Antisemitism in Reader Comments: Analogies for Reckoning with the Past by Matthias J. Becker (review)

Reviewed by: Antisemitism in Reader Comments: Analogies for Reckoning with the Past by Matthias J. Becker Zbyněk Tarant Antisemitism in Reader Comments: Analogies for Reckoning with the Past. By Matthias J. Becker. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. 522 pages. €149.00 (cloth) Recent global events such as the Covid-19 pandemic or the Russian invasion of Ukraine have once again forced us to contemplate the appropriateness of historical analogies, namely analogies to Nazi crimes, when discussing contemporary affairs. Be it anti-vaxxers appropriating Holocaust imagery as a way to protest vaccination certificates and mask mandates or the Russian establishment's comparison of Ukraine to Nazi Germany as a casus belli in 2014 and 2022. The inflation of Nazi-era analogies and allusions has recently grown to an extent that threatens to trivialize the actual horrors End Page 172 of Nazism. This is especially a problem when these allusions are used against Jews themselves, such as in response to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The research for Matthias Jakob Becker's book started long before the global pandemic and before the first Russian-Ukrainian escalation in 2014, yet its conclusions on the use and abuse of allusions to Nazism within anti-Israel discourse will also find wider application to what we are witnessing today. While also dealing with the traditional myths concerning Jews, manifested by online users, such as "greed" or "conspiracy," the book's main focus is hinted at by its subtitle: "Analogies for Reckoning with the Past." The author himself asks: "How can writers of reader comments . . . adopt antisemitic patterns of language use as well as language that relativises the historical atrocities of their own country, without being sanctioned within this milieu-specific discourse?" (394) The main focus of the book is on various historical analogies made by readers of online news media (Die Zeit in Germany and The Guardian in the UK) in response to news articles published between Autumn 2012 and Summer 2014. These analogies may include comparisons of Zionism to Nazism, apartheid or colonialism. The time period, which frames the book's corpus, was not selected randomly, as it coincides with two main escalations of the conflict between Israel and Hamas, referred to in Israeli military jargon as Operation Pillar of Defense (November 14 to 21, 2012) and Operation Protective Edge (July 8 to August 26, 2014). Despite the relatively short time-period, the author was able to collect and analyze 6,000 relevant comments, which subsequently constitute the core of his corpus. The book is chiefly rooted in the field of applied cognitive linguistics and uses the topic of anti-Israel and antisemitic historical allusions as a case study for the wider phenomenon of implicit hate speech and indirect speech acts (45). While it uses a set of basic quantitative overviews to present some general characteristics of its dataset, the study is primarily based on qualitative discourse analysis, which the author sees as the most effective tool for the identification of indirect and implicit meanings. This is also End Page 173 the reason behind the author's decision to frame his corpus into a rather short time span, as recognizing the fine pattern of speech by means of manual coding is a tedious and time-consuming process, especially since the author collected multiple snapshots of the same articles and discussion boards across a certain time period, allowing him to analyze how these online spaces changed over time. While the book focuses mainly on the readers' comments, the author shows that these responses do not happen in a vacuum as he documents cases in which the content of the newspaper articles themselves may have contributed to the antisemitic nature of the readers' comments (36). Becker also notes the paradox in which readers' comments are actually produced by a minority of users but tend to be taken as the vox populi or a mirror of public opinion by other non-participating users, thus contributing to the distorted perception of public opinion on certain matters (37–38). Moreover, both The Guardian and Die Zeit apply their own method of post-publication comment moderation procedures (in contrast to other media's pre-publication moderation, which is more intrusive in...