Sick Societies Suffer the Anomie of Antisemitism

"The data presented in this report suggest that, despite all these efforts [conferences, training programs, legislative proposals to fight antisemitism], something has gone terribly wrong."

"[Of the 2,616 antisemitic incidents in the United Stats last year, 345 invoked Israel and Zionism; associating all 345 incidents with the left is an error; 68 represented] propaganda efforts by white supremacist groups to foment anti-Israel and antisemitic beliefs."

"[One of the most popular QAnon influencers, GhostEzra] is an open Nazi who praises Hitler, admires the Third Reich and decries the supposedly treacherous nature of Jews."

Report: Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry, Tel Aviv University

"We've never seen data like this before, ever."

"[Over 80 percent of the incidents documented in the A.D.L. report] cannot be attributed to any specific extremist group or movement."

Jonathan Greenblatt, national director, Anti-Defamation League

The Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated 77 years ago as the Second World War was coming to an end. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

 

Emile Durkheim, a father of modern sociology, in 1899 wrote an essay, "Antisemitism and Social Crisis", an effort he undertook as a French Jew to come to grips with antisemitism exploding at the time, leading to the conviction of French artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus accused falsely of treason. In Durkheim's explorations, he wrote of Jews being blamed for the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 defeats. He tracked an economic crisis in 1948 leading to a burst of antisemitism.

"Our current antisemitism", he wrote, "is the consequence and the superficial symptom of a state of social malaise". In this academic's mind, social malaise was encapsulated by social dissolution. "Durheim understood France's social malaise in terms of a pathological dearth of moral and social regulation, a condition that he termed 'anomie'", wrote sociologist Chad Alan Goldberg contemporarily. Anomie as a chronic condition of industrial society, when traditional social bonds were eroded.

Anomie could become acute, according to Durkheim, when society was rent asunder through "painful crisis" or "abrupt transitions", and at these times society sought a reason and found one in the presence of Jews, as classic scapegoats for the venting of hateful frustration. "Antisemitism serves as a useful index of the health of society", Goldberg wrote, in interpreting Durkheim's conclusions.

Global society has just undergone, and is continuing to grapple with, a pandemic whose virulence has caused millions of deaths, social estrangements, industrial upheaval, mass poverty, financial losses, galloping price increases in lock-step with transportation and distribution problems, and a palpable sense of grievance and resentment between wealthy nations and those struggling to survive. Add the usual regional conflicts, and this is a world in crisis.

Even before the pandemic there was a stark confrontational and bitter political polarization between liberal and conservative national cliques. Israel, as a symbol of Jewishness globally, has become a target for increasing bigotry, that extends itself to Jews everywhere in the diaspora, and with that conflation of contempt has come an increase in antisemitism, aided and abetted by social media resources becoming a comfortable medium for conveying hateful slander.

In the United States in particular there has been a growth of Jew hate. The recent Tel Aviv University report  pointed out that antisemitic incidents saw a huge increase in the last several years in countries as diverse as Australia, Britain, Canada, France and Germany. Often the governments of those countries express their dismay at this turn of events, and strike committees and investigations while mounting education campaigns to combat deep-seated Jew-hate within their populations.

In the U.S. in particular the Republican Party underwent a radicalization under former President Donald Trump. Where the party embraced far-right thought and groups exemplifying that ideology incorporating white supremacists into their fold. While the Democratic party extended itself further left in an orgy of of defaming Israel and extending antisemitism expressed by their elected members with Middle East backgrounds bringing their searing hatred of Israel to the fore.

A combination of social disaffection, the growing polarization and de-civilizing effect of radicalism on the part of both the right and the left, the pandemic years and its isolating effect encouraging people to rely more heavily on social media for direction, have all played a part in the steady rise of victimhood- inspired anger toward Jews, accusing Jews everywhere for all the things that have gone and continue to go awry in the world; whatever it is, a conspiracy of Jews had to be the motivator.

When rabid antisemitism is on the rise and becomes a cause celebre, that is the signal that social guidance of decency and civil merit is wallowing in the gutter of disaffection and misery, allied with distrust of politics and science.