You’re Discrediting Jews & Don’t Even Realize It, The Most COMMON Antisemitism Hidden in Plain Sight

Watch and Listen

By the end of this video, you'll understand the most common form of anti-semitism today.

Oh, and if you just rolled your eyes at what I just said, Mazaltov, you just did it.

Legal scholar Christine Littleton once wrote that feminism begins with the very radical act of taking women seriously.

Believing that what they say about themselves and their experience is important and valid even when or perhaps especially when it has little or no relationship to what is being said about them.

Swap in the word women for Jews and you have the perfect expression of perhaps the most pervasive and maddening form of anti-Jub bigotry at work today.

It's called epistemic anti-semitism.

Epistemic meaning related to knowledge or the acquisition of knowledge.

Essentially, epistemic anti-semitism is the invalidation of Jews as credible voices about Jews, Jewish identity, Jewish experience, and what hate against Jews looks like.

All because we are in fact Jews or in some cases the wrong kind of Jews.

Obviously, Jews are far from the only victim of this sort of epistemic prejudice.

You can't listen to women.

They're hysterical.

can't listen to the poor.

They're ignorant.

Democrats, they're insane.

Republicans, they're insane.

You get the point.

But Jews are getting hit with epistemic anti-semitism, which I'll call EA from this point out, so voraciously and from all points along the political spectrum that it requires a deliberate and focused spotlight.

As law professor David Shroud keenly notes in his excellent paper, the epistemic dimension of anti-semitism, otherwise neutral parties often fall prey to EA, because the actual bigots pedal in tropes that have been unfortunately normalized in the culture.

And left unchallenged, which is almost always the case, those tropes, even unconsciously, become embraced as fact, a phenomenon of cognitive biases we've discussed in this space at length before.

Opponents on both the right and left have myriad ways of discrediting Jewish and even Allied voices, all of which rely on racist tropes and conspiracy theories to prop them up.

And because there's been no widespread education about EA, you see it happening absolutely everywhere.

One of the most common forms is that of the quote unquote victim card, as in Jewish complaints of mistreatment are manufactured, exaggerated, or oversaturated and motivated not by legitimate concern, but out of a desire to manipulate the public emotion.

Basically, that Jews are the boy who cried wolf and are by default always believed.

As I'm sure I don't need to tell you, the opposite is true.

Jews actually under reportport anti-semitic events and hide their identities out of the assumption they will not in fact be believed while we face rising anti-Jew hate at record numbers.

There's also the victim card holocaust edition where bigots bemoan the fact that Jews dare to still discuss or be affected by the Holocaust a mere two generations after it happened.

Literally, the entire world either participated in or ignored the systematic slaughter of millions of our family and community members.

But we're supposed to shut up about it already.

We've reached a moment where somehow being a Jew with intimate knowledge of the Holocaust has actually become an argument against the validity of Jewish claims.

Listen, if you're annoyed by having to hear about the Holocaust, imagine how annoying it is for us to have 30% of our population wiped out by it while haters all over the world continue to chant for our deaths while thousands of people who were literally there and survived it are still freaking alive.

Despicable.

Next, there's what I'll call the Julian Casablancas version of EA.

Casablancas recently appeared on the Subway Takes podcast and had this to say about Jews.

Sorry.

American Zionists.

>> American Zionists are get the benefits of, you know, white privileged people but talk like they are black people during slavery.

>> If you look up epistemic anti-semitism in the dictionary, it'll play you that clip.

First of all, as we've discussed many times on this show, Jews, sorry, American Zionists are not white.

Jews are a tribal group whose origins date thousands of years ago, long preceding and exceeding the western construct of race.

And even if we're talking about straight skin color, hundreds of thousands of American Jews do not even present as white.

And the ones who do experience conditional whiteness based on what space they're in and how visibly Jewish they are or not.

Does Julian think Jews experience white privilege when they're murdered outside a museum?

Or when they're beat up on the street for speaking Hebrew or wearing a kipah or randomly harassed at a restaurant?

Or when a terrorist rams a car loaded with explosives into a Jewish preschool?

Does that sound like the kind of privilege random white dudes like Julian Casablancas enjoy?

And say we play along and take Casablancas at his word that he only meant Zionists, as in those who believe in Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state.

then that's an ideology with no inherent correlation to skin color or race or level of privilege at all.

Anybody can be a Zionist.

And I haven't even gotten to the epistemic part yet.

That's the end of the sentence when he says that Jews, sorry, American Zionists talk like they are black people during slavery.

I've had a lot more conversations with Jews than Julian Casablancas, and I have literally never heard anyone compare the situation of Jews today with black enslavement.

There are, of course, plenty of parallels between the broader experiences of black and Jewish people on this planet.

Both have lived centuries as nationless minorities within other nations that codified them as secondclass citizens.

Both have had laws written expressly to exclude them from work, housing, education, and plenty more.

But that's not even what Casablancas is referring to.

To him, and this is the EA part, there's no such thing as intersectionality.

If you're a Jew, ah, American Zionist, you must have it.

so good that any possible complaint you have about the Jewish experience is outlandish, inappropriate, and in fact insulting to other groups of people.

Kasablancas believes it is impossible that a Jew could experience comfort in one space and bigotry in another.

A belief which is itself an act of gaslighting anti-Jew bigotry.

According to him, Zionist complaints are not to be taken seriously.

On the contrary, they should be met with disgust and minimization.

So, not only does he completely miscategorize Jews from the start, but he then uses that miscatategorization to justify the invalidation and silencing of Jewish voices, specifically regarding topics that directly relate to Jewish experience.

Wow.

Thanks a lot for ruining the strokes for me, Julian.

You uneducated bigoted ass hat.

Next, we've got the hosbora or paid or Zionist shill monikers, which are applied to any Jew or ally espousing any sort of message that runs counter to the preferred anti-ionist narrative.

Van Jones offering an opinion in support of the people of Iran.

Paid Zionist shill.

Me making any sort of easily verifiable, factfully based argument.

Zionist propaganda.

Again, the key element of EA is not that there's anything right or wrong with the claim itself.

We don't even get into the claim.

it's that there's something inherently wrong with the claim maker and thus the claim does not even warrant being engaged with.

Rather than someone thinking, well, I'm not a Jew or an expert, so maybe I should respect what this Jewish person or expert has to say, they think the opposite.

That person is a Jew andor in alignment with Jews, so their opinion on this matter is less reliable than mine, the non-Jew non-expert.

How messed up is that?

A related form of EA is built on the conspiracy theory of Jewish control.

An organized Jewish response to anti-Jew hate does not offer a legitimate narrative to be considered, but is instead living proof of Jewish control.

A Jew hater says something hateful, Jews push back, which may result in real world consequences.

And so the hater goes, "See, I told you they control everything." In this scenario, not only is what every Jews have to say completely illegitimate, but by saying anything at all, it has affirmed the haters bigoted worldview, strengthening the eternal logic behind the epistemic anti-semitism in the first place.

Yet another flavor of EA is when folks on the left urge Jews to focus on quote the real anti-semitism.

First of all, as with all these types of EA, the actual merits of the Jewish claim are never investigated.

Not only are Jewish concerns immediately dismissed, but the Jews who voice them are then condescended to by this anti-ionist and often non-Jewish person who asserts themselves as more of an authority on what counts as hate against Jews than actual engaged Jews themselves are.

so much more of an authority in fact that only they have the intelligence and qualification to tell Jews what's real which not only implies the non-Jew is more expert than the Jew but that what Jews believe to be hate against them is in fact not even real bigotry baby similarly nine times out of 10 when folks categorize Jewish claims of anti-semitism as smears groundless baseless slanderous bad faith ridiculous weaponized or meant to silence criticism of Israel.

These are all forms of EA.

Jews aren't trying to systematically silence criticism of Israel.

The entire population of Israel criticizes Israel on a daily basis.

And yet, we've got this condescending and bigoted assumption that Jews offer no additional insight into the Jewish experience beyond what the bigot already believes to be true.

And not only are these Jewish grievances illegitimate, they're not even defensive expressions of having been wronged in this scenario.

They're framed as aggressive attacks on others, a nefarious twisting of nothing into something in order to harm an otherwise innocent party.

The last form of EA I want to unpack is often the result of something I'll call reverse causation.

Many an unsuspecting progressive has signed him or herself up as a member of the anti-ionist camp, thinking it the morally righteous thing to do without actively harboring significant anti-Jew sentiment.

Once embedded within the anti-ionist community, however, as they discover traditional pro-Israel Jews to be their constant opponent, anti-Jew ideas begin to develop.

Rather than becoming an anti-ionist because you hate Jews, you end up hating Jews because you became an anti-ionist.

This in turn leads to epistemic anti-semitism.

The same way an entrenched Democrat may invalidate the claims of a Republican, as a matter of practice, the anti-ionist grows to see the engaged establishment pro-Israel Jew as an enemy of justice or supporter of genocide or white supremacist or whatever awful thing the core anti-ionist would have them believe.

And so, without even meaning to, the anti-ionist has become the anti-semite and the non-anti-ionist Jewish voice has become invalid and eagerly dismissed.

It's as a result of this reverse causation effect that we find what might be the most hurtful form of EA, as it's the smallest, simplest, and most personal, the quiet dissolution of trust or benefit of the doubt from someone you know just because you're a Jew.

You might be my friend, you might be my teacher, you might be my spouse, but because you're Jewish, I just can't quite believe anything you say.

Any argument you might make, I'm predisposed to not buy because you've been compromised.

You're blinded by a tribal Jew lens over your eyes that must be oluding your sense of judgment and reason.

So unless you're the right kind of Jew for me, nothing you have to say on the topic of Jews is valid.

And like all forms of EA, this one is of course an inversion.

It's the Jew with the lifetime of lived experience who isn't seeing this one clearly, not the completely random person who started paying attention 5 minutes ago and got their entire education from social media and other anti-ionists.

By now, I hope you can see why epistemic anti-semitism, despite its subtlety and shockingly widespread normalization, is so terribly destructive.

It accomplishes so many harmful things at once in the quietest of ways.

It reinforces bigoted anti-Jew tropes, silences Jewish voices, belittles Jewish intelligence and experience, blocks critical ideas about Jewish safety for being understood, and somehow also manages to make Jews seem like the villains at the same time.

Calling out epistemic anti-semitism must be a priority one.

See something, say something.

Especially in real world situations.

As Bishop Michael Fischer and I spoke about on this show during Black History Month, one of the key elements of being an ally is speaking up for me when I'm not in the room.

Being a defender against epistemic anti-semitism is a simple and effective way to do just that.

Whether you're standing up for yourself or somebody else.

Remember, this is not about having to say every Jewish claim is valid.

Because with EA, we don't even get to the substance of the claim.

Rather, it's about saying being Jewish does not invalidate me as a claim maker.

And to suggest otherwise is bigoted, condescending, insulting, and has no place in polite society.

The only way to push back on epistemic anti-semitism is to start pushing back on it.

And certainly, there are plenty of other groups facing epistemic injustice, too.

So now that you've learned to recognize it, you are equipped and responsible for being a better advocate for yourself and for others.

So get out there, shut that down, and if you see Julian Casablancas on the subway, punch him in the face for me.

That guy sucks.