FWIW — difference between antisemitism and racism again:
— In short, however, the distinction is quite fundamental: affected by
the fetish, the subject cannot make sense of the capitalist realities it
is surrounded by, but seeks to alleviate its struggles. That's where
anti-semitism comes in: the Jews are depicted as powerful, invisible,
superior, ghost-like forces that control the world in secret. This
characterization is exactly the same as the one Marx used to describe
value. But because value itself isn't seizable, the subject is forced
into blaming the circumstances onto somebody else, hence the Jews.
Anti-semites see Jews as superior, not inferior, which is the major
difference to racism.
A racist tries to explain e.g. an african-american person's character by
projecting stereotypes on them, but an anti-semite tries to explain the
world's character by "pathetically projecting "
(Adorno/Horkheimer/Löwenthal) the realities onto Jews. A racist would be
content with not having to see the "inferiors", Anti-semites are
paranoid about somebody else running the strings and holding the world
hostage. Because they want to "liberate themselves" from those in
control, the only consequence is annihilation, or as Postone put it
"extermination for the sake of extermination". In short: people are
perplexed by the dimension of value and instead see Jews as personifying
the effect value has, which is why the shoah was the
"negative sublation of capital". In the process of extermination, the
Germans' societal structure vanished, and whether one was a worker or a
major capitalist didn't matter anymore; all that mattered was that they
were united in chasing the enemy, the Jews, and thus molded into a
"Volksgemeinschaft", a people's community.
The answer to your second question is simple:
Anti-semitism has never ceased to exist; its direct communication is
just widely condemned, which is why a different valve is found through
which Anti-semites channel their delirium. Most of the time it's Israel,
the country which isn't just "the state of the Jews" but their only
weapon against annihilation. Neither communist utopia nor bourgeois
enlightenment saved them but pure weaponry. There is barely anything
special about Israel in comparison to other countries but yet it is the
most educated folks, yes even some Jews, that despise it the most.
Adorno and Horkheimer sensed that so they were appalled to see their
students turn on them. We find it weird that the Nazis hated ordinary
people, but at the same time the hatred for Israel is widely accepted as
"legitimate criticism", although 99% of its critics have very little to
no idea about the realities there. Alvin Rosenfeld's essay
"Progressive Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism" is far from
perfect but has a lot of good points on that.
The string of theory that most closely followed Adorno and Horkheimer in
Germany is radically pro-Israel today, which is why I refuse to refer to
postmodernists or postcolonials as critical theory - they may have some
valid points in some areas, but understand very little of what
anti-semitism even means and therefore have no instruments for
understanding the existence of Israel.
The second way of avoiding Jews while adhering to anti-semitic
structures is the hatred for "finance capitalism" and so forth, totally
ignoring the fetish and its consequences. Once again there's not a lot
of literature on the antisemitism perpetuated by Occupy protestors or
other vulgar "anti-capitalists" in english but the mechanism is quite
similar https:// thecharnelhouse.org/2016/05/02/structural-
antisemitism/ —