America’s upper-middle class antisemitism
The Jewish community has become the “safety valve” for this lumpen class’s discontents.
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“It represents, therefore, a safety valve for the owning classes, who encourage it and thus substitute for a dangerous hate against their regime a beneficent hate against particular people,” Jean-Paul Sartre wrote of antisemitism in his classic analysis, Anti-Semite and Jew.
Sartre’s observation is particularly insightful because it understands what many analysts tend to miss: Antisemitism is often a class issue and a class phenomenon. It is how an elite class that knows it is hated transmutes this hatred into a “beneficent” loathing of the Jews.
Sadly, America today provides a somewhat different but nonetheless suitable case study in class-based antisemitism because we find ourselves in a rather remarkable situation: Contrary to the expectations of generations of American Jewish activists and leaders, current antisemitism is not an ideology of the poor and lower-middle classes. It has emerged, instead, as the ruling passion of many members of the most privileged, educated and elite sector in the United States...