Image credit to twitter account - will update when I find
Though I had intended to introduce some of the themes covered below in future posts on group narcissism in America, focusing on Nicole Hannah Jones’s project in particular, the Jewish Tunnels event and my receipt of hostile interrogatory replies on twitter from fringe and unknown internet antisemitism communities inspired me to compose a short survey of the themes in the context of the Chabad question.
These communities insist that Chabad and related Orthodox Jews should be scrutinized by the right because of alleged illegal activity that covers everything from local nuisances to treason. While not equating Chabad with similar non-Jewish groups, I acknowledge that they engage in unsavory behaviors that are sometimes associated with other 17th- and 18th-century pietists sects, like the Amish, such as organized crime, violation of labor laws, sexual abuse, and the like. Without saying anything about the scope of such behaviors, which varies by group, we could further generalize this by saying that such unsavory behaviors are often, or have been, features of insular ethnic and religious things in general, be they Italian, Irish, Catholic, Mormon, Jewish, or Scientologist.
I’d say most of these concerns can be reformulated as legitimate concerns about the presence of clannish populations in a cosmopolitan nation-state, which nation-state is predicated upon a formal liberal constitutional framework and civil religion. Our civil religious-liberal institutional framework is easily exploited by group entities -- political machines, ideologies, religions, and ethnic groups -- because the framework’s institutions are by nature individualistic and group-neutral, and therefore inadequately control for group subordination of individuality or national loyalty to minority group loyalty (the civil rights movement is an example of Americans attempting to control for such a concern, another is the movement to reform the WASP old-boys network in the Ivies).
When a group associates with foreign interests, as in the case of Chabad with the state of Israel and other foreign satellite communities (or similarly, as in the case of Catholics and the Vatican), the urgency of these legitimate concerns will be amplified because of practical foreign policy concerns about loyalty.
In the context of Chabad, one piece of evidence suggesting that these concerns are legitimate under our civil religion is that even progressives have begun challenging Hasidim in the mainstream media, with the hilarious Ramapo school district scandal covered on This American Life being a prominent recent example.
For those who don’t recall, evidently the diverse community of Ramapo came to an informal agreement with Hasidic Jews about educational funding for non-Hasidim on the one hand and educational autonomy for Hasidim on the other. The diverse non-Hasidic Ramapo community was therefore surprised to discover that Hasidim had, through ordinary democratic procedure, taken control of the school board and begun reducing public school funding.
Public school funding is sacred for progressives so the board’s policies obviously caused a scandal. I won’t pass judgment. Based on what I know about public school funding, the Hasidic board’s reductions may have been beneficial for the non-Hasidic community in Ramapo. What’s salient here is that a clan or tribe was able to use liberal-democratic procedure to install itself in public leadership positions, creating the potential for group self-dealing against the common good.
No apologia by Jews or supporters can reduce the significance of this fact and justify censure of public suspicion. Americans are entitled to suspicions of ethnic and religious “Things” when those Things participate in matters of public concern, regardless of whether the Thing is Jewish, Catholic, Mormon, WASP, Black, southern Italian, or Scientologist. Such suspicions sometimes uncover legitimate problems and catalyze policy changes benefiting the common good, while at other times the suspicions produce undesirable consequences, which in the context of Jews I’ll label Peasant Antisemitism.
I define Peasant Antisemitism as a negative orientation toward the abstraction Jews and individual Jews based on crude overgeneralizations, extreme paranoia, apocalyptic conspiracy theories, and resentment. Though Peasant Antisemitism may skew middle- and lower-class, I don’t use the predicate Peasant to connote anything about socioeconomic status but only to create an association with the motivations of European peasants who engaged in violent pogroms against European Jews in the past. European Christian peasants may in some cases have had good reason to be hostile toward Jews in their midst, but the ideological manifestation of this hostility was characterized by the constellation of irrational beliefs and attitudes I define as Peasant Antisemitism, often with tragic consequences.
What’s interesting to me is the tendency for legitimate suspicions about Jewish “things” to be heavily censored in public, with any high-profile criticism tending to either be Peasant Antisemitism or be portrayed as such. In contrast, suspicions about, for example, Catholic disloyalty or subversion have enjoyed mainstream coverage and are often (though not always) expressed in less “Peasant” terms. For instance, as recently as the early 2000s, Gore Vidal was able to write freely in Vanity Fair about his suspicions of an Opus Dei conspiracy in the FBI and on SCOTUS.
I suspect there are multiple reasons for this discrepancy and will focus on a few of my suspected reasons in this article. The reasons I highlight here generally focus upon the secondary functions or effects of Peasant Antisemitism for different groups. Specifically, I’ll focus on incentives for progressives, non-Jews, and rabbinic/Zionist Jews to promote or at least embrace Peasant Antisemitism. Some of these reasons are highly speculative, bordering on conspiratorial, while others are innocuous and grounded in uncontroversial research.