In 1975, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, one of the leading postwar film directors and writers in Germany, wrote a play entitled “Garbage, the City and Death.” Set in a desolate urban landscape of prostitutes and seedy nightclubs, the play cemented Fassbinder’s infamy largely because of the inclusion of a character named “The Rich Jew.”

“The Rich Jew” is an uncomplicatedly antisemitic construct. Not only is the name is a bit of a giveaway, there’s what he does on top. He’s a Jew who becomes rich off property speculation in a blighted, rotting city. He then enters into a relationship with a prostitute whom he subsequently kills. But her pimp gets blamed for the murder because post-Holocaust guilt towards the Jews puts them above suspicion and ensures them favors which would be denied to other mere mortals.

Fassbinder’s Jew assembles all the hang-ups of antisemites through the centuries: money, power, shadowy connections and sexual exploitation (the sleazy sexuality of Jewish males was an obsessive theme of antisemites like Edouard Drumont in France and Julius Streicher in Nazi Germany.) But Fassbinder, the archetypal libertine, was not a Nazi. If anything, he was a leftist. “The Rich Jew,” then, was a testament not just to the revived flirtation with antisemitism which marked a part of the German left during the era of Baader-Meinhoff terrorism, but to a much older tradition of Jew-hatred camouflaged as anti-capitalism.

I thought of “The Rich Jew” when I read this excellent piece by Harry about the latest outburst of “progressive” antisemitism in Detroit, a city which Fassbinder would no doubt have found quite inspiring in its current state. Some readers will recall that I wrote, a fortnight ago, about a particularly repellent piece masquerading as investigative journalism by someone called Michelle J. Kinnucan. Kinnucan, who is something of a Fassbinder without the artistry, has peddled these falsehoods about the Michigan State Fair in a few publications now, including, shamefully, the Arab-American News.

In my original piece, I pointed to Kinnucan’s “Rich Jew” antisemitism: the protest she urges is as much, if not more, directed at Michigan’s Jewish community as against Israel. Indeed, her words are the foundation for this uncomplicatedly antisemitic sentence taken from this call to protest at the Fair: “We will protest the exclusive, no-risk sweetheart deal granted by a state agency to a largely affluent community to stage a celebration of racism in a largely economically disenfranchised city.”

Here’s what Harry has to say:

“So, in addition to the usual distortion of facts designed to push the “Palestinian narrative” into people’s heads, we have the return of the condemnation of that evil, demonic creature known as The Rich Jew. And how does The Rich Jew become rich? Racism, of course. It’s as obvious as the hook nose on a Jew’s face. Yes, it seems that we Jews in Detroit, not Israel - excuse me - the Zionist Entity, are Shylock and Fagin once again. So what shall it be this time Michelle, inquisition or pogrom? How about plain old fashioned anti-Jewish riots and massacres like you had back in the old days before the existence of Israel? The old days when these stereotypes caused the destruction of entire Jewish communities.

My grandparents came to this country from Russia and Poland. They came to escape persecution and to build a better life for their children. My father’s father was fired from Ford because he was Jewish. Since there was no ACLU or any other “civil rights” group to whine to, my grandfather and grandmother opened a poultry store. In other words, they used the skills they had to continue to make a living, to raise their family, and to contribute to the fabric of American society. There were no complaints about what Ford or the government owed them, there were no demands about what they were entitled to. Had they demanded that they or their Judaism had to be “accommodated” they would have been laughed at by everyone, including the Jewish community.”

Harry also makes the true - if also, to a sensible person, unremarkable - observation that both non-Jews and Jews are represented among those who have been able to accumulate vast quantities of wealth in America. But when antisemitism becomes a device to interpret the world - something the German socialist leader August Bebel called the “socialism of fools” - you focus only on the Jews.