The Case of Judith Butler: The Anti-Semitism that Defines Today’s Western Left
As the British writer and left-wing intellectual Norman Geras discussed at the YIVO conference on Jews and the Left, the left in his own Britain made opposition to Israel its main focus and concern, and has willingly joined hands with anti-Semites. Geras writes:
At the same time, that affinity has now been compromised by the existence of a new climate of anti-Semitic opinion within the left. This climate of opinion affects a section of the left only, and not the whole of it. But it is a substantial section. Its convenient alibi is the state of Israel — by which I mean that Israel is standardly invoked to deflect the charge that there is anything of anti-Semitism at work. Israel, so the story goes, is a delinquent state and, for many of those who regard it so, a non-legitimate one — colonialist, imperialist, vehicle of oppression and what have you. Similarly, diaspora Jews who defend Israel within their home countries are not seen as the conduit of Jewish interests and/or opinion in the normal way of any other democratic articulation; they are treated, rather, as a dubious force — the notorious “Jewish lobby” — as if their organized existence were somehow improper.
Speaking about the British newspaper The Guardian, Geras writes:
This once great paper of British liberalism now provides space on its opinion pages for the spokesmen of Hamas, the contents of its programmatic charter notwithstanding; provides space on its letters page for philosophers justifying the murder of Jews; and provides space on its website for people who deploy well-known anti-Semitic themes even while professing that they have nothing whatever against Jews.
His point speaks directly as well to Judith Butler, whose support of Hamas is justified by her in precisely the terms that Geras notes the British leftists use as rationale for their anti-Semitism.
Geras concluded his remarks by saying:
We now know, as well, that should a new calamity ever befall the Jewish people, there will be, again, not only the direct architects and executants but also those who collaborate, who collude, who look away and find the words to go with doing so. Some of these, dismayingly, shamefully, will be of the left.
Judith Butler is one of those Americans who now has helped, despite her own so-called explanations, the campaign to delegitimize Israel. But in contrast to Professor Landes, I would argue that this new anti-Semitism defines the left today. Landes writes that Butler’s entire audience is on the left; as he tells her, “that’s where you get your kudos.”
I’m not sure why it is so often claimed that Adorno was a jew. He wasn’t, unless you take the definition of the Nuremberg Laws.
His mother was catholic, and he was catholically baptized, and later became a member of the protestant church.
But all this doesn’t change one bit that it is horrible decision to give a price named after him to a vicious anti-semite.
“The Enemy of my Enemy” has evolved into a newer, more direct, more sinister form.
“I want my Enemies to die, but do not wish to get my own hands dirty. I certainly hope that these people will do the killing for Us.”
Various Western nations were either unconcerned about genocide during WW2 or happy to see the Germans and others do it. What could be better than striking a moral pose while becoming accessories to murder?
The whole war was an exercise in ethnic cleansing. The Allies continued tidying up the ethnic cleansing loose ends after the war, putting stateless people into their appropriate nation-boxes.
Then after 30 or 40 years of diversity promotion, we again face calamity. One wonders if we will ever learn, balkanization doesnt produce strength, but discord and disharmony, violence and eventually war.
Something interesting, part of our problem with enforcing immigration policy stems from UN Agreements on refugees post war, which were designed with the Jewish inability to flee Germany in mind.
These agreements are being abused by would be immigrants, and also used by the Left to push open borders and the importation of new third world voters.
The left is merely the other side of the fascist right. They are currently in line with Islamists, but only due to their hatred of the west – the Red/Green alliance.
In the same manner in which disciples of Allah are making war on all things western – first the Saturday people, then the Sunday people – the radical left is bent on upending America and capitalism. Therefore, it is mandatory that Jews/Israel must be neutered.
/2012/07/01/leftist-dogma-the-same-world-over-freedom-loving-people-beware-commentary-by-adina-kutnicki-32-2/
/2012/08/21/the-paradox-pitfalls-of-liberal-democracies-in-a-time-of-immoral-relativism-the-havoc-wrought-by-leftist-academia-commentary-by-adina-kutnicki/
/2012/08/08/leftism-lethal-to-jews-their-overall-health-others-too-commentary-by-adina-kutnicki/
(put a ‘.com’ after Adina Kutnicki and the blog will pop up, links are bouncing again)
For the now dominant New Left cohort, “materialism” was a symptom of the baneful effect of “jewification.” I tried to explain all that here: http://clarespark.com/2012/09/08/what-is-a-materialist/. There is much more medievalism in our culture than most of us would like to admit. It is no accident that all the nuances of antisemitic thought and imagery are not taught in the schools. Instead, many schools will teach about the Holocaust, which makes Jews victims, not perpetrators, and it is the Jew as perpetrator that is the preferred argument for New Leftists and their luckless students.
Wasn’t that the source of Karl Marx’s anti-Semitism, that “the Jews” were materialistic (and therefore not interested in his ideology)?
Karl Marx’s ironic anti-Semitism, that is …
Karl Marx’s antisemitism was not ironic, but real. He denounced Judaism as “materialistic.” but it was his father who proved to be the lover of money. His father converted to Christianity in order to become a lawyer and so make money.
Having read Landes’ fine book Heaven on Earth, he is a scholar of history first and foremost regardless of his personal politics. For so many in academics there is no separation from the personal views and the Action Research they want to use the classroom to encourage. Right now the favorite tactic for the Left is to disparage the analytical mind and foster “thinking” grounded in emotion. Just like the Frankfurt School pushed as a means of subjugating the West by stealth via the destruction of the mind’s ability to think rationally. It is about to get much worse as I wrote about today.http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/college-ready-as-a-goal-of-k-12-is-not-helpful-if-first-you-gut-the-historic-purpose-of-college/
No one who has described millenialism and cults grounded in emotion and the irrational as well as Landes has could fail to appreciate where this emphasis on emotion is going. No wonder he wrote such a passionate response.
Perhaps someone should inform Ms. Butler that is she is concerned about “colonialism” the Muslims are the first colonialists in the post-Roman world. Long before Columbus Muslim imperialists overran and oppressed many peoples.
I refuse to believe that these leftists do not understand that their solution to the “problem” would result in the destruction of Isreal. I put “problem” in quotes because the only problem is the refusal to accept that Isreal has a right to exist. A permanent peace would be great but Kumbayah ain’t gonna make it happen.
But these leftists live in an unreal world. For instance Richard Landes wrote:
“They are the antithesis of everything we on the global left stand for: the dignity of voluntary human interaction.”
“Voluntary”? The left is all about compulsion, forcing everyone to work towards their concept of social utopia.
The left are only concerned with diversity when white people are involved. The never wish to move white people into black/hispanic/arab neighborhoods (or nations). It’s only when they see too much whiteness that they become hysterical – and only in other peoples neighborhoods/towns.
They exempt themselves, of course. THEY can live in lilliwhite neighborhoods.
they take to heart Susan Sontag’s words: “The white race is the cancer of human history.”
So then the question remains: Why do so many Jews continue to cling to a political movement that hates them?
Is there some sort of inherited physical brain deformity? Something that is inherited like Tay Sachs disease but that warps thinking in a way to want to kiss the fist that hits them? I am really running out of rational explanations for why so many otherwise intelligent people do such dumb stuff.
Even back in the beginning of the Golden Age of the Children of Israel Jews would irritate God no end. He called them a “stiff-necked” people.
The miracle of God in Blessing the Children of Israel” wasn’t in the Iraelites themselves, but in what God was able to accomplish throughthem, despite them.
think trauma, for one thing, Gilligan
maybe Judith Butler had a white hot flash vision of the endless slaughtering of Jews, it scared her, and she’s been running away from it ever since, turning against them herself, who knows
but a lot of this comes from a childish hatred of their own family, parents usually, Eric Alterman is an example of a Jewish teenager infected by that malady who then went ballistic against Israel and is still acting out
for Judith Butler, it might be her father, who “failed” to meet her teen-aged expectations in some way
what she thinks, or why, if she’s out to kill us. She’s a murderess, spreading poison around about Jews all over the place, and that is the sole reason for her winning such lavish rewards in Germany and rewarding positions teaching at cesspools like Berkeley and now Columbia University.
All this crap about hot flashes (of insight, yet!) is imbecilic. She writes gobbledygook, a fancy pornographic version of hate literature, for the “learned” among us to absorb while they finger themselves, getting off on what’s “between the lines” of all her bullshit, which is a vision of dead Jews.
Judith Butler’s a hate-filled pervert, no doubt since her early college days, where she first learned how to be one.
The diseased minds of the “global left” targets America and Israel as a bloodsport.
There is no logic or consistency to their platform, because they don’t stand for anything, only against. They have principles of convenience and Butler’s sophistry is nothing but ordinary “tear down capitalism” gruel.
They aren’t even anti-colonialist. If a Marxist went on a colonizing rampage they would avert their gaze and make up inane excuses why reality was fantasy and fantasy, utopia.
Butler is a worm in a toxic ocean vent, clinging to the shifting sands of hypocrisy and deceit. Landes gives her too much credit, because he cannot and will not face the facts. The left is not what it pretends to be.
It is a worldwide disgrace. Classic liberalism no longer shares DNA with modern leftism. They are a separate species, this latest branch a mutation of pure evil.
We can water it down, whitewash it, scrub it daily from all its vile impurities, but we can never run away from the fact that modern leftism is a cancerous, ugly, despicable boil on the face of humanity. And Butler is a carrier.
Who says? Throughout my lifetime, the left here and abroad has always demanded that “human interaction” consist of only those “interactions” they approve of, and that any actions on their “to-do” list be made mandatory for everyone else. How is that either “dignified” or “voluntary”?
Based on the track record of “progressives” here and elsewhere, I’d say “pretty much everything”. The major difference between Hamas, Hisb’Allah (And why can’t anyone spell it correctly?), and the “progressive” crowd in the West is that the Islamists are just more honest about the amount of damage, destruction, and human suffering they dream of inflicting in their quest for their version of Utopia. Although, as with many in the “progressive” crowd here, I suspect that a large percentage of them are in it for the thrill of hurting others with the full approval of their culture.
Plus, of course, the Islamists are quite content to do their own killing, while Western progressives always want to “hire it done” as John Wayne said to Ed Asner in El Dorado. Unfortunately, they can always find someone to do the dirty work if a big enough carrot is waved under that someone’s nose.
Or if, in the case of the Islamists, the progressives just say, “go ahead- we’ll hold your coats.”
clear ether
eon
I suppose one can apply
Plus, of course, the Islamists are quite content to do their own killing, while Western progressives always want to “hire it done”
to exactly the manner in which Europe and the US have carried out their foreign policy of rewarding the Arabs everytime Israel succeeded in defending itself, dishing out dollars and euros to the Palestinians while lashing Israel verbally.
One egregious event was Kissinger’s behaviour during the 1973 “Yom Kippur” war to get Israel into line and saving the Arabs/Egyptians.
I know this sounds off track; but, I just saw 2016. A lot of what is being discussed here are echos of what I just saw. The only difference is instead of Butler being the subject, Obama was. If you haven’t seen the film, you should. It’s not Butler who worries me with this philosophy, it’s Obama.
Actually, the real worry is not Obama but the people who will vote for him.
Isn’t the real problem that we still give away awards for Neo-Marxist thought and that we have a professorship that competes and cares about it?
Attempting to understand Judith Butler and her ilk as ideological thinkers is a waste of time–as Ron points out, for a radical lesbian feminist to support Hezbollah and Hamas on ideological grounds makes no sense whatsoever. In fact, Butler–like all academics, these days–is first and foremost a retail politician, and her constituency is the community of academic peers that judges her work and decides the fate of her career. The intellectual coherence of her political stances is thus–as for all politicians–a minor concern compared to their appeal to her constituency’s tribal allegiances and material interests.
In this context, Butler’s pro-Islamist position makes perfect sense. The primary material interest of the modern academic community is to preserve the position of cultural authority that justifies its enormous system of perks and subsidies. To do so, it must work hard to undermine various domestic institutions, such as the military and law enforcement, traditionalist religions and nationalist political movements, that compete with, and even threaten to replace, academics and intellectuals as sources of cultural authority. Since academics cannot hope to compete with these other institutions as defenders of society against radical Islam, they must instead downplay that threat as insignificant, and other threats–those which cast those competing institutions as powerless or even counterproductive, such as reactionary traditionalism or “law and order” authoritarianism–as far more dangerous.
Excellent point!
What is today will not be tomorrow. The academic tower will crumble of its own weight. As the population becomes poorer, the children will scramble for an education that will pay the bills. If government jobs come to dominate, then this scenario of Leftist collapse will take another indeterminate period of time to catch on. If government jobs dry up, then the collapse will occur sooner. There are very few hippies today, because even hippies had to eat.
Cultural distortions produce only temporarily anomalous humans. Survival issues will, as always, assert themselves. That is neither good nor bad necessarily, but absolutely necessary nonetheless. Too bad these things don’t happen in periods of time short enough for us to see their inevitability sooner.
When children’s parents cannot pay for them to sit in Butler’s classes, she will become a subsistence farmer and disappear into the real world of raising vegetables and an occasional sheep for clothing.
dan
your comment is one of the most consise discriptions of the left i have seen.please write more.thank you
Butler needs to be marched into a concentration camp in “Palestine” to get the smack upside her dumb head that she needs. Is anyone surprised the Jewish left is breaking bread with the Islamofascists? They ARE BOTH FASCIST CENTRIC. Anyone with half a brain understands that western leftists think they can harness the hate of the Muslim hordes to used as a battering ram to accomplish their heart’s desire. The only problem is that when they have been good and used up, their “friends” will turn on them and slaughter them for the TRAITORS THEY ARE. The Frankfurt School? Wasn’t that a group of lefty Jews from Germany who wanted to tear down Christianity in America? ‘Nuf said.
The Frankfurt Jews were a group of men who could come to America to escape Nazi Germany, get plush teaching assignments and then run back to Germany as soon as the war was over and declare the USA was as bad or worse than the Nazis. It takes an academic.
With that said they didn’t come to the United States to overthrow Christianity. They came to the US to promote the European Socialism and intellectualism they had come to regard as their religion. Christians are not the victims of Jewish leftists and minorities. They had their way in Europe and throughout the world for hundreds of years and the Leftist ideas were by Christians. Jews latched onto it for sure but we are a tiny minority and the worst of us are sad followers and not leaders. If you don’t like post-Christian Christians look inward.
Actually the most extreme members of the Frankfurt School were exactly those who did not return to Germany.
“understanding Hamas and Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive and that are on the left, that are part of the global left is
extremely importantfundamentally ignorant and suicidal in the extreme .”There! Fixed it for her…
Unfortunately, human nature is such that most people will not allow themselves to see the danger in this type of thinking until the roundup begins. And for many, at that point it will be too late.
Judith Butler = the latest in a long line of Useful Idiots
Judith Butler is so ignorant that she does not even know what “Palestinian” means. It meant “Jew” from the time that the Roman Emperor Hadrian changed the named of Judea to “Pslestina” in 135 A.D., after having defeated the last Jewish rebellion under Bar Kochba. (He outlawed Judaism, and renamed Jerusalem “Aelia Capitolina,” “Aelius” being his gens name.) “Palestine” meant “land of the Jews,” which is why after World War I, Great Britain was awarded the “Palestine Mandate” to be the “homeland of the Jews.” Calling Arabs “Palestinian” is the effect of the founding of the “Palestine Liberation Organization” (P.L.O.) in Cairo in 1964 by Gamal Nasser and the Soviet Union, both haters of Jews.
Palestine never meant ‘Jew’. Part of the land had been known as Judea (from the tribe of Judah) from which the term ‘Jew’ came. The Romans changed the name of the land to Palestine, taking the name from the Philistines. It was a transparent attempt to undercut the historic Jewish connection to the land. The name remained and was incorporated in ‘The Palestine Mandate’, at which time the Jewish residents accepted the designation of Palestine – but they never called themselves Palestinians.
The good news is – the IRS will hound her to the ends of the Earth for their cut of the 63 grand. Thanks to the Foreign Account Tax Compliant Act, it doesn’t matter if she earned the money abroad – they still want it.
http://reason.com/archives/2012/09/10/the-insatiable-taxman
The far left, the far right, the islamists and all the egomaniacal power worshippers, hate Israel, the Jews and the USA because they hate the fact that G-d has given Mankind inalienable rights. Both the left and the right wish to supplant the rights given by G-d with their own desire to rule over Mankind. G-d gets in the way. That is why both Israel and the USA are hated- Israel and the Jewish People are a living testament to the reality of His existence and America is a living testament to His gift of inalienable rights.
Do not forget that the Israelis are mostly caucasians and therefore colonists/colonials/colonialists?
Greenfield has written some important, excellent pieces on anti-Semitism and the Left, and this is another one. Yet it’s up to a few of the commentators to allude, even if they only skirt the issue, to the root of the problem that is too little mentioned. Namely that the Left’s Jew-hatred is rooted as much in the belief that Jews are greedy and worship money and represent the capitalist status quo, as anything else (this delusion is then transferred into animus against the Jewish state). Of course it’s wrong to pin this belief solely or even predominantly on Marx, it’s a pervasive anti-Semitic caricature and scapegoating, that predates Marx by easily more than a millenium. Marx just bought into it and helped to promote it.
If the Left were honest about its Jew-hatred and this primary reason/delusion for it (of course it’s not the only root, just a predominant one), then it would be so much easier to tackle; yet they are as blind to it as could be, well naturally enough.
Israel was the European plan for getting rid of the remaing Jews. It was not supposed to survive. The whole idea was to dump them in a desolate backwater with no money or infrastructure and under a strict arms embargo. They recieved no international political or economic support. The British made sure that the Arabs were better equipped and trained.
These were Jews. They were not supposed to be able to grow food, build roads, or fight. It was assumed that they would either perish or remain as a subservient minority like other Jews in Arab lands. It was not supposed to turn out this way.
These folks would have no problem with a weak impoverished Israel it is the success that galls them no end.
You guys neglect the real political issue between religious and secular in Israel.
The Jewish Left hates Israel to the extent that it embodies what they see as religion, even if no more than defensible borders.
Being Marxist they see themselves as finally being part of a final synthesis where all and included, except people who stand apart because of their religious beliefs.
Not that the Left is not a religion, it is and it hates competition.
These leftist today sponges of the capitalist welfare-state hate it as it suits the fashionable rebel intelectual image.The Jews,always the target for the surchers of the success,being the victims of the Western countries before the 21th century became the intellectual elites and the defendant for the Western capitalism evils.The moral support of the masses and the Church is constant.For the propagandists of the equality the Jews are the eternal target.
Some make sense of the world by living in the World of Words and word-meanings. It is a cleaner and more tidy place than the real world, but a bit off. For example, isn’t kerensky’s General Order #1 to the Imperial Army something out of the World of Words?
Is it possible that some of these people resonate with the claims of authoritarian movements, not looking past the words? Are they in effect Power Groupies?
The real issue is that we must realize that antisemitism is not an accident of socialism, it is part of its essence.
Socialism asserts the primacy of the social collective over the individual. It sees the socialist state as the only legitimate connection among individuals, who can have no existence outside of the socialist state.
Judaism insists on the connections among Jews and between them and God. Socialism rejects the validity of intra-ethnic connections and the idea of God. Socialism will accept individual Jews, but only if they renounce Judaism.
European Jewish Zionism began with socialist Jews like Herzl, who tried to square this circle by relocating a socialist state of Jews to the historic land of Israel. Herzl’s first Zionist propaganda was a socialist utopia: “Alte Neue Land”. And, at its inception, the Zionists tried to create a socialist state. The kibbutzes were some of the most thoroughgoing experiments in socialist living ever.
However, dreams die hard. Socialism always fails and so it did in Israel, where the socialist state has been dismantled, and the kibbutzes have been liquidated or privatized. Further, many of the Jewish refugees from Europe and Muslim countries turned out be more interested in Judaism and its traditions than socialism.
The remaining Jewish Socialists are a sad lot. Unfortunately many of them are academics like Butler, Finklestein, Chomsky, and the late Tony Judt (may his name be blotted out) who have many routes to afflict their fellow Jews who have remained faithful to the Jewish people and their religion.
Thank you. This is the best structural explanation of the phenomena.
Menachem Ben Yakov has the same understanding, but you really spelled it out.
Leftards are delusive: “Honestly, do you really believe that the people who join these groups share the anti-hierarchical, anti-domineering values of the civic culture you, we all, thrive in?”
Since when are leftists ANY of those things?!
They eschew individual human rights in favor of idolatrous, hierarchical group rights. They – like the colonialist moslems, who violently invaded and enslaved all those peaceful, formerly Greek, Christian and Jewish countries in the middle east such as Egypt, Syria, Libya, and Iraq (not to mention India and Iran) – are domineering, global-oriented conformist imperialists.
They are fear-focused, fearsome cowards who avoid all individual responsibility by championing imaginary group rights. They find it much easier to slanderously blame their victims by selling endless victimology scenarios in stead of bettering themselves through self-reliant responsibility.
Finally, of course Israel is a legitimate country, a sovereign nation peacefully bought in 1919, whose creation ALL the moslem Arab kings and potentates in the area had eagerly agreed to. And of course they have a perfect right to exist, and to defend their borders (including by “occupying” their own territories, such as “The West Bank” aka JUDEA, and Gaza)! The moslems’ only real excuse is the racist anti-Jewish hatred detailed in their Qur’an, a book which was written at a time 1,400 years ago, when there were hardly any Jews left in the land of Israel to complain about anyway! So the existence of the modern state of Israel today isn’t why the moslems are taught from birth to hate Jews – it’s just their latest backwards excuse to do so!
And the left, knowing islam is the greatest threat out there, only eagerly jumps on their bandwagon, gets behind their hate and out in front of Hamas and Hezbollah to “defend” those bullies, in order to simply save their OWN skins: they imagine that, by Submitting to the islamic threats and lies, then those threats will be immediately OVER – for THEM, anyway! And if the rest of us have those silly consciences and are too “stupid” to get with the “inevitable” pogrom program, then that’s just evolution in action! Whee!
Andrei S. Markovits, writing in the relatively progressive magazine Dissent, said in the Winter 2005 issue, “A new European (and American) commonality for all lefts—a new litmus test of progressive politics—seems to have developed: anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism (though not anti-Semitism, at least not yet).” European and American leftists may not yet be anti-Semitic, but they are deaf to overt anti-Semitism coming from Islamists.