The mind operates by means of emphasis, especially the mind in the grip of fear or anger. When it brings order to the welter of experience, the mind sometimes exceeds the requirements of coherence and proceeds to exercises in simplification. Out of our many identities, we select one; out of our many loves, we select one; out of our many threats, we select one. Life is more easily managed this way. And we fit in more easily this way: such choices are determined chiefly by how we wish to be known by others, and by what others demand of us in the way of personal validity in our time. And so we choose single symbols of ourselves, and the rest, which may include some of our strongest capacities, is left to languish, undetected and undeveloped. Complexity is never trending. It is true that the appeal to complexity can become complacent and ponderous and an alibi for mental inaction; but surely nothing of consequence is ever simple. Surely the truth about us is that we are many things, we have many commitments, and we suffer many troubles. We take our pleasures in many places. We fight on many fronts. Perhaps nothing is more responsible for our myopias than our politics. Identify friend or foe, to borrow the naval code, is the rule. Those appear to be the only kinds of other people in existence. The Schmittians among us should take heart: we are living in the dystopia that their sordid hero described. Consider the question of our security. Our future depends significantly on how we conceive of the “foe.” If we misdescribe the danger we face, our powers will fail us. But in keeping with our pathologically synchronized political culture, or, to put it another way, in keeping with the growing repudiation of the liberal mentality, we are losing our mental dexterity in the confrontation with what threatens us. “Precarity” is the shibboleth of the day, and there is certainly a basis in reality for the popularity of the term; but “precarities” would be more accurate. The weakening of our sense of multiplicity has become one of our most significant vulnerabilities. Ideology is a method for seeing less than is there. We elect to see less, in exchange for the confidence that what we have seen we have mastered. It is a satisfying contraction. Even if we cannot proceed without frameworks with which to interpret experience, frameworks are blinders. That is why we are so often surprised, and ambushed; why crisis always finds us catching up. I remember when I first learned this lesson. I was a young student of modern Jewish history, and in the study of Zionism and the creation of the Jewish state I came upon the famous pronouncement by David Ben Gurion in 1939: “We will fight the White Paper as if there were no Hitler and we will fight Hitler as if there were no White Paper.” The White Paper, an act of supreme callousness that would be right at home in our era of scorn for the stateless, was an instrument of the British government that severely curtailed Jewish emigration from Europe to Palestine, with the aim of eventually banning it altogether. In 1939! I took away a larger point from Ben Gurion’s strategy in extremis. It is that there is never only a single danger. The challenges are always multiple and simultaneous. This is not as obvious as it sounds, because it requires certain mental adjustments that do not comport well with simple pictures, with intellectual italics, with “systemic” analysis, with holistic explanations. In the Jewish community in Palestine, there were many Jews who overcame their opposition to the British occupiers to fight alongside them against the Nazis, and there were even some Jews who overcame their opposition to fascism to fight the British occupiers (the history of Jewish fascism did not begin with Kahane and Ben Gvir); but Ben Gurion was insisting upon a double struggle, because history had afflicted the Jews with more than a single enemy, more than a single cruelty. And sometimes the challenges are not all external: I was schooled in the art of the double struggle, the fight on many fronts, by some of my teachers, who were in the valiant minority of American intellectuals in the 1950s who denounced Joseph Stalin and Joseph McCarthy with equal vehemence. No excuses were accepted and no extenuations were made. And if the double struggle made no sense according to the politics of the day, so much the worse for the politics of the day. The contemporary Jewish community is now faced with the prospect of a double struggle, but so far it has demonstrated only a skill for singleness. The Jewish left wants to know only one thing, the Jewish right wants to know only another thing. Right now it should be the duty of American Jews to fight the anti-Semitism outside the Jewish world and the anti-democratic decay inside the Jewish world, and on the basis of the same principles. 
One of the most impressive accomplishments of the fight against anti-Semitism is the literature — scholarly and philosophical — that has been created about it and against it. There is very little new to say about it, except to insist upon its eternal recurrence and to document its recent manifestations. But a succinct characterization of the malignancy is useful, and the finest one I know was recently written by Anthony Julius, the British Jewish intellectual and lawyer who is an authority on the terrible subject. Antisemitism consists of false and hostile beliefs about Jews, the Jewish religion, Jewish institutions or Jewish projects; these beliefs often lead to injurious things being said or done to Jews or their projects, or said about them. It has several modes of existence. Principally: it is a family of discourses; it conditions or deforms institutions and institutional practices; it is a choice made by individual men and women. Antisemitism variously threatens Jewish lives,
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