Scottish poet, Robert Burns, reflecting on the challenge of honest self-observation wrote perceptively:
O would some Power with vision teach us
To see ourselves as others see us!
It would from many a blunder free us.
Living in an age of acute antisemitism we are often bewildered, if not astonished, by the distorted perception of Jews and Judaism by our detractors. Since October 7 the depiction of Jews as evil blood suckers, vermin, baby killers, and trash has surfaced with a vengeance. One vile example is the portrait of Netanyahu by Hamas as a vampire of Palestinian children with blood dripping from his mouth. Another is French-language La Presse which published a cartoon of Netanyahu with long claws, pointed ears, and wearing a long black coat – images reminiscent of Count Orlok, a vampire from the 1922 silent film, Nosferatu. On April 7, speaking at Princeton, former Israeli PM, Naftali Benett, was disrupted by protestors who shouted at Jewish students that they were “inbred swine” who should “go back to Europe”. In Australia we have been treated to similar toxic depictions on the placards at the Palestinian protests and on our campuses.
We shouldn’t be surprised – medieval blood libels and stereotypes are as ancient as our history itself. We shouldn’t be astonished; Hollywood and the media may have been dominated by Jews, but its depiction of Jews has been permeated by bias and the depiction of Jews as driven by money and power, or being prime nerds and facile fashionistas. A recent study (at the end of 2024) from the American USC Annenberg Norman Lear Centre’s Media Impact Project revealed that Jewish representation on-screen still falls flat, leaning into detrimental stereotypes and highlighting only specific types of Jews. The study noted several damaging stereotypes that recurred throughout television shows, including those produced from 2021 to 2022: “The Nebbish Man” (a nerdy, mama’s boy), “The Overbearing Jewish Mother”, and “The Jewish American Princess (JAP)”. They also found that in scripted television Orthodox Jews are often “othered”, while Jewish people at large are painted in broad strokes as a monolith. It’s not necessarily so marvellous to be Mrs Maisels, and we need to curb our enthusiasm for those few Jews who defy the stereotypes!
Recognising and knowing how others see us is knowing how to counter their egregious depictions: “With increasingly brazen attacks on Jews, a message from Hollywood that leans into Jewish joy and pride could be contagious and move off the screen to Jews and non-Jews alike,” Allison Josephs, founder and executive director of JITC Hollywood Bureau, said. The Media Impact Project posited, perhaps somewhat naively but nevertheless laudatory, that with more positive, diverse representation of Judaism in film and television, the rate of antisemitic hate could slow.
Robbie Burns may be right that seeing ourselves as others do can be helpful and even liberating, but it’s also a potential pitfall or blunder. It can be detrimental and even dangerous, because if the other comes from a place of hatred we may start to believe their negative presentations of us and who we are. If you are hated, you may come to believe you are hateful and that the flaw is in you. This is rarely so, for “hate exists in the mind of the hater, not in the person of the hated”.
Rabbi Jonathan posited that internalised antisemitism gives rise to either self-righteousness or self-hatred, and that we need to remember that Jews are the objects of antisemitism, not its cause. Both of these trends have surfaced with a vengeance since October 7. A good number of young Jews – especially on our campuses – have drunk the Kool-Aid of self-destructiveness proffered by those who hate us. I am not suggesting that all of those standing with the Palestinians are self-hating, but their failure to extend their compassion for the awful suffering of the Gazan people, to the acute pain and angst of their own people, is surely one of moral ineptitude. The suffering of every human being should pain us, but prioritising your own kin is also a moral obligation – we are called on to love ourselves as a precondition to loving our neighbour. Rabbi Akiva famously formulated it that your life needs always take precedence. This surely means we must be, at the very least, as vigorous in our advocacy for our fellow Jews in the face of ferocious antisemitism as we are for the suffering of ordinary Palestinians.
Self-righteousness is another sickly product of internalised antisemitism and has sadly flourished since October 7, especially in the extremist supporters of Ben Gvir and Smotrich and their ilk across the Jewish world.
In these critically worrying times for our people, we need to assure we are not driven by paranoia nor fear, but motivated by the values that have sustained us for centuries: love of God and love of the stranger, the sanctity of human life, justice and righteousness. Perhaps then, when we look into the eyes of the other, we will see reflected back the best of who we truly are.
May this Pesach season reinforce those redeeming values.
Chag Sameach
