Welcome to ‘You Asked For It’ the weekly mailbag column for Banter Members!
A reader writes in response to my interview with Julie Roginsky on left wing antisemitism:
Honest question that I’m not sure I’ve heard an answer to.
If I find the idea of a “democratic Jewish state” suspicious, does that make me an antisemite?
Let me clarify: “democratic Jewish state” could mean different things. If it means a democracy in which the majority of citizens are ethnically (or theologically, or both) Jewish, thus vesting a good bit of the political power in people who identify as Jewish, then I have no problem with such a state, and indeed I’d probably like to live there.
But if it means a state where being ethnically or theologically Jewish gives a citizen higher status than a non-Jew, then I’m seriously uncomfortable with that. I’m not sure even thousands of years of persecution legitimates consigning certain ethnicities to lower caste status. And “Jewish state” sounds like it COULD mean that arrang…