About the Guide
This guide was written by Sharon Rose Goldtzvik, prepared for Bend the Arc: Jewish Action and the Collaborative for Jewish Organizing and its member organizations. The guide can be explored as a webpage or downloaded as a PDF.
Who is this guide for?
- If you are a person who wants to end antisemitism and believes it’s a critical step toward a safe, liberated future for all of us—Jewish or not, no matter our religions, races, or genders—this guide is for you.
- If you are Jewish and are looking for ways to talk about antisemitism that lead to action and help bring people together across lines of difference to end it, this guide is for you.
- If you are progressive— no matter who your people are—and you want to learn how to take the lead on addressing antisemitism, creating more equitable and liberated movements, and winning the thriving future we all deserve, this guide is for you.
What You’ll Find
This guide contains specific language recommendations advocates should use to tell a coherent story about antisemitism and how we can eliminate it, including a powerful new metaphor and guidance on how to avoid unhelpful and even damaging metaphors that are commonly used today, advice for responding to accusations of antisemitism, and guidelines for ensuring that our responses to antisemitism do not damage other connected movements and people.
The language was strongly informed by insights from polling and message testing research, including the extensively tested Race-Class Narrative research project. The guide may be updated as new research emerges.
Contents
- How to Dismantle Antisemitism
- Introduction: Words Create Worlds
- Antisemitism and Fear
- The Story of Antisemitism
- The Bad Metaphors
- Message Guidance
- The Machinery Metaphor
- Using vs. Fueling
- Smokescreen Antisemitism
- Polluting our Society
- Machinery Metaphor in Use
- How to Talk About Antisemitism
- Message Platform
- Language Choices in the Message Platform
- Adapting the Message Platform
- Rhetorical Considerations and What to Say Instead
- Israel and Palestine
- Messaging Principles
- Specific language recommendations
- Responding to Antisemitic Incidents and Accusations
Excerpt
Jewish tradition teaches us that words create worlds.
The words we use to talk about antisemitism profoundly shape our reality. They inform our understanding of the
nature of the problem, what solutions might be appropriate, and who has the power to do something about it. For those of us working toward a future where all of us can live full, thriving, joyful lives, no matter our religions, races, or genders, language is an essential tool.
Our language should conjure the world we wish to create, and reflect the truth embedded in that vision that antisemitism is a problem we can—and must— solve.
Our language should express the way antisemitism is inherently connected to other forms of discrimination and oppression, including anti-Black racism, anti-immigrant xenophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia, and more, and show how antisemitism is a fundamental threat to democracy. It should provide a framework for growth and unlearning antisemitism that has polluted our society. It should help our multiracial, multiethnic Jewish audiences overcome the very real fears resulting from our experiences and histories with antisemitism and make space to talk about the complexities of our intersecting identities. And it should help audiences outside the Jewish community to find themselves and their own stakes in this story to help us take action together across many lines of difference.
What World Are We Creating?
Unfortunately, much of the language commonly used to talk about antisemitism today does just the opposite. In subtle and overt ways, this language, in use over many decades and expressed by a wide range of messengers, has undermined the idea that we can live in a world free from antisemitism, discrimination, and oppression of all kinds. This harmful and inaccurate story presents antisemitism as a problem completely different and separate from all other forms of discrimination and bigotry—one that has and will exist forever. This leaves Jewish people feeling afraid and isolated, suspicious of our neighbors, and unable to see our fates as fundamentally interlinked. For audiences of all religions and backgrounds, it can make the idea of taking decisive action to end antisemitism seem pointless.
The stakes are very high: While antisemitism harms Jewish people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds directly, antisemitism isn’t just an issue for Jewish communities to address. Antisemitism is used to deflect blame for the failures of those in power, to remove fundamental freedoms, and to weaken democracy. It is a core component of white supremacist and white nationalist ideology that is used to directly undermine movements for social, economic, racial, and gender justice. In some cases, white supremacists use antisemitic ideas about Jewish people as a supposed “explanation” of Black excellence and the transformative success of Black-led movements, the thriving of transgender people, and the imagined threat of those who are immigrants,
particularly people of color—all of which should be impossible according to supremacist ideology. In other cases, those same supremacist leaders and individuals point the finger at Black, brown, and Muslim people as the source of antisemitism, inventing or exploiting mistakes and missteps—which should be opportunities for growth and repair—to break apart our efforts to join together across differences to win the future we all deserve. This two-pronged strategy pitting Jewish communities and communities of color against each other is particularly painful for Jews of color, who exist fully in multiple communities across this manufactured divide.
We cannot dismantle antisemitism without addressing anti-Black racism and all other forms of institutionalized oppression. And the reverse is true as well: we cannot dismantle anti-Black racism, nor any other form of institutionalized oppression, without addressing antisemitism. Ending antisemitism is critical to achieving a thriving multiracial democracy.
Freedom and safety for any of us depends on freedom and safety for all of us. – Emma Lazarus and Fannie Lou Hamer
What We Know to be True
What we know to be true about antisemitism:
- It is a form of systemic oppression with a specific function—usually to deflect blame for hardships, to discredit leaders or institutions, or to create an imagined “enemy from within” used to justify removing or damaging fundamental freedoms and democratic institutions (like freedom of speech or the right to vote);
- It is often a form of conspiracy theory used to generate fear and division;
- It is distinct but connected to other forms of identity-based oppression and present in all sectors of American society;
- It harms Jewish people and all of us; and
- We can and must dismantle it as part of our struggle for collective liberation.
Please note, this guide does not endorse the IHRA definition of anti-semitism. Free speech is a core democratic protection that is particularly important for minority groups, including Jews. Jewish people and concerns for Israel should never be used as an excuse to damage these rights. Some efforts to codify a definition of antisemitism into law (including the International Holocaust Remembrance Association [IHRA] definition) or limit people’s right to participate in boycotts or protests have the effect of damaging the right to free speech. These efforts damage Jewish communities, all minority groups, and our democracy. It is useful to refer to these efforts as “gag legislation.”
‘Smokescreen Anti-semitism’
From the guide (page 15):
Understanding “using” and “fueling” antisemitism is particularly important to help shield against and respond to the complex “smokescreen antisemitism” strategy used by authoritarian and antidemocratic politicians and movements—a strategy which has now been largely embraced (or at least legitimized) by the mainstream Right in America.
In a smokescreen antisemitism strategy, politicians and political movements use antisemitism to increase racialized fear and division in order to gain supporters and win elections. This is a key component of their power strategy, but it could lead to being branded an antisemite, which could become a political liability. They need cover for this strategic use of antisemitism—it’s too powerful a tool and too central to their ideology to give up entirely. So the second step of the smokescreen antisemitism strategy is to create confusion by pointing the finger at progressives, people of color, and Muslims for antisemitism while claiming to be the true defenders of Jews. Sometimes these accusations are completely false, and sometimes they are true or based on some truth. But smokescreen antisemitism accusations are always initiated with the intent to obscure the user’s own responsibility for using antisemitism for political gain. This is still true even when some people joining in on the accusation of antisemitism don’t intend to do this. All of these effects are harmful and it is useful to identify and name smokescreen antisemitism when it is used, even if an accusation warrants apology and steps toward repair.