Jewish Social Studies

On April 18, 2020 a protest against lockdowns enacted to stop the spread of COVID-19 took place at the Ohio Statehouse. ¹ The protestors waved Trump banners and yellow Tea Party "Don't Tread on Me" flags, and they held signs reading "Open Ohio" or "Open My County." Among protesters were some with antisemitic signs. Some spotted signs depicting a blue rat with a star of David and a caption "The Real Plague." Soon, conspiracies around George Soros, the Hungarian-born Jewish American philanthropist and a Holocaust survivor, began to circulate in far-right circles. ² This has come on the heels of the upsurge of antisemitic attacks that have intensified in the US since 2016, leading to responses in op-eds, blog posts, and reports that almost invariably make sweeping statements about Jewish history and antisemitism. "COVID-19, like any crisis in history since the inception of the Jewish people, will ignite a wave of antisemitism," wrote Michael Laitman on the online platform JewishBoston.com. ³ NPR reported: "American Jews are finding themselves in a historically familiar position: Scapegoated for a plague." ⁴ "All of this can feel medieval," wrote Aviya Kushner in The Forward. ⁵

Many of the articles refer to the premodern era, with the Black Death, which peaked in western Europe in 1348–49, and the persecution of Jews that followed repeatedly becoming a focal point of their examples. Aviya Kushner homed in on the word "burning." Brian [End Page 20] Schrauger, in The Jerusalem Post, discussed Jews being "slaughtered," "murdered," "bludgeoned to death, herded into houses to be burned alive en masse, stripped naked and marched to a collective massacre," before asking "Could COVID-19 ignite an outbreak of antisemitism?" ⁶ Dan Freedman, in Moment Magazine, sought to explain "why Jews were blamed for the Black Death"; doing so, he too repeated the language of persecution by highlighting "episodes of violence," "slaughter," "burning," "torture," and more. ⁷ Although Freedman did not answer the question asked, the answer seems implicit in the vocabulary he employed.

Even before the COVID-19 crisis, recent acts of antisemitic violence, including shootings and stabbings, have prompted widespread responses. In their discussions of the issue, members of the news media and Jewish community leaders alike commonly cite the string of anti-Jewish attacks that have occurred in recent years in the United States—in Pittsburgh, Poway, and Brooklyn. Commentators analyzing the December 2019 Hanukkah attack in Monsey, New York commonly referred back to these and other recent cases of anti-Jewish violence to emphasize the rise of antisemitic violence. ⁸ A headline to Deborah Lipstadt's piece published in The Atlantic following the Monsey attack declared: "Jews Are Going Underground." ⁹

The intention of these media articles has been to combat antisemitism by pleading that we learn lessons from the past. Yet, the act of recounting horrifying violence underscores the dangerously narrow context of news about Jews and the limited common vocabulary deployed in such reports about past and contemporary events alike—a vocabulary that has been marked, not without good reasons, by the language of persecution. But the relentless repetition of the language of violence does nothing to explain the cause of such anti-Jewish violence. It only suggests to the public that Jews have always been hated by others, with no alternative offered. Showing that kind of persistent hatred does not answer the "why" and thus does not provide readers with tools to combat this hatred. In fact, it may do the opposite; it may encourage hatred and violence as evidenced by the fact that some of the perpetrators of anti-Jewish attacks today have been known to have Googled questions like, for example, "Why Did Hitler Hate Jews?" ¹⁰ The current popular writing about American Jews in the era of the pandemic (and Trump) feels eerily like Leidensgeschichte (the history of suffering), but without the Gelehrtengeschichte (the history of learning) that was equally a hallmark of much nineteenth-century Jewish historiography. [End Page 21]

The narrow vocabulary used in public media is not just descriptive. It has a longer and darker history that is...