Antisemitism’s antirace struggle claims exceptionalism while other antiracist movements claim universalism.

Evidence

Clearly, the fight against antisemitism has been global and coalitional. And yet, in declaring antisemitism certainly since the Shoah as the constitutive extreme, always the exceptional case, the struggle against antisemitism has characterized itself in the singular, as exemplary, as unlike any other struggle. It has resisted extension to others who for whatever conceptual reasons, strategic positioning, or political gain would have the mantle cover them. There is a generality, a gesture at least to generalizability if not universalism, fueling antiracist social movements: to be free, like others; to be self-determining, independent, treated as a human being, like others. The case against antisemitism, by contrast, turned on the insistence to be left alone, to be free perhaps but even if it meant others’ constriction and devaluation, even destruction. The legacy perhaps of a “Chosen People.” That’s what exceptionalism amounts to. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 117

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to moral panics literature and ‘exceptional case’ framing in the reader’s panic/scapegoat interests, and to theories of Holocaust exceptionalism in Jewish studies. — connects to: Antiracist movements claim generalizable freedom while anti-antisemitism insists on Jewish exceptionalism — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 117
• SHARE: A specifically Jewish-studies interlocutor would appreciate this sharp contrast between exceptionalist antisemitism-framing and generalizable antiracism.