Biden’s Plan to Combat Anti-Semitism May Have You Singing in Russian

In searching for, in the words of Mark Twain, history’s rhymes, the Biden administration’s strategy to combat anti-Semitism, unveiled May 25 to enthusiastic applause, shares a seminal stanza with the architect of the Bolshevik Revolution, Vladimir Lenin, who sought to eradicate anti-Semitism by fighting the greater evils of his time: capitalism and the Russian monarchy. (READ MORE: Joe Biden’s Sop to the Jews)

Lenin’s 1919 public speech “Anti-Jewish Pogroms” was a first ever for a country steeped in a long and bloody history of anti-Semitism. If we transport our minds to that of the Jews of the Pale of Settlement, we can understand that Jews who heard Lenin’s speech must have been mesmerized. He began by showing solidarity with the Jewish people: “Anti-Semitism means spreading enmity towards the Jews.” However, the much-anticipated declaration quickly veered in a very different direction:

[T]he accursed tsarist monarchy … tried to incite ignorant workers and peasants against the Jews. The tsarist police, in alliance with the landowners and the capitalists, organized pogroms against the Jews.… Hatred towards the Jews persists only in those countries where slavery to the landowners and capitalists has created ignorance among the workers and peasants.  

Carefully read his words, and you’ll find that he distinguished anti-Semitism as a marker of capitalism. Couching hatred for the Jews as part of a war against the “working people,” Lenin brilliantly weaponized an age-old hatred to further his political agenda: 

 It is not the Jews who are the enemies of the working people. The enemies of the workers are the capitalists of all countries.… They are our brothers, who, like us, are oppressed by capital; they are our comrades in the struggle for socialism.

Lenin concluded his speech by inviting the Jews to join “in the struggle” of “workers of all nations … to overthrow capital[ism].” The golden ticket, an invitation for the dejected Jew to finally become part of a society that would include and value this accursed minority, had finally arrived. 

Fast forward to 2023 and President Joe Biden’s 60-page strategy to combat anti-Semitism, which shares a very similar method of eradicating anti-Semitism to combat the larger struggle against a greater enemy: white supremacy. According to the press release, Biden “decided to run for President after what we all saw in Charlottesville in 2017, when Neo-Nazis marched from the shadows spewing the same antisemitic bile that was heard in Europe in the 1930s.” Whether this is true is not essential; what is important here is that, from the onset of this strategy, anti-Semitism is framed as part of a problem that emanates from the far Right. Indeed, in the document, Biden admits that “our intelligence agencies have determined that domestic terrorism rooted in white supremacy—including antisemitism—is the greatest terrorist threat to our Homeland today.”   

For both Lenin and Biden, anti-Semitism must be eradicated not because it is wrong on its own, but because it is a product of, respectively, capitalism and white supremacy. Lenin opposed anti-Semitism to combat capitalism; Biden opposes anti-Semitism to combat white supremacy and the far Right.

And, like Lenin, who saw anti-Semitism as a threat to the working class, Biden views anti-Semitism as a threat to persecuted minorities at the intersectional table. Lenin used anti-Semitism to enshrine the working class; Biden uses anti-Semitism to enshrine the collective oppressed.

Both only weaponize anti-Semitism to further their own political agendas.

Conquer Anti-Semitism the Right Way, Not the Biden Way

If you are a consequentialist, what matters to you is the action, not the intent. That is, you believe that, sometimes, doing the right thing for the wrong reasons is justifiable. But here we run into a fundamental question: What would combating anti-Semitism look like in its purest form? If government and politics are cuddlesome bedfellows, do all attempts to combat anti-Semitism only further a political agenda? 

To answer this question, we need not look too far.

The 1964 U.S. Civil Rights Act represented a commendable effort by the U.S. Congress to legislate the prohibition of discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, or sex. In a nationally televised address on June 11, 1963, President John F. Kennedy urged the nation to take action toward guaranteeing equal treatment of every American “regardless of race.”

The key word here is race. Unlike Biden’s strategy, which generalizes its strategy on combating hatred of the Jews to include “other forms of hate, such as racism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and misogyny,” Kennedy’s speech neither generalized the issue nor included any other forms of bigotry. And that was the right thing to do. The Civil Rights Act was effective precisely because it focused, like a laser beam, on rooting out institutional racism from American civic life. Furthermore, the architects of the Civil Rights Act did not lay out a strategy to combat racism so as to deal with the greater threat of, say, communism to “our Homeland.” The success of combating racism in the United States of America is owed to the simple fact that lawmakers set out to combat just that: racism.

Racism, however, was a well-defined form of hatred and made clearly visible by laws that upheld segregation. In contrast, Jew-hatred — the “longest hatred” — is one of the most complex forms of bigotry, as it evolves and mutates. From the 12th to 21st century, Jew-hatred progressed from hatred for their religious character in medieval Europe, to hatred for their racial impurity in post-Enlightened Europe, to hatred for their ethnic character in today’s evocation of anti-Zionism.

Jews today are not victims of racism. They are not excluded from spaces because they are seen as sub-human. They are excluded when they identify as Zionists.

This is not addressed in Biden’s strategy to combat anti-Semitism.

See, for example, the case of University of Souther California undergraduate student Rose Ritch, who in 2020 resigned from student government, referencing in her letter “intense pressure and toxic conditions” that included “online harassment she endured because of her … Zionist identit[y].” Or the more recent case of a graduate of the City University of New York School of Law, who at the end of her graduation speech called for a time when we will “rejoice” in the “fight against capitalism, racism, imperialism, and Zionism around the world.”

How would the Biden strategy deal with these two separate-but-very-much-similar examples? How would the strategy confront the shouts of “Free Palestine” at Jewish students in Brooklyn? Likely not well at all.  

Returning to the fundamental question — what would combating anti-Semitism look like in its purest form? — an essential starting point requires grasping that Jew-hatred is not like any other form of hatred. It may share features with other forms of bigotry, but it has its own DNA sequence.

The Biden administration would be better off if it acknowledged just that and, in doing so, recognized that today’s Jew-hatred not only from — yes — white supremacy but also from the radical Left, Islamism, and the Black Hebrew Israelite movement.

Until such a declaration is made, this strategy will do nothing to address anti-Semitism in America.

Naya Lekht was born in the former Soviet Union and came to the United States with her family in 1989. She holds a Ph.D. from UCLA in Russian literature. She is currently the education editor for White Rose Magazine and a research fellow for the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy. Naya has written and lectured extensively on the history of antisemitism, communism, and the Holocaust. Her writings can be found in the Jerusalem Post, the Jewish Journal, JNS, the Algemeiner, the American Thinker, and Times of Israel.

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