Imagine arriving at a family gathering and discovering that, before you can be yourself, you are expected to account for people you have never met, decisions you did not make and a government you do not represent. Everyone else gets to be an individual. You have been appointed spokesperson without being asked.
That expectation deserves attention wherever it appears. Applied to Jewish people, it can turn an ordinary conversation into a demand to establish innocence.
A Times of Israel blog poses the question of why antisemitism remains socially acceptable. The headline alone cannot establish how widely it is accepted, or in which circumstances. But it invites a more immediate examination: what do we allow people to say about someone simply because they are Jewish, and what happens when the person saying it is someone we like?
It is relatively easy to recognise prejudice in a stranger whose politics we already despise. There is less comfort in recognising it at our own dinner table. We know the speaker’s generous side. We can supply explanations. Perhaps they are angry about suffering elsewhere. Perhaps they have expressed themselves badly.
Those possibilities may deserve a hearing. They do not make the person on the receiving end responsible for absorbing the remark.
There is a real complication here. Criticism of an Israeli government, its decisions or its military actions must remain possible. Treating every criticism as antisemitic would obstruct necessary argument. Equally, a political grievance cannot justify treating Jewish identity as evidence of culpability. The distinction requires us to attend to what is actually being said, rather than deciding in advance that our own side means well.
In ordinary life, that may involve interrupting a conversation we would rather leave undisturbed. It need not involve a performance of outrage. We can ask why a Jewish colleague is being required to explain a state’s actions when nobody else in the room has been assigned responsibility by ancestry.
The conversation may become awkward. A friendship may require a harder discussion than either person wanted. But the alternative is also a choice: leaving one person to carry the discomfort so that everyone else can enjoy the evening.