“anti-Semitism, like all conspiracy theorising, is ultimately about providing comfortable reassurance. It tells the anti-Semite that the problems in her society do not really run very deep, that they are only the work of some small cancer to be zapped while leaving a healthy body intact. It is a mechanism for defending the fundamental rudiments of the existing social order as they come under strain. Far from merely peripheral fanaticism, anti-Semitism on this reading has always held a central place in the everyday political thought of the West: rescuing the image of civilisation by identifying its problems as really alien to it. [...] Anti-Semitism is appealing because it offers explanations for experiences of power and especially alienation that are more obvious, more intuitive than any developed social theory of capital. It is on these terms that it must be fought, understanding it grimly as a conservative form of subaltern consciousness, whose danger lies partly in providing a distorted frame through which to see the world, a frame inimical to meaningful human emancipation.
[...]
“Our epoch bolsters and alters anti-Semitism. In the days of ‘There Is No Alternative’, we are all Panglossian pessimists: we live in the best of all possible worlds, and it is shit. In such times, the appeal of anti-Semitism is not as it once was, that it purports to identify a cancer easily expunged while leaving the broad structure of social relations intact. Rather, like David Icke’s lizards, the attraction of the omnipotent Jew for neoliberal anti-Semitism is that he cannot be abolished, or won’t be. Online and in conversation, anti-Semitism often arises today not in the demand for another Final Solution but as a cynical shrug directed against dreamers and radicals: ‘You won’t be able to change anything anyway,’ says the anti-Semite, ‘they will never let you.’ Frequently the identity of this ‘they’ is left unstated. It doesn’t really matter. This is still, like the anti-Semitism of old, a structure of thinking that is not really about Jews at all. As in the old model, antipathy towards Jews is only a convenient tool for sustaining broader political commitments [...] just as classic models of anti-Semitism work both by regarding it as anti-modern and as constitutive of modernity, we should identify not only the nominally anti-neoliberal content of contemporary anti-Semitism but also the degree to which neoliberal ideology spurs anti-Semitism as its supportive spouse – a portrait of Jews as a closed cabal acquires additional horror at a time that worships the free competition of open markets. Together this anti-political pessimism and the hostility to Jews as a cartel constitute the embeddedness of anti-Semitism as a mode of thinking about politics under neoliberalism.
[...]
“The demolition of those institutions and cultures once capable of reproducing left-wing consciousness has been so stark in some parts of the world that people grasp for cruder, more base and above all more pessimistic languages of ostensible anti-elitism. Meanwhile, the double nature of modern anti-Semitism makes it a perfect fear for the same crowd who worry about ‘populism’, that ideological horseshoe. Anti-Semitism is the unacceptable anti-elitism, so seeing it everywhere is the technocrat’s terrified coding of the reappearance of antagonistic politics.”
https://salvage.zone/in-print/jewophobia-2/#
AntiSemitism
