Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World

Content Warning: This section discusses fascist ideology, genocide, antisemitism, and racism.

There is a type of doubling that occurs when racialized individuals are confused with each other on the basis of their skin, eye, or hair color. As a white woman, Klein previously believed herself to be immune to this kind of doubling, but when people begin to confuse her with Wolf, her mother suggests that people conflate them because they are both Jewish. Prejudice functions by conjuring up a racial or ethnic double that comes to signify and represent all people within a hated group. Klein suggests that the ethnic double for Jewish people is Shylock, the “moneylending mutilator in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, determined to get his pound of flesh” (294). The image of Shylock is used to justify antisemitic hatred when it supersedes all individual Jewish people and defines them by stereotypes that they cannot escape.

Klein has “smoothed out [her] ethnic edges” (297) to avoid being associated with her ethnic double. She grapples with this choice. Antisemitism is on the rise again in the West, although it never disappeared entirely. Klein traces the origins of modern antisemitism to the Christian Bible, where Jewish people are associated with Satan and cast as “the demonic doppelgangers of the faithful followers of Christ” (298). This portrayal set the stage for many centuries of antisemitic conspiracy theories and hatred.

The conspiracy theory group QAnon draws on antisemitic stereotypes to position Jewish people as the primary adversaries of Christian nations and the cause of all injustices in the world. These anti-Jewish conspiracy theories act as buffers for outrage. Instead of blaming a king or landowner, or later, capitalist structures and billionaires for injustices, conspiracy theorists divert blame onto Jewish people. In many struggles against tyranny throughout history, Jewish people have become scapegoats, often making it easier for the ruling class to pit oppressed groups of people against each other.

In the 20th century, many Jewish people had debates about how to dismantle antisemitism. The Holocaust cut these fruitful discussions short. In the years following WWII, when European and North American countries did little to combat antisemitism, Zionism was positioned as the only remaining option. Zionism is the idea of a “territorial homeland for the Jews, a nation that could be armed and protected from all possible threats” (310). The nation of Israel was created to be such a place in 1948, on the land that was once Palestine. Zionism positioned antisemitism as something so deeply rooted in human history that any attempt to fight it through solidarity with other oppressed groups was naive and dangerous.

While Jewish people were considered the dangerous doppelgangers of European Christians, Israel constructed Palestinians as the Israeli shadow-self. When the Nakba was committed and 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homelands, while thousands more were killed, the image of Palestinians as Israel’s enemy became inescapable. Any resistance that Palestinians attempted was portrayed as “a seamless continuation of the very same anti-Semitism that had resulted in the Holocaust, and that therefore needed to be crushed” (311). This rhetoric was used to justify the partitioning of Palestinian lands into Gaza and the West Bank, the demolition of homes that continue in these areas to this day, and the discriminatory apartheid system that ensures that Palestinians remain second-class citizens.

In many ways, the nation of Israel is a doppelganger of European colonialism. However, Zionist colonization differed from European colonization because it was established not from a position of perceived superiority, but of victimhood. According to Zionist rhetoric, the colonization of Palestine was justified because Jewish people had faced discrimination and near-extermination. The Zionist colonial project was “colonialism framed as reparations for genocide” (316). Klein understands why so many were drawn to Zionism in the beginning: Many were survivors of genocide, desperately looking for a place to finally feel safe and protected. European countries failed to make their countries safe places for Jewish people to live and opted to “[offload] their Jewish problem, along with their collective shame and guilt about the Holocaust, onto the Arab world” (320). Israel is an example of what happens when collective grief is used to build identities around the dichotomy between insiders and outsiders.

There was a time in 2014 when Wolf spoke out against Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and called what was happening a genocide; she was shamed and silenced for speaking out. Klein, who has had similar experiences, sympathizes with Wolf. There are groups of Jewish anti-Zionists around the world who brave ostracism when they speak up for Palestinians and criticize Israel’s actions. Klein is part of this movement and has taken part in calls for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against Israel as peaceful opposition to the government. She has also visited Gaza as a journalist and spoken to Palestinians about their experiences of Israeli colonization. She believes that there are many ways to be Jewish and to battle antisemitism without subscribing to Zionism.

Klein is wary of any political group that silences and censors people. In discourse about antisemitism and Israel, she has seen how the silencing of voices can go horribly wrong. Wolf has gone from defending Palestine to not speaking about it at all; instead, she now constructs her entire identity around being a victim who must arm and defend herself at all costs, rather like Israel. Klein rejects this approach. She does not want walls to separate people.