Jews and the Bubble of History

With living memory of the Holocaust fading, anti-Semitism could get even worse.

As the new year approaches, I’m still a bit stunned by the scope, ferocity and moral confusion of the anti-Semitism that erupted this fall. The situation is worse in Europe than in the U.S., but the last ten weeks have been unnerving here, too.

My college professor friends say that it’s not as bad on campus as it seems in the press — that they have Muslim and Jewish students in class who disagree strongly on the Mideast but remain friends.

That’s nice to hear, but around the country the number of anti-Semitic incidents is up more than 300 percent over last year, when it was up significantly from the year before. All of this is coming at a time when Jews are still reeling from the worst anti-Jewish mass murder since the Holocaust.

Let’s roll tape of some of what’s happened since October 7th:

• In cities across the world, heartless protesters rip down posters of hostages held by Hamas, including those of children and elderly Holocaust survivors. 

• Graduate students in social work at Columbia organize a teach-in about “the October 7th Palestinian Counteroffensive,” as if the Hamas slaughter of innocent Jewish civilians—many of them peace activists— had been directed against military targets.

• A mob in Philadelphia screams threats into a Jewish-owned falafel store with no connection to the war, chanting: “Goldie, Goldie, you can't hide; we charge you with genocide.”

• The ham-handed presidents of three major American universities cannot reply with a simple “yes” after being asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate their rules of conduct—this at a time when speakers and professors have been driven off campuses just for opposing affirmative action or believing there are only two genders.

• The Republican congresswoman who asked the question, while claiming to oppose all anti-Semitism, refuses to offer even the slightest criticism of her cult leader when he dines with two Nazi supporters and repeatedly employs the rhetoric of the Third Reich.

• The message “Glory to Our Martyrs”— a reference to the Hamas fighters who butchered innocent people in Israel — is projected on the side of the library at George Washington University.

• Rampaging students at a Queens high school force a Jewish teacher who had attended a pro-Israel rally to seek refuge in a locked classroom.

• The wealthiest man in the world — and owner of a powerful social media platform — retweets “Jews will not replace us” conspiracy theories, the same sinister idea that inspired the 2018 massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.

• One in five young Americans don’t think the Holocaust happened.

I think we’ll look back on the fall of 2023 as a time when Jews around the world were traumatized twice, first by the horrors of October 7th and then by essentially being blamed for the retaliatory strikes of the Israeli Defense Forces, whether we support them or not. Instead of sympathy after Jews were butchered, we heard a deafening silence.

And it’s disheartening that many supposedly well-educated supporters of the Palestinians are both ignorant of the history they’re spouting off about and morally confused. Some are so captured by the oppressor/oppressed frame on the conflict that they cannot distinguish between intentionally massacring civilians one-by-one at close range and killing them accidentally (if recklessly) from the air after warning them to evacuate. At the same time, otherwise thoughtful people are simultaneously seeing red and seeing everything in black-and-white. They fail to understand the simple and ancient truth that human beings are often perpetrators and victims at once.

Yes, it’s important to hold Israel to a higher moral standard and not to be hardened to the suffering of children. But too few recognize that the mass civilian deaths in Gaza are, in critical ways, the fault of the Hamas government, which has never built a single shelter to protect its people.

One more source of Jewish trauma: Hamas has promised more October 7-style pogroms, and that hugely-relevant fact has been missing from most coverage of whether a permanent ceasefire is advisable. Does the world really want these monsters to keep their weapons? Hamas cannot be entirely destroyed but it can—and must—be disarmed and removed from power. At this point, that should be accomplished by means other than indiscriminate bombing, but it must be done.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s permission slip for hate of all kinds is fanning anti-Semitism in the U.S. When he parrots Nazi rhetoric (“poisoning the blood,” “vermin,” “enemy of the people”) and promises to rule as a fascist dictator, he provides aid and comfort to anti-Semites everywhere. And his enablers are getting a pass. Note that Tucker Carlson is employing what even the New York Post called “counterfeit curiosity” about Jews hurting whites.

Over on the left, resurgent anti-Semitism (or just plain bone-headedness) is rooted in bogus post-Marxist theories of colonization that often ignore the facts. Some people simply refuse to acknowledge that more than half of Israelis are non-white refugees from Middle Eastern countries that threw them out, with the rest made up mostly of descendants of Jews who fled European anti-Semitism, communism and fascism— hardly the instruments of the British imperialists whom they fought against in 1948. When activists care only about Israeli retaliation and can’t be bothered about, say, Syria killing more than 300,000 civilians, it’s hard not to conclude that the double standard is, at least some of the time, tinged with anti-Semitism.

To be clear: condemnation of Israeli policy in Gaza is not anti-Semitic. If you believe, as I do, that Israelis are Goliath-like oppressors on the West Bank and that the behavior of the Netanyahu government is reprehensible, that’s not anti-Semitism, either. But behind virtue-signaling protesters who in many cases don’t know which river and which sea they’re chanting about (not to mention anything about the 1947 UN partition rejected by Arabs), it isn’t hard to spot some serious anti-Semites. Rejecting Israel’s right to exist is not only anti-Semitic, it is, at least implicitly, genocidal, to use a word that has descended from global humanitarian standard to cliche in ten weeks flat. Where are the millions of Jews supposed to go? Into the sea? The fact that Jews aren’t fleeing anywhere any time soon is cold comfort. The lesson of Hitler is that when someone says they want to kill you, believe them.

All of this has made me realize that I’ve lived for decades in a post-Holocaust protective bubble—an illusion that somehow allowed us to think we’d be spared the oldest form of hatred in human history. Chuck Schumer got at some of this last month in an important if over-looked speech on the Senate floor, as did Michael Oren, an Israeli diplomat and historian, in this sobering piece suggesting we have not put the Holocaust behind us.

Steven Spielberg, who plans to document October 7th as he did the Holocaust in his Shoah Project, seems genuinely alarmed:

“Not since Germany in the ‘30s have I witnessed anti-Semitism not lurking but standing proud with hands on hips like Hitler and  Mussolini. Kind of daring us to defy it. I have never experienced this in my life, especially in this country.”

Nor have I, another beneficiary of the protection afforded by the collective memory of the Holocaust. Like many postwar baby boomer Jews, I experienced little or no anti-Semitism growing up. One classmate in my Chicago school told me in 3rd Grade that my people killed Christ, but it didn’t keep him from being my friend. At Andover — in the heart of the WASP aristocracy that had kept Jews out of fancy neighborhoods, major law firms, banks, and universities for 200 years — I was welcomed in the early 1970s along with other Jewish students. Harvard in the ‘70s was about 25 percent Jewish — its Jewish population has since shrunk below ten percent — and my Jewish friends and I felt that with the possible exception of the snooty Porcellian Club (which now includes many Jews), there was no bias we could detect.

The same culture of tolerance prevailed when my children were young, but my grandchildren may not be so lucky. Anti-semitism is a virus of history and now it’s back, thanks to massive migration to Europe of Muslims who often despise Jews, the revival of rightwing nativists peddling conspiracy theories blaming Jews (for Muslim and Latin American migration, among other concocted offenses) and of course the ease of virus transmission on the internet.

Even before October 7th, Jews were fleeing France, and anti-Semitic incidents were up 24-fold in Denmark. Please watch this terrifying video of German Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck describing how bad anti-Semitism has become in Germany eight decades after Hitler launched the Final Solution.

This suggests that the booster shot against the virus that the Holocaust provided is now wearing off, even in Germany, which has made a strong effort since the war to tamp down anti-Semitism.

It won’t be easy to re-vaccinate the world. Once the last survivors (now mostly in their nineties) die, rampant Holocaust denialism will quickly follow. Combating that is complicated by the generational divide (even among American Jews) over supporting Israel. We need to look to our education system and ensure that curricula on all sides teaches tolerance. Arnold Schwarzenegger can help lead the way:

 Anti-semitism is not just a problem for Israel and the Jews. To the metaphor of a virus, add the scapegoat (a perennial explanation for Jew-hatred over the centuries) and the proverbial canary in the coal mine, which suggests that a rise in anti-Semitism usually signals some kind of social breakdown. Over time, hate speech and us-versus-them thinking erode and eventually end democracy, with devastating consequences for the world.