Jamie Raskin Puts It All Into Perspective
You probably don’t know this about me: I daven everyday. Before jumping in my pool and doing some laps, I center myself with Muslim, Jewish, Christian and Buddhist prayer rituals. I look forward to it. It takes my mind off the kinds of mundane things that I’m usually concerned with, especially politics. I’m Jewish by heritage. My father was an atheist. My mother wasn’t concerned with religion. My grandfather was a Jew who escaped the Russian Empire as a teenager, settled in New York and was more into socialism than religion. When I visited St Petersburg, I spent some time meditating and communing with his spirit in the Grand Choral Synagogue because it was the first building not made of wood and mud he had ever been in and from which he left the next morning to the U.S. His wife, my grandmother, was into Jewish ritual and was something of a Zionist. The two of them were the most important people in my young life. I picked up his socialism and, thankfully, not her Zionism. Roland and I spent a month in Egypt once and he forced me to take a bus to Israel. I didn’t want to go and the only thing I liked was spending Christmas Eve in Bethlehem, although Roland claims I loved eating in the YMCA in Jerusalem.
Tuesday, the House passed a foolish and divisive resolution from David Kustoff (R-TN) and woman beater Max Miller (R-OH) that included a line that claims, incorrectly, that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism (“clearly and firmly states that anti-Zionism is antisemitism”). Among the 4 cosponsors were two rabid Democratic Zionists, AIPAC shills Josh Gottheimer (NJ) and Jared Moskowitz (FL). 216 Republicans and 95 Democrats voted for it. 12 progressive Democrats and one GOP kook (Massie) voted against it and 92 Democrats voted “present.”
One of the “Present” votes came from Barbara Lee, a candidate for California’s open Senate seat, who reiterated that she “unequivocally condemns antisemitism in all forms— full stop. The documented rise in antisemitism requires a comprehensive, bipartisan, good-faith effort to address. This resolution does not meet that criteria. This extreme Republican resolution is an unserious attempt to address the very real and urgent threat of antisemitism. We must continue finding ways to protect people from all forms of hate speech and hate violence. A peaceful future at home and abroad is not attainable without standing up to hate.” You can see how every member voted here.
Right after the vote, Chris Lehmann referred to the episode as the “summit of cynical grandstanding... That measure is not only a kind of photographic negative of the 1975 UN resolution condemning Zionism as racism (revoked in 2019); it also is founded on the antisemitic equation of Zionist sentiment with Jewish identity, even though many Orthodox Jews, and secular dissenters, remain opposed to Zionism. New York Democratic Representative Jerry Nadler raised that crucial objection, among others, in an impassioned dissent to the resolution…”
The House Education and Workforce committee tee-ed up the bill by “trying to demonstrate that universities are warrens of fifth columnist Hamas sympathizers. After pressing the school presidents on the percentage of faculty in their schools identifying as conservative— numbers that all quite properly replied that they didn’t track— South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson (whose own Foxx-like moment of press notoriety came when he bellowed, ‘You lie!’ to President Barack Obama at his 2009 address before the joint chambers of Congress) darkly warned that ‘the rise of antisemitism is due to an illberalism that’s taken over the country. And you might bear that in mind when you get your next government grant.’
Other members eagerly took up the same inquisitorial line. New York Representative Elise Stefanik demanded that [Harvard president Claudine] Gay report whether any students who had taken up chants calling for a renewed intifada or using the phrase “from the river to the sea” would have their admissions rescinded. Georgia Representative Rick Allen wanted assurance from Gay that she would suspend foreign students who had broken the law. (Allen, who’d prefaced this query with a quotation from Proverbs 9:10 about how the fear of God is the getting of wisdom, used his five minutes of speaking time to denounce “biblical illiteracy” and to invoke at length the passage from Genesis beloved among extremist Christian Zionists holding that all whom are blessed by Israel will be blessed by God, a key item of prophecy intoned by antisemitic preachers like John Hagee.)
If it sounds odd for so many right-wing critics of the American university, long inured to decrying speech codes and political correctness as grave trespasses against the First Amendment and free inquiry, calling for the expulsion of students and faculty on grounds of selective thoughtcrime, well, this is now simply mainstream Republican orthodoxy. Donald Trump made a great show, after all, of decrying political correctness in his first presidential run, and is now openly plotting to use the power of the state, should he be returned to office, to punish political enemies, harass journalists, and continue carrying out the right-wing takeover of public education. Besides, Trump’s House acolytes were armed with a key talking point: the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression had bestowed on Harvard the lowest score in its annual collegiate free-speech rankings, with Penn in the second-lowest position. So as the three presidents all did their best to spell out the difficult, actual balancing act that they sought to strike between free inquiry and abusive speech, their GOP inquisitors trotted out the FIRE ranking as yet another variation of the great culture-war taunt, “I know you are, but what am I?”
That is, they would have, had they allowed their witnesses to reply in full. More often, questioners like Stefanik— whom other GOP members repeatedly graced with the balance of their questioning time— would start to ask incendiary questions about pro-Hamas genocidal rhetoric or insufficient crackdowns on it, demand an immediate yes-or-no reply, and shout over the replies-in-process, declaring them either a nonresponse or a no. Footage of the hearings should come with a clear trigger warning for any American educators seeking to instill critical thinking via the Socratic method or other modes of open-ended discourse.
More than four hours into the proceedings, the committee was gaveled into recess. The members had to attend to floor votes— including the main event, the anti-Zionism-as-antisemitism resolution. The hearing would rumble on, but Virginia Foxx’s work here was clearly done— and as Presidents Gay, Magill, and Kornbluth understood all too well by that point, anyone thinking otherwise could just shut up.
The House Democratic leadership-- even career-long AIPAC shill Hakeem Jeffries-- voted “Present,” as did many of the most respected Jews in Congress, like Jerry Nadler (NY), Jan Schakowsky (IL), Jamie Raskin (MD), Suzanne Bonamici (OR), Susan Wild (PA), Summer Lee (PA), Sara Jacobs (CA), Dan Goldman (D), Becca Balint (VT) and Seth Magaziner (RI). Most of the “No” votes were from the no-bullshit, unabashedly progressive wing of the party, folks like AOC, Pramila Jayapal, Cori Bush, Jamaal Bowman...
Jamie Raskin voted "Present." He wrote an explanation of his vote for his constituents. It's pretty fantastic, by far the best writing on this topic that any member of Congress has offered, and I want to share it with DWT readers:
“Antisemitism is a toxic, dangerous and lethal force in human history. It has appeared and reappeared in different forms and guises, but always as an enemy of the Jewish people, traditionally as a threat to reason and Enlightenment, and in our times as a gateway to destruction of liberal democracy and universal rights.
“Historians have identified different kinds and strains of antisemitism which have combined and recombined over the ages: early Christian antisemitism; early Muslim antisemitism; European Medieval superstitions; the blood libel and false claims of ritual murder; the Holy Inquisition and Crusades; French nationalist antisemitism and the scapegoating of Captain Dreyfus; Czarist pogroms; fantastical conspiracy theories and the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” Nazi antisemitism, eugenics and totalitarian pseudoscientific racist ideology; Stalinist antisemitism; anti-intellectualism, antisemitic social snobbery and institutional exclusion; antisemitism dressed up in the language of anti-Zionism; Islamist and Hamas antisemitism; and right-wing neo-Nazi antisemitism, Holocaust denialism and anti-Jewish Christian white nationalism. This list is incomplete but suggestive of the breathtaking variety of forms, guises and manifestations of antisemitism.
“It is an essential moral and political responsibility of citizens of constitutional democracies, like the United States, to oppose and denounce every form, guise and manifestation of antisemitism, as well as every other kind of racism and dehumanizing prejudice and superstition. In the House of Representatives, we have passed more than 20 Resolutions against antisemitism in the last two decades. We have treated all calls for the destruction of Israel or denial of Israel's simple right to exist as antisemitism. Just last week, the House voted overwhelmingly on a bipartisan basis to affirm Israel's incontestable right to exist. On Monday, I introduced with my colleagues Jerry Nadler and Dan Goldman another Resolution condemning antisemitism which is not only a statement of the problem but also the mobilization of a solution in the implementation of President Biden’s National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism. The strategy outlines a whole-of-society approach to confront resurgent antisemitism in the U.S. It provides over 100 actions that the government can take to increase awareness and understanding of antisemitism (including its threat to American values); to broaden appreciation of Jewish American heritage; to improve safety and security for Jewish communities; to reverse the normalization of antisemitism and counter antisemitic discrimination; and to build cross-community solidarity and collective action against hate.
“By contrast, H. Res. 894, the Resolution introduced by Reps. Kustoff and Miller, offers no support for the Biden Administration’s National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism. It is merely a restatement of the problem, which might make it par for the course around here, but even as a restatement of the problem, it is flawed and unfortunately introduces serious new problems and confusions, both by omission and by commission.
“To begin with, it strangely omits some of the most sinister and lethal manifestations of antisemitism in our time. For example, it does not mention the worst antisemitic massacre in U.S. history, the Tree of Life Synagogue attack in Pittsburgh, where the perpetrator, wielding an AR-15, killed 11 Jewish worshippers and wounded six others, among the victims several Holocaust survivors. The murderer was a right-wing anti-Jewish and anti-immigrant propagandist who promoted the racist and antisemitic Great Replacement Theory. Why would this massacre be excluded from the preamble of this Resolution while the authors include the protest at the Democratic National Committee last month where—whatever one thinks about its politics—no Jew or anyone else was killed and where the Resolution’s authors identify no antisemitic attacks or utterances? Even if the authors were exclusively focused on demonstrations in the vicinity of the Capitol, they did not need to go to the DNC to find one. To be more precise, why did they not mention the worst mass domestic violent attack on the Capitol in U.S. history, the violent insurrection of January 6, 2021, where some of the protesters wore T-shirts saying “Camp Auschwitz,” others brandished Confederate battle flags and swastikas, 150 of our police officers were seriously injured, seven people died and domestic violent extremist groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers led the attack?
“There are other bizarre omissions in this Resolution, like the failure to identify Donald Trump’s trafficking in antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories, including his infamous 2016 TV ad denouncing George Soros, Lloyd Blankfein and Janet Yellen as “globalists,” his identification of very “fine people on both sides” at the Charlottesville antisemitic “Unite the Right” Rally and attendant riot in August of 2017, and his consorting with antisemites and neo-Nazis like Nick Fuentes and Kanye West. The Resolution does not even mention Hamas’s antisemitic charter and pronouncements or the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s promotion of antisemitic teachings all over the world through its madrasa schools. But you get the point: this Resolution is not an honest attempt to describe antisemitism in its full magnitude and political complexity but a lopsided and transparently partisan maneuver, which is why there are only Republican sponsors of this Resolution.
“Beyond everything it carefully leaves out, the Resolution actually introduces new conceptual confusions. In the only “Resolved” clause asserting a point we have not reaffirmed in Congress many times before, H. Res. 894 says that the House “clearly and firmly states that anti-Zionism is antisemitism.”
“But this assertion is simply and demonstrably false, the mirror image of the old poisonous canard and myth that “Zionism is racism.” While a lot of traditional antisemitism today does indeed obviously camouflage itself as “anti-Zionism,” it is perfectly obvious that anti-Zionism is not, and cannot be, a synonym for antisemitism, for there have been—and are—tens of thousands of Jews who have opposed Zionism and the creation of a Jewish state. I remember from a young age my grandfather, who was a very strong liberal Zionist and champion of Israel, explaining to me that certain Hasidic and other sects of Orthodox Jews fought against creation of the Jewish democratic state in 1948 because they thought it was blasphemous and sacrilegious to anticipate and preempt the Messiah by creating a Jewish state before the Messiah’s arrival. It was the more liberal and secular Jews after World War II who insisted that the new Israeli state was an historical imperative as a place of permanent refuge for Jews fleeing Nazi violence and persecution throughout Europe and the Arab world. Indeed, every Jewish high school student in America who has read The Chosen by Chaim Potok—a coming-of-age novel about two boys post-World War II in New York who become best friends, one the son of a Modern Orthodox scholar and teacher who is a passionate champion of the founding of Israel and the other the son of a Hasidic Rabbi who is an equally passionate anti-Zionist—knows that the categorical claim that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism” cannot withstand any kind of serious critical or historical scrutiny. The Satmars and certain other Orthodox sects to this day continue to oppose the short-circuiting of the arrival of the Messiah which they believe is embodied in the creation of Israel.
“Nor has Jewish opposition to the creation of Israel been confined to those who have a theological disagreement. For example, the only Member of the British Cabinet to oppose the Balfour Declaration in 1917 was, famously, its only Jewish Member, Edwin Samuel Montagu, who argued vehemently that he was a British citizen, not a member of the Israeli nation, and that a British Jew had no more in common with a French Jew than a British Christian had in common with a French Christian. He also argued that the creation of Israel would lead to antisemitic legislation in other societies: “When the Jews are told that Palestine is their national home, every country will immediately desire to get rid of its Jewish citizens, and you will find a population in Palestine driving out its present inhabitants.” This is obviously not my position on the matter, but I fail to understand the logic of denying obvious historical facts like this to serve ideological pretenses and historical fantasies.
“It is intellectually dishonest to suppress the history of Hasidic, Satmar and certain other Orthodox sects’ opposition to the Jewish state, however much we might want to reject it, or to describe such opposition as antisemitic. It is similarly scandalous to try to insinuate that current political critics (in Israel, the United States or anywhere else) of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are, by definition, “anti-Zionist” and therefore “antisemitic” simply because they object to one official’s performance in office, his plans to undermine the power of the Israeli Supreme Court and judicial review, his potential responsibility for the security lapses in the south of Israel, his policies in the West Bank and Gaza, or any other policies of his government.
“Real antisemitism is not only a pernicious ideology but also a profound character and personality disorder, as Christopher Hitchens argued, a disease that is fundamentally corrosive of your mind and your life. Surely America has no interest in misdiagnosing and falsely proliferating this awful disease by defining it in a sloppy and overly broad way. Antisemitism is virulent and dangerous enough on its own without conflating it entirely with other political phenomena and social ideologies.
“The struggle against antisemitism and other types of fanatical irrationalism and prejudice today is a surpassing moral and ethical imperative, not the occasion for partisan mischief and ideological games. I will not vote for this Resolution.”
And as long as we're vaguely on the subject, Congress seems to be calling something like 60% of American voters "anti-Semites." New polling from Data for Progress found that 61% of likely voters support the U.S. calling for a permanent ceasefire and a de-escalation of violence in Gaza. This support includes a majority of Democrats (76%) and Independents (57%) and a plurality of Republicans (49%). The same survey also found that a majority of voters believe that the U.S. should only provide aid to Israel if they meet our standards for human rights. 63% of voters, including 65% of those under age 45, agree with this statement: “The U.S. should hold its ally Israel to a high standard and only provide military aid to Israel if they meet our standards for human rights.”
