I’ve been planning on writing a long, serious piece about anti-Semitism and the intersections and non-intersections between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism for a while now. I am still planning on doing so. But these are heavy, daunting, complex subjects. So in the meantime, I am going to start with smaller, more bite-sized reflections and posts (which my Twitter followers may have already seen, but for those of you who don’t tweet, I’m going to collect a few recent thoughts here). These pertain specifically to the decision to disinvite Matisyahu from a Spanish reggae festival.
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I’ll follow this case, and be open to hearing arguments in either direction, but I do think, as a guiding principle, that a European boycott campaign that singles out an individual Israeli or an individual Jew (as contrasted to an Israeli corporation or business, which is a very different thing) has a huge burden of proof to show that there is not residual anti-Semitism left over in their call. Not to say that such a thing couldn’t be proven. Of course it could. Just saying, in the words of April Rosenblum, that the past didn’t go anywhere.
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Update, 10:27 PM. After a long, heated tweet-debate on a few different fronts, in which the argument of Matisyahu having made bigoted anti-Palestinian statements in the past came up a lot, I’ve posted this temporary conclusion, and will update if my thoughts change:
The Leftern Wall 