Did the discourse of "anti-semitism" make Judaism right-wing?

Possible book title:
From intellectual comfort food to alibis for genocide: How liberal Judaism became right-wing

Chapter: Anti-semitism explains everything

Perhaps it starts with a certain will to think, not to be confused with a (simpler) will to power. This will to think may be "radical" in wanting to question things as they are, and angry in, perhaps almost intuitively, opposing them. A certain conservative "moderation" will be constitutively allergic to just that possibility, which is precisely what it must try to sanction or prevent. To want to understand, critically, the way things are because there are things you see and experience that seem to you unjust, that is, not as they should be, this will naturally encounter the risks of criticizing wrongly. The American "liberal" mode, based in the nihilistic democracy of the market, of reactive and comforting thought will reflexively oppose taking any risk in the process of thinking.

Though it may be comfortable with simplistic hatreds. Antisemites have those, and so do many people in the "moderate" center. Those who accuse others of hating them probably hate them precisely for this, and they may exaggerate their own victimization in the process; such as the way of many "victim" types who start wars, from Hitler to Milosevic and beyond. There are plenty of such people in Israel and in the Jewish world today. This comes to light as an outrage because Jews have so often opposed what it seems monstrously incongruous to then simultaneously propose.

The model of the conservative liberal Jewish thinker today is reactive. This model is nurtured in the American media, and is not specific to Jews, though quite specific to our contemporary market democracy. The reactive model involves people attacking others by calling them out for some kind of excess. The calling out is almost always moral. There are people on the left as well as the right who play this game. One popular form it takes is to find some famous intellectual, usually either on the left or provocative enough to have followers on the left -- and that of course is what is important, and then show that this thinker had dirty hands as a person: crime, scandal, moral outright. There is never too much righteous indignation to go around and be used to call out anyone who seems to stand out.

So this reactive thinking is conformist and uninventive. Indeed, it is not interested in any kind of critical thinking that is experimental, that takes risks, and so that has any intellectual courage.

Instead, there is lots of intellectual-moral blackmail. If you say this, you're that. And that's a no-no.

Now much of the official Jewish world operates this way. It must be opposed, and opposing it, as with anything, means taking risks. Of course, the first thing they do will be to call you out as an antisemite. This works well in America because among the unpardonable sins in the American polity is any form of prejudice. After all, the Holocaust happened because Hitler was any angry man who could not love and welcome his neighbors by being nice in the manner of country club suburban protestants. Right? Actually, that's mistaken. The Holocaust did not happen because of unruly, disobedient, angry people with a misguided radicalism; it was highly organized, mostly calm, methodical, exercising German coldness and self-control. The contemporary reflexive critics of antisemitism do not understand what the Holocaust was about or why it happened, and they don't want to. If anything remotely like it happens again, it will probably happen mostly to some other people, for they've fortified themselves now, and the critics of yesterday's genocides will be blind to today's, deliberately blind to be sure.

In the early 80s, a punk zine I read published a terrific banner statement: "Would you rather be wrong or boring?" Should thinking take risks or just try to "feel correct" and win another battle for the gipper you work for?

If someone says, "That's just antisemitism," that means they don't want you to read it; it's been put on the Index. And of course, they wouldn't bother to read anything that comes anywhere near to crossing a line between the permitted and the forbidden. Their own writings stay wholly within the permitted and relentlessly oppose the forbidden. Aren't they comforting to read?