Beyond Racial, Religious, and Political Binaries: Toward Antisemitism Literacy

Literacy studies scholarship and pedagogy have not attended comprehensively to Jewish cultural literacies or the discursive operations of anti-Jewish hate. As a result, antisemitic rhetoric may be employed, strategically or accidentally, by people who do not see themselves as antisemitic—and who, regardless of their critical and cultural literacies, cannot accurately identify that rhetoric as such. In this article, I draw upon existing research, both mine and other scholars’, as I explore how histories of Jewishness and antisemitism disrupt binary understandings of race, power, and partisanship; explicate how these disruptions complicate efforts to recognize and understand antisemitic rhetoric; and identify strategies for moving forward with greater awareness of antisemitism as a rhetorical system and deeply situated cultural ideology. This article gestures toward the development of teachers’ and students’ antisemitism literacy.