Recently, for whatever reasons that I truly cannot discern, I’ve been seeing more and more anti-semitic tropes, themes, discourse—just simply more antisemitism than what I’m used to, which isn’t much, and I’ve liked it that way. It’s a shame that that personal norm has come to such a seemingly abrupt pause. It has almost never been overt; I’m lucky in that I have not experienced blatant, directed antisemitism, but there are unfortunately many people who can’t say the same.

In one of my English classes this semester, we’re reading Phillip Roth’s The Plot Against America (which I would highly recommend not reading as I find Roth’s style and the book itself to be incredibly mundane, but I do think it’s an important story and they did a screen adaptation on HBO so maybe try that if you’re interested?). In our Zoom breakout room discussion, my group was to discuss a government-sponsored volunteer program that is mentioned in the novel which is geared towards 12-18 year old Jewish American boys, and places them in predominantly Christian towns essentially to learn about discipline through hard work. As the book is set during the time of Nazi Germany, and it is an alternate history novel in which a Nazi sympathizer and friend of Hitler’s is elected over FDR and comes to power during the Holocaust, one can see why this is a relevant aspect of the narrative to analyze. In the breakout room, one of my classmates said that this volunteer program was just like the concentration camps, explaining that “they’re both forced labor.” Not only is this an entirely unnecessary and unproductive comparison, it is disgustingly ignorant and misinformed, as concentration camps were, in absolutely zero sense of the word, voluntary, and were not just “forced labor.” Camps that served as a death sentence for over six million Jews were not “just like” the fictional government-sponsored volunteer program in this book.

Instead of correcting this ignorance, another classmate took it a step further and began discussing how racism is much worse than antisemitism, as the economic and political policies in the US are far more discriminatory towards Black Americans than Jewish Americans. Again, this is a comparison risen from gross, full-fledged ignorance. Racism and racist events, and antisemitism and antisemitic events, are NOT comparable. To compare slavery, the greatest atrocity in the American history to the Holocaust, the greatest atrocity in European history in a “who has it worse”-natured argument is truly offensive. As a white American, I will never know the struggle of being Black in America. However just as I will never know firsthand the effects of racism, non-Jewish people will never know firsthand the effects of anti-semitism. Both are horrific prejudices that serve only to harm and uphold supremacist ideals. Neither is a struggle that can be compared to literally anything else in the history of the world. When you compare two forms of prejudice, you are actively furthering the misunderstanding of what victims of those -isms are experiencing. To compare antisemitism to racism (and vice versa) is to show that you do not understand what constitutes antisemitism and antisemitic thought, and that you aren’t willing to try to understand. Comparing struggles is never, EVER helpful.

This is unfortunately not an isolated incident. It just happened to be the incident that made me angry enough to speak on the topic. But I’ve been noticing these covert antisemitic microaggressions more and more lately, and the fact that no one is talking about them is problematic. When an insurrectionist storming the capitol is wearing a “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt and it is dismissed in a matter of hours, something is wrong. When I speak about antisemitism to someone who isn’t Jewish and their initial gut reaction is that Jewish people aren’t oppressed because they’re rich, or white, especially given that Judaism is not synonymous with rich or white, something is wrong. Racism is abhorrent. And while it is more culturally important in America right now to educate yourself on issues of racism and how to be a better ally if you aren’t personally affected by racism, that does not mean that antisemitism, and all other -isms for that matter, aren’t also abhorrent.

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