Liberal Protestant Philosemitic Anti-Semitism

“You spend so much time among anti-Zionists. How can you tell which ones, which minority, are anti-Semites?” Mark Oppenheimer once asked a friend of his he described as “a Jew very much on the Left . . . who favors boycott and divestment [from Israel and is] . . . deeply enmeshed in proudly anti-Israel politics.” Oppenheimer, who writes the “Beliefs” column for the New York Times, is questioning an Episcopal minister who lost his job after allegedly anti-Semitic statements, and seems (and rightly, I think) unconvinced by the minister’s explanation.

“Well, that’s easy.” He said, “It’s the liberal Protestants. The Jews aren’t anti-Semitic, even if they’re called self-loathing. And the Muslims aren’t anti-Semitic, because they get us.” He said they understand everything about us, as we understand everything about them. He said it’s the well-meaning leftie Protestants. They profess a deep spiritual kinship with Jews, they’ve often lived in the Middle East, they’ve led tours there.

After an interjection from he subject, Oppenheirmer continued:

He said, “But they fundamentally see Jews as, their image of the contemporary Jew is of a rich, crass, Zionist who distorts American politics and is bad for the idealized Jew whom they love. Whom they may or may not know any of anymore.”

And, I knew exactly what he was talking about. And I’m not saying that’s you. At all. I don’t know you. But I know people like that … And what I sometimes think is, about the philo-Semitic liberal Protestant experience, is that they don’t understand the why the contemporary liberal Jew might be a Zionist. That in their mind the last good Zionist went out sometime around the late 1960s, was a socialist on a kibbutz somewhere, was totally secular, and that they don’t actually get the lived experience of being, say, a religious Jew in Brussels today.

I think there’s a truth that one can deeply love Jews and have loved Jews, but feel that there are no good Jews left. Except the ones that are entirely secular and anti-Zionist. That there are no good Jews left like there once were.