The Times does devote the first four paragraphs – the ones most likely to be read – to repeating rightwing bitching and moaning about these dang antiwar protesters. (2) But the picture at the top does show four examples of stock antisemitic tropes from Trump and other Republicans.
The rest is mostly a decent description about how most of the antisemitism in American politics is coming from hardcore rightwingers like Trump. This will come a surprise to approximately no one who has spent any of the last 35 years or so paying attention to the theme.
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
One of the things they at least mention in passing is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a propaganda fraud that has the more-than-dubious distinction of being basically the ur-text of antisemitism since at the early 20th century. And this took me into a related line of history.
The Protocols were influential on Hitler’s thinking as expressed in Mein Kampf, which he apparently accessed in the German translation published by Henry Ford (yes, that Henry Ford): “For example, reference should be made, to Henry Ford's pamphlet, The International Jew (1920). which in the early NSDAP [Nazi Party] was included as part of the canon of books that ‘every National Socialist [Nazi] must know’"... (3)
The Protocols purport to reveal a very secret but nevertheless incredibly power group of Jews who secretly exert major influence on world events. Puppet masters, as it were.
Holocaust scholar Wolfgang Benz identifies some of the likely various sources of the sleazy themes assimilated into the Protocols from various versions of antisemitic conspiracist writing (4) in circulation during the late 18th century and the 19th century, the actual author remains unknown:
The [immediately preceding] "missing link" in the creation of the Protocols has never been discovered, a fact that still fires the imagination of anti-Semites whenever the "authenticity" of the Protocols is up for debate. However, it is undisputed that the piece was written at the turn of the century [circa 1900], that traces lead to France, [and] that Russian hands were involved. (5)He concludes:
What is certain is that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was written shortly before the end of the 19th century – probably 1898 – at Russian instigation and quickly became widely distributed with several variants of both the text and the title.By “Russian instigation,” he means by officials of the czarist government of Russia. And since promoting hostility to Jews was a key element of Russian society and the various social segments who supported it, it’s not surprising they wanted to make “the Jews” look as sinister as possible. Benz:
Resentments against Jews were in [czarist] Russia an element of the [dominant] political understanding. Unlike the rest of Europe, it was not particular social strata – a chronically fearful affluent middle class in Germany, aggressive small capitalists in Austria, the anti-republican and Catholic milieus in France – who were carriers of the hostility toward Jews, but rather the entire establishment of czarist rule – aristocracy, the Orthodox Church, the military, justice. In their insecurity about reforms and their fear of revolution, the state-supporting strata were united in their hatred of the Jewish minority and used hatred of Jews as a tool to hold on to power. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion originated in this connection. In the denunciation of “the Jews” as the cause of all adversity, as a danger for social peace in the conservative and reactionary understanding, the motive and the prescription for action are displayed, and after recognizing the "Jewish threat," the political intention to fight it. [my emphasis]The Protocols were a source used as propaganda by the Nazis and other rightwing extremists. And still are. They have also been used the same way by various Islamist groups in more recent decades. The often-mentioned original charter of Hamas does refer positively to the Protocols. (Although in the two English-language translation I read from Israeli sources, it does not literally say they want to kill all Jews, which commentators keep repeating endlessly that it does.)
The Times article mentions the Protocols as a key source of the global Jewish conspiracy that the far right uses with their “George Soros” conspiracist fantasies. It describes the work as “a fraudulent document used by Josef Stalin and the Nazis as a rationale for targeting Jews.” (my emphasis)
Wait, “Stalin and the Nazis”? Presumably here “Stalin” means the USSR when Stalin was the main leader, i.e., 1922-1955. Now, I’m sure that antisemitism didn’t magically disappear when the Czar was overthrown in 1971. But rightwingers including the Nazis used the Protocols as support in their accusations that “the Jews” were behind the Communist and Soviet conspiracy they saw as threatening the world. Why would the USSR promote that particular tract during that period? Also, it’s the first time I’ve seen it suggested that the Soviet Union promoted it.
Thinking a bit about “information operations”
This sent me on a chain of thought about propaganda and “information operations,” which is what follows.
A 2024 report from the US State Department, whose theme is the continuity of Russian antisemitism from Czarist Russia until today, notes:
The Protocols spread outside Russia after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. In their attempts to discredit the revolution, the supporters of the fallen Tsarist regime presented The Protocols as evidence of a Jewish-Communist conspiracy to “enslave the world.” The tract resurfaced between World War I and World War II to become “one of the central texts in Nazi and fascist anti-Semitism, becoming the most influential forgery of the 20th century.” [my emphasis] (6)That State Department report lists a number of incidents during Stalin’s time as leader that it describes as antisemitic. But none them has any mention of the Protocols that I found.
Also, it’s worth remembering the two main countries supporting Israel during their 1948-49 War of Independence were the United States and the Soviet Union. Both had their reasons at that time for wanting to end British colonial dominations in the area. And it was Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia that provided the most substantial arms supplies to the Zionist forces. (Much of the military equipment and arms they provided had been originally made for the German Wehrmacht when Germany controlled Czechoslovakia, which included some insignia that were definitely not originally intended for a Jewish army.)
At the time, Israel’s success was seen as, among other things, a victory for Stalin’s foreign policy. That alliance didn’t last very long as the Soviets soon turned toward cultivating relations with Arab nations and put new hope in the potential of Arab socialism.
But neither of those two countries’ support of Israel in its independence war says anything about how much antisemitism (or philosemitism) may have existed at home. The Republicans today are devout in their support for aggressive war policies on Israel, but their Party is anything but diligent in opposing actual antisemitism, as David Lurie explained back in 2022:
There’s been much talk lately about whether the Republican Party is, finally, readying itself to jettison Donald Trump, perhaps in favor of a new “populist” leader, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. That talk is likely to increase in the wake of Trump’s recent dinner with a couple of Hitler-loving antisemites.
But even if Trump recedes from the political stage, the GOP is all but certain to remain poisoned by bigotries that Trump introduced into the mainstream of Republican ideology for the foreseeable future. The normalization of antisemitism within the Grand Old Party is a particularly noxious case in point. [my emphasis] (7)
A 1980 example of Soviet polemics against Israel and Zionism
In a 1993 article published by the American Jewish Committee, Robert Wistrich writes:
Anti-Zionism was given international legitimacy by Soviet sponsorship of the 1975 United Nations resolution defining Zionism as "a form of racism and racial discrimination," which encouraged a further escalation of this propaganda line. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, Zionism was being widely equated in the Soviet Union with Nazism, and Zionist leaders were being accused of collaborating with the Germans in the mass murder of European Jewry-a Goebbels-style lie that found a ready echo not only in the Arab world but also in some Western quarters.Pamyat (Memory) was an organization closely associated with the Russian Orthodox Church which during the 1980s was:
A number of publicists, like Valery Emelyanov, Yevgeny Yevseev, Lev Korneyev, Vladimir Begun, and Aleksandr Romanenko (some of whom would become closely involved with Pamyat in the 1980s), developed a particularly poisonous form of "anti-Zionism" under Communist party auspices at this time. [my emphasis] (8)
... the leading group espousing [conspiracist and right-leaning authoritarian] Black Hundred ideology … whose main spokesman after 1984 was Dmitry Vasiliev. During the communist era Pamyat worked for the restoration of churches and national monuments in Moscow, and Vasiliev generally supported the Communist Party and praised Lenin, Stalin, and the KGB for defending national traditions. After 1989, however, Vasiliev increasingly supported the Russian Orthodox Church and began to advocate monarchism. Pamyat writers denounced communists as “godless,” “cosmopolitan,” and “antipatriotic,” and they criticized the neglect of national traditions, anti-Russian sentiment in the Baltic countries, the moral decline of youth, increased crime, the weakening of the family, and alcoholism. Although Pamyat had a near monopoly on the extreme right in 1987–88, by 1991 it had been overtaken by rival movements. (9)Wistrich also writes:
The mushrooming of anti-Zionist literature in the Soviet Union coincided with a policy of consistent discrimination against Jews in higher education, not to mention the near-total exclusion of Jews from military, political, and diplomatic careers. Without doubt, the official anti-Zionist campaign of the Leonid Brezhnev years also paved the way for the even more vicious populist anti-Semitism that, ironically enough, began to blossom after Mikhail Gorbachev's more liberal policy of glasnost was instituted after 1985.In the light of current controversies in the US and Europe over whether anti-Zionism is also antisemitism, we could ask of Wistrich’s article: Does this mean that the era of the Communist government of Brezhnev (1964-1982) was antisemitic and encouraging fascist thinking? Or that Brezhnev and his pre-Gorbachev successors were keeping antisemitism under control, while Gorbachev permitted or encouraged an “even more vicious populist anti-Semitism”?
Or possibly that politics in the USSR was somewhat more complicated than a single figure at the top dictating every aspect of politics and political debate?
Lev Korneyev, one of Wistrich’s publicists who practiced “particularly poisonous form of "anti-Zionism" under Communist party auspices,” was the author of a pamphlet/booklet that appeared in English in 1980, titled Israel: The Reality Behind the Myths. (10) This was part of the broad “information operations” of the USSR at the time. All countries use some form of it, certainly including the US. And, of course, whichever side someone considers Our Side is presumed to be employing benevolent forms of it and that from the Other Side is presumed to be malicious. Korneyev’s book was published in Moscow by an official Soviet publishing house, so the source of the document was not concealed.
The booklet is definitely anti-Zionist, it does engage in conspiracist tropes, and it presumes “Zionist” influence to be particularly powerful. In its first paragraph, Korneyev informs his readers, “Not a day passes without [Israel] being mentioned in Western newspapers or radio and television broadcasts. Western propaganda, which to a large extent is under Zionist financial control, proclaims Israel to be the social and economic ‘miracle’ of the twentieth century.” (my emphasis)
This booklet seems to be targeted to a “middlebrow” audience literate enough to read newspapers be not especially inclined to check sources for even the more exotic claims. But it provides seemingly precise figures in various places referring to “official Israeli sources” or “the Research Service of the US Library of Congress” - without specifying the source document so that the reader could easily check. (And in 1980, checking sources wasn’t nearly as easy or convenient as it would become once the World Wide Web was A Thing.)
This is a typical device of conspiracist presentation: describe seemingly detailed information with vague references to its source. This is why the concept that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof” is so relevant to processing such presentations.
That, by the way, is a big part of why I’m a bit obsessive about provides links and references to sources when I’m making claims that one might not hear on, say, a normal MSNBC news show.
The response that approach is looking for is something like this: “This sounds like something that could be made up. But he describes things in such detail that it makes me wonder … maybe there is something to this!”
That’s the first step down the conspiracist/doing-my-own-research/red-pill rabbit hole.
The approach reminds me of an interview with Al Franken that I’m quoting from memory here. (I tried to find it but it was probably 15 years or more ago.) He was describing how in his Air America days they would listen to Rush Limbaugh, one of the key players in the development of what we now know as Trumpism. He gave an example where Rush cited some figure about employment. So Al’s crew researched the Bureau of Labor Statistics data and determined that Rush’s figure was completely bogus, so Rush had obviously just pulled it out of his rear end.
Franken explained: So that’s the difference between us and them. We get our information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They get theirs from the Bureau of Rush’s Butt.
Framing matters
The general framing of Korneyev’s booklet, though, is to talk about Israel’s past and its (1980) present using actual events but making Israel the unquestionable villain in the narrative. Emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel was a big international story and part of the endless sparring between the US and the USSR. So there are stories about how bad life in Israel supposedly is for people like, you know, Jewish Soviet immigrants.
That was also the heyday of China and the US cooperating and the Chinese and the Soviets not getting along with each other well (to put it mildly). So Korneyev explains how China is betraying the Arab national-liberation movements by supporting the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, the deal brokered by the Carter Administration. Because the USSR and its Arab allies were not happy about the deal.
The following passage is a classic suggested-but-not specified conspiracy theory being put into the narrative stream.
In a section talking about Jewish mobsters in the US like Benny Siegel and Meyr Lansky who had provided “great” services “to Zionism,” we get this paragraph:
There have been reports [none of which are specified] that the World Zionist Organisation was tipped off by Lansky and his secretary (who had connections with Jacob Rubinstein, alias Jack Ruby, the man who killed Harvey Oswald), about the Mafia's plans to assassinate President Kennedy. But the Zionist leaders did as little as they could to prevent this from taking place. The young president was not as complaisant about Israel' s plans for aggression as some of his successors have been.Now it doesn’t say that Israel’s government used Jewish mobsters in America to put a hit on Oswald because they decided he needed to be taken out to cover up Israel’s passive-but-conscious role in facilitating the JFK assassination plot. But, you know, he describes it in such detail that it makes you wonder …
None of the sources of this it-makes-you-wonder story are cited. (Surprise!)
But Korneyev does include a cute Marxist-economics joke when he’s describing Las Vegas in connection with the “Zionist” mobsters. Karl Marx had a succinct formula - M-C-M’ - for the process by which money (M) becomes capital (C) which becomes in turn more money (M’):
Las Vegas is only a town in the technical sense of the word. From any other point of view it is a huge industrial combine for the manufacture of an end product from raw materials by means of a fairly simple process. The peculiarity of the product is that there is no need for it to participate in the classical "money-goods-money" cycle in order to accrue a profit. The raw materials used in Las Vegas are people with money and the desired end product is money without peoplc. This cycle is accomplished in 23 gaming houses, 11 casino-hotels, and hundreds of gaming machines. "Work" goes on round the clock, every day of the year. [my emphasis]
I’m not so sure about the economics. But it is a good description of Las Vegas!
What Korneyev does not include in his booklet is any mention of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In a “middlebrow” pamphlet aimed at English-speaking audiences in which you pitch Israel as a master manipulator and villain, a direct reference to a notorious-but-famous rightwing antisemitic book known to be favored by Nazis would really spoil the it-makes-you-wonder-effect.
Notes:
(1) Edroso, Roy (2024): The Times is On It, Student Protest Edition. Roy Edroso Breaks It Down 05/13/2024. <https://edroso.substack.com/p/the-times-is-on-it-student-protest> (Accessed: 13-05-2024).
(2) Yourish, Karen et. al. (2024): How Republicans Echo Antisemitic Tropes Despite Declaring Support for Israel. New York Times/Yahoo! News 05/09/2024. <https://www.yahoo.com/news/republicans-echo-antisemitic-tropes-despite-122048857.html> (Accessed: 13-05-2024).
(3) Hartmann, Christian, et al. (2016): In "Einleitung" to Hitler, Mein Kampf.Eine Kritische Edition, Bd. 1, 58. Munich & Berlin: Institut für Zeitgeschichte. My translation from German.
(4) Here I’m using “conspiracist” to refer to concocted “conspiracy theory” thinking.
(5) Benz, Wolfgang (2017[3]): Die Protokolle der Weisen von Zion.Die Legende von der jüdischen Weltverschwörung. Munich: C.H.Beck. My translation from German.
(6) US Department of State (2024): More Than a Century of Antisemitism, 19. <https://www.state.gov/more-than-a-century-of-antisemitism-how-successive-occupants-of-the-kremlin-have-used-antisemitism/> (Accessed: 13-05-2024).
(7) Lurie, David (2024): How Bannon and Trump normalized antisemitic bigotry. Public Notice 12/05/2022. <https://www.publicnotice.co/p/trump-bannon-antisemitism-globalists-soros> (Accessed: 14-05-2024).
(8) Wistrich, Robert (1993): Anti-Semitism in Europe Since the Holocaust. The American Jewish Year Book Vol. 93, 3-23. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/23605811>
(9) Soucy, Robert and Editors (2024): Neofascism: The postwar period to the end of the 20th century: Russia. Encyclopedia Britannica 04/19/2024. <https://www.britannica.com/topic/fascism> (Accessed: 14-05-2024).
(10) Korneyev, Lev (1980): Israel: The Reality Behind the Myths. Moscow: Novosti Press Agency Publishing House.
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