Was Albert Einstein an anti-Semite? Was Hannah Arendt? These questions may sound ludicrous. Yet, according to the definition of anti-Semitism that more than 30 countries—including the United States through the Biden Administration—recently adopted, these two leading intellectuals could very well be labeled as such. This is due to an open letter they sent on December 4, 1948 to the New York Times, claiming that the right-wing Herut Party in the newly formed State of Israel was “closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.”
The list of potential anti-Semites goes on. Take the British-American Jewish historian Tony Judt, who not long before his death from Lou Gehrig’s Disease in 2010 described Israel as “autistic” after it had put Gaza “under a punishment regime comparable to nothing else in the world.” Then there is the celebrated Italian Jewish novelist and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, who was highly critical of the Israeli government’s “fascist” tendencies alongside its use of the Holocaust as a “favorite defense” against attempts to criticize its actions. The late Hebrew University philosopher and biochemist and Israel Prize winner, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, would not have fared much better given his criticism of the growing “phenomena of Judeo-Nazism” following Israel’s 1982 invasion of
— source commondreams.org | Neve Gordon, Mark LeVine | Mar 31, 2021