Eve Garrard argues we can learn something of value about contemporary antisemitism from the use of two metaphors. The infection metaphor reminds us that if antisemitism is ignored or indulged by others it grows and spreads. The addiction metaphor reminds us that the rewards of antisemitism aren’t negligible and its bearers will cling onto them tightly, especially if they perceive, sometimes though not always rightly, that their society is disturbingly unstable and unfair.
Antisemitism as a phenomenon is not only alarming but also very puzzling, especially in countries which pride themselves on having won the war against the Nazis; whose principal educational institutions are generally very disapproving of all forms of racism; where people who regard themselves as anti-racist often deploy the rhetoric of ‘Never again’. [1] Even more puzzling is the fact that antisemitism is currently on the increase, in many places by leaps and bounds. [2] The spike started immediately after 7 October, before a single Israeli army boot entered Gaza, so it wasn’t prompted by the war in Gaza, though it was certainly greatly increased by the armed conflict. It looks as if the very sight of atrocities being committed against Jewish civilians was enough to make some people – on occasion, rather a lot of people – hate Jews and want to harm more of them. No doubt there are many different causal forces producing this result, and much thought and discussion and research will eventually be needed to pinpoint the most important ones. But right now, to help us understand and even just to describe this phenomenon, it may be useful to reach for a metaphor, since we often try to understand a puzzling phenomenon by comparing it to another one which we do understand a bit better, and hope thereby to get a better grip on the less comprehensible event.
Infection
We live in an age in which millions of people are exposed daily to some variant of the argument that the challenges of the world they live in are best explained in terms of ‘Israel’. (David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The History of a Way of Thinking) Metaphors can be very illuminating (a great deal of literature, especially poetry, rests on them), and one that springs readily to mind in the current case is the metaphor of infection. If we think of antisemitism as being like a virus, then as the virus spreads, it infects more and more people, each victim radiating infection to even more people, so that the virus increases by leaps and bounds, as we have seen. People do often come to adopt whichever views are prevalent and widely voiced in their communities, and in so doing they help to spread those views. (This is not confined to antisemitism; there are many ideological fashions which spread in this way: less by study and hard thinking, and more by casual communicative contact with those who accept the ideologies in question.) The comparison between antisemitism and infectious disease is an attractive one, since it helps us see why the problem spreads so easily, and it has in the past produced at least one literary work of great power: Albert Camus’ The Plague (La Peste), written in the aftermath of the greatest blood-fest of antisemitism the world has ever seen. In the novel a large city falls prey to a form of bubonic plague, which is spread by rats carrying the deadly bacillus. Many die, but the disease is finally defeated (for now) by the unceasing efforts of those few doctors and other workers who have the resolution, knowledge, and perseverance to combat it.
This is a powerful metaphor for antisemitism. But although it’s attractive, and it certainly captures how quickly antisemitic speech and action can spread through a culture, there’s something about antisemitism which the idea of infection doesn’t fully reflect. Admittedly, no metaphor is ever fully satisfactory, mainly because no two events are ever fully identical; but the metaphor of infection for the current dramatic increase in antisemitism, illuminating though it is, can’t be entirely adequate because it doesn’t fully capture certain key features of Jew-hatred, in particular the presence and role of human will and choice – that is, human agency. This is a very significant difference between physical disease and antisemitism: in cases of physical infection, neither the virus nor the victims choose to spread the disease, nor can they be morally blamed for doing so. Viruses aren’t the kind of thing that can ever choose or be held morally responsible for anything, let alone their own deadly consequences, and most viral victims would very much prefer to avoid catching whatever plague is currently around, and often take elaborate (though frequently unsuccessful) precautions to do so. We can’t normally blame them for catching the disease or for spreading it. But in the case of antisemitism, we do, and should, want to hold the antisemites responsible for their prejudices and their consequences, especially given the lethal history of that catastrophic bigotry. Many antisemites do willingly choose their views – often indeed embracing them with every sign of warm welcome – and that’s a measure of their responsibility for both their views and the actions that flow from them.
Addiction
There’s another metaphor which may help us think more comprehensively about the current outbreak of malignant hostility towards Jews: it’s the metaphor of addiction, with its unusual mixture of both visible choice and inwardly felt compulsion. The addict is an object of compassion because he feels irresistibly driven towards taking the drug that harms him, while at the same time he’s at least partly responsible both for initiating his addiction and for the harm, often considerable, which it does to others. Addiction can also be treated as a public health issue, rather like a purely physical disease, and as with antisemitism, those who are addicted, perhaps especially in the case of alcohol addiction, often deny the presence of any addiction at all. Antisemitism too can be regarded as a public health matter, though in this case it’s the health of the body politic which is at issue: the increasing prevalence of antisemitism is a threat to democracy, as has been frequently pointed out. [3]
Why might addiction be a satisfactory metaphor for antisemitism – that is, what are the significant points of similarity between them? First, and most importantly, there is the fact that antisemitism is enjoyable: it gives its bearers pleasure to criticise, deride, blame, and condemn Jews and their behaviour. [4] For some it has the added frisson of being a transgressive pleasure, disapproved of by more conventional people, so that there’s the extra enjoyment for the antisemite of feeling bold, original, swimming bravely against the mundane everyday tide. Given that antisemitism is a source of pleasure (though only for the antisemite, of course), it isn’t surprising that it becomes deeply embedded; people usually want to continue or repeat enjoyable activities. And in general, people are normally quite reluctant to admit that they’ve been wrong about any of their views, and it’s even harder where abandoning a view also involves relinquishing a significant pleasure. So far, so similar to the first steps on the road to addiction, where the initial drug-taking is pleasurable, and wanting to repeat so satisfying an experience may be regrettable but it’s very understandable.
Secondly, drug-taking is habit-forming, and so is antisemitism: the more often a person voices it, the more likely they are to do so again. It becomes easier and easier to take that stance, to find Jews a bit objectionable in a particular context, and then objectionable in a wider range of contexts, until, as Nirenberg suggests, the Jews become the standard locus of blame for whatever problem strikes antisemites as currently important.
Another very noticeable point of similarity with addiction is the desire not merely to repeat but also to increase the stimulus dose. What used to give sufficient pleasure is now not quite enough: a bigger dose is needed. Where once a person may have wanted to keep Jews out of the golf club, or to crack jokes about Jews loving money, now they may want to keep them out of the university campus, or make up rhymes about the need for violent intifada against them. Where once they (falsely) complained that Jewish immigrants to Israel had stolen land from Arab inhabitants, now they (falsely) claim that Israel is deliberately and intentionally committing genocide against all Palestinians. This slide to hyperbole constantly ups the ante: the hostile vocabulary moves from stinginess and clannishness to settler-colonialism, apartheid and Nazism, until the demonisation becomes so extreme that it’s almost funny – see, for example, the charge recently laid against Israel that its aim was to starve Gazans into cannibalism. [5] To be fair, pockets of antisemites displaying this implausible extremity of hatred have been visible for some time, but there’s a lot more of this around than there was, say, 20 years ago, aided no doubt by the rise of digital media. [6] And regrettably there’s nothing funny about the recent slide into claiming that Zionists don’t deserve to live, or the voicing of threats to rape or murder particular specified (or even unspecified) Jews.
The use of hyperbole provides a further source of pleasure for the person deploying it, since the degree and scope of the wickedness allegedly being revealed is a testimony to the importance of the antisemite’s critique. This can be seen not only in the students engaging in hostile protests, but also in some of the journalism sympathetic to them. One journalist has declared that protesting students were burdened under ‘an impossible moral load’ of feeling that ‘the responsibility for forcing a reassessment of the nation’s stance on Gaza now rested on their shoulders’. [7] It was noticeable that the article which contains this claim made no mention at all of 7 October; or of whether Israel, like any other country, might have a right to defend its citizens against the repetition of that dreadful event, a repetition which was explicitly and chillingly promised by Hamas itself; or whether Israel might in fact have a duty to defend its citizens against such atrocities; nor was there any consideration at all about whether Hamas might be the proper locus of blame for the current war; or whether any of the impossibly morally burdened students have at any time considered Hamas’s responsibility for this war; or whether in the journalist’s view that consideration is in any way appropriate; or whether in contrast the students and their allies simply assume that Israel and the Jews who support it can safely be blamed for all events of which anyone might disapprove, including the rapes, sexual and other tortures, kidnappings and murders carried out by those who want at best to evict and at worst to murder all the Jews in Israel and if possible elsewhere.
None of these considerations seemed to count against the satisfactions of admiring the supposedly high moral load carried by the protesting students, and possibly the consequent admiring of journalistic sensitivity to the existence of that impossibly heavy burden. (To be fair, though, this journalist did say that she could see why some Jewish students would feel uncomfortable. She did not, however, consider whether the Israeli hostages currently incarcerated in Gaza might be feeling something rather worse than uncomfortable.)
Further pleasures currently offered by antisemitism include the satisfaction of believing that you’re on the right side of history, and even more of contemplating your own courage in telling truth to power. For many people, especially when they’re young, these satisfactions are very great; rather like alcohol and other drugs, they induce feelings of power and confidence. Hence they naturally increase the strength of the commitment to the antisemitic standpoint, and a consequent reluctance to abandon it.
Other similarities between antisemitism and drug addiction include the reluctance to desist even when it’s obviously harming other people as well as yourself, and the extreme blunting of sensibilities towards any attempts to persuade the addict to change. This is certainly the case with antisemitism: if David Nirenberg is right (and I think he is) in suggesting that hostility to Jews across the centuries is a prism through which people make sense of whatever most disturbs them in the world, then it’s bound to be very difficult, indeed painful, for them to abandon that prism, to acknowledge that they were wrong, that their moral vision was so defective that they were in effect hallucinating, and in doing so they often caused great harm in the world. [8] It took defeat in a world war for many Nazis to come to see that they had been wrong in their consuming addiction to Jew-hatred, and notoriously for some of them even that wasn’t sufficient to change their minds. Breaking an addiction is very difficult and painful, and if we’re reasonably empathetic we may feel for the addict in this predicament. But not, it is to be hoped, as much as we feel for those who have been damaged, sometimes terminally, by the antisemite’s consuming absorption in an illusory good.
The metaphor of addiction isn’t a completely perfect one for antisemitism: in the later stages of drug addiction free choice seems to play a vanishingly small role, whereas the antisemite does appear to remain at liberty to reject her hostile views. It’s just that the rewards they provide for her are sufficiently satisfying to make it unlikely that she’ll do so. Nor does the metaphor (nor indeed could any single metaphor) do justice to the full and complex roll-call of the causes and consequences of this deadly hatred. But it does have some traction in the project of understanding what antisemitism is like: the metaphor of addiction illuminates its persistence, and allows us to see something of what makes it so resistant to eradication. It also allows us to think of the antisemite both as responsible for his bigotry and its dreadful results, and also as a person whose cognition of the world is so damaged by his unexamined and self-indulgent presuppositions that he is to some extent an object of pity. The spectacle of affluent young middle class students demanding that others provide them with what they refer to as humanitarian aid to prevent them from suffering alleged dehydration and starvation, while surrounded by the entirely accessible plenty to be found on any university campus, is not a lovely one, and it certainly suggests some serious cognitive failures. It’s even less appealing if they regard themselves as uniquely carrying the heavy moral burden of expressing hostility to Zionism and to those Jews – a very large majority – who support it, and eventually to Jews in general. And if they want their country to seek the weakening, and possibly the destruction, of the only Jewish state in the world, a state which has acted as a life-raft for thousands upon thousands of Jews fleeing persecution and ethnic cleansing, from the surrounding Arab states as well as from Russia and other parts of Europe, then there’s remarkably little left of any moral appeal at all. But students are on the whole very young, and allowances should be made for them on that account. The responsibility of those adults who encourage them in covert or overt antisemitism, from within the university as well as from outside it, is another and much more severe matter.
What does all this imply for the struggle against antisemitism? Probably that it’s ineradicable, but we already knew that, although we may have needed reminding. Whatever metaphor or metaphors we choose to help us think about this phenomenon, which hideously degrades its practitioners and devastates and sometimes kills its many victims, fighting against it remains a permanent necessity. But we can also learn something of value from the use of metaphors: comparison with infection and addiction focus on different, though complementary, aspects of the problem of antisemitism. The infection metaphor reminds us that if antisemitism is ignored or indulged by others it grows and spreads. The addiction metaphor reminds us that the rewards of antisemitism aren’t negligible and its bearers will cling onto them tightly, especially if they perceive, sometimes though not always rightly, that their society is disturbingly unstable and unfair. [9] And it will also tell us, again and again, that antisemites will find it deeply uncomfortable, difficult, and sometimes very painful to relinquish their bigoted views, and will strongly resist efforts to encourage them to do so. This is not an entirely new idea: Carl Jung, the founder of the school of analytical psychology, saw the possibility of states of mind being addictive, and remarked that ‘Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism’ … or, as he might have added (though he certainly didn’t, antisemitism. And some current research in cognitive sociology is prepared to treat the broader phenomenon of hate itself as addictive in quality. [10]
The two metaphors are not in fact in conflict: sadly, a state of mind, an idea, an ideology, can be both addictive and infectious. And as Camus tells us in the final sentence of The Plague: ‘[Rieux, the central character] knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city’.
We – all of us, including those who have trouble recognising the situation for what it is – are having to deal once again with the ominous truth which lies behind these metaphors.
[1] My thanks to Lesley Klaff, Shalom Lappin, and Stephen de Wijze for very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this piece.
[2] I’m not going to discuss here the question of whether antizionism is invariably antisemitic. I’m assuming that it needn’t necessarily be antisemitic, but that much, perhaps most, of the time it is, and I’m also assuming that the readers of this article can tell the difference.
[3] See for example Dave Rich, Everyday Hate, Biteback Publishing Ltd, 2023, ch 8.
[4] For a fuller argument for this claim see E. Garrard, The Pleasures of Antisemitism, in A.Johnson (ed), Mapping the New Left Antisemitism: the Fathom Essays, Routledge 2023
[5] See https://medium.com/@jackieatworknow/israeli-goal-cannibalism-in-gaza-b855ea6182c5
[6] See Cary Nelson’s excellent treatment of such cases in Israel Denial: Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, and the Faculty Campaign Against the Jewish State, Academic Engagement Network & Indiana University Press, 2019, especially ch 6.
[7] Nesrine Malik, ‘Amid the furore, listen to what the students are saying’, The Guardian, 6 May 2024.
[8] David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, Norton, 2013. See also Norman Geras, ‘Alibi Antisemitism’ in A. Johnson (ed), Mapping the New Left Antisemitism: the Fathom Essays, Routledge 2023.
[9] For a full analysis of this aspect, and many others, of modern antisemitism see Shalom Lappin, The New Antisemitism, forthcoming, Polity, June 2024.
[10] See, for example, P.Simi, K.Blee, et al, ‘Addicted to Hate: Identity Residual among Former White Supremacists’, American Sociological Review, 2017.
