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User voted Yes, all types of anti-semitism are a problem..
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Oct 8, 2015

Yes.

Anyone who does anti-racism work knows how quickly the accusation that a person is just a puppet of a Jew shadow cabal will come out. The anti-Semitic fear is a deep cultural one that has a lot of antecedents and causes. Even well-meaning people often wonder why Jews have seemed to be so successful in certain fields like entertainment and finance. Unfortunately, many of us do not have the kind of training to recognize how everything from small sample sizes to geography to specifics of the journey to whiteness all play into that impression of Jewish success. And it is very easy to turn from admiring a group's success to treating that group as a monolith to then demonizing and suspecting them.

However, anti-Semitism is a tough topic to discuss because it has all too often been launched at anyone who criticizes Israel. There are certainly people who oppose Israel for anti-Semitic reasons. But the region is full of ethno-religious and ethno-linguistic resentment. Israel has itself demonstrated anti-Arab, anti-Muslim and anti-African sentiments, even internally (look at the treatment of Sephardic and Ethiopean Jews in Israel). So it's hard to measure anti-Semitism in a realistic way because so many anti-Semitic activists have distorted that data by including criticisms of Israeli foreign or domestic policy in it. And you can't entirely blame them either, because there does seem to be a unique vitriol around debates about Israel and a unique paranoia. The fact that the region sees Jews facing Arabs, Turks and Persians makes the whole thing alien to many Europeans and Americans and thus promotes a lack of empathy for or understanding of all the players in the region and their actual needs.

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