I'm finally playing the rightly celebrated Wolfenstein: The New Order, a campy story-driven video game of the first-person shooter genre, set in an alternate history in which the Nazis won the war. I'm having a great time and while I will be criticizing a choice the writers made, I'm not here to say they are antisemites, or anything of the sort. And while I take issue with something in the game, this is by no means to say it's a bad game nor that anyone should avoid playing it. On the contrary, I highly recommend it if you're a person who ever enjoys this kind of thing! My point is only that lacking a structural understanding of antisemitism, it is easy to reinforce antisemitic thinking even while trying to do the opposite.
The New Order (TNO) is a game from 2014 so this may be superfluous, but anyway: spoilers follow.
A prominent part of the esthetic and substance of TNO (and the Wolfenstein franchise in general) is that the Nazis you plow through wiht unlikely tenacity have inexplicable sci-fi technology. Pretty early in TNO you encounter robot dogs, massive mechs, laser guns, and other pieces of imaginary technology. I recently reached a point in the game where it is revealed how the Nazis gained technological supremacy, and this is what I want to talk about. Because the big reveal is that the Nazis stole their key technologies from the Jews.
More specifically, TNO reveals a secret society of Jewish scholars going by the name of Da'ath Yichud, who have apparently been developing sci-fi technology for centuries and mostly managed to keep it perfectly secret. The Nazis stumbled upon what one character refers to as a minor, almost insignificant cache of DY sci-fi gadgets and secrets, enabling them to suddenly gain the upper hand over the Allies and take over the world.
To understand why that's a little fucked up, I want to look at what makes antisemitism different from other forms of racism. These are by no means my own new and original thoughts, and I am probably most influenced by April Rosenblum's, the past didn't go anywhere, a pamphlet for leftists seeking to understand and fight antisemitism. (It's been years since I last read it, so anything silly I say is likely my own mistake and not hers.)
The function of racist ideology, as I understand it, is to justify and enforce racial hierarchies — real-world power differentials created between different populations based on their collective background or origins. Generally speaking, racism is propagated by a group holding disproportionately high social power and serves to justify the fact that another group is relegated to disproportionately low social power. This is true of antisemitism as it is to anti-Blackness, Islamophobia, and other forms of racism.
But one key difference between antisemitism and most other forms of racism is the content of the racist ideology, the false ideas it uses to justify itself. Generally speaking, racism denegrates and degrades the out-group it targets, providing comforting reasons for the in-group to see its own high status as justified. But with antisemitism, a key element is kind of the inverse: exaggerating the supposed power and influence of Jewish people. Rather than arguing our inherent inferiority, we're cast as secretly super-powerful.
Antisemitism does contain some degrading stereotypes to help antisemites see Jewish people as less than human, but the focus is elsewhere. The focus is on how “The Jews” are secretly controlling the world, be it through finance banking, through mass media, or through academic philosophy (lol what?). Rather than casting us Jews as naturally weak and destined to be ruled over by more powerful “races”, antisemitism marginalizes us by warning that if we aren't kept down, even eradicated, we're going to use our immense power to ruin everything.
Antisemitism has taken all kinds of different forms over the centuries, changing with the times as ideologies always must. In some times and places, antisemites have emphasized Jewish mysticism, as with the medieval blood libel which alleged that Jews required the blood of Christian children for religious rituals. At other times the focus was on mundane means such as money and mass media. The key, the core, remains the belief that while Jewish may seem powerless (as Jews certainly did in pre-modern times), we are actually a force far greater than meets the eyes.
Well, you can probably see where I'm going here. TNO's idea that Jews were hiding away technology so awesome that just a bit of it was enough to bring the Nazis to world domination, actually echoes antisemitic thinking about Jewish people.
This is clearly not intentional, and honestly, it does little to detract from the joy of killing massive amounts of virtual Nazis, or liberating Jews and other prisoners from their camps. I'll even admit I relish the idea of getting some of that secret Jewish scifi technology to kill scifi Nazis more efficiently.
But upon reflection, it seems like a bit of a problem. Because while, for instance, Black Panther's Wakanda is a fantasy which beautifully rebukes White Supremacy with its hundreds of years of attempts to substantiate the false belief that Black people are inherently inferior, antisemitism is just a bit of a different beast. Emphasizing Jewish greatness or fantasizing about even greater Jewish greatness doesn't rebuke antisemitic fantasy regarding Jewish people — it reinforces it. After all, if Jewish people might secretly be hiding technology centuries ahead of the rest of humanity like TNO suggests, maybe we really are more dangerous than we look!
Of course, TNO is not a source anyone is liable to take seriously. It's intentionally, hilariously over-the-top, and that's part of its appeal. Nonetheless, repeating an idea, even tongue-in-cheek, has been known to reinforce that idea regardless. Taking the time to better understand what makes antisemitism work can prevent us from accidentally reinforcing it while we try to combat it.
Now, if you will excuse me, I'm off to steal a scifi Nazi submarine to get to a cache of Jewish scifi gadgets so me and my virtual comrades can kill us a whole lot more scifi Nazis. Byeee.
Comments are welcome via Mastodon (@abgd@tooot.im) or Twitter (@meemsaf)
I just encountered the Nonbinary Hebrew Project, and I have mixed feelings about it.
It’s a project by US Jews to add a third grammatical gender to Hebrew – and I think it’s pretty good at that! It fits the morphology pretty well and doesn’t sound too off.
But it also seems to ignore the fact that there is actually already a very lively Hebrew-speaking nonbinary community in, you know, Israel, that country where Hebrew is the dominant language? And that Israeli nonbinary folx have not, as a whole, tried to add a third gender to our native language’s very binary system, and have instead developed what I would argue is possibly an even more radical linguistic praxis: using mixed grammatical gender as a third option. Like adding a third gender, it takes some getting used to. But unlike adding a third gender, it makes use exclusively of existing words (unless you include the multi-gender plurals -imot/-otim, which also just use existing morphemes in a new way.)
This is arguably more radical because it doesn’t require learning any new info, making it more accessible, and also paves the way for more inclusive ungendered language in Hebrew, a famously “gender-maniacal” language. I.e. the mixed forms (talmidim tovot) serve simultaneously as a third grammatical gender for nonbinary folx and a neutral form for addressing mixed, Queer, or unspecified groups.
As Tzor points out, Hebrew is also different from European languages in that speaking in the first person requires gendering oneself, so adding a third grammatical gender means one might have to misgender oneself in certain spaces to stay under the radar – a problem English-speaking NBs are less likely to face. Israeli NB “mixed speech” avoids this problem, and I feel it generally loosens up the very binary gender feelings Hebrew grammar always gave me.
Still, as a Hebrew-native NB person trained in linguistics I can’t help but admire the Nonbinary Hebrew project – it’s delightful! I even hope it sees wider adoption and makes inroads in Israel – there’s always room for more forms of gender expression. I just feel uncomfortable with the way a diasporic community, in some ways privileged over Israeli nonbinary folx, has seen fit to re-engineer our native language to fit the (linguistically) European approach to nonbinary language of adding new pronouns while ignoring the existing, Hebrew-native NB community and the brilliant solution it has already been putting into daily practice for years.
(P.S. Tzor also noted that really, the NB Hebrew project’s -eh endings sound very diasporic and Yiddic, and don’t fit quite naturally with Israeli Hebrew. Moreover, many Israeli native speakers, possibly Mizrachim in particular, have a less rigid approach to vowels than natives of European languages would, and -eh and -ah often flow into one another rather than being entirely distinct phonemes.)