“..a dislike can be based on seeing and then judging, but real anti-Semitism– and all other forms of genuine bigotry- is based on first judging and then seeing.”
“If indeed, one is confronted with a case of bigotry, four phases or aspects of a bigoted narrative will usually follow. The first is selectivity: only “data” that are unfavorable to the targeted group will be acknowledged, and all other data will be ignored. The second is demonization: comparing the “guilty” to culturally embedded symbols of unarguable evil. The third is selective representation: finding the few members of the targeted group who are critical of their own and wildly exaggerating their relative significance. And the fourth is obsession: the idea that the targeted group is virtually everywhere and is responsible for virtually everything evil or troublesome or problematic in the life of the bigot.”
“It is thanks to the power of obsession that the anti-Semitism ascends into the ultimate abstraction, in which the medieval bias that what is Jewish is also evil gets inverted in more modern time to what is evil must be Jewish.”
From” Jewcentricity– why the Jews are praised, blamed, and used to explain just about everything” by Adam Garfinkle
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