A Pittsburgh native writes book about anti-Semitism (and its discontents)
After October 2018’s deadly shooting, Bari Weiss wrote several moving pieces about her childhood experiences in the Tree of Life synagogue for The New York Times where she’s a writer and editor. She then spent a year writing “How to Fight Anti-Semitism,” a slim book in which she defines her opponent as “an ever-morphing conspiracy theory in which Jews play the starring role in spreading evil.”
Ms. Weiss argues that growing global inequality poses a risk to Jews, whom populists are eager to blame for economic downturns and crises. In the conclusion, Ms. Weiss provides useful strategies for confronting antiSemitism. Throughout, Ms. Weiss expertly explains how Jews often “occupy the duplicitous middle”; they appear white yet frustrate white supremacists because they are “slavishly loyal to those at the bottom.”
‘Slavishly’ is a clumsy word choice, but there isn’t time to parse adverbs when there are, unfortunately, more pressing problems in this sloppy book about the evil that has quite recently terrorized our city.
I’m uneasy writing that last sentence. I recognize that many readers — particularly younger ones — may find this book to be an important introduction to an overlooked chronology. For
Ms. Weiss, the shooting served as a wake-up call, revealing that “I had spent much of my life on a holiday from history.”
The problem is that Ms. Weiss is very much on holiday throughout this book. She regularly directs readers elsewhere (“Others far wiser and more knowledgeable than I have written books about …,” “Many others can give you chapter and verse …”). A generous interpretation is that she’s providing a syllabus, although she infrequently names or quotes from these authors.
The more you read, the more you realize she has an allergy to context. Jeremy Corbyn has transformed the British Labour Party “into a hub of Jew hatred,” but Ms. Weiss doesn’t explain how. In Oslo, “a rapper asked if there were any Jews in the crowd” before disparaging them, and that’s the entirety of the setup: “a rapper.” She writes as though she wants her arguments to be unGoogle-able.
Let me emphasize: This history is vital. The book is accessible. It wants to be read alongside Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me” and Valeria
Luiselli’s “Tell Me How it Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions.”
But whereas Mr. Coates can lean on his experience as a reporter and memoirist when describing black parenthood, and whereas Ms. Luiselli can rely on her experiences as a novelist and translator when depicting the immigration crisis, Ms. Weiss lacks a go-to move. The result is a book that reads like op-eds stitched together with Wikipedia (consecutive paragraphs start “In 1984…,” “In 1999…,” “On
April 28, 2000…”). Structurally, her repeated “Anti-Zionists will say…” line starts to sound like a Jeff Foxworthy bit about rednecks.
Worse yet, Ms. Weiss is alarmingly eager to simplify issues rather than explore their complexity. Take this question: Was President Trump culpable for the political atmosphere that produced Robert Bowers, the accused murderer of 11 Jews at Tree of Life last year?
The answer was “yes” for the thousands who marched in Squirrel Hill after the shooting to protest the president’s visit. It was “yes” for the tens of thousands who signed an online petition arguing that the violence was “a direct culmination” of the president’s influence. Ditto 72% of Jewish respondents in a J Street survey taken a week after the shooting.
It would be reasonable to counter that it’s hard to draw a straight line between ideas and actions, between atmosphere and event, particularly with the internet filtering every social transaction.
But Ms. Weiss manages to avoid this debate entirely. She instead explores a literal reading of the president’s post-shooting commentary, suggesting that he gave “a full-throated condemnation of the act, which revealed an understanding of anti-Semitism.” She entertains the notion that because Mr. Bowers wrote about his displeasure with the president, the president and the political atmosphere he created cannot be considered an influence in his behavior.
Perplexingly, Ms. Weiss writes these paragraphs from the vaguely “imagined” perspective of “Trump-supporting Jews.” So: None of those bad takes are technically “hers.” It’s a mystifying move, all in the name of avoiding extended interaction with a quoted human perspective.
It’s worth noting that Jewish writers have published outstanding criticism of this book. I’d advise tracking down reviews from Talia Lavin, Jordan Weissmann and Judith Butler. They all admirably grapple with a tricky paradox: No Jew should ever be labeled as having a “disproportionate” response to anti-Semitism … yet each writer cannot ignore that Ms. Weiss’ text regularly invites a form of this critique.