“Commies want to make trans jewish women the rulers of the world and we weak and oppressed cishet white men will be their servants.”
Okay so I’m not a Jew and I don’t know any Jews (I live in West Germany, for some reason there’s not that many here ) so correct me if I’m wrong, it seems to me that Jewish oppression and antisemitism are very different from racism, transphobia, homophobia etc. There is less casual, internalized antisemitism on a wide-spread scale and it’s more focused on extremists, but those extremists hate them all the more. So basically you’re less likely to miss out on a job because of who you are than a black or a trans person is, but you’re just as likely to get shot at a synagogue as a muslim is at a mosque.
Again, this is my impression as someone who is mostly clueless, so feel free to tell me that I couldn’t be more wrong and Jews experience microaggressions all the time, I genuinely have no idea.
Open antisemitism used to be very widespread. It became rarer during and after World War 2, because when your enemy’s main thing is hating the Jews, you have to distance yourself from that (or, for Germany, the state’s legitimacy is tied to convincing everyone they’re not nazis anymore).
Even now you don’t have to find people all that extreme to start finding antisemitism though. It’s as common as openly racist people. Jews also play a special role in racist mythology, so anti-Jewish racism is weird and different from others.
While I’ve been living in Europe for the past 3 years I have definitely experienced more antisemitism than I have since being bullied as a kid in the USA. People bringing up the rothschilds (lots of banking talk), casual insulting of jews while also disparaging other minorities, claiming that the jewish people deserved the holocaust because of what they did afterwards (implying Israel).
All to say, I think that anti-semitism in europe is more prevalent than in the USA, but I am unsure how widespread it is. I don’t think it’s necessarily common but I don’t really come across as jewish so who knows how many people just treat me as another white person. I think a lot of it comes from just not knowing any jews or really learning about them in their history. My landlord was a history teacher and had no clue about jewish history in europe outside of the holocaust. Her son even less. Folks end up learning about us through the news, especially about Israel and/or wealthy jewish bourgeois. It’s basically just ‘socialism of fools’. People making uncritical critiques of Israel, banking, capitalism, their personal material woes and blame it on the jew. Tying it up with a nice bow is the dumb conflation of anti-Israel sentiment with antisemitism which made it even messier to engage with people about it.
