Scholar/activist Dr. Rachel Fish is a renowned expert on antisemitism in America. She will be in Tucson on Sunday, October 26, to lead Southwest Institute 2025, a program from the Center for Jewish Resilience at Jewish Philanthropies of Southern Arizona designed to help educators and administrators identify and address antisemitism in our schools. In the evening, Dr. Fish will keynote a community dinner, “Throughlines: October 7 to Contemporary Antisemitism in America,” along with a survivor of the October 7 attacks.
The AJP spoke with Dr. Fish this week to learn more about her work. The following Q&A has been condensed from a longer interview:
Q. You often use the term “Jew-hatred” rather than “antisemitism.” Why is language so important in how we understand and confront this issue?
A. From research that I had been involved with in the past, we learned that Americans, non-Jews, and even Jews between the ages of 13 to 35 very often did not know what antisemitism was. The majority responded, “idk,” meaning “I don’t know.” We heard from individuals things like, “I’m anti-racist, I’m anti-homophobic, I’m anti-Islamophobic, so I must be an antisemite. And we were like, “No, no, you’re an anti-antisemite.” But it just went to show that the construct of the word was very confusing to many individuals. We then tested the terminology “Jew-hatred” and we saw very clearly that the respondents 13 to 35 years of age understood it. They had a better sense that it was the targeting of Jews individually and collectively for the purpose of discrimination, prejudice, stereotypes.
The other element here is that antisemitism is a term popularized in 1879 by a German named Wilhelm Marr, who introduced it into the political lexicon to begin a political organization focused on a platform that is targeting Jews. At that time, in Europe, Jews were referred to as the Easterners, the Orientals, and the Semites. He was replacing the term “Judenhass,” Jew-hatred or hatred of Jews. The reason he’s replacing that term with this language of antisemitism is because it sounds more clinical, more sanitized, and it makes it more politically palatable to target Jews. I don’t want to use the terminology that was popularized by an antisemite. I’d rather use the original language, Jew-hatred, to be very clear and direct about what we are confronting today.
Q. The Southwest Institute focuses this year on educators. What can teachers and school administrators do differently to help students recognize and respond to Jew-hatred in their daily environments?
A. Most people do not understand contemporary expressions of Jew-hatred. It’s much easier to understand the targeting of Jews during the rise of Nazism because of the perceived racialization of the Jews. It’s more challenging for individuals to understand the way the conversations about Israel and Zionism intersect with Jew-hatred, and how that conversation, which is often under the guise of political discourse, is actually a conversation about targeting Jews themselves and their collective political identity. In our day of learning opportunities for educators, for administrators, for trustees, we give them some foundational knowledge and help them situate these subjects within a historical context. We also give them language that helps them better articulate how Jew-hatred is emerging within their educational institutions. If they can identify it and label it, they can confront it.
We also provide different tools they may need to address it. Sometimes, that’s the law, which is why we will have a session on understanding Title VI under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Sometimes that relates specifically to how you actually build classroom environments to be able to teach and unpack this material. Sometimes it’s helping them understand policies and think about the auditing of policies they already have, to be able to better implement the actions that need to be taken.
Q. In your Jewish Journal essay, “Zionism and Liberalism Can Remain Strong Bedfellows,” you argue that the two are compatible. How can Jewish and non-Jewish Americans reclaim that understanding in a time of such polarized politics?
A. We have to ensure that everyone has an understanding of what Zionism is. At Boundless, the think-action tank that I co-founded along with my colleague Aviva Klompas, we did research on Americans 18 to 34 years of age, and only about 14% of the general population knows what Zionism is. That’s a very small percentage.
Too many believe that Zionism is a form of white Jewish supremacy. If you believe that, then it isn’t compatible with liberalism. If you believe Zionism is a form of white Jewish supremacy, you are going to want to stand against Zionism and you will subsume the idea that Zionism is apartheid, Zionism is racism, because that’s your perception of this ideology.
So part of it is helping people understand that Zionism is an idea that says Jews have agency and they no longer are only subjects of history, but they are actors in history. Zionism is an idea for political self-determination, for the Jews to return to their ancestral homeland, constituted in a sovereignty, Israel. That’s the idea of political Zionism.
And that idea exists at a time in which you have a decline of empires and a rise of nationalism across Europe, and Jews are looking at what’s happening in Europe in the 19th century and feel the pressures of both assimilation and antisemitism. The Zionist movement, in its essence, is about a modern nationalist movement that is seeking to place Jews at the center, so that Jews are no longer dependent on the host society in which they are living.
Liberalism, as a modern progressive enlightenment movement, says that you actually have a place for all peoples. You have women as part of this movement. You have a functioning system that allows for representation of different voices, even when they don’t agree. The Zionist movement writ large allowed for that liberalism. If you read Israel’s Declaration of Independence, you see the elements and the seeds of liberalism, knowing that some of it is aspirational and has not yet been achieved, like peace with the Arabs and the Palestinians in particular. The idea of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state is not a contradiction. They can both coexist, but it does require checks and balances. It requires a vital democracy. It requires that you have leaders who care about Israel as both a Jewish and a democratic state, and it’s that healthy tension between universalism and particularism, which always has to be recalibrated and examined, but it can exist simultaneously.
Q. You’ve said antisemitism is not only a Jewish problem but a societal one. What partnerships or alliances outside the Jewish world give you hope right now?
A. It’s important to remember that Jews alone can’t solve for Jew hatred, just like Black and brown people alone can’t solve for issues of racism or members of the LGBTQ+ community can’t solve for homophobia and transphobia. Humanity has to recognize these various forms of hatred, and even if you are not part of those identity communities, be willing to stand up when you see that type of hate perpetrated.
We know that Jew-hatred never just ends with the Jews. Jew-hatred, or antisemitism, is a gateway drug for other forms of hate. We have seen this in a variety of research initiatives, that what begins with the Jews leads to misogyny, racism, Asian hate, homophobia, etc.
It’s very easy at times for Jews, when feeling besieged and under attack, to turn inward and want to only be part of the Jewish community. But that’s also a danger. We have to continue to have an outstretched hand and build bridges between different communities within American society to be able to strengthen humanity, to humanize Jews and Judaism and the Jewish state.
There’s an organization called the National Black Empowerment Council that is working to bring Black Americans to Israel and understand Jews in a deeper way. Fuente Latina works with the Spanish-speaking communities across the world to help them understand more about Jews and Judaism and the Jewish state. So there are real opportunities. There are initiatives that are trying to take place between different religious communities, like through Interfaith America. There are initiatives that exist, but it is very hard to do that work if you don’t have it based upon trust.
The work we’ve been doing with educators and administrators has led them to think about how to bring that content to the student level so that students can build bridges between different communities through constructive dialogue, by creating brave spaces in order to really get to know their peers, to learn how to talk about ideas, so that they can do so with civility. We unfortunately are living in an American society right now that is quite fissured and that doesn’t allow for deep engagement. We are way too quick to see in America political violence aimed at individuals that we don’t like. We are way too quick to see leaders and politicians and pop culture celebrities hurl insults and harm one another physically rather than actually engage in a way that allows for meaningful, substantive disagreement.
Q. Can you elaborate on “brave spaces”?
A. People talk a lot about wanting to have safe spaces, and everyone deserves physical safety, but we need brave spaces for people to be able to actually have conversations in a way that allows for the engagement of ideas. There’s too much self-censorship, too many people are silencing themselves and not offering their perspectives on ideas because of potential repercussions, professionally or personally. So that’s why we talk about brave spaces that allow people, of course, physical safety, but to engage bravely and courageously with ideas.
Q. As you prepare to meet the Southern Arizona community, what message do you most want people here, educators, parents, students, to take away from your visit?
A. We want them to have a better sense of these issues and have the language to talk about Jew-hatred in the 21st century. We want them to have skills, to be able to call in and call out when Jew- hatred is encountered. We want them to be able to have a degree of confidence, not only to talk about these issues, but to address these issues, and we want them to know the resources that exist, both in their backyard and nationally, to be able to support them should they need that support.
It’s really important that educators and parents find ways to talk about this with children, with teenagers, with young adults. They need to be able to have these conversations, because we are living at a moment in time in which it is no longer about whether they might encounter some form of Jew-hatred, but now it’s about when they encounter Jew-hatred. This is a different reality than an older generation of Americans who maybe didn’t experience Jew-hatred in the context of American life, because their children and their grandchildren will and so we need the parents, the adults in the room to be able to navigate and have these conversations, rather than shy away from them.
To register for the Southwest Institute day of learning for educators, click here.
To register for the community-wide dinner program, “Throughlines: October 7 to Contemporary Antisemitism in America,” click here.
