What Dickens Can Teach Us About Antisemitism in the Age of Trump and Gaza
Hi friends,
This edition is an off-schedule bonus essay that veers from the regular programming of Dirtbags Through the Ages. It’s more topical than our usual content, and definitely less fun. If that’s not a thing you want to read from me, consider this your warning, though I don’t think I’ve kept my opinions a secret from you all, and I don’t buy the argument that writers owe their readers a politics-free zone.
I drafted the following essay several months ago, but my team and I weren’t able to find a home for it, so I’ve toyed with the idea of self-publishing it anyway. Then the news and images out of Gaza this past week pushed me to brush it up.
Since this is the closest thing I have to a platform, I wanted to share it with you here. Some thoughts on where we find ourselves today, through the lens I’ve been using to think about so many things over the past five years.
What Dickens Can Teach Us About Antisemitism in the Age of Trump and Gaza
Oliver Twist is likely the most famous novel by Charles Dickens that doesn’t have a corresponding Muppet adaptation. And if you first encountered the story through Oliver! the musical or any number of kid-friendly movies, you might immediately picture a merry band of found-family thieves picking a pocket or two. The original novel, however, is bloody, cruel, and simmering with rage. Dickens crafts a parable on the cruelty of poverty using stock characters that might have stumbled off the pages of one of the darker Grimm’s fairy tales. Bill Sikes, the violent monster of the back alleys. Nancy, the prostitute with the heart of gold.
And, of course, Fagin, the Jew.
Cowardly, selfish, violent, vicious, lizard-like in his cold-blooded avarice. And—Dickens uses the word 326 times to make sure you don’t forget—a Jew.
Readers have always loved Oliver Twist, both for its value as a morality tale and for its violent spectacle of crime fiction, but its antisemitism didn’t go unnoticed in its own time. In 1863, Dickens received a letter from Eliza Davis, a Jewish woman soliciting charitable contributions for a “Convalescent Home for the Jewish Poor.” Davis took Dickens to task for Fagin, arguing that a sizable donation was only appropriate after the anti-Jewish hate Dickens encouraged:
“Charles Dickens, the large hearted, whose works plead so eloquently and so nobly for the oppressed of his country…has encouraged a vile prejudice against the despised Hebrew.”
Dickens was defensive at first, but gradually, it seems, Davis’s critique got to him. The character of Riah in Our Mutual Friend is commonly read as Dickens’s apology for Fagin: a harmless, dull, self-sacrificing pushover of a Jew who silently accepts the insults and indignities heaped on him by Fledgeby, a conniving, unscrupulous, lying moneylender. (Telling, that Dickens’s only frame of reference for a villain was all the things he usually said about the Jews.)
The scholar James D. Mardock described Riah as an “anti-Shylock,” and to me this rings painfully true. If you prick Riah, he does not bleed; if you wrong him, nothing is less likely than revenge.
Over the past five years, I’ve thought a great deal about how antisemitism in Dickens’s time compares to what we’re wrestling with today. More and more, I find myself wondering how far we’ve moved past the two options Dickens presented nearly 200 years ago. Riah, so noble as to be beyond critique. Or Fagin, so degenerate as to be beyond admiration.
Some days, it doesn’t seem that we’ve come very far at all.
***
Granted, the Fagin Problem used to be much more obvious. Open almost any classic novel written pre-1950 and you can’t get a hundred pages without stumbling on a Meyer Wolfsheim type wearing human molars as cuff links. You’re less likely to see that particular strand of antisemitism in any media that goes through some sort of quality control, though if you spend more than 10 minutes on the internet, you’ll stumble across more than you could ever want.
To be clear, this is a good thing. It’s a sign of at least surface-level progress that a mainstream publisher couldn’t put out Oliver Twist today without public outcry over the blatant hatred in its pages. But a shifting of cultural norms doesn’t mean the underlying problem is solved.
Yes, most people today at least publicly agree that antisemitism is wrong. But we cannot for the life of us agree on what antisemitism is. And the conversation is getting more twisted every day.
To look at discussions of antisemitism in modern America is to watch words mutate beyond recognition at lightning speed. “Israel” blends into “Judaism.” “Anti-Zionism” becomes synonymous with “antisemitism.” “Hate speech” is indistinguishable from “political protest” or even “any criticism at all.”
By the time the Trump administration launched its Task Force to Combat Antisemitism in February, the slippage seemed complete. Any critique of any Jewish person is a critique of Israel, and any critique of Israel is a declaration of hate against Jewish people everywhere. It strains credulity that anyone might genuinely believe this task force was created with the best interests of American Jews in mind, or that its actions were anything other than an effort to exert ideological control over American institutions.
And yet, we’re taking the bait.
For months now, I’ve watched politicians and universities trip over themselves to deflect accusations of antisemitism—even if it meant condoning war crimes, or deporting protesters with valid student visas, or shuttering academic programs without a word of dissent.
Right this second, we are closing our eyes to a manufactured famine in Gaza, to open fire on civilians gathering for food and aid, because some of us heard the phrase “never again” and thought it meant “never again criticize a Jew” when what it means is “never again condone a state-led genocide.” Better a collaborator than an antisemite, the thinking seems to be.
More than once, I’ve had the thought: this administration has so much to gain from turning all Jews into Riahs. Harmless. Pathetic. Far more sinned against than sinning. A monolith of bland virtue and tragedy, who can be used as a shield and a justification for whatever serves powerful interests, and without their consent.
It reminds me of the trend of best-selling Holocaust novels: the public seems to be most comfortable with Jews when they are beyond reproach and suffering. To voice a word of critique against any member of this beleaguered minority would be antisemitic, surely.
Wouldn’t it?
***
This vein of thought is intellectually lazy at best, dangerous at worst. When we decide that our opinions of any given Jewish individual can be either “supportive” or “racist,” we strip an entire people of their humanity.
Jewish people are not symbols. Jewish people are people.
People do terrible things. People do noble, selfless, beautiful things. Every one of us is capable of both. None of these statements feel worth saying, and yet apparently we must continue saying them, because our ability to navigate antisemitism seems to be no better than the flat, incomplete sketches Dickens left us with 200 years ago. Universally good or unspeakably evil, and no room in between.
I’m watching a nation atrophy its cultural ability to see nuance, to comprehend that a person’s identity and their behavior are related but not synonymous. We leap back from complexity as though to speak the words “this person is Jewish and I disagree with them” is to indulge in stereotype as hateful as seen in Oliver Twist. We are arresting protesters without due process, hustling them off the street into unmarked cars, under the pretense that Jews cannot bear to hear criticism of a country that is not even theirs.
It baffles me that this doesn’t make more people sick to their stomachs.
Fleeing from one extreme representation to the other did not solve the prejudice in Dickens’s society, and we cannot expect it to solve the prejudice in ours. Nor can we expect to fight antisemitism through the wrongful arrest and deportation of student protesters, or by deciding children dying of starvation doesn’t matter if the children are Muslim, or by collapsing the distinction between disagreement and hatred.
It’s our responsibility to take our cue from Eliza Davis when she wrote her letter to Charles Dickens almost two centuries ago. It’s on us to point to prejudice when we see it—done against us, in our name, or in this case both. Risk being called an antisemite by those who don’t understand the term, if it means standing up for what we know to be right. And make it clear that we won’t accept poisoned apologies in place of justice.
Anyhow. That’s where I’m at these days. Thanks for listening. I’m a bit nervous to publish this one, for the obvious reasons, but it feels worse to say nothing.
If you feel so inclined, consider making a one-off or recurring donation to any of the charities below that are providing desperately needed aid to Gaza, to the extent they are allowed to deliver it:
-Allison
This had to be said, and you've said it very well. Thanks for going out on a limb. I have Palestinian friends and Jewish friends, and we are all pretty much in agreement that the genocide in Gaza needs to stop, that the U.S. needs to quit supporting the tragic affronts to morality and decency. If we didn't agree, we wouldn't be friends.
American Jewish person here, and I love what you wrote. I wish I'd written it myself. I absolutely hate the way the Trump administration is using Jews as human shields to mask its authoritarian crackdown on dissent and higher education more generally. Trump doesn't care about Jews; this is the same man who has Nick Fuentes as a dinner companion and defends neo-Nazis as "very fine people". And his fascist tactics do nothing to make us safer; quite the opposite, in fact. It's past time for us to speak out against what's being done supposedly for our benefit.