Who is Opposing the AAA and Why

A few weeks ago, the House passed the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act by a vote of 320 to 91. Obviously, I’m pleased that 320 members of Congress take anti-Jewish prejudice seriously enough to want to specify in law what constitutes an anti-Semitic act so as to facilitate taking legal action against the perpetrators of such acts. But I’m much more involved emotionally with the fact that 91 members of the House voted against the measure. The naysayers were a bipartisan group too, albeit a lopsided one: 70 of those who voted against the bill are Democrats and the other 21 are Republicans. To condemn them all as haters opposed to opposing anti-Semitism would be wrong. Nor is it so that they came to their opposition from similar vantage points.

The basic concept of the AAA is that the bill requires the U.S. Department of Education to use the definition of anti-Semitism developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, a group based in Sweden that works “to foster education, remembrance, and research about what happened in the past, to build a world without genocide in the future.” (That’s a direct quote from their website; to see more, click here.) To do their work, it became necessary at some point to define anti-Semitism precisely. And so they developed a precise definition, one as brief as it is almost banal: “Anti-Semitism,” they determined, “is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” It’s hard to know what anyone could possibly take issue with in that. But, of course, the devil is always in the details.

The definition comes with quite a big set of elucidatory details, each describing a specific manifestation of anti-Jewish prejudice. They are:

1.       Calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion.

2. Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.
3. Accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group, or even for acts committed by non-Jews.
4. Denying the fact, scope, mechanisms (e.g., the gas chambers) or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany and its supporters and accomplices during World War II.
5. Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.
6. Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.
7. Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
8. Applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
9. Using the symbols and images associated with classic anti-Semitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libels) to characterize Israel or Israelis.
10. Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis, and
11. Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the State of Israel.

So you can already see where this is going. The Democratic opponents of the bill, including several Jewish member of Congress, were afraid that adopting the IHRA definition would criminalize criticism of the State of Israel under points 7 and 8 above. To me, that seems almost bizarrely exaggerated: the points listed above do not seem even remotely to me to mean that criticizing this or that decision or policy of the State of Israel ipso facto makes someone an anti-Semite in the way that questioning the right of Israel to exist would. Our own Jerry Nadler (D-NY) voted against the bill. So did Bernie Sanders (D-Vermont). That hardly surprised me, but what did me was a comment by yet another Jewish member of Congress, Sara Jacobs (D-California), who observed that although she personally feels that Israel has a right to exist, she knows many people who don’t feel that way at all despite the fact, and I quote, that they are “deeply connected to their Judaism.” I’m sure there are people out there whose understanding of Judaism is so unconnected to classical Jewish thought that they really imagine it possible to be “deeply connected” to Judaism without feeling any emotional connection to the State of Israel. We see such people, thankfully in tiny numbers, when they show up annually at the Israel Day Parade. But was it those people that Representative Jacobs had in mind? I doubt it. Whom she really had in mind, I obviously have no way to know. But to speak of such a position as though it were a valid, reasonable approach for a Jewish person to take—is it even possible for someone educated enough to be elected to Congress to know so little about her own faith? Apparently, the answer is yes. But weirder and creepier still are the reason at least some of the 21 Republicans who voted against the measure chose to do so, of which the one that made the headlines was the one put forward by Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) who opposed the bill not for any reason that had to do with Israel, but because she perceived the bill to threaten her right to hold Jewish people responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus in the 1^st century C.E. Oy.

It would be easy—and more than easy—to write off a comment like that. This is, after all, the same woman who speculated, apparently seriously, that the 2018 wildfires in California may well have been ignited by secret lasers orbiting in space that were put in place by the Rothschilds as part of a larger plan to control the world by controlling the weather. But Greene was not without her own supporters. Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, took things one step further by observing that, in his opinion, the adoption of the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act would basically outlaw the entire New Testament, an opinion promulgated on X by Representative Matt Gaetz (R-Florida). That sounds even loonier than the idea of Jewish space lasers, but students of Jewish history have long since learned not to wave away anti-Semitic tropes or remarks just because they sound crazy. And so should we not pass lightly by this kind of statement, especially when used to justify opposing a bill that would criminalize the use of extremist religious rhetoric to justify harming or killing Jewish people.

Unlike most rabbis, I know the New Testament well. (I spent years of Graduate School working on my knowledge of New Testament Greek, and took courses in New Testament theology at the Union Theological Seminary and the General Theological Seminary, both Christian institutions of higher learning in Manhattan.) So I feel entitled to an opinion. All four of the Gospels are set in first-century Israel. The Romans are in charge; Judea is a province (or, in the very beginning of the story, a client kingdom) of the Roman Empire. Other than the Roman overlords, pretty much every person in the story is Jewish: Jesus himself, all his disciples, all of his relatives, all (or almost all) of his followers, the Temple priests, the High Priest, the citizens of Jerusalem. It was a fully Jewish place, Roman Judea in the first century CE. And leaving that detail out of the mix more or less guarantees that the resultant sense of what life was life in that time and place will be basically false.

The authors of the Gospels wrote decades after Jesus’s death and for Gentile audiences. As a result, “the Jews” were depicted—I’m generalizing here, but not to the extent of giving a false impression—the “Jews” were depicted as the non-Christians and the followers of Jesus as the Christians, without it being over-emphasized (or emphasized at all) that those followers were themselves Jewish as well and that the sharp division between Jews and Christians that later became basic to the Christian self-conception did not apply really at all in the days that Jesus himself walked the earth. And so, somehow, starting with the earliest extant Christian literature, the followers of Jesus were de-Judaized and depicted as proto-Christians, while the Jews who chose not to follow Jesus ended up depicted as “the” Jews. As a result, a casual perusal of the Gospel literature suggests a struggle between proto-Christians and Jews, thereby missing the point that Christianity doesn’t exist in Jesus’s day and that all the players in the story other than the land’s Roman overlords were Jews.

The bottom line, though, is that many Christian denominations have moved past the anti-Jewish tropes of the Gentile authors of the Gospels. (To give just one example, the papal encyclical called “Nostra Aetate,” promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1965, specifically renounces that belief, saying explicitly that “what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.”) But for a member of Congress to oppose a bill criminalizing anti-Semitic behavior because she perceives it possibly to be denying her the right to hold Jews responsible for the execution of Jesus—that is precisely the kind of statement of extreme prejudice that Jews know far better than to wave away as “just” silliness. When I ask myself what the future could possibly hold for the Jews of the United States, I find it impossible to consider an answer without hearing Marjorie Taylor Greene’s comment ringing in my ears. I suppose there are many people who feel the same way. I’m sure there are, actually. And that is precisely why the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act should become the law of the land.

And what actually are the bill’s chances in the Senate? We shall find out soon enough!