We need to talk about anti-Semitism

Nov 2, 2019 by

by Frank Furedi, spiked:

I felt genuinely spooked when I heard that gravestones in a 300-year-old Jewish cemetery in Rochester in Kent had been smashed just a few hours before Yom Kippur. I live close to Rochester, so I took this act of anti-Semitic vandalism a little personally. But what really spooked me was not so much the grotesque destruction of the gravestones as the way in which it was reported. Most media outlets seemed to think this act of desecration was not really big news. They didn’t give it the attention it deserved.

The low-key reporting of the incident at Rochester is similar to the media response to the attack at a synagogue in Halle in Germany earlier this month. A gunman shot and murdered two people, yet as far as the media were concerned this attack did not merit the kind of response given to school shootings or attacks on mosques. Within a few days, Halle was all but forgotten.

This media indifference to attacks on Jews can also be seen in the response to vicious assaults on Orthodox Jews in Crown Heights in New York City in recent weeks. Few media outlets are making a big story of this awful violence. It seems that for sections of the media, when Jews are attacked it isn’t so much a hate crime as an unpleasant incident, soon forgotten.

There are two reasons why anti-Semitic attacks are often reported by the media in a casual, low-key manner. The first is that in the worldview of Anglo-American identity politics, Jews are increasingly seen as the personification of white privilege. Jewishness is looked upon with suspicion by those of a ‘social justice’ persuasion. As I have argued previously, when identity politics dominates public life Jewishness will come to be regarded as a ‘spoiled identity’, as the sociologist Erving Goffman described those identities that are viewed as polluted or problematic.

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