It might be the alien lizards imagined by David Icke or the wicked manipulators of weather, wielding their “Jewish space-laser”, dreamed up by the Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor-Greene. It might even be a capitalist predator called Hershel Fink. The fantasies about Jews adapt to each age, and can find a home on the right and left. But the presence of these fantastical, diabolic Jews in the global imagination – often embedded so deep in the culture that we hardly notice them – is a constant."

"This terrifying pattern of antisemitic attacks has been relentless since the Israel-Hamas war began on Oct. 7, with no signs of diminishing...The lid to the sewers is off, and Jewish communities all across the country are being inundated with hate.""

"Without anti-Semitism, Nazism would have been inconceivable, both as an ideology and as a catalyst of the emotions. As for German society only two of its many sub-groups, the cultivated liberal minority among the bourgeoisie, and the politically educated segment of the working class, were relatively immune to anti-Semitism."

"It is a moral idiot who thinks that anti-Semitism is a threat only to Jews. The history of civilization demonstrates something rather different: Judaeophobia is an unfailing prognosis of barbarism and collapse, and the states and movements that promulgate it are doomed to suicide as well as homicide, as was demonstrated by Catholic Spain as well as Nazi Germany. Today’s Iranian “Islamic republic” is a nightmare for its own citizens as well as a pestilential nuisance and menace to its neighbors. And the most depressing and wretched spectacle of the past decade, for all those who care about democracy and secularism, has been the degeneration of Palestinian Arab nationalism into the theocratic and thanatocratic hell of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, where the Web site of Gaza’s ruling faction blazons an endorsement of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This obscenity is not to be explained away by glib terms like despair or occupation, as other religious fools like Jimmy Carter—who managed to meet the Hamas gangsters without mentioning their racist manifesto—would have you believe. (Is Muslim-on-Muslim massacre in Darfur or Iraq or Pakistan or Lebanon to be justified by conditions in Gaza?) Instead, this crux forces non-Zionists like me to ask whether, in spite of everything, Israel should be defended as if it were a part of the democratic West."

"[A]nti-Semitism was rife in almost all varieties of socialism."

"[J. E.] Wolfson told the teachers that it was important that "anti-Semitism should not be your students' first introduction to Jews and Judaism." He said this almost as an aside, just before presenting the pig-excrement image. "If you're teaching about anti-Semitism before you teach about the content of Jewish identity, you're doing it wrong.""

"In Western Europe, anti-Semitism directed against Arabs has largely replaced anti-Semitism against Jews"

"It (First Amendment) was intended not only to keep the states' hands out of religion, but to keep religion's hands off the state, and, above all, to keep bitter religious controversy out of public life by denying to every denomination any advantage from getting control of public policy or the public purse."

"It's very sad that this march has to take place at all. What we're all doing here is showing solidarity with Jewish people, and that is necessary. Since October 7, there has been a very peculiar response from many parts of the world including, I'm sad to say, in London. What we've seen is the re-emergence of antisemitism and the failure to focus on the appalling terroristic events of Hamas. Whatever the rights and wrongs of what Israel has done, or is doing, I think that the antisemitism we have seen in some of the marches around Europe has really confirmed for me the absolutely human necessity for Israel to exist."

"Kristallnacht was the wake-up call that failed to wake us up. October 7th was the worst massacre of the Jewish people since the Holocaust - and once again, we are failing the test of humanity. Instead of standing with Israel against barbarism, chanting mobs filled the streets of Western cities. When the world turns on the Jews, it is always the early warning sign of a wider descent into darkness. We must find the courage to call out the lies, reject false moral equivalence, and confront this resurgent antisemitism before it is too late."

"When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You're talking antisemitism."

"Anti-Semitism means spreading enmity towards the Jews. When the accursed tsarist monarchy was living its last days it tried to incite ignorant workers and peasants against the Jews. The tsarist police, in alliance with the landowners and the capitalists, organised pogroms against the Jews. The landowners and capitalists tried to divert the hatred of the workers and peasants who were tortured by want against the Jews. In other countries, too, we often see the capitalists fomenting hatred against the Jews in order to blind the workers, to divert their attention from the real enemy of the working people, capital. Hatred towards the Jews persists only in those countries where slavery to the landowners and capitalists has created abysmal ignorance among the workers and peasants. Only the most ignorant and downtrodden people can believe the lies and slander that are spread about the Jews. This is a survival of ancient feudal times, when the priests burned heretics at the stake, when the peasants lived in slavery, and when the people were crushed and inarticulate. This ancient, feudal ignorance is passing away; the eyes of the people are being opened. It is not the Jews who are the enemies of the working people. The enemies of the workers are the capitalists of all countries. Among the Jews there are working people, and they form the majority. They are our brothers, who, like us, are oppressed by capital; they are our comrades in the struggle for socialism. Among the Jews there are kulaks, exploiters and capitalists, just as there are among the Russians, and among people of all nations. The capitalists strive to sow and foment hatred between workers of different faiths, different nations and different races. Those who do not work are kept in power by the power and strength of capital. Rich Jews, like rich Russians, and the rich in all countries, are in alliance to oppress, crush, rob and disunite the workers. Shame on accursed tsarism which tortured and persecuted the Jews. Shame on those who foment hatred towards the Jews, who foment hatred towards other nations. Long live the fraternal trust and fighting alliance of the workers of all nations in the struggle to overthrow capital."

"South African Nationalism is riddled with anti-semitism, but Jews are entirely free to practise their religion and study their sacred books; in the Soviet Union anti-semitism is directed and encouraged by the state, and Jews can be, and are, imprisoned for teaching Hebrew scripture."

"Of all the bigotries that savage the human temper there is none so stupid as the anti-Semitic. It has no basis in reason; it is not rooted in faith; it aspires to no ideal; it is just one of those dank and unwholesome weeds that grow in the morass of racial hatred."

"Antisemites certainly found Zionism useful"

"Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics, And the Catholics hate the Protestants, And the Hindus hate the Moslems, And everybody hates the Jews."

"Anti-Semitism is a Socialist movement, only nobler and purer in form than Social Democracy."

"Any discussion of anti-Semitism is frequently lost in a misunderstanding of the distinction between Hebrews, Jews, and Zionists. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language describes a Hebrew as a member of the Semitic people, a race descended from Abraham of the Old Testament which, ironically enough, also includes most Arabs. A Jew, on the other hand, is a adherent of Judaism, a religion handed down by the Israelites. A Zionist is a member of a political movement concerned with preserving and furthering the aims of the state of Israel. These constitute three separate issues: race, religion, and politics."

"We are up against a people who think. They survived 2000 years of pogroms not by hitting back, but by thinking. They invented and successfully promoted Socialism, Communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so they may enjoy equal rights with others."

"Anti-Semitism is a kind of social mark of Cain that indicates a society or culture that is not ready for prime time and which will fail the tests of modern life; when anti-Semitism gains a foothold, the canary in your coal mine has just keeled over and died."

"But overall, the political Right tended to oppose Jewish equality, and to eschew cooperation with Jews. This exclusion meant that politically active European Jews often had few political choices other than the political Left."

"Formerly an anti-Semite was somebody who hated Jews because they were Jews and had a Jewish soul. But nowadays an anti-Semite is somebody who is hated by Jews."

"Anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism flourish among the few, but those few are over-represented in Europe’s newspapers, its universities, and its left-wing political parties."

"World Jewry has been, for sixteen years, despite our policy, an irreconcilable enemy of Fascism. In Italy our policy has led, in the Semitic elements, to what can today be called a true rush to board the ship."

"All 10 of the world’s most anti-Semitic territories, indeed, are in the Middle East and North Africa."

"I think that a lot of anti-Semitism is historically a deflection of resentment of capital. It’s a deflection of that by the elite onto Jews, who are a convenient population to target."

"First they came for the Communists"

"Antisemitism is a cancer. It spreads when leaders stay silent; it retreats when leaders act."

"There is little evidence about this at present, because the Nazi persecutions have made it necessary for any thinking person to side with the Jews against their oppressors. Anyone educated enough to have heard the word ‘antisemitism’ claims as a matter of course to be free of it, and anti-Jewish remarks are carefully eliminated from all classes of literature. Actually, antisemitism appears to be widespread, even among intellectuals, and the general conspiracy of silence probably helps exacerbate it. People of Left opinions are not immune to it, and their attitude is sometimes affected by the fact that Trotskyists and Anarchists tend to be Jews. But antisemitism comes more naturally to people of Conservative tendency, who suspect Jews of weakening national morale and diluting the national culture. Neo-Tories and political Catholics are always liable to succumb to antisemitism, at least intermittently."

"All the Jews I had known till then were people who were ashamed of being Jews, or at any rate preferred not to talk about their ancestry, and if forced to do so tended to use the word ‘Hebrew’."

"When my father was a young man in Vilna, every wall in Europe said, ‘Jews go home to Palestine.’ Fifty years later, when he went back to Europe on a visit, the walls all screamed, ‘Jews get out of Palestine.’"

"I always say that racism is like pneumonia and anti-Semitism is like the common cold—everybody has it."

"Marx and the early French socialist, developed antisemitism ideals that have characterized much of the Left to this day."

"I've long been intrigued by one of defining characteristics of the Corbybnites, which is often thought too rude to state plainly. They are, like their leader, very stupid. Nothing better illustrates this than a film intended to show how Labour's antisemitism scandal wasn't real, which deals obsessively with how Jews control British politics. See what I mean?"

"Zosa Szajkowski concluded his painstakingly researched article, 'The Jewish Saint-Simonians and Socialist Anti-Semitism in France,' by noting that try as he might, he could not find a single word on behalf of Jews in the whole of French socialist literature from 1820 to 1920."

"Die Deutschen werden den Juden Auschwitz nie verzeihen."