There's an interesting article in this week's "New Yorker" about Dieudonne, a French comedian (who the author likens to a cross between Lenny Bruce and Sacha Baron Cohen) who has become a leading voice for that nation's rising anti-Semitism.
What's interesting is the article's articulation of modern anti-Semitism, which I found rather accurate:
"Dieudonne is the spokeman, the godfather, the icon of a new kind of anti-Semitism," Alain Finkielkraut, the philospher and memoirist of jewish identity, told me. "It is an explicility anti-racist anti-Semitism, which inverts traditional anti-Semitism by asserting that the Nazis today are in fact the Jewis. The idiom of anti-Semitism is no longer racism; it is now anti-racism. Diedonne's followers say they don't hate Jews, they hate Jewish racism. They say that Israel is like Nazism, like apartheid." . . .
"In France, being an anti-Semite in the old way does not work. You will not raise a mass movement by saying the Jews killed Christ - nobody cares. Accuse them of having invented Christ, like Voltaire did in the eighteenth century, still nobody cares. As far as being a special race, nobody believes that anymore. But anti-racist anti-Semitism - saying tha tfor the sake of the blacks, for the sake of the Arabs, we must make the Jews shut up - this works. If the Jews practiced "memorial pornography" [a Siudonne quote referring to Jewish commemoration of the Holocaust] - thus exaggerating their own suffering - they became responsible for why the world didn't care enough about the history of slavery and the suffering of blacks. Dieudonne and his followers suppose that the capacity for empathy and the capacity for indignation is limited. But the brain doesn't work like this - you can care about the Holocaust and slavery. The more you are concerned by one, the more you are likely to be concerned by the other.
Phillppe Val, an idiosyncratic hero of the French left and the editor of the biting satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, says that Diuedonne "pushes us to transgress the very basis of our culture and politics - the knowledge that we have constructed on the ruins of Auschwitz. We are constructed upon that. Modern European democracy stated from there. If you want ot tear it all apart, the ultimate destructive anarchist gesture, there is no better place to start."
I would link to Tom Reiss' full article, but unfortunately it's not online. You can find it in the November 19th issue of The New Yorker.
"In France, being an anti-Semite in the old way does not work. You will not raise a mass movement by saying the Jews killed Christ - nobody cares. Accuse them of having invented Christ, like Voltaire did in the eighteenth century, still nobody cares. As far as being a special race, nobody believes that anymore. But anti-racist anti-Semitism - saying tha tfor the sake of the blacks, for the sake of the Arabs, we must make the Jews shut up - this works. If the Jews practiced "memorial pornography" [a Siudonne quote referring to Jewish commemoration of the Holocaust] - thus exaggerating their own suffering - they became responsible for why the world didn't care enough about the history of slavery and the suffering of blacks. Dieudonne and his followers suppose that the capacity for empathy and the capacity for indignation is limited. But the brain doesn't work like this - you can care about the Holocaust and slavery. The more you are concerned by one, the more you are likely to be concerned by the other.
Phillppe Val, an idiosyncratic hero of the French left and the editor of the biting satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, says that Diuedonne "pushes us to transgress the very basis of our culture and politics - the knowledge that we have constructed on the ruins of Auschwitz. We are constructed upon that. Modern European democracy stated from there. If you want ot tear it all apart, the ultimate destructive anarchist gesture, there is no better place to start."
I would link to Tom Reiss' full article, but unfortunately it's not online. You can find it in the November 19th issue of The New Yorker.
