'Bistro' Anti-Semitism

Ben Cohen, at Commentary, offers the notion of 'bistro' anti-Semitism to explain a new "civilized" version of anti-Jewish hatred, a version particularly sinister in how it turns outrage against attacks on the Jews into a form a bigotry itself.

See Cohen's essay, "The Big Lie Returns":

Anti-Semitism’s newfound respectability is not unprecedented. Indeed, the fact that anti-Semites have been given power over the definition of anti-Semitism reflects the very origins of the term. Coined in late 19-century Germany, anti-Semitism was not intended as a descriptor for a troubling social trend—like racism, or the more recent Islamophobia—but as the positive organizing principle of an emancipatory political movement.

While the Jews and their allies regard anti-Semites as propelled by hatred, anti-Semites regard themselves as a fraternity bound by a message of universalist love. “This book is above all a book for friends, a book that is written for those who love us,” wrote Edouard Drumont, one of the founders of France’s Ligue Antisemitique, and an especially shrill voice behind the false allegations of treason against Alfred Dreyfus, in his Le Testament d’un Antisemite. Atzmon expresses himself with similar pretensions: “When you talk about humanity, you talk about a universal system of values promoting love for one another.” Rather than being anti-moral, the moral sensibility of anti-Semitism resides in its presentation of the Jews (or “Jewishness” or “Judaism”) as the barrier to a society founded upon love. What seems at first glance to be a material battle is really a spiritual one.

With this understanding, we can better appreciate a rare modification in the nature of anti-Semitism in our own time. I say rare, because, as a framework for interpreting the world, anti-Semitism resists innovation. Charles Maurras, another French anti-Semite, took great delight in hawking a worldview that “enables everything to be arranged, smoothed over, and simplified.”

The modification rests upon a distinction between what I call bierkeller and bistro anti-Semitism. Bierkeller anti-Semitism—named for the beer halls frequented by the German Nazis—employs such means as violence, verbal abuse, commercial harassment, and advocacy of anti-Jewish legal measures. Certainly, the first and second generations of modern anti-Semitic publicists and intellectuals had no qualms about this sort of thuggery. Since the Second World War, though, this mode of anti-Semitism has waned sharply, along with the tendency to use the word anti-Semite as a positive means of political identification.

Bistro anti-Semitism, on the other hand, sits in a higher and outwardly more civilized realm, providing what left-wing activists would call a “safe space” to critically assess the global impact of Jewish cabals from Washington, D.C., to Jerusalem. Anyone who enters the bistro will encounter common themes. These include the depiction of Palestinians as the victims of a second Holocaust, the breaking of the silence supposedly imposed upon honest discussions of Jewish political and economic power, and the contention—offered by, among others, Mearsheimer’s co-author, Stephen Walt, of Harvard—that American Jewish government officials are more suspect than others because of a potential second loyalty to Israel.

To this list we can now add the assault upon what Atzmon calls the “Holocaust narrative.” This type of revisionism doesn’t deny that the Nazis killed Jews, but it redistributes a good deal of the blame among the victims. Additionally, it disputes the conclusion of mainstream Holocaust historians that total elimination was the goal of the Third Reich’s Jewish policy.

RTWT at the link.