Where does today’s anti-elitism come from? Anti -Semitism, says Adam Gopnik

New York writer and former CBC Massey LecturerAdam Gopnik claims that there is a connection between contemporary anti-elitism, as advocated by authoritarian leaders and their supporters around the world and historical anti-Semitism.

In the second annual lecture of Irving Abella, which he held in the fall of 2024. At Massey College in Toronto, he sketches the evolution of anti-Semitism from the political right of the left, and illustrates that this evolution has notified and shaped today’s anti-theatetism and anti-urbanism.

Hitler’s original goals, for example, were not impoverished Jews of Eastern Europe, which suffered immensely during the Holocaust. It was a class of written, educated and established Jews in urban centers – the elite of their place and time.

“We see that the firm removal of Jews was related to only hatred of the Jews, but to the wider hatred of cosmopolitanism,” Gopnik told the audience.

Here are some passages from his conversation, Chatting hate.

Guilt template

“There is no more insidious form of transformed anti -Semitism than blaming opponents of authoritarianism, for the increase in authoritarianism, directing the finger of guilt, not in the Nazis, but on their social democratic opponents for somehow creating circumstances that enabled the Nazis to flourish.

“This is a well -known trop. So, I will make belligerent, say Jewish, counter -case. Whenever you hear about talking about elitism as a true impulsor of popular fascism, or again, anyone who blames the most interesting enemies of authoritarism as authors of authoritarianism, whenever we hear that anyone is anyone blamed the educated and enlightened for the works of benir and brutal, we are in the presence of This permanent template, which begins with hatred of Jews, a turn of thought that has its roots and its branches at the ugliest of all modern tropics.

“To make those who fight fascism responsible for this means involve in the core of the 20th century anti -Semitic channel. In my opinion, educated and erudite should be ruthlessly unpalogged about the absolute good education and erudition. While working only as As a relentless to ensure that education remains open for as much as possible, which is cheap how human is achievable and equally widespread on the ways that never had before. “

Anti-Semitism as anti-urbanism

“If you read Mein KampfWhat will be striking is not in the original impulse, the idea is not that Jews are horrific outsiders trying to break their path to Germany. No, these are those who already have insiders. And control cultural institutions. The Jews, in Hitler’s feverish imagination, controlled the Academy of Drawing in Vienna, from which Hitler, in defiance, was excluded.

“Arrogance, disgusting skill and argument, above all, their skill in getting a place, this is the root emotion of Hitler’s hatred of Jews. And interesting, Hitler connects Jews with the French in Mein Kampfas people are especially good at lubricating their path to institutions where they do not belong.

“Hitler was furious at the Jews in Vienna, not because the Jews practiced art instead of agriculture, but because they would not let him go to art school.

“Goebbels was similarly a failed philosophical novelist, not a cunning Roser. Circles of populist authoritarians then, as now, tend to be fulfilled with bitter B-Minus competitors. And so we come to the last and still most notable more educated thing about studying about studying the history of anti -Semitism now.

“We can see that the firm removal of Jews was related to only hatred of the Jews, but to the wider hatred of cosmopolitanism. Although a huge number of Jews that failed in mass murders were poor religious Jews from Eastern Europe, peasants and nursing and small traders, the main enemy , as the leaders of the murder understood, were always and always remained by the educated Jews of Western Europe. “

Overturning the sacrifice script

“Those who fight against authoritarianism become responsible for his increase, while those who cheered him the flames were portrayed as poor victims, without any agencies or understanding the ideologies they support. Common sense, as I say, shows us that it makes no sense.

“People who broke into the capitol in 2021. They knew perfectly well what they were doing, and whose name they worked. They did not fight to return factories to Akron. They fought to set up a dictator, which they rightly imagined shared their terror and hated and hated his ideological enemies.

“The same right-wing populist anti-Auto-authoritarian movements increased in parallel in countries with species of providden states that I would like to be the United States in them, whatever happened in them, and obviously the fact of immigration is a strong drive in itself.

“The Swedes and the French are well protected by their own social networks from the relaxation of neoliberalism. To blame people trying to stop fascism’s rise to increase fascism again to insist that social democrats are wrong for insufficient compassion with indigenous anti -Semitism of the German people as happened in the 1930s.”

Patriotism vs nationalism

“The whole point of our social existence is to expand our circles of compassion. It is terribly difficult with a built -in trap too rarely admit that, like we, while we spread our circles of compassion from our immediate family to our city in our city or towards our people, we necessarily risk to become closed in the same increased circle.

“This is precisely a trap of a 19th -century liberal nationalism on which Canada was built and which [Theodor] Herzl dreamed of Jews … We increase our circles to build a country and fail to see the native people lying outside of it.

“Nations are thus dangerous. The nomads and tribes tend to fight each other for the goods but not to shake each other from the principle. So the struggle [is] First increase our circle of compassion. And then again, not to be trapped in this extension, it is the struggle of patriotism against nationalism. “

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*The transcript is decorated for clarity and length. This episode was produced by Greg Kelly.