So you know where this is going.
I have been a Jew for 83 years. Though I’ve only known it for around 78. My parents explained it to me at Christmas in 1945, as the reason that I was not going to get a Christmas tree, like my playmates, in Los Angeles. It was at the end of the Second World War and Jews in the United States were coming out of the antisemitic closet that mainstream 20th-century America had constructed for them, and widespread news about the Shoah (Holocaust) had shaken them out of.
Growing up in west L.A. and the San Fernando Valley in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, I had a reform bar mitzvah and went to college, without ever experiencing the sort of fist-fight-in-the-schoolyard antisemitism my son-in-law faced in the 1960s growing up in Alexandria, Virginia.
It wasn’t until the mid-1990s, on returning to Amherst from a job I had in Iowa, that I learned from my friend Bob that we were both listed on a website as “Self Hating, Israel Threatening Jews.” You can still find references to it as the Masaada2000 S.H.I.T. List on the internet.What was my crime? As far as I can tell, it was my criticizing of Israel as an “apartheid state.” And this is the point of my note here. There are a good many people, Jews and non-Jews, who think that criticism of the state of Israel is antisemitic, as so many white nationalists consider any criticism of the United States to be anti-American.
As with all the modern antisemites, Jewish or other, he moves the goalposts and claims that he is merely a "critic of Israel."
But if he accused Israel of "apartheid" - especially in the mid-1990s, during the Oslo process, when Israel was heading towards giving autonomy and a state to Palestinian Arabs - then he wasn't merely "criticizing Israel." He was engaged in a blood libel, of expecting standards of Israel not given to any other nation on the planet.
The straw man argument that every critic of Israel is accused of antisemitism is a lie. Criticism of Israel similar to criticism of any country is not antisemitic. But singling out Israel for acts that other countries do and reserving all the vitriol for Israel is indeed antisemitism.
There have been more column inches denouncing Israel's accidental killing of aid workers in three days than there have been in all the accidental killings of civilians by US and British forces over twenty years. And no mainstream media outlet accused the Western armies of doing this deliberately.
When the US attacked a hospital in Kunduz in 2015, killing 42 medical personnel and patients, not one newspaper accused the US of a systematic campaign to destroy Afghan healthcare. But when Israel goes into hospitals and only kills terrorists, it is accused of that.
Those double standards are antisemitism, whether intended or not. Just as racism can be subconscious, so can Jew-hatred.
Tartakov is an expert on Dalit art. He spent decades studying and teaching about it. Dalits are members of the lowest caste in India and they suffer unimaginable abuse as this 2007 HRW report describes:
Dalits endure segregation in housing, schools, and access to public services. They are denied access to land, forced to work in degrading conditions, and routinely abused at the hands of the police and upper-caste community members who enjoy the state’s protection. Entrenched discrimination violates Dalits’ rights to education, health, housing, property, freedom of religion, free choice of employment, and equal treatment before the law. Dalits also suffer routine violations of their right to life and security of person through state-sponsored or -sanctioned acts of violence, including torture.Caste-motivated killings, rapes, and other abuses are a daily occurrence in India. Between 2001 and 2002 close to 58,000 cases were registered under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act – legislation that criminalizes particularly egregious abuses against Dalits and tribal community members. A 2005 government report states that a crime is committed against a Dalit every 20 minutes. Though staggering, these figures represent only a fraction of actual incidents since many Dalits do not register cases for fear of retaliation by the police and upper-caste individuals.
Tartakov is quite aware of the systematic discrimination Dalits suffer. He's written about it. But he didn't call it apartheid.
If you describe Israel's treatment of its Arab minority as apartheid but don't use the same term for India's treatment of Dalits, when by every possible metric the Dalits are treated worse, yes, you are an antisemite.
Even if you had a Reform bar mitzvah.
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