(Jewish Group) Context always matters when reporting on antisemitism

[Behind the Aegis]

(THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP! RESPECT!!)

The starting point for any investigation of antisemitism should not be: “Why does this obviously irrational belief appeal to other people?” but “Why does antisemitism appeal to me?”

George Orwell posed the question in his essay, Antisemitism in Britain, published by the Contemporary Jewish Record in 1945 and republished seven weeks ago with his related Notes on Nationalism (Penguin Modern: 07). Orwell uses “nationalism” expansively to include not just loyalty to country or government but also “such movements and tendencies as communism, political Catholicism, Zionism, antisemitism, Trotskyism and pacifism”.

Dated in some ways, in others both his essay and the notes still chime. For example: “… the nationalist is often somewhat uninterested in what happens in the real world. What he wants is to feel that his own unit is getting the better of some other unit, and he can more easily do this by scoring off an adversary than by examining the facts to see whether they support him.” And: “A known fact may be so unbearable that it is pushed aside and not allowed to enter into logical processes, or on the other hand it may enter into every calculation and yet never be admitted as a fact, even in one’s own mind.”

An eruption of controversy about antisemitism in the UK Labour party has brought complaints to the readers’ editor’s office. Some accuse the Guardian and Observer of unfairly treating the Labour party and/or its leader Jeremy Corbyn; others are concerned about references to the Jewish community, or to Israel.

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Last word to Orwell: “… something, some psychological vitamin, is lacking in modern civilisation, and as a result we are all more or less subject to this lunacy of believing that whole races or nations are mysteriously good or mysteriously evil. I defy any modern intellectual to look closely and honestly into his own mind without coming upon nationalistic loyalties and hatreds of one kind or another.”

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