Antisemitism, Wonka and Questions of Profit

Behind the Material Girls Episode: Wonka x Antisemitism and Censorship

from Marcelle Kosman

I remain distressed by Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Like a lot of you, I think about it constantly and can’t quite wrap my head around how this is still happening, is still allowed to happen. For us in North America, especially after the holiday “break” from the everyday, life is just business as usual while charitable organizations and our taxes fund a genocide—like, what? So we keep doing what we can: talking about Palestine, writing letters, boycotting, marching.

In tandem with the essential ongoing protests and BDS campaigns are the pervasive accusations of antisemitism. You can’t criticize Israel, the logic goes, without being antisemitic. Again, what? People still believe this?

So when I set out to write the script for our Wonka episode, I had antisemitism on the brain. I wanted to write about fashion; I had planned to base the whole episode off of this tweet:

After all, our guest

Leena Norms

has a brilliant YouTube series about rejecting fast fashion, making and altering her own clothes, and building a sustainable wardrobe for our wonderful changing bodies. Fashion, if you will pardon the pun, seemed like a perfect fit for Wonka.

But there was just something about a major motion picture adaptation of a character created by a notorious antisemite, opening in theatres at a time when the term “antisemitism” is being liberally applied to those of us protesting a genocide, that, frankly, distracted me.

So while my research for our Wonka episode took a few different routes, none of them (sadly) went to the Fashion District. Instead, I’m going to tell you all about my research into antisemitism and its relationship to the popularity of Wonka. 

This may come as a surprise, but I started out by researching what antisemitism actually is. Like a lot of sociopolitical terms, I kinda thought I just knew what it meant; hatred of Jews, right? Well, it’s more complicated than that! To understand antisemitism and how the word is meaningful today, we first need to know what a semite is—because Palestinians are also semites.

If you listened to our podcast Witch, Please, you may remember our episode about Orientalism. In that episode Hannah and I drew from the incredible mind of Edward Said, a Palestinian scholar who literally wrote the book(s) on how white supremacy and Imperialism shaped the world as we know it. Said’s work helps us to understand that the region we now call the Middle East was in many ways a product of the Western (especially British) imagination. Let me grossly reduce Said’s work down to a single sentence from his book Orientalism:

Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient — dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.

As Hannah puts it in the episode, with that sentence, “Said is explicitly drawing together politics and art as a way of thinking about how representation and literal political and military power work together to invent—and in his words, ‘deal with’—this thing called the Orient.”

The Western thinkers “dealing with” the Orient understood themselves to be part of the Occident (not to be confused with Oxidant), the “norm” against which the Orient is defined; so where the Orient is ancient, the Occident is modern; where the Orient is erotic and sensual, the Occident is scientific and rational. To be clear, these things aren’t literally or wholly true about these respective regions of the world; rather, Western thinkers were able to define themselves, the Occident, by imagining themselves in opposition to the Orient.

Much like the word Orient, the word “Semite” is also a category invented by Westerners studying the Orient to collapse the diverse peoples of that very big region into a single, definable, racial group. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the name Semite was “given in the 19th century to a member of any people who speak one of the Semitic languages … includ[ing] Arabs, Akkadians, Canaanites, Hebrews, some Ethiopians (including the Amhara and the Tigrayans), and Aramaean tribes.” That is a LOT of culturally diverse people to treat as “one race”! As Said himself puts it, “We must imagine the Orientalist at work in the role of a clerk putting together a very wide assortment of files in a large cabinet marked ‘the Semites’” (my emphasis). Surprise! Like all racial categories, the “Semitic race” is an invention of white supremacy!

In our Witch, Please episode on the Nation State we talked about the historical period when a bunch of European Empires were overthrown and split into nation-states. Well, in my research about the term antisemitism, I learned that this period of nation-state formation is also the period when antisemitism comes to be understood as a reaction to the political enfranchisement of Jewish people in Europe. I drew on this article by David Feldman, who himself draws heavily on the historical writing of the anti-Zionist Jewish journalist Lucien Wolf. In his article, Feldman explains that this specifically political flavour of antisemitism (as distinct from the older religious persecution flavours) emerges in Germany in the late nineteenth century:

It [antisemitism] was a political ideology inspired by nationalism: an attempt to reverse the social and political gains of emancipation and to exclude Jews from public life and German civil society. These ideas had gained political momentum, [Wolf] believed, from the conflicts generated by capitalism, from the migration westward of Jews from Eastern Europe, and from appeals to the mass electorate. 

As we explained in our Witch, Please episode about the Nation State, the late modern period saw nation-states emerging around cultural sameness like a shared vernacular, rejecting what the people considered to be the illegitimate rule of aristocracies who didn’t have a cultural connection to the people over whom they ruled. In other words, popular national movements developed in light of a growing consciousness of shared culture. This is the ideological rationale for the political suspicion of conspicuous Jewish culture in burgeoning nation states. 

Writing in the early twentieth century, Lucien Wolf described the growing antisemitism of the period as “a symptom of the birth pains of modernity and the triumph of the bourgeoisie in economic and political life” (Feldman). In fact, Wolf cited the political focus of antisemitism as a reason to reject Zionism, arguing that Zionism (claiming a Jewish nationality) would undermine the Jewish struggle for full citizenship in the West. (Considering US President Biden argued that Israel is responsible for global Jewish safety, I’d say Wolf was right.)

The heightened xenophobic nationalisms that followed the collapse of the Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires radically changed the experience of European Jews and other minorities vying for citizenship in newly formed nation-states like Poland and Romania. Feldman explains that during this period, writers (like Wolf) begin using the term antisemitism to describe a much wider range of hostilities meted out against Jews. Again, drawing on Wolf’s writing, Feldman argues:

The mutable and dynamic capacities of anti-Semitism in the post-imperial world demanded a new and different explanation of its causes and persistence. Attacks on Jews no longer seemed to reflect the teething problems of modernity or the vestiges of outdated fanaticism: they had acquired new vitality and taken new forms. By the mid-1920s, Wolf no longer ascribed anti-Semitism to economic development and political contingency. The Jewish question in Poland, he reflected in July 1925, was “not a political problem but a psychological problem.”

The overarching thesis of David Feldman’s article, “Toward a History of the Term ‘Anti-Semitism,’” is quite simply that antisemitism “was an invented term whose meaning changed over time. … It proved a flexible category that allowed Jews and non-Jews to make sense of and respond to successive political challenges.” This thesis feels appropriate and useful to remember because the term is, at its core, a word whose meaning is shaped by the way that people use it. Indeed, that is how all words work!

So to wrap up this educational section, I want to stress the value of thinking critically about the application of the term antisemitism today. I think we would all do well to ask ourselves who literally profits from a definition of antisemitism that downplays a prolific author’s vicious caricatures of Jews as the “incomprehensible” opinions of an old man, while simultaneously treating anti-Zionism and criticisms of Israel as hate speech. 

Now, I don’t want to create the impression that Roald Dahl’s antisemitism has gotten a completely free pass. I mean, if it had, the Roald Dahl Story Company (RDSC) wouldn’t have made a teeny tiny apology on a nearly-hidden corner of its website. Even Puffin, the publisher of Dahl’s books (a subsidiary of Penguin Books), has attempted to reduce the harm caused by Dahl’s capacious bigotry by rewriting some select sentences in new editions of his books.

Capitalism is nothing if not interested in reaching new consumers. As I noted in our episode, the Warner Bros. movie Wonka has been in the works since 2016; and Netflix, which acquired the RDSC in 2018, has an “extended universe” in development for Dahl’s characters. Both of these media companies have brought high profile Jewish celebrities into their productions: Netflix hired Taika Waititi to direct the first two extended universe series, and Warner Bros. cast “cool Jew” and extremely popular movie star Timothée Chalamet as the eponymous lead character in Wonka. Do these hiring choices say “Rot in your grave you antisemitic prick”? Maybe! But slapping a hot Jewish mascot over an antisemitic legacy seems to me to be a pretty convenient way to keep making money.

Reading List

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Feldman, David B. “Toward a History of the Term ‘Anti-Semitism.’” The American Historical Review, vol. 123, no. 4, 1 Oct. 2018, pp. 1139–1150, academic.oup.com/ahr/article/123/4/1139/5114731. Accessed 9 Jan. 2024.

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