The Fight against Antisemitism and the Iranian Regime: Challenges and Contradictions in the Light of Adorno’s Categorical Imperative

Abstract

The purpose of a critique of antisemitism is to disable it and to decipher it through a critique of ideology. Any reconstruction of the mentality of the antisemite, however trenchant, and any account of the history of antisemitism, however comprehensive, ends up in stunned amazement at the projective madness of the Jew-hatred that one is committed to countering at the practical level. As Maximilian Gottschlich put it: “when all is said and done, there is only one serious motive for concerning oneself with antisemitism: to resist it.”1 However, if we wish to resist it without illusions, a critical reconstruction of the antisemitic mentality is essential. In some established academic schools of thought, the impression is given that antisemitism is a result of a lack of knowledge about Jews, Judaism, or the Jewish state. I think that this idea is not only wrong but also underestimates the problem.Were it correct, the situation would not be nearly so bad and could be easily addressed, for example, through meetings between Jewish and nonJewish young people, synagogue open days, and study trips to Israel. Of course, all these things should be done; however, they will not banish antisemitism, because it is a comprehensive worldview of a delusional-projective kind. Instead of downplaying antisemitism as mere prejudice, we have to decipher it through a critique of the “antisemitic society,” as Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer put it in their Dialectic of Enlightenment.2 Anti-Jewish hatred must be viewed in the light of the basic constitution of this society. Antisemitism is not an anthropological constant but an ever-changing, delusional reaction to the historically existing society. A developed critique of antisemitism must, unlike a traditional theoretical approach, feel itself ob-