Aftershock: Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism

Jay Newman is a professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph. His
books include Inauthentic Culture and Its Philosophical Critics and
Biblical Religion and Family Values.

According to David Matas, senior counsel to B’nai Brith Canada and a
key figure in the struggle against antisemitism in Canada, “The
ideology of antisemitism has shifted. It still maintains its old myths
of Jewish world conspiracy, Jewish control of the media, and Jewish
demonization. But it has added a new and potent element: Jews as a
criminal population because of their perceived support for a mythical
criminality of the Jewish state.” Matas is forceful, unrelenting,
concise, and informed in establishing here the critical importance of
the correlation between contemporary anti-Zionism and appallingly
persistent forms of antisemitism. Several chapters of the study
systematically attack the various arguments used to demonize the State
of Israel and, by extension, all Jews. There is a great deal of valuable
detail in these chapters, and the author is served well by his knowledge
of international law. Several chapters of the study are devoted to
surveying and appraising practical strategies for combatting
anti-Zionism and antisemitism, and Matas’s observations constitute a
very valuable resource. The book ends on a somewhat disappointing note,
with some inadequately developed reflections on the appropriate stance
of Jewish ethics toward the relevant issues.

Scholarship here is the handmaiden of advocacy, which is fair enough,
as the author is understandably impatient with what passes for
“balanced” journalistic, diplomatic, and academic treatment of
matters of grave concern to the Jewish people but is in effect a
permissiveness or encouragement of animosity toward Jews. (Some of the
grounds for his impatience are cogently identified for us in the middle
chapters of the book.) Matas’s project requires him to be highly
selective in his historical and political accounts and to ignore
sociological complexities that would inevitably obscure his primary
themes. For these reasons as well as for reasons that he himself has so
effectively indicated, his important polemic is unlikely to receive the
attention that it merits from many of those who have the most to learn
from it, including self-hating Jews, muddle-headed pseudo-liberals in
the media and the academy, amoral diplomats and politicians, and the
garden variety of old-fashioned Jew-baiters.