The danger of “tropes”
JVL Introduction
In a insightful article in Vashti, Em Cohen explores the danger of “tropeification”.
That is, certain phrases are identified, in advance, as antisemitic. Thinking goes out the window, and anything that uses one of these phrases, or even triggers off a possible link to one of them, constitutes antisemitism.
It doesn’t. This is a topsy-turvy way of going about things: similarities between a statement and a trope are not always meaningful or intentional.
Indeed as Cohen shows, “formulaic understanding of antisemitism is most routinely used to neutralise criticism of Israel” (as in the IHRA definition of antisemitism and elsewhere).
Furthermore, tropeification of antisemitism does not protect Jews.
Rather, its oversimplification makes understanding antisemitism difficult and dismantling it impossible.
Thanks to Vashti where this article first appeared.
This article was originally published by Vashti on Wed 24 Mar 2021. Read the original here.
Antisemitism isn’t a set of tropes – and thinking about it that way helps nobody
The outrage over Michael Che’s SNL joke is everything that’s wrong with our fight against antisemitism.
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The IHRA (mis)definition includes a mild limiting constraint about context which is largely ignored by avid trope hunters who use the examples not as clues but as he basis for a simple matching exercise; replacing ‘might be’ with ‘is’.
This was taken to a greater intensity by Luke Akehusrt, a star among trope hunters and now a member of Labour’s national executive. He circulated, under the name of Local Government Friends of Israel (what seems to be a one man band but might generously be one man and a dog) a version of the IHRA document which omitted the moderating sentences. This even more dangerous versions was adopted by a number of local authorities by ignorance or malice putting many innocent Council employees at risk of their livelihoods and protecting no Jews.
Very neat and simple dismantling by Em Cohen of the way antisemitism has largely become about tropes, which inevitably are in the eye of the beholder – or the person who chooses to cry ‘antisemitism’. Even the seemingly most blatant examples might not be what they seem.
Many years ago, working in a Dublin office of a trade union, I sought to borrow some cash from the office manager. It was the way all of us coped with our remoteness from a bank, short and eccentric banking hours and the fact that a hole in the wall still meant a hole in the wall, while bank cards weren’t even a gleam in anyone’s eye. But that day, I was unlucky, the office manager’s petty cash box was bare – or, as he put it when he apologised for being unable to help, ‘I haven’t any money, I’m like a Jew with short arms’.
I was horrified, extremely upset, and also astounded: a couple of nights before, I had wrecked the most popular TV programme in Ireland, which EVERYBODY watched – except, clearly, the office manager – by demolishing the evening’s star guest – Oswald Mosley. Which meant that everyone in Ireland – except, I suspected, the office manager – knew I was Jewish.
Because I knew instinctively that he hadn’t be intending to insult me as a Jew. He hadn’t done it because I was Jewish – as it turned out, he was the one man in Ireland who hadn’t seen that weekend’s edition of The Late Late Show. And when he failed to work out why I blanched, I was pretty sure he simply didn’t have a clue what he had said. For him, just like ‘it’s raining cats and dogs’, it was just words. Words, of course, that were nakedly antisemitic in origin, and equally overtly antisemitic in their content, but words that had lost their meaning and significance over the decades.
I was so startled and hurt, I couldn’t deal with the situation (Mosley before an audience of millions was a much easier gig), and it was left to an Irish (catholic) colleague to explain to the office manager just what he had done wrong. The office manager was overwhelmed with horror and profusely apologetic. And it was over.
Did he say something antisemitic? No argument about that. Did he realise the significance of what he was saying? I don’t believe so. Was he targeting me as a Jew? Indisputably not. Did he ever use those words again? I am certain not. What was our subsequent relationship? Just fine. So had he deployed an antisemitic trope? Yes, I reckon he did, and one whose meaning was perfectly plain on the face of it. But equally, if you ask me, was he ‘an antisemite’ because he had used those words? It didn’t – and still doesn’t – feel like that to me.
Yet people have been disciplined by and suspended from the Labour Party for ‘tropes’ whose ‘meaning’ is buried far more deeply, and is far more open to dispute. Even when it seems ‘obvious’, it might not be.
This is an excellent piece. As we could say, give em enough trope and they’ll hang themselves… Not original I know.
As Tony Greenstein (and myself and others) keep wearily saying, we know what antisemitism is and someone stumbling into a ‘trope’ doesn’t make you so and we don’t need lengthy definitions with examples.
Yes, where is the committee that adjudicates on when ordinary forms of words become forbidden and start to carry sanctions? How do its members get elected? I have never voted for anyone to carry out this work on my behalf. Language belongs to us all. People should be free to use ordinary words, and combinations of words, in their ordinary meanings. The world of tropes and memes is an Orwellian nightmare. The use of tropes and memes should be called out at every opportunity.
“Mike Cushman. 3rd April 2021 at 16:15. The IHRA (mis)definition includes a mild limiting constraint about context”
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Even more bizarre, however, the IHRA definition does not give any information about what the context(s) is/are or is/are not which would make something antisemitic or not antisemitic. So the phrase in the IHRA “depending on context” is completely meaningless.