Is Michael Moore an antisemite?
The most striking thing in [Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story] was the religion. I think Moore is seriously motivated by Christianity. He says he is (and has been since he was a boy). And he presented various priests, Biblical quotations, and movie footage from “Jesus of Nazareth” to make the argument that Christianity requires socialism. With this theme, I found it unsettling that in attacking the banking system, Moore presented quite a parade of Jewish names and faces. He never says the word “Jewish,” but I think the anti-Semitic theme is there. We receive long lectures about how capitalism is inconsistent with Christianity, followed a heavy-handed array of — it’s up to you to see that they are — Jewish villains.
Am I wrong to see Moore as an anti-Semite? I don’t know, but the movie worked as anti-Semitic propaganda. I had to struggle to fight off the idea the movie seemed to want to plant in my head.
Myself, I think this is a bit of a stretch, although I haven’t seen the film yet. But I think there are two serious points here worth making.
1. It doesn’t actually matter whether Michael Moore “is” an antisemite. What matters is whether it does something antisemitic. That is, if, as Althouse suggests, the movie “worked as anti-Semitic propaganda”, then that’s what matters. There are, to be sure, plenty of ideologically motivated, deeply antisemitic people. But lots of decent, anti-racist people also find themselves saying or doing antisemitic things without realising it. Combating antisemitism is not about rooting out the antisemitic people; it is about coming to a reckoning with how antisemitic discourses and actions work practically, and disseminating that knowledge. Combating antisemitism should not be a liberal moralistic, guilt-tripping exercise; it should be an exercise in understanding.
2. What Althouse is pointing to in the post is something like what many on the German left call structural antisemitism (see here, here). That is, a structure of thinking that is inherently antisemitic, even if it does not explicitly name Jews. This structure of thinking is often associated, as Moishe Postone’s work shows, with certain partial forms of anti-capitalism: forms of anti-capitalism which attempt to personalise capitalism in evil individuals (bloated plutocrats, Jewish bankers, parasitical locust-like financiers) rather than understanding it as a web of social relations. Such partial forms of capitalism also tend to focus on the evil of finance capital, and tend to valorise productive capital. Michael Moore, with his roots in the rust belt radicalism of Flynt, Michigan, as portrayed in Roger and Me, is deeply involved in this kind of productivist socialism.
This entry was posted on Saturday, October 17th, 2009 at 6:59 pm and is filed under Capitalism/anti-Capitalism, Left, U.S., antisemitism, neoliberal capitalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on October 18, 2009 schalomlibertad wrote:
Nice post. I also have not seen the movie (yet?).
It would be interesting to look into the theme further… two topics come to mind, the use of christian themes in chavez psuedo-socialism in venezuela. the example that comes immediately to mind is the 2004 christmas where he says:
The other example is from the other side — the mobilization of christian themes in anti-communist political movements, for example in poland during the power struggles of the late 60s, in which polish christian nationalilsm was mobilized against stalinism, in which thousands of jews lost their jobs and fled the country during the “anti-zionist campaign”.
but christian anti-communism is broader than just that example. i think the left often falls into conservativism when it fails or refuses to think critically, or chooses a populist strategy.
On the topic of “producerism”, here is a resource on the right-wing variety: The Producerist Narrative in Repressive Right Wing Populism
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on October 19, 2009 negative potential wrote:
I find the notion of “structural anti-semitism” extremely problematic.
Modern anti-semitism is a personalization of abstract social relations, agreed, but not every personalization of abstract social relations is itself anti-semitic. That trivializes real anti-semitism, and is grotesquely offensive to boot. To consistently apply this overly broad definition of anti-semitism means to effectively regard every attribution of will or conscious agency in capitalist society as a manifestation of anti-semitism.
Yes, capitalism is a structure, and not simply the result of malicious intent, but structures only circumscribe and limit agency, they don’t *determine* it.
Not that Moore’s parading of Jewish financiers isn’t anti-semitic; it’s just that I think one can criticize Moore without resorting to the dodgy, useless concept of “structural anti-semitism”. There’s nothing “structural” about the “Jew as financial puppeteer” stereotype; that’s plain old-fashioned anti-semitism.
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on October 19, 2009 bigmouth wrote:
so, did moore cherrypick jewish bankers to present? or could it be that a high percentage of wall street bankers just may have jewish-sounding names? afaik, jewish-americans earn about 2.5 times the average income, so it shouln’t be too surprising to find them represented well on Wall Street
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on October 20, 2009 schalomlibertad wrote:
strange comment.
i am not sure it is either of those two theses, either (1) cherry picking or (2) that moore has captured an accurate representation of wall street.
i don’t think ann or bob were suggesting that moore consciously and intentionally selected (ie. “cherry picked”) only jewish-sounding names. neither one of them were placing so much intentionality on moore.
and i think your suggestion that moore accurately represented wall street is also not grounded. for your argument, you state that jews have an average higher income and therefore are more highly represented on wall street, and that’s why moore ended up with more jewish people than non-jews.
first, where did you get your figure on income disparity? you didn’t tell us. [according to a study done by United Jewish Communities the difference between jewish household incomes and the country-wide average is much lower than the figure you give. they put the median household income for the Jewish population at $50,000 against the $42,000 median household income for all U.S. households.]
additionally, income disparity does not tell us anything about occupation distribution either.
but more interestingly is that there is a huge zone of possibility between (1) explicit and intentional antisemitism (cherry picking jewish sounding names), and (2) that moore has presented a representative picture. and this area is where much antisemitism (as well as racism) operates on the political mainstream, on the conservative right, and on the left.
but more on michael moore’s deranged self-orientation. here is how he responded to CNN Wolf Blitzer’s question “Are you a socialist?” Moore says: “I’m a Christian. And I’m a heterosexual, too, if you want to know that.” Why does he think we want to know that? We don’t. What does it say about his worldview?
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on October 22, 2009 negative potential wrote:
yeah, bigmouth, even if your statement about income disparity is correct, that implies nothing about how well-represented people of Jewish heritage are in the financial industry. If I were to engage in wild speculation, I’d assume that WASP-y “old money” is probably more prominent, but even that is just pulling something out of my ass. Not serious social science at all.
schalom: is it really such a big revelation that Moore is a populist? His whole career has been built around the juxtaposition between the good, fordist, social peace capitalism of his youth and the bad, post-fordist, neo-liberal capitalism of the present. For the douchebags at Fox News, that’s evidence of Moore’s insidious socialist principles, but really, he’s arguably to the right of the Democratic Party circa 1964.
I don’t see much of a point going after a tepid liberal like Moore. If I were going to pick my fights concerning anti-semitism in the left, I’d target the asshats at “Upping the Anti” magazine, who conceal their Jew hatred behind a lot of fluffy, pseudo-Autonomist phrase mongering. It’s the anti-semites who purport to be radical opponents of capitalism who are most worthy of scorn and ruthless critique.
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on October 22, 2009 schalomlibertad wrote:
hey negative potential,
agreed, michael moore is a populist with a “back to fordism” politic which simply scandalizes neoliberal capitalism, without offering a critique of capitalism as such. i think it´s important to criticize populists such as Moore because they have such a larger voice than Upping the Anti, for example. And, as you point out, it is not only the possible antisemitism in Moore´s thought that is problematic, but that it is part of a generally conservative critique of contemporary capitalism, with it´s affirmation of the heterosexual, male bread winner, employed in industrial labor, and organized in the nuclear family structure. That from such a conservative position, Moore would also focus disproportionately on Jewish figures in the financial industries, is therefore no surprise. Because he has such a huge audience is precisely why it is important that he receive criticism from the left.
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on November 4, 2009 transform wrote:
my friend dragged me to the movie, and all i can say is: oh, dear.
It’s a classic populist, “producerist”, pseudo-socialist narrative. The “good US” – the segregationist, Fordist america of the ’50s – has been highjacked. (Moore also very explicitly stresses the Christian nature of this nation, and Christianity’s incompatibility with capitalism.) Who did this neo-liberal turn? Certainly it’s not the product of global economic changes; a shadowy group has taken power from the people … the bankers! The people just need to reclaim their democracy from this shadowy elite, based in New York City, and reclaim their Christian nation…
Now, were the bankers he paraded Jewish? Dunno. (The ending, however, does lay the blame on one company in particular: Goldman-Sachs.)
But regardless of whether the bankers are Jewish themselves or not, the narrative is the same one utilized by modern antisemitism: the ‘productive’ labor of the Christian nation is good, and ‘unproductive labor’ (esp “finance capital” ), which is controlled by a small elite who are separate from the national body as a whole – is bad. We live in a time of decadence and corruption, and we need a national regeneration.
Oh, dear.
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on November 11, 2009 schalom libertad wrote:
On the Charlie Rose show Michael Moore explains how the good old fordist system meant real laborers doing honest work. Today, people make money from money. We need a return to good old fashioned capitalism — as if industrialization had nothing to do with credit and finance.
“I´m not saying anything radical here.” We don´t need anything new. We just need to “apply some of the old principles we used to have.”
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