Martini Judaism

In 1977, a man named Frank Collin announced that he planned to march his fellow neo-Nazis through Skokie, Illinois, a Chicago suburb where roughly one in ten residents had survived the death camps. Chicago had already blocked him from marching there, and his history of violence and property damage offered the city an easy “no.”

PS. Frank Collin was the son of a German Jewish Holocaust survivor.

The ACLU took his case anyway, on First Amendment grounds, and Skokie became the defining American test of whether even the most hateful speech deserves protection.

That fight did not end in 1978. It resurfaced in Charlottesville in 2017, where marchers carrying torches chanted “Jews will not replace us” under the same constitutional canopy that had once shielded Collin.

And it has resurfaced again, right now, on college campuses, where students and administrators are still arguing over what speech the law should protect and what speech should count as harassment.

Skokie did not settle anything. It just wrote the opening chapter.

I learned about Collin, and much more, from James Loeffler, a historian at Johns Hopkins and the author of a new book called Exceptional Hatred: Antisemitism and the Fight over Free Speech in Modern America. I spoke with him for this week's Martini Judaism podcast.
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Rabbi Jeff Marx has written a new book, Jewish Firebugs: Arson and Antisemitism from the Civil War to World War I, and he does something almost nobody has tried before. He tells the story behind the charge that Jews deliberately set fires in order to collect insurance money – “Jewish lightning.”

In fact, there were real Jewish arsonists who operated in American cities for roughly sixty years, and Jeff tells those stories. He begins with the 1867 "Jew risks" affair, when major fire insurance companies instructed their agents to deny policies to Jews outright. He follows the stereotype through three decades of trade-press obsession, into vaudeville sketches and silent films, and into real criminal networks of torches, public adjusters, and fire brokers.

So, yes: there were actual Jewish arsonists. But, they were extremely few in proportion to the population -- approximately 200 individuals, or roughly one one-thousandth of one percent of New York City’s population. Despite this tiny number, their cases became front-page news and were syndicated across the United States.

But, then again, there were also Italian, Greek, and Black Americans. The fact that Jewish suspects were framed through ethnicity while others were not raised a central question for the book: why did Jewish arson cases become the basis for a broader ethnic stereotype?

We talk about why he chose arson over the more familiar stories of Jewish bootlegging and gambling; about the progression from caricatures, stereotypes, and most dangerously, antisemitic narratives which emerge when stereotypes depict Jews as malevolent conspirators, echoing European tropes of Jews plotting harm; and about what it meant to write this history with his own parents watching over the dedication page, with their own whispers of -- you guessed it -- shanda.
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It turns out that every corner of progressive culture has a price of admission, and Jews are finding it progressively more difficult to pick up that tab.

Add feminism to the list. That's the case Kara Jesella makes in her new book, "Feminist Antisemitism: An Intellectual History," which I discussed with her on my podcast.

Jesella majored in women's studies at Vassar College, where her real education in Jewish feminism came from her college rabbi, she told me. She spent years as a journalist before going back to school for a Ph.D. in performance studies at New York University. She finished that doctorate in 2021 — the same day that she watched former classmates post infographics calling Jews colonizers. And Oct. 7, 2023, she says, is when she stopped being patient about any of it.
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View Zionism from one angle, and it is Theodor Herzl, seeking to rescue the Jews of Europe. From another, it is seeking to resurrect Jewish culture. From another, it is a spiritual connection to the Land; from yet another, a socialist utopia. The images change, depending on where you are, and where we are at this moment of history.  

That is the subject of my podcast with Nadine Epstein, editor-in-chief of Moment magazine, and Gil Troy, the historian and Zionist educator. Several months ago, Epstein wrote a lead essay that argued, in some detail, that we should retire the word “Zionism” because 136 years of accumulated meanings can no longer clarify anything.

Troy had the opposite instinct: we don’t destroy a word just because those who hate it — and its supporters who have distorted it — have made it more challenging.

 

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Author and musician Daniel Rachel has written a new, disturbing and quite overdue book, "This Ain’t Rock ‘n’ Roll: Pop Music, the Swastika and the Third Reich." And I interviewed him about it for my podcast. 

The book documents something that has been hiding in plain sight for more than 60 years. As Rachel writes:

For over seventy-five years, musicians have been drawn to the language and provocative imagery of Nazism, fascinated by its power, menace and underlying sexuality. They have flirted with the theatrical spectacle of the Third Reich, displayed the swastika, flaunted memorabilia, worn Nazi uniforms and marveled at the grandiose rallies of 1930s Germany.

Decades ago, Woody Guthrie had a guitar with the words inscribed on it: "This machine kills fascists." We never thought that future rock stars might have guitars that could say they celebrate fascists.

The worst part is the rock music industrial complex industry spent seven decades simply looking the other way. And so did the audiences, including me.  

 
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