r/antisemitism

A fair article discussing the emergence of Antisemitism Studies. I’m proud that it really highlights how innovative Gratz College is, and how removed mainstream Jewish Studies programs are from the values and needs of American Jewry.

https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-fight-over-antisemitism-studies

Don’t worry, right-wing antisemites — I didn’t forget about you,
by Jaclyn S Clark, The Times of Israel, 2026-04-30.

> Rene Girard, a French literary critic who pivoted into anthropology > and spent the back half of his career at Stanford, focused on one > question for almost forty years: why do human communities, at every > scale, over and over, converge on a single target when the > collective pressure builds? Why does the choreography of that > convergence look the same across cultures, across centuries, across > causes? > > His answer begins with mimetic desire. The claim is simple: > desire is not original to the person experiencing it. We learn what > to want by watching each other want. Status, partners, jobs, lives, > sneakers, abs — almost all of it is borrowed. Advertising operates > on this. Social media weaponizes it. The dating economy runs on it. > The reason teenage boys all want the same shoes, the same body, the > same girl is that each of them is reading the others’ wanting and > converting it into his own. > > When a community is collectively wanting the same things and the > supply does not stretch, you get rivalry. Multiply rivalry across an > entire society and you get what Girard called a mimetic crisis — > a pressure system with no release valve, social cohesion fraying, > frustration accumulating with nowhere to go. > > The relief mechanism societies have repeatedly reached for is the > scapegoat. Pick a target — different enough to mark, embedded enough > to make sense as a symbol — and load the accumulated anxiety onto > it. The unanimity of the choice is what makes the violence feel like > justice rather than mob rule. Nobody pauses to interrogate whether > the target actually caused the problem. The crowd moves as one. The > pressure dissipates. > > Girard wrote in the abstract. He was too good a scholar to spell out > the empirical pattern. He did not have to. The historical record > names one population that Western civilization has, more reliably > than any other, fed into the scapegoat mechanism every time the > pressure has built.