Politics & Power Quote by Jack Schwartz

Schwartz is trying to reroute the moral reflex around boycotts by yoking a contemporary target to an early, ominous stage of Nazi persecution. The move is deliberate: he doesn’t begin with the Holocaust, but with the prelude - boycotts and exclusion - when respectable society could still tell itself this was “only” economic pressure. By naming “the entrepreneurial and professional classes,” he highlights a group many audiences instinctively read as integrated, productive, and comparatively protected. The subtext is: if even they were first, then no one should assume insulation when a campaign of ostracism hardens into something worse.

The second sentence compresses centuries into a single emblem: Israel as “the most powerful symbol of Jewish national resurgence in two millennia.” That phrasing is doing cultural work. It frames Israel less as a state among states than as the collective answer to historical dispossession. So a boycott of Israel, in this telling, is not merely a critique of policies; it becomes an attack on Jewish reconstitution itself. The implicit accusation is that today’s anti-Israel exclusion reproduces an older pattern of delegitimizing Jewish presence, but updated for a postwar world where open antisemitism is disreputable and political language provides cover.

The context is the long-running fight over BDS and cultural/economic boycotts. Schwartz’s intent is polemical: to make boycotts feel like a moral hazard rather than a tool of nonviolent pressure. The rhetorical risk is also clear: by drawing a line to Nazi tactics, he raises the stakes so high that it can foreclose distinctions between antisemitism and political opposition, which is precisely the point - and precisely what critics will contest.