I would ask Ms. Trivellato to contrast treatment of Jewish communities with that of the Roma.

I do not understand us/them conflicts like the one in the Ukraine. What disturbs me is that antisemitism often is turned on the poorest and unfortunate and not the rich.

Most disturbing is Israeli intent to sell and continue to sell Pegasus to Putin's Russia despite the evil.

There are many choices I don't get. I'm keeping friends close and enemies farther of late. Those that deal in the devil are causing havoc. Antisemitism might be touching on the root. It is far too past time to pull the weeds.

Jealousy is an evil and insidious thing. As a young person, my memories of comments/criticisms of Jews always seemed to be perjorative. People of my parent's and grandparent's generations far more often made caustic remarks. Jews were shrewd business people. They would cheat you, any way they could. So, it was a not a far stretch to conclude no Jewish person could be trusted Generational ethnic condemnation. This sort of thing continues now, across a broad range of issues. We call it culture war.
Anyhow, Nietzsche may have said it best---if it was he who said it: whatever does not kill you makes you stronger. A good rule of thumb for any oppressed people.

In discussion of the new anti-Semitism it seems important to distinguish it from two recent previous ones. The first is an artificially generated version designed to deflect criticism of actions and policies for which the Israeli state together with the relationship to the U.S. is/are responsible. This occurs e.g. in exceptions to international law on grounds of state-survival, and therefore by association as asserted in terms of Jewish nationalism, the objections to which thereby can be termed as anti-Semitic by means of that association, translating support for international law into the translator's claim of offense against the respective population.

The second anti-Semitism is the one which makes the same arbitrary association but on the other side of it. On the receiving end of respective state conduct, deflecting demands for critique of conduct is not the target, but rather the claim of association as generalized to the offending object as associated with the extra-national population in whose name the state behaves.

If these two anti-Semitisms above are put aside, what's left is the current one in the Western industrialized nations, which in my view is in largest part a result of the crisis in economics occurring November of '08. In that relation it can't be accurately viewed as a relationship between two separate groups, with one as actor and the other as patient. This is true on account of the fact that the institutional form in a given society is characteristically shared in more fundamental ways than associated cultural pullulations; and as these institutional forms belong to social institutions, they are by association if not by definition matters of choice. What I'd like to argue here is that a more fundamental causal determination can be found in a distinction between two sets of choices, rather than between two or more cultural groups. As a means of one set overriding the practical efficiency of the other set, Anti-Semitism, as a tool of blaming economic exploitation on a non-responsible party, emerges in the service of collective apology for participation in this exploitation. Anti-Semitism as a heritage therefore counts for very little. Its heritability-function consists in lying around in the actor's toolbox, as a participation-apology. (The word "scapegoat" is here avoided, since its reference to animal sacrifice would confuse the issue). More important are the conditions under which this tool was deployed, which have to do with prevailing elements of our financial system. Perhaps it might be of some assistance, then, to review some elements of the '08 crash and the government's response, commonly referred to in terms of a crisis in the derivatives-market and a "bank-bailout". A derivative is a secondary form of tradable security derived from a primary one. As a condition for a loan, for example, the recipient agrees to buy something from the lender, say a bag of apples, at a later date. The lender needs insurance against default, so at least she or he will sell a bag of apples out to the deal before the lender loses the principle or, extended more generally, files for bankruptcy. The role played by a derivative in this example is as an insurance contract, but where such contracts can be bundled together and traded as a single package, the need for oversite by an impartial party to prevent fraud becomes evident. The crash of the housing market in November illustrated the system's unregulated character by showing how repayment of loans became irrelevant once their contracts had been included in a package of securities which is sold by the firm which wrote them. The top incentive was to lend out as much as possible, knowing that most wouldn't be payed back so that the insurance contracts against loan default can be drawn upon. This had the effect that any asset still liquid was drained out of the economy, so that a multinational version of a run on the banks ensued.

The original borrower was in all respects defrauded into unaffordable loans. This fact together with the unpopular recapitalization of the big investment banks, instead of the much more rational response of nationalizing them and the banking sector in general, generated the conditions under which the current form of Anti-Semitism, (which has distinct characteristcs not shared by other forms, such as a relationship to frequent references to what's called "border security"), has been not only deployed as insertable apologetics into the typical functioning of the predatory financial elements of the prevailing economic system, but has exercised it's more overt and extreme elements as nurse to respective anti-social potential. Here the typical anti-Semitic tropes as a handed-down heritage can be fitted easily into an otherwise accurate account of the government's response and continued similar financial behaviors. The well-intentioned borrower was swindled into a bad deal because he/she couldn't understand the terms of the contract, so that the TARP program (the Troubled Assets Relief Program) looks like a reward to the predators and a disregard for the afflicted. Only with respect to the facility of associating the actual institutional conduct with inherited fears and prejudices do these latter play any detectable role. Primary on the contrary is the way it fits into the narrative that the bearing of such views can hold as a personal absolution from involvement in the anti-social behaviors which can now be in effect tacked onto another apt carrier, in effective place of an understanding of one's own involvement and optional participation.

The issue of the anti-Semitisms having to do with Israeli state-conduct, both as artificially generated internally to deflect any critique of it and arbitrarily expanded externally to include those not responsible for it, can as said above be safely put aside for topical purposes, as being determined by a different set of causes, having to do with colonial expansion more than economic malfeasance. Your reference to the recent events in Buffalo is to an effect of anti-Semitism (among presumably several other things), not a cause of it. In a similar relation, references to propaganda tracts are to mere instruments in the toolbox of rhetoric, in possession of no determinative capacity until someone picks it up and starts using it. And truly useless is trying to confuse the issue by a supremacist's claim of nationalist aspiration as having any determinative value whatsoever except for the fact that its fanaticism and violent potential can be favored by one side or another in political contests, or even be conceivably deputized by an unpopular government as a defense against popular will. But to say it's a cause of contemporary anti-Semitism has little to defend it. As another remark, your reference to a "march on the Capitol", which I suppose refers to January 6, 2021, as "not a non-sequitur", is unintelligible. If you're trying to say that the attempted coup was a cause of anti-Semitism just because anti-Semites were involved in it, then it would be just as non-sensical as if one said that because a hammer was used in a construction project, that it's the cause of its blue-print drawn up by the architect.

To the contrary, I argue that the cause of contemporary anti-Semitism is the historical plunge into recession as a result of the '08 crisis together with how the recovery from it was managed by the state. As historical objects are complex ones, their causes can not be isolated and are untestable by experimental methods. For this reason the imagination must come to the aid of the understanding which, since it's object is imagined as something believed to be real, or to have existed at one time, this special variety of rendered aid in the context of the historical sciences can be called the "historical" imagination. The special domain which belongs to it is optative in tendency. More than the causes of what actually occurred, the historical imagination constitutes an instrument for determination of the causes of what didn't happen, but could have. Only when one ascertains the cause of the latter, can one do so for the former.

The most salient characteristic of response within the economics-intelligentsia to the crash was bafflement, whether genuine or pretended. While many in the economics establishment claimed to not understand how things went wrong, many who "acted in good faith" were adversely effected. The psychology is hard to miss, and is written of by Professor Trivellato as part of the ambiguous relationship which European commerce has with credit (cf. "The Rumor About the Jews", January 8, 2020), so that in both pre-industrial finance and industrial capitalism a destructive demon must be found to account for the negative consequences with rarely detectable causes of a system upon which major sectors of society had become dependent or addicted.

The causes of the current form, understood as a complex object, are, as stated above, three in number. One is availability for use as a demonization-tool, as handed down by cultural history. A second is the openness of its common or frequent reception; and the third is the most fundamental, and underlies the other two: the cause of the conditions which open the arms of reception to the use of its traditional form. As this cause is the '08 crisis and how its problems were solved by those in government, it becomes important to understand what it is.

The event began in September of 2008 with the collapse of two major financial firms, Lehman Brothers and A.I.G. (American International Group). Their problem was something the other investment banks were doing too: "over-leveraging" borrowed money by that actually possessed by the bank at any given time. "Leverage" is the economic term for the proportional ratio between money that's borrowed and how much the lender has. Occurring in the housing market by overselling loans, it opened the door, (after the illegal merger between Citicorp and Travelers, becoming Citigroup, made legal the next year [see- "Graham-Leach-Bliley Act", 1999] and overturning the New Deal's Glass-Steagall law, which insulates deposits in commercial banks from being used in speculation by investment banks), for investment banks to borrow from one another, using derivatives from the loans held by borrowers as insurance against their own default to repay. The result of this was that the debt-function of the low-level transaction becomes irrelevant as overridden by the derivative-function of the loan contracts. Because these latter are packaged together and sold to other banks, their only service to the speculator consists in the failure to be paid back. And as such a system is unsustainable, (as liquid assets are limited), the loan-contract derivatives, called "credit-default swaps", lose all exchange value, or become "junk bonds".

To reiterate: The primary cause of the current form of anti-Semitism is its conditioning by the management of an economic system in which fraud is encouraged and economic good faith is a liability. Largely because of investment-bank recapitalization, (the "too big to fail" policy, constituting the government's insurance policy in the tax-base for investment bank-insolvency), the appearance of an unconcealable insidiousness was produced which caused a need in educated and popular thinking as to how to accommodate one's dislike for how the system works to one's voluntary participation in it. As a tool for self-apology one demon is as good as another, and purported Jewish associations, involving the "rumor" (Professor Trivellato's term) that medieval Jews invented letters of exchange and maritime insurance, function efficiently for the purpose.

Any possible solution to the problem must therefore come from an accurate understanding of its fundamental causes. As these latter are argued here to belong to the relatively unregulated and speculative character of our economic system which favors wealth-concentration in the private investment banking sector, the most rational suggestion which is ready to hand is to nationalize the banking sector and open its books to public accountants. To remedy the conditions which furnish the receptacle to its symptoms is the first step in alleviating the source of the problem.

First a few issues with the paraphrase in the first paragraph. Nothing justifies anti-Semitism (cf. second sentence) and no such claim is made. My argument is that it's a tool of self-apology used to psychologically readjust one's self to voluntary participation in a system which is known to be duplicitous or destructive. It's one of the ways in which people can function within a kleptocracy without regarding themselves as thieves. Another drastically inaccurate interpretation is the notion that I'm arguing that the government encourages financial fraud. Ignoring something amounts to encouragement only where one doesn't pretend that it's not there. To the contrary, a deregulated derivatives-market was sold by investment banking as a way to make markets safer by increasing speculation-capability. In May of 1998, for example, the Chairperson of the Futures Trading Commission which oversees the derivatives market, Brooksley Borne, drew up a proposal for its regulation which Larry Summers (Secretary of the Treasury '99-'01) and Alan Greenspan (Chairman of the Federal Reserve) pressured Clinton (U.S. President at the time) to override. Unlike fraud-encouragement, the regulatory agency was overridden to preserve speculative capacity which, when bundled appropriately, would theoretically be to shareholder benefit and subsequent general economic stimulus. In December of 2000, the Commodities Futures Modernization Act was passed by Congress (H.R. 5660) which prohibited any future regulation by the Commission.

Another inaccuracy involves the connection you draw between the story about Jews having invented bills of exchange and the '08 housing bubble. Although to my mind a connection can be made, it's associative, not modular. Where financial success within the context of a state capitalist system is understood as a virtue, the fraudulent malfeasance of the banking sector in its institutional behaviors, by which the bubble was generated, had to be associated with a non-virtuous party, more than with the benefactors of its systemic functioning.

The most inaccurate interpretation however is that the recommendation of bank-nationalization is offered in the service of something consistent with the frequently used phrase "restoration of order" with respect to a given financial system. How neatly arranged or messy it is does not impinge upon the investor's right not to be robbed and the borrower's right not to be defrauded. One benefit of nationalization would be protection of these rights by making the books of accounting within the banking sector a matter of public record. As monitored by public accountants, the role of speculation in the system could be sufficiently regulated. Not relevant is whether this is accomplished by the current government or a future or previous one, (assuming the distinction between government and the state, with the state as institutional form and the government as consisting of whoever is staffing its offices at a time and considered as a group). Only its choices are relevant, as in this case the official choice for nationalization is the recommended one.

The comparison in the second paragraph between designs to overthrow the government and nationalize the banks is not accurate. One doesn't need to take over the state merely in order to deploy its power of the audit. And whatever similarity criminal actions which are based on anti-Semitic or other racist beliefs have with one another is not pertinent to their assessment as effects of shared historical causes, but rather to their otherwise accurate description as topical causes of other effects, as for example inspiring another to commit a similar crime.

It's not at all clear to me who you're talking about in the sixth paragraph, but it sounds a little like Plotinus. Still, you're critique of her or him brings up the distinction between our knowledge about the world and the way the world really is. Indeed, just because the former doesn't in some cases apprehend the latter, the former is not invalidated, but rather is determined as prescriptive phenomenological analysis instead of descriptive sufficiency of correspondence.

The seventh paragraph runs into the same problem as the second. The fact that the actions which constitute a crime wave share similar motivations is quite natural and supports my thesis on account of the fact that explanations which resemble each other are used by the agents of these actions, in the interpretation of the historical conditions which are the more fundamental causes of their behaviors.

The ninth paragraph begins with an incredulous paraphrase whose source I can not detect in review of the monograph. It states as attributed to me a claim that economic crisis is a "sign" of contemporary anti-Semitism. It's not a sign, but a cause. And you're also mistaken that I haven't included anti-Semitic perpetrators in my analysis. They are included as symptoms of a larger phenomenon of sociological degradation whose historical causes are rooted in an implacable disfunction of speculative economic structures. And as these structures are not products of nature but of individual choices, voluntary involvement in their functioning implies some responsibility for any aggregate adverse effects. Its the latent knowledge of this responsibility which sets off the search for a demon by those who in spite of the destructive character of their institutional commitments still want to think of themselves as ethical people. The demon functions to absorb the system's negative effects away from the responsibility of its participants. In terms of the relation of effects to their causes, the attacks against its symbols are the topical effects of its prior creation.

Also, I'd like to make it clear that I reject the use of the term "white nationalism" to refer to a North American phenomenon. The reason for this is that it suggests being paired with black nationalism, which is a mistake. While the latter refers to a movement of liberation, the former refers to one of supremacy.

Not by my lights. The use of the term "White Nationalism" together with the concept or notion it refers to needs further clarification. In addition, it should be emphasized that while one can not overestimate the increase and severity of the growth of white supremacy in recent years, one can underestimate the relation to economic conditions which furnishes what some describe as its anti-Semitic ideological core as a means of organization. Anti-Semitic racial condemnation functions sufficiently as an explanatory factor in representations of crises of society whose underpinnings rarely fail to be preceded and/or produced by economic crises, or crises in material distribution of means of subsistence. When popular institutions are destroyed, whether confirmable or phantasmagoric (cf. the "war on Christmas" during the 1990's), the practice of demon-grasping in the context of social intercourse reaches a statistical pitch whereby its organizational capabilities are released. Unique in this case is the relation between use of the instrument and the context in which the crisis emerges to which its use is a response. The context is constituted by the historical slave-based economy integral to the functioning of the original colonies and forms the economic base of the Industrial Revolution in North America, which was in largest part based on cotton. The instrument on the other hand develops together with the appearance of speculative finance on the Continent, on account of a "rumor" (cf. Trivellato) that the Jews created one of its more arcane instruments. Anti-Black racism occurs in its early forms on the contrary as apologetics for the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and as such was serviceable to preserve the ethical self-image of its perpetrators.*

The name "White Nationalism" is an unfortunate one for the reason that it indicates a comparison with other nationalist movements for which the design is liberation from oppression (e.g. Black Nationalism, Lakota Nationalism, Puerto Rican Independence, and others). If used, it can enforce a claim of the genuineness of that comparison and thereby function as white-supremacist propaganda, to wit, that racially Caucasian people are oppressed. Furthermore, it doesn't distinguish between the current extremist movement aided by the last Presidency and the original white-protestant nationalism prevailing at the constitutional conventions at the nation's beginning, or for that matter any since. In that sense "White Nationalism" doesn't name a movement but rather a status quo.

In addition to the role played by anti-Semitism in the ideology of white supremacy, then, it also makes sense to mention a way in which the phenomenon of white supremacy can be misapplied in any interpretation which makes it a cause of the instrument employed to generate what some describe as its "theoretical core". For that would discount its own sources in European cultural and economic history. One could almost say that the role played by anti-Semitism in white supremacist ideology is similar to that played by white-supremacist ideology in economic-malfeasance-apology: as an explanatory one for organizational purposes-- for the one as white supremacist in context of nationalist aspiration which uses the instrument, and for the other in institutional financial consolidation in the hands of the wealthiest speculators, generating its current available form.
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* Although anti-Jewishness appears in the ancient Mediterranean, appearing e.g. in Cicero (cf. pro Flacco) and Tacitus, it lacks association with finance; and the slave-economy depended on a regional criterion for inclusion in its labor-force, not a racial one.

Posted October 26 at its website, a Globe and Mail columnist wrote how during a recent concert at Vancouver’s Hollywood Theatre, “a band member said something about a free Palestine. This, according to attendee Hanah Van Borek, led to a few shouts from the audience: ‘F--- the Jews!’

"It was clearly audible in her area of the crowd, a person who was with her confirms, but nobody around them shut this down. There were some cheers of support, though. ‘My whole body went into shock,’ says Ms. Van Borek, who is Jewish.

“Ms. Van Borek left the venue and explained why to security staff. She says a worker encouraged her to go back inside and reassured her she was safe. ‘Nobody will be able to tell that you’re Jewish,’ he said, according to Ms. Van Borek. (Oy.)

"She did return to the show, but Ms. Van Borek was — and is — rattled. She supports the band’s right to make political statements. It was the shouts from this group — and the silence around them — that were alarming.”

I have long been, and still am, a critic of what I see as clear maltreatment of the general Palestinian people by the state of Israel [i.e. its government and security/defense agencies] and, with few exceptions, Western mainstream news-media’s seemingly intentional tokenistic (non)coverage of it.

By doing so, that media, whether they realize it or not, have done a disservice to its own reputation and the Israeli/Jewish people themselves. The road to hell, after all, is also paved with good intentions. Not as widely criticized thus publicized as the violence are the considerable fossil fuel reserves beneath long-held Palestinian land that are a plausible motivator for war.

Perhaps also because I have no Jewish heritage thus experience, I still never expected the level of anti-Semitic attacks in the West, notably the U.S. and Canada, since the initial Hamas attack against Israelis. For one thing, the Jewish people in Israel and especially around the world must not be collectively vilified, let alone physically attacked, for the acts of Israel’s government and military, however one feels about the latter’s brutality in Gaza.

It’s blatantly immoral for them to be mistreated, if not terrorized, as though they were responsible for what is happening there. And it should be needless to say that diaspora Palestinians and Western Muslims similarly must not be collectively blamed and attacked for the acts of Hamas violence in Israel or Islamic extremist attacks outside the Middle East. ...

There seems to have been much latent animosity towards Jewish people in general, perhaps in part based on erroneous and disproven stereotype thus completely unmerited. Also, incredible insensitivity was publicly shown towards Jews freshly mourning the 10/7 victims, especially when considering that young Israelis and Jews elsewhere may not be accustomed to such relatively large-scale carnage (at least not as much as is seen in other parts of the Middle East) in post-9/11 times.

Having the top-mentioned (in The Globe and Mail) ugly occurrence playout in my mind’s eye and ear left me disgusted. Particularly disturbing was the Jewish audience member being told she shouldn’t worry about the loudly voiced anti-Jewish anger, since “nobody will be able to tell that you’re Jewish”.

Also concerning is: what would young Jewish, or Palestinian, children think and feel if/when they hear such misdirected vile hatred towards their fundamental identity? Scary is the real possibility that such public outpour of blind hatred may lead some young children to feel very misplaced shame in their heritage.