The Fatal Embrace
Reading, Watching 07.27.25
This is a regular feature for paid subscribers wherein I write a little bit about what I’ve been reading and/or watching.
Usually on Sunday, I ask free subscribers to sign up, but today I want to ask people instead to donate to the United Nations World Food Programme for famine relief in Gaza.
You might notice that this is a bit more of an essay than the usual Reading, Watching roundup. That’s because I meant this to be a mid-week post, but I have been struggling with it all week. It’s also technically about what I’ve been reading, so it fits the Sunday feature.
Even the least reflective observer of the news must have noted, with some queasiness, no doubt, that the biggest stories of the day involve the Jews. World opinion is outraged by the ceaseless and unstoppable catastrophe in Gaza; the Trump administration is dealing with its toughest political challenge yet: the president’s very public connections to Jeffrey Epstein, a shady financier and Svengali who, much of the country believes, ran a child sex trafficking and blackmail ring through his connections to other rich and powerful men.
“MAGA,” which is neither a party nor really a movement, but more a fickle and amorphous mob that charlatans of various stripes try to steer in this or that direction, is divided by the “Jewish Question,” if you’ll permit me. More than immigration, and more than trade, the key issues roiling that “coalition” are the United States’s relationship to Israel and the “Epstein Files.” On their own, these matters are serious and real, but in the MAGA imagination, they become converted, along with all political questions, into lurid conspiracy theories. If you buy my contention that Trumpism is essentially fascist, these tendencies are not hard to fathom. MAGA is splitting into a “vanilla fascist” section that is happy to simply menace political opposition and the darker nations at home and abroad, and a hardcore National Socialist fronde that sees in all things a more sinister, hidden enemy. The fascism question seems to me closed: the question now is whether MAGA will be “merely fascist” or go full Nazi. (If you still aren’t convinced that antisemitism is not a live ideological current on the American right, then explain the sudden transformation of X’s AI Grok into “MechaHitler:” it was mirroring users’ posts.)
For a historical example of how fascism can radicalize in a national socialist direction, one can look at the transformation of Mussolini’s regime from philosemitic and pro-Zionist to antisemitic. Italy was not a very antisemitic nation, and Italian Jews were highly assimilated, with some even sympathizing with and participating in the fascists’ ultranationalist project. So why did Italian fascism become antisemitic? Partly that had to do with the needs of cementing an alliance with Hitler, but partly it had to do with the structure of fascism itself and the paranoid mentality of Il Duce, who had always been inclined to see the world in terms of shadowy conspiracies and intractable wars between races and peoples. He wanted the help of fictitious “world Jewry,” and when it didn’t materialize to his satisfaction, he became more open to antisemitic claims. Fascist pro-Zionism, like American right-wing Zionism today, inclined to the Revisionist, Jabotinskyite wing of the movement, which shared its bloody-minded ethnonationalism. According to the analysis of Michael Ledeen (yes, that Michael Ledeen), the turn to antisemitism was not accidental: the Jews, by being a group still visibly apart in Italian society, were an almost inevitable target for a totalitarian movement that purported to define and unite the entire nation. “The Jew was simply the extreme case of an Italian population that had pigheadedly refused to be disciplined and reshaped by Fascism,” Ledeen writes. The Jews, some fascists in their number notwithstanding, were also particularly associated with the old, failed regime of liberalism. By the end of the 1930s, the Italian fascist project of creating a wholly new society and “New Man” was itself facing stagnation or failure, and the turn to antisemitism was pushed hard by what one might call the radical populist wing of the fascist movement, who saw in it a way to accomplish their failed revolution. In short, Mussolini did not need antisemitism to seize power, but he did need it to stay in power.
A few years ago, I came across a peculiar book from the early 1990s titled The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State by the political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg. From what I can tell, it’s little commented upon today, and its author, currently a professor at Johns Hopkins, is someone I might call, in a less generous mood, a bit of a libertarian crank. But I’ve often returned to The Fatal Embrace and its provocative thesis: the Jews have historically made a tragic error in seeking the protection of political elites, making them a target when anti-system movements attack the state.
Developing Hannah Arendt’s theory in Origins of Totalitarianism, Professor Ginsberg thinks that the key to understanding antisemitism is not through the psychology of hatred or mere scapegoating. Rather, he believes that antisemitism is best analyzed as a structural and political phenomenon. The Jews, a vulnerable outsider minority in the nations they came to inhabit, must look for allies to protect them. They turned to the state, offering services in exchange for protection and privileges. Literate, with commercial experience and international contacts throughout the diaspora, Jews proved themselves useful to the princes of Europe and the Middle East as money-lenders, merchants, administrators, and advisors. Roughly speaking, these are the “court Jews” of history.
According to Ginsberg, this pattern persisted into modernity. While only a few court Jews were granted privileges under feudal and absolutist regimes, the rise of liberalism and democracy, and with it emancipation and full citizenship, offered the greater mass of Jews the prospect of participation in society. This made them enthusiastic liberals and democrats, and they became a prominent part of the new political and civic life of the liberal democracies. But they did not quite become citizens like any other of their nation-states; they remained, in many ways, a highly visible group apart. This would make them a convenient political target for all those who might oppose the regime.
Ginsberg outlines three conditions where antisemitism can become an organized political factor rather than merely a prejudice:
First, political forces that oppose a state in which Jews are prominent may seek to undermine the regime and its supporters by attacking its Jewish backers and depicting the government as the puppet of an alien group. Typically, in this circumstance, anti-Semitic appeals are used to create what might be termed coalitions of the top and bottom. In the modern world, these are associated with Nazism, but in early modern Europe they were sometimes associated with efforts by the church or aristocracy to rally popular support against the crown. They are used by forces that attempt to mobilize the masses while avoiding threats to the interests and property of elite strata. Thus, anti-Semitic ideologies are typically espoused either by radical populists who court elite support or by a segment of the upper class seeking to arouse and mobilize a mass base for an assault on the established order.
The second condition Ginsberg gives is when Jews are part of a political movement and then seen as rival claimants to power within that movement use antisemitism to jettison or purge them. The example he gives is Stalin’s purge of Trotsky and his allies in the USSR, but we can see something like that going on in the example from fascist Italy, and also, in one of my particular interests, the fight between neocons and paleocons, too. Ginsberg’s third possible condition for antisemitism is when a conservative regime wants to attack its opponents as essentially alien in some way, with the clearest case being Tsarist Russia. But it is the first case where antisemitism acts as a kind of epoxy for a reactionary populism that typifies the antisemitic parties and movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. As Ginsberg writes, “Anti-Semitism was an extremely useful instrument in late nineteenth-century France and early twentieth-century Germany for uniting seemingly incompatible groups from the uppermost and lower ends of the social spectrum around their shared antipathy for the bourgeois order and the liberal state.”
This theory may make some readers a little uneasy. Does it not rationalize an irrational hatred and, in effect, blame the victims of “the oldest hatred in the world.” This is certainly one response to Hannah Arendt, whose painstaking and often somewhat convoluted reconstruction of antisemitism, Ginsberg is simplifying. She responded that there must be a reason why antisemitism was so persuasive and attractive to people, and it was the job of the historian to figure it out. She also made the point that the idea of “eternal antisemitism” is both question-begging and essentially the same conceit as antisemitism itself: that Jews are loathed from time immemorial and therefore their persecution and murder is unremarkable and natural. There is a subtle difference between Ginsberg and Arendt that I think is important: for Ginsberg, the problem is the Jewish identification with power, but for Arendt, antisemitism arises in particular places where Jewish prominence persists, but when the institutions they are associated with are losing power and prestige, under conditions of a social and political crisis. They appear there even more as an extraneous, useless “parasitical” being, a part of a failing order.
Ginsberg’s book is not primarily a work of history; it is an analysis of the potential for antisemitic politics in the then-contemporary United States. But from a certain perspective, it sounds like a work of political science rather than a prophecy. As in the Jewish tradition of the prophets, it criticizes the errors of the children of Israel and foretells doom if that wicked course is continued. Here’s his prediction about the possible rise of an antisemitic movement in the United States, given the appearance of Duke and the Buchananite paleocons in the early ’90s:
Given the absence of other barriers to entry in American electoralpolitics, and given the media's fascination with them, the radical populists will be sure to have at least a public relations field day in the years to come. Of course, Duke and the other radical populists represent a real political threat only if times are very hard. Only then will the upper-middle classes and the business community overcome their distaste for rabble-rousers.
If Clinton and the Democrats are able to deal forcefully and effectively with America's long-term economic problems, the threat from the far—and near—right will certainly recede as it did during the late 1930s. If, however, times are hard—as they may well be for America in the coming decades—it is not much of a leap to imagine that some respectable conservative groups would be willing, as they were during the early 1930s, to swallow their distaste and support forces that propose a "real" alternative to the contemporary liberal regime. As Buchanan has ably demonstrated, one wing of the Republican party is already quite comfortable with Duke's ideas, if not with Duke.
If this happened, the unthinkable would quickly become thinkable. An alliance of radical populists and respectable conservatives would almost inevitably make vigorous use of anti-Semitic themes to attack the liberal Democratic regime, and the Jews would find themselves locked in the fatal embrace of yet another state.
Has it come to pass? Well, history has very few straight lines, so the answer is, “Yes and no.” Trump and his proxies certainly make use of barely coded antisemitic themes when they attack Soros, globalists, and so forth. And Trump’s appearance on the political scene has been viewed as a godsend by just about all antisemites: “finally, our type of guy,” they said as a chorus. As noted above, within the MAGA movement, there is a strong antisemitic streak, although in its more respectable and popular forms, it still shrinks from openly adopting that label for itself and hides behind “legitimate” issues. For example, Tucker Carlson’s new resident Expert on the Jewish Question, Darryl Cooper, does not openly identify as an antisemite; he just happens to take an excessive interest in the exposure of Jewish misdeeds. Steve Bannon uses antisemitic rhetoric, but his target is cosmopolitan, liberal Jews; he makes an exception for the Orthodox and counts himself as a strong supporter of Israel, but still distances himself from traditional neocon reflexive hawkishness for Israel by citing his preference for “America First” foreign policy. The pattern of Zionist antisemite should be familiar now: Then you have Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes, who are much more openly and proudly antisemitic and anti-Zionist.
The complicating factor for Ginsberg’s prophecy is Israel and Zionism, an issue he has a particular blind spot about: in an otherwise fairly sophisticated analysis, he totally identifies all anti-Zionism with antisemitism, and misses how American Zionism and its relationship to the right wing itself forms its own “fatal embrace.”