‘A new reality’: three academics discuss 7 October and its aftermath

Three Jewish academics explored both British and American perspectives when they took part in a discussion at JW3 on the Hamas attacks and their aftermath.

Dr Linda Maizels, a Chicago-based researcher on antisemitism, said that while she could not offer comfort or catharsis, the hope was to bring clarity.

At the anniversary event held on 7 October, she borrowed from the Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer’s idea that describing the Holocaust as unique was not as helpful as describing it as unprecedented. The same went for the 7/10 massacre, she said, which was unprecedented in its intensity, “probably also in its gleeful celebration of Israeli death, in the dehumanisation of Israelis in general”.

She spoke of a pattern of treatment of Jews on American campuses, which she said had begun after 1967 and accelerated, especially during the second intifada.  A binary had developed, of oppressors and oppressed, which came with the idea that Israel was a white, imperialist, European settler state. “Young Jews were being singled out as not only white but the epitome of whiteness.” And once they were identified as oppressors, Jews had “no recourse to respond, because they’re part of the power structure”.

The difference now in the treatment of Jews on campuses in both the UK and the United States was that those ideas had moved from the extracurricular to the faculties themselves. “They’re in the classroom, and they are more difficult to combat,” she said.

Dr David Hirsh, a senior lecturer at Goldsmiths and director of the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, spoke of 7 October as a “watershed”. A lot of British Jews had not experienced being frozen out in the way that some had in the Labour Party under Corbyn, and in the way he himself had been frozen out of sections of academia because he had made arguments against proposals to boycott Israeli academics.

“But then they did after 7 October,” Hirsh said. “A lot of Jewish people in Britain experienced themselves being made into a pariah and being accused of treason and of support for genocide, and that is the mechanism by which this kind of antisemitism operates.”

Anthony Julius, the leading lawyer and historian of antisemitism, told the audience that Jews were now in “a new reality”. That reality followed “the closed season on Jews”, as he described it, which lasted from 1945 and looped through events in Israel’s history until 1989. The collapse of communism meant that “a whole lot of disinherited people on the left looked for a cause”.

What the past year had shown Julius was that the debate about antisemitism and anti-Zionism was “mercifully” at an end. “We now know that the current iteration of anti-Zionism arrives at the same lethal outcome as the worst kinds of antisemitism,” he said. The past year had also fractured British and American Jews’ faith in their national institutions. “For example, the BBC, universities, the Metropolitan Police. We no longer believe that we can rely on these institutions in our ordinary dealings with them.”

Julius also felt that we no longer needed to debate with antisemites, because it had become clear that Jew hate could not be “corrected” by argument and fact, a realisation he went so far as to describe as “liberating”.

On the subject of the BBC, Hirsh agreed with the lawyer. “I was always someone who rolled my eyes when people shouted that the BBC was antisemitic,” he said, “but I cannot listen to the Today programme anymore.” And he was also worried for academics, Jewish or not, who were trying to understand antisemitism. “If you say that Jews in the Middle East are not deliberately murdering thousands of children then you’re in trouble. You are excluded from the community of the good and the community of rational discourse.”

The discussion, chaired by Rabbi Baroness Julia Neuberger, concluded with thoughts about what could be done to turn enemies of the Jews into their friends. Hirsh pointed to the importance of seeing antisemitism as part of a more general rise of populism and conspiracy fantasy, and that he saw other kinds of conspiracy fantasies on the right that he said were related and were a threat.

Neuberger herself was clear that dealing with antisemitism had to be done bluntly. We should tell antisemites “to hell with you”, and “eff off”, the rabbi told the audience. More positively, she recommended that Jews stand up and be proud, and that they recognise their friends. “Buy them a box of chocolates or a bunch of flowers,” she said.” Quite a good idea.”

• Responses to 7 October, a three-volume set edited by Rosa Freedman and David Hirsh, is published by Routledge at £35.99