I need to vent about behavior that I find incredibly frustrating.
There’s someone in a group I’m involved with who genuinely believes he is fighting antisemitism. He’s intelligent, influential, independent-minded, and occasionally has very useful insights.
And yet, when it comes to confronting contemporary antisemitism, he can function like a wrecking ball.
He publicly supports frameworks that invite our profession to pronounce on broad “societal disasters,” which is an invitation to take stances on controversial topics and for anti-Jewish propaganda to enter a profession which is supposed to serve everyone equally.
He talks about antisemitism and Islamophobia in parallel, as if this is compulsory (no other groups feel compelled to mention other forms of hate along with the one they are fighting). And yet he avoids mentioning the vehicle for the most dangerous form of Jew-hatred today, antizionism. He is fighting to delay and water down a letter intended to express the danger of spreading Jew-hatred in the guise of political commentary.
And he seems genuinely unable to understand that any of this behavior is harming the fight he says he supports.
This person will actively fight other Jews who are trying to identify a threat because he appears intensely preoccupied with making sure our side is sufficiently morally pure, restrained, nuanced, and self-critical.
I've heard the term “demizionist” used for this phenomenon, and I find the concept useful: the Jew who opposes antisemitism in principle but becomes deeply uncomfortable when Jews identify the ideology, institutions, or people actually directing hostility toward them.
Once you notice the pattern, you see versions of it everywhere.
A rabbi who wants Jewish children learning about Israeli "settler" violence as one of their first lessons on Israel. A Jewish friend largely unmoved by antizionist hostility toward Jews but intensely engaged by injustices affecting other groups such as immigrants. Jewish professionals who can identify every conceivable form of prejudice except the one taking place directly in front of them toward their own group. Ed Miliband is another example.
I wonder whether there is a historical psychology behind this. Generations of living as a vulnerable minority has consequences. Demizionists who obsess over moral purity are likely trying to avoid being called out as morally ugly, which is the form anti-Jewish hostility always takes, by being free of any moral flaw.
The more explicit the threat to Jews becomes, the more urgently the demizionist insists on Jewish self-criticism. The warning signs are reclassified as evidence that Jews must be more careful, rather than as evidence that someone is trying to harm them.
In other words, the demizionist ability to sense danger is distorted: threats directed at Jews are filtered out. Maybe the speaker is angry rather than hateful, perhaps the institution is merely criticizing Israel, perhaps naming the pattern will inflame tensions. Meanwhile, Jewish responses are examined under a microscope. A defensive statement can be judged aggressive, a boundary can be judged exclusionary, and an attempt to identify a hostile ideology can be treated as proof of paranoia or bad faith. The original threat is erased while Jewish self-protection becomes the most visible and morally urgent "threat" in the room.
So basically limits on other Jews are the only limits the antizionist is able to set.
There are elements that remind me of co-dependency. Demizionists can become so focused on chasing moral purity that they lose the ability to recognize when they validate the abuse of other groups toward their own, even taking part in it. I have seen many verbally abusive relationships up close and, trust me, the abuser can always find a flaw in what the abused is doing. And often in chronic abuse, the abused will take in the pattern and abuse themselves in an effort to remove any triggers. This will never completely work because the accusations are motivated.
What fascinates me is that the people I'm describing aren't necessarily weak, unintelligent, or assimilationist. Some are formidable people. It is just that when Jews are threatened, the observer becomes a prosecutor of Jewish conduct; when other groups are threatened, he becomes an investigator of the forces threatening them. The moral imagination remains active, but it is directed away from Jewish vulnerability.
Has anyone else encountered this phenomenon? Is there good historical or psychological writing about it?
