Will the Real Anti-Semites Please Shut Up

Normally I wouldn’t waste any time on Rob Eshman, a senior columnist at Forward whose mealy-mouthed brand of liberal Zionism is so clueless that it’s an embarrassment even to liberal Zionists.

He’s argued in print that the only real trouble with the “sacrifice and bravery of Israeli soldiers on the front lines” in Gaza is that the genocide they’re perpetrating “is making American Jews less safe” – as if Albert Schweitzer had written to Hitler, “Enough with the gas chambers, Adolf! I mean, people are starting to look at me funny when they hear my accent.”

But I am taking a moment to respond to Eshman’s bizarre column of April 18 because, in trying to fabricate a nationwide epidemic of “anti-Semitism” from a fire started in the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion by one mentally disturbed man, Eshman’s apologetics for Israeli crime take him way beyond cluelessness.

In fact, as I see it, his column is one of the vilest examples of anti-Jewish bigotry I have ever read – and the weird part is that Eshman insists that he is fighting anti-Semitism, when he is actually disseminating it.

That should not be allowed to pass without comment.

On the surface, Eshman’s latest is a typical example of pro-genocide gaslighting: Cody Balmer’s reported statement that he started the fire in Josh Shapiro’s official governor’s mansion because of “what [Shapiro] wants to do to the Palestinian people” is, according to Eshman, “textbook antisemitism.”

Get it? If you oppose genocide and support the rights of Palestinians, you’ve just got to be a Jew-hater. So it doesn’t matter what Balmer (who, by all accounts, suffers from mental health problems) has given as the reason for his act; Eshman knows that his real motive was anti-Semitism, because – well, just because.

I suspect Eshman’s analysis would have been different if the governor had been a Muslim who publicly supported ISIS and had slandered its critics as Shapiro has slandered anti-genocide protesters – but who’s counting?

Relying on an email from one Anna Wrobel (another Israel apologist who claims that Hamas, not Israel, is the genocidal party), Eshman goes on to argue that “anti-Israelism” is “Jew-hatred in one of its most corrosive forms.” And then he unleashes his real point: that the “anti-Israel movement in the United States and Europe” is permeated with the “all-consuming hate” of anti-Israelism, making it somehow responsible both for Balmer’s arson and for the desperate Palestinian resistance of October 7, 2023.

His conclusion?

Even though some of the “outrage” about Israel’s actions is “justifiable” (Eshman doesn’t say what sort of outrage is “justifiable,” let alone why it is), criticism of Israel’s crimes against humanity “needs to be channeled in ways that don’t flatly demonize Israel.”

So as long as we don’t say anything too harsh about Israel’s genocide in Gaza or its bloody apartheid regime throughout occupied Palestine, Eshman will recognize our right to protest.

But if we commit the cardinal sin of “anti-Israelism,” we reveal ourselves as pure Jew-haters who must be silenced and vilified – after all, we’re on the same side as a guy who started a fire in somebody’s home. (No, I’m not talking about the Israeli pilots who’ve burned up scores of Palestinian civilians by dropping incendiary bombs on their tents while they were sleeping; Eshman sees nothing wrong with being on their side.)

So much for what Eshman wrote. Now let’s exercise a bit of rudimentary logic.

If condemning Israel’s crimes is “anti-Israelism,” and if “anti-Israelism” automatically implicates and alienates all Jews – and Eshman insists on both points – then it follows from his argument that every Jew in the world, simply because he or she is a Jew, supports those crimes.

Criticism of genocide can’t be “textbook antisemitism,” as Eshman says it is, unless we assume that all Jews everywhere are automatically complicit in that genocide. Remember that Balmer never said a word about Governor Shapiro being Jewish, let alone that Shapiro’s support for Israel’s mass murder had anything to do with his religion or his ethnic background. Eshman simply assumes the identity of Jewishness with Israeli crime, or at least with support for such crime.

In other words, according to Eshman, every Jew is by definition a genocidal racist. Every Jew is emotionally bound to Israeli apartheid, Israeli ethnic cleansing, Israeli mass murder. To be a Jew, according to Eshman, is to be a criminal. A gangster. A Nazi.

Nothing less than that.

That’s why Eshman’s column isn’t just a piece of half-assed special pleading for international crime: it’s also an anti-Semitic slur of the most ugly variety. Eshman is not only gaslighting truth-tellers about Israel. He’s smearing every Jew in the world as a racist born with genocidal DNA. If he’s right, so was Hitler.

I suppose it’s possible that Eshman, who says he writes about “politics, spirituality and food” – could he have parodied the uncommitted, non-threatening type of Jewish “progressive” he embodies more perfectly if he’d tried? – is just too stupid to realize that he’s joined the ranks of anti-Semitic propagandists.

But I’m not so sure. After all, Eshman must know as well as the rest of us that there is a very simple way to protect Jews around the world from “anti-Israelism.” All Jews have to do is to repudiate Israel’s crimes – clearly, forcefully, unequivocally. Then all the whining of the Eshmans and Wrobels of the Jewish world would be as unnecessary as it is disgraceful.

No – when a prominent Jewish columnist chooses to tar all Jews as members of a Nazi cult, when he could just as easily have recommended calling genocide and apartheid by their proper names, his anti-Semitism can’t be rationalized as the product of mere foolishness.

And lest I be accused of foregrounding Jewish comfort in the midst of genocide, I will stress at once that Palestinians are the primary victims of Eshman’s propaganda – and that his position would be no less deplorable if it weren’t anti-Semitic on top of being a smokescreen for mass murder. It is morally abominable to make the legitimacy of accurate condemnation of Israeli crime turn on whether or not it’s “good for the Jews.”

But Eshman’s anti-Semitism does matter, because the well-heeled PR campaign of which his column is a part – the purpose of which is to conflate Jews with Israeli policy – is bound to have consequences, and those consequences will be the exact opposite of what the propagandists promise. Public opinion is not as malleable as Jewish pundits like Eshman would like to believe. It is no accident that the Israel-firsters have already resorted to police violence and official blackmail to get their way. No one – outside the bubble inhabited by mainstream opinion-makers – is fooled any longer by fairy tales about critics of Israel being closet anti-Semites.

This means that Israel is not likely to escape the judgment it deserves. And if people like Eshman (and the readers who listen to him) have their way, that judgment will also fall on its collaborators, including, according to Eshman, every Jewish community the world over. Is that a good thing? Perhaps the “spiritual” Mr. Eshman would benefit from reading a page or two from the Hebrew prophets – writers who, by his standards, were among the worst anti-Semites in history.

Here is Isaiah rendering God’s rebuke to the people for the official crimes of his own day:

I cannot endure iniquity along with the solemn assembly.
Your new moons and your appointed seasons
My soul hateth;
they are a burden unto Me;
I am weary to bear them.
And when ye spread forth your hands,
I will hide Mine eyes from you;
yea, when ye make many prayers,
I will not hear;
your hands are full of blood.

The community always pays a price for the sins it does not repudiate – not because some unpleasant person has pointed them out, but because that is the nature of moral responsibility. Jewish tradition has always understood that. It’s time today’s soi-disant Jewish spokespeople understood it, too.

Michael Lesher is an author, poet and lawyer whose legal work is mostly dedicated to issues connected with domestic abuse and child sexual abuse. His latest nonfiction book is Sexual Abuse, Shonda and Concealment in Orthodox Jewish Communities (McFarland & Co., 2014); his first collection of poetry, Surfaces, was published by The High Window in 2019. A memoir of his discovery of Orthodox Judaism as an adult – Turning Back: The Personal Journey of a “Born-Again” Jew – was published in September 2020 by Lincoln Square Books.

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