In the David Mamet movie Homicide, a Jewish cop grumbles about being made to investigate the murder of a Jewish pensioner. “They're not my people, baby,” he quips to his partner. “So much anti-Semitism in the last 4,000 years, we must be doing something to bring it about!” Yet as he starts to uncover the most extreme form of organized anti-Semitism, he realizes that his secular choices count for nothing. He rushes to embrace his Jewish identity—only to find that it has been drawn to the surface by a skillfully constructed echo chamber. A movie that appeared to be about anti-Semitism turns out to be about confirmation bias. More fundamentally, it is about the pitfall of allowing Jewish identity to be defined by anti-Semitism.
Both issues are at the heart of a major study recently undertaken in the United Kingdom. It draws a distinction between conscious, ongoing anti-Semitism—rated at about 5 percent of the population—and anti-Semitic tropes more widely present in society; one or more of which are held by up to 30 percent of people. It cautions that because people often hold one such sentiment in isolation—or even alongside positive sentiments—a single expression alone does not necessarily make an anti-Semite. Yet lack of context means that such isolated sentiments “have an important bearing on how Jews perceive anti-Semitism.” The report did, however, find that anti-Israel and anti-Semitic views are much more closely correlated when they become extreme—while both are much more pronounced among certain other religious subgroups present in British society, namely Muslims. The acceptance of open anti-Semites and anti-Semitism at the highest levels of the British Labour party highlights the growing danger of anti-Semites gaining mainstream acceptance in Britain.
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