Great article. I hadn't known that about the Billie Holliday song. That... really speaks to me, for some reason.
A lot of people don't give a fuck about antisemitism for a lot of reasons. Part of it's that it's viewed as an "old" problem, because it is, in the sense that it's as old as the hills. The holocaust helps and hurts that perception, since it gives a clear defining "and then it was over!" point, a little like the way the civil rights act does (or did) for white people. After we beat the nazis and discovered the horrors of the camps, everybody definitely stopped being antisemitic, right? Well, no, of course not. Antisemitism is as old as the hills. It'll be here long after everybody posting in this thread is dead.
It's also got a lot of really unfortunate intersectional fault points specific to it. Like, being woke means, to some extent, being anticapitalist, right? Even if you're not a full-bore socialist, nobody can deny the way the excesses of capitalism feed into other systems of prejudice. Buuuuut when you start chanting about the banks controlling everything you start picking up some pretty fucking unfortunate agreement. Because hey, you know who definitely agrees with that? Nazis, because they think the banks are all run by Jews. This is not to say you can't critique or even want to demolish capitalism - go nuts. It's just that it's really, really easy to pick up on a thread of real oppression and get diverted into millennia-old conspiracy theories instead. The people with all the money have all the power, you say, and the guy next to you goes yes, they do, like those Rothschilds, and then you're off to the races. That's what people mean when they say that anti-semitism is bi-partisan. The left has antisemites and the right has antisemites and even though they might very well hate everything else about their opposite they will agree on that. That's not me drawing an equivalency, mind - the right's the one that built Auschwitz. But it gets tiring, hearing excuses from supposed allies.
This is kinda all rooted in the the religious oppression, which is like, it's own kettle of fish. Antisemitism being both a racial and religious prejudice means it crops up across demographics that you wouldn't expect. And the way that Jews are variably white to most people (in NA, at least) and very much not white to the white supremacists puts us on the outs with everybody, it sometimes feels.
Anyway, KAJ with the great article. Recommend everybody read it.
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