Where does today’s anti-elitism come from? Antisemitism, says Adam Gopnik

New Yorker writer and former CBC Massey Lecturer, Adam Gopnik argues that there’s a connection between contemporary anti-elitism, as espoused by authoritarian leaders and their supporters around the world, and historic antisemitism. 

In the second annual Irving Abella Lecture, which he delivered in the fall of 2024 at Massey College in Toronto, he sketches the evolution of antisemitism from both the political right and left, and illustrates how that evolution has informed and shaped today’s anti-elitism and anti-urbanism. 

Hitler’s original targets, for example, weren’t the impoverished Jews of Eastern Europe, who suffered immeasurably during the Holocaust. It was the class of literate, educated, and established Jews in urban centres — the elites of their place and time.

“We can see how tightly the elimination of the Jews was bound not to a hatred of Jews alone, but to a broader hatred of cosmopolitanism,” Gopnik told the audience.

Here are some excerpts from his talk, Confronting Hate.

The blame template

“There is no more insidious form of transmuted antisemitism than blaming the opponents of authoritarianism, for the rise of authoritarianism, pointing the finger of blame, not at the Nazis, but at their social democratic opponents for somehow creating the circumstance that allowed the Nazis to flourish.

“This is a familiar trope. So I will make a belligerent, let us say Jewish, counter-case. Any time you hear talk of elitism as the true impulsor of popular fascism, or here again, anyone blaming the staunchest enemies of authoritarianism as the authors of authoritarianism, anytime we hear anyone blaming the educated and the enlightened for the acts of the benighted and brutal, we are in the presence of this enduring template, which begins with the hatred of the Jews, a turn of thought that has its roots and its branches in the ugliest of all modern tropes.

“To make those who fight against fascism responsible for it is to engage in the core antisemitic canard of the 20th century. To my mind, the educated and the erudite should be relentlessly unapologetic about the absolute good of education and erudition. While working just as relentlessly to make sure that education remains open to as many as possible, is as inexpensive as is humanly achievable, and is as widespread in ways that it has never been before.”

Antisemitism as anti-urbanism

“If you read Mein Kampf, what will be striking to you is not in its original impulse, the idea is not that the Jews are horrific outsiders who are trying to break their way into Germany. No, it’s that they’re insiders who already have. And they control the cultural institutions. The Jews, in Hitler’s fevered imagination, controlled the drawing academy in Vienna, from which Hitler was, in defiance of his expectations, excluded.

“Arrogance, devious skill and argument, above all, their skill at getting places, this is the root emotion of Hitler’s hatred of the Jews. And interestingly, Hitler pairs the Jews with the French in Mein Kampf, as people are particularly good at lubricating their way into institutions where they don’t belong.

“Hitler was enraged at the Jews in Vienna, not because Jews were practicing the arts instead of agriculture, but because they wouldn’t let him into art school.

“Goebbels similarly was a failed philosophical novelist, not a rabble rouser. The circles of populist authoritarians then, as very much now, tend to be filled with embittered B-minus competitors. And so we come to the last and still the most morally instructive thing about studying the history of antisemitism now.

“We can see how tightly the elimination of the Jews was bound not to a hatred of Jews alone, but to a broader hatred of cosmopolitanism. Although huge numbers of the Jews who perished in the mass killings were poor religious Jews from Eastern Europe, peasants and peddlers and small merchants, the main enemy, as the leaders of doing the killing understood, had always been and always remained the educated Jews of Western Europe.”

Flipping the victim script

“Those fighting against authoritarianism are made responsible for its rise, while those fanning its flames are portrayed as pitiful victims, without any agency or understanding of the ideologies they support. Common sense, as I say, shows us that this makes no sense.

“The people who stormed the Capitol in 2021 knew perfectly well what they were doing, and on whose behalf they were doing it. They were not struggling to return factories to Akron. They were struggling to install a dictator whom they rightly imagined shared their terrors and hated their ideological enemies. 

“The same right-wing populist anti-authoritarian movements have risen parallel in countries with kinds of providential states that I wish the United States had, whatever else has happened within them, and clearly the fact of immigration is in itself a powerful propellant.

“The Swedes and the French are well protected by their own social networks from the depredations of neoliberalism. To blame the people who are trying to stop the ascent of fascism for the rise of fascism is to insist all over again that it is the fault of the Social Democrats for being insufficiently sympathetic to the indigenous antisemitism of the German people as happened in the 1930s.”

Patriotism vs nationalism

“The whole point of our social existence is to broaden our circles of compassion. This is horrifically difficult with the built in trap too rarely recognized that as we do, as we broaden our circles of compassion from our immediate family to our clan to our city or to our nation, we necessarily risk becoming enclosed in that same enlarging circle.

“This is exactly the trap of the 19th-century liberal nationalism upon which Canada is constructed and which [Theodor] Herzl dreamed of for the Jews… We enlarge our circles to build a country and fail to see the Indigenous people who lie outside it.

“Nations are in this way dangerous. Nomads and tribes tend to fight each other for goods, but not to exterminate each other out of principle. So the fight [is] first to enlarge our circle of compassion. And then again, not to become entrapped in that enlargement is exactly the fight of patriotism against nationalism.”

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*Transcript was edited for clarity and length.This episode was produced by Greg Kelly.