Antisemitism, homophobia and a radical response to both

One of the complaints of Jews who are concerned about growing signs of antisemitism across the world is that antisemitism is often excluded from discussions of racism. There are particular reasons for this, which a comparison with homophobia helps clarify.

Most racism assumes inferiority on the part of the other. Indeed, racism as it developed in the western world was necessary to justify slavery, as Black Africans could be deemed less human than their white slave owners. In the shameful case of Australia, the original British settlers not only believed Aborigines were inferior, but talked openly of their dying out in favour of more superior Europeans.

These assumptions linger today in lingering assumptions about people seen as non-white, although rarely expressed in the crudities of a century ago. But Jews, rather like the Chinese in Southeast Asia, are disliked and persecuted precisely because of the fear that they are superior, that they are rich, cosmopolitan and powerful and therefore a threat in a very different way to that posed by Indigenous Australians.

In the minds of antisemites, Jews can simultaneously be exploitative capitalists and subversive communists. One of the bizarre features of some Christian Zionists, who are a powerful pro-Israeli lobby, especially in the United States, is that they are both ardent defenders of an expanded Jewish state while clinging to antisemitic tropes about Jews.

This is where the parallel with homosexuals becomes useful, for we, too, are perceived as subversive, cosmopolitan and powerful. The parallel is hardly new: back in 1951 Hannah Arendt wrote of “the complicated game of exposure and concealment … only one’s Jewishness (or homosexuality) had opened the doors of the exclusive salons, while at the same time they made one’s position extremely insecure”.