Antisemitism has nothing to do with color.
It's a kind of hatred that has everything to do with religion, with ethnicity but not
necessarily with physical appearance.
Even the Nazis were not sure what Jews looked like.
They have a great deal of pornographic antisemitism.
Julius Streicher - and Der Stürmer was an example in Streicher - was convicted of crimes
against humanity and executed.
But the images of the Jewish nose, the Jewish ears, the caricatures of the Jewish body that
were so famous in Nazi propaganda went alongside the decision to have Jews wear a yellow star.
Why should Jews wear a yellow star?
Because the Nazis didn't know what the Jews looked like.
Because there were Jews who had blond hair and blue eyes.
That's one aspect of the difficulty that antisemitism is not primarily about color and it's not
primarily about what Jews biologically are supposed to look like.
And that's why it's so difficult for many Americans to understand antisemitism.
Because when Americans think about racism they think immediately understandably about
skin color.
Second aspect of antisemitism that's different from white racism is that the dangerous aspect
of antisemitism is that they are small in number but they are evil and powerful and
very very smart.
And this small group of people has managed somehow to accumulate enormous amounts of
power and run the world.
And this small group of people who has accumulated enormous amounts of power and are running
the world and causing wars and economic catastrophes and disease and illness, this group of people
is so dangerous we need to kill them.
We need to kill them in order to make the world a better place.
We are not going to enslave them.
We are not going to just deny them citizenship.
We are going to kill them.
Because by killing them...
Not just by getting them out of the country - there is that. But it's not enough to get them
out of the country because they are going to be some place else and as long as they
are around, as long as they are some place else, they'll be conniving and conspiring.
So how are we going to make the world a good place?
How are we going to bring about peace?
How are we going to make the world economy bloom?
How are we going to defend ourselves against this evil bunch?
Wipe them out.
And that was the ideology that justified the Holocaust.
In my book The Jewish Enemy I elaborated that in great detail.
Sad to say in 2019 this understanding of antisemitism and how it differs from other forms of racism
that focus on color is still not widely enough understood.
The genocidal aspects of antisemitism are inseparable from this conspiracy theory.
The antisemitic imagination tells a story about the world.
It's not about noses, and ears, and body sizes and sexual proclivities, and obsessions.
It's all there.
There is a pornographic dimension and there are people who are interested in that kind
of thing.
But fundamentally, the most dangerous aspect is historically in the Nazi period and then
in the government of Iran and in the Hamas covenant is the notion of the Jews as a political
actor who want to subordinate and dominate other people.
And it's because of what the Jews do, what is alleged that the Jews do - not the way
they look - but what they do that is so dangerous.
That's the most dangerous aspect of antisemitism.