Tag: antisemitism

The elite aren’t who you think they are

At any given time, but especially in recent weeks when Israel’s conflict with Hamas has been front-page news, a perusal of the comments under any story involving Jews almost inevitably devolves into some variation on the theme of Jewish control. It is notable how frequently, even in 21st-century Canada, Jews are depicted as manipulating the media and puppet-mastering the powerful, like the United States.

The advent of the electronic age has brought the phenomenon to even greater levels of intensity. We are now all broadcasters. We are all publishers. We are all curators of the news.

A few years ago, the vast majority of North Americans gathered their information from the same couple of sources. While every city and town had its own newspaper, these mostly received international news from the same few press agencies. On television, Canadians were offered CBC or CTV. We now have access to hundreds of English-language TV stations and millions, if not billions, of other sources for whatever information we seek. News, which was once a staid medium, has morphed into infotainment, in which beheadings in Iraq mingle with Kardashian marriages.

Time was, one could count on the fact that most of the people at your dinner party would have heard what Barbara Frum had said the previous night or would catch the reference to a Wayne and Shuster skit. Now, if you don’t “get” the references, an electronic device will promptly be provided so that you can watch the original source of the reference itself.

There is certainly something democratizing about this panoramic access to information. Yet there may be something contra to healthy democracy in this situation, as well. The underpinnings of a successful civil society rest partly on a shared foundation of knowledge. As we have become more individualized in our choices of what we know or ignore, those shared foundations are crumbling. That a great number of young people get their news from sources like Jon

Stewart’s The Daily Show is slightly reassuring in the sense that at least they’re getting some knowledge of world affairs, similar to the transition in the 1960s when attitudes changed from viewing comic books as something akin to pornography to a resigned attitude that “at least the kids are reading.”

It is true that social media has helped young people – all people – take up causes and devote themselves to social change if they seek to do so. One of the greatest examples was this summer’s ubiquitous Ice Bucket Challenge, which has raised millions of dollars for ALS research and advocacy. Still, there is a diminishing of comprehensive, shared, reliable news and information upon which all people form their opinions.

In a democracy, everyone has the same voice at the ballot box. But a democratic society is not formed only on one day every four years. A thriving democratic society requires the engagement of an informed population every day. From that perspective, democracies risk losing an important element of viability and vibrancy when a huge proportion of the population is choosing the garden channel over Newsworld, TMZ over the New York Times.

For centuries, there has been the conspiracy theory that a tiny minority somehow controls knowledge and everything that goes with it. In a strange way, this myth may be approaching reality. But it is not Jews who are the elite increasingly controlling what transpires in the world – it is the diminishing number of people who are actually paying attention.

This is not, like the conspiracy theory, the effect of a minority seizing control from the masses. It is the opposite: it is masses of people abdicating their right and responsibility to be informed, active participants in democratic society. And, as more people look away from the uncomfortable realities of the world, a smaller and smaller elite – those who choose to remain informed – will have an outsized influence on public opinion and what governments do worldwide.

Ukrainian incidents concerning

In Europe, it has often been dangerous for Jews to be Jews. And Easter in particular has led to frenzied antisemitism, as priests commonly riled up parishioners with a selective retelling of the crucifixion story, after which throngs would emerge from churches and attack Jewish fellow residents.

This is a generalization, of course. Many Easters have passed peacefully in many parts of Europe. But Jew-bashing was a common occurrence with formal and informal sanction. Children sometimes came home from school with arts and crafts mallets to be used symbolically to hammer the Jews on Easter weekend. Predictably in such an environment, on many, many occasions, the hammering was not symbolic.

So it was this past weekend, when firebombs were reportedly thrown through the windows of the main synagogue in the Ukrainian city of Nikolayev. Thankfully, prayers were not taking place at the time and no one was injured. But the traumatized and beleaguered community must certainly have heard echoes of the past in this act of contemporary vandalism and hate.

Ukraine, of course, is the centre of global anxieties, verging as it does on something between a civil war among ethnic Russian and Ukrainian citizens and an incipient full-scale invasion by Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which has already invaded and annexed Crimea.

It may be an unofficial aspect of our tradition to always expect the worst even while hoping for the best, so it may not have come as a complete surprise to some of us that Easter weekend did not pass without an unfortunate incident. Particularly in the aftermath of another chilling incident in the days before the firebombing. A photocopied sheet was spread throughout parts of Ukraine during Passover declaring that Jews over the age of 16 must register at the (Russian-occupied) government building in Donetsk, paying a $50 registration fee and listing all real estate owned. The echoes of the past this poster elicited were obvious and outrage went viral.

From the start, there was uncertainty about the provenance of the sheet and whether it was being distributed on behalf of an official/ government agency. By the weekend, media were reporting that the poster had been “debunked,” that it was not issued by authorities. If true – because the “debunking” report is no more certain than the original belief that it came from whatever counts as a government in the region now – it would be a bit of a relief. But there should be no great celebration. In recent weeks, as Ukraine and Russia have become more and more conflicted, Jewish citizens of Ukraine have found themselves in an historically familiar and dangerously undesirable position. As has been so often the case in Europe, sides in the conflict are either demanding Jewish allegiance or scapegoating Jews.

Ukraine has a small but overt, visible and thriving neo-Nazi movement – with the support of about one in 10 Ukrainians – which is trouble enough. Putin did not help matters when he suggested recently that Russian influence in Ukraine would be good for the Jews because of rampant antisemitism there. There could hardly be a more dangerous position for Ukrainian Jews than to be seen as a justification for Russian incursion (as if Russia or Putin have records worthy of Jewish admiration).

Leaders of Ukraine’s Jewish community, which traditionally has been more Russian-speaking than Ukrainian-speaking, stood firm with their Ukrainian fellow citizens against Putin’s assertions that Ukraine is a hotbed of Jew-hatred.

“Your certainty about the growth of antisemitism in Ukraine, which you expressed at your press conference, also does not correspond to the actual facts,” rabbis and other leading figures in the community wrote in an open letter to the Russian president. “Perhaps you got Ukraine confused with Russia, where Jewish organizations have noticed growth in antisemitic tendencies last year.”

All these decades and centuries later, our coreligionists still struggle to find a place of welcome in their home countries, amid the nationalist and racial conflicts of Europe. Of course, we should not assume this is a far-away problem. The murders at two Jewish institutions in Kansas City last week is proof that antisemitism exists in our own backyards, as well, and we will continue to watch developments in the region and closer to home with wariness and hope, prepared to speak out and act on behalf of Jews – and anyone – who is endangered.