Author Topic: Anti-semitism & Jews  (Read 434528 times)

ccp

  • Power User
  • ***
  • Posts: 19433
    • View Profile
Re: Anti-semitism & Jews
« Reply #1050 on: January 01, 2024, 08:25:48 AM »
"  Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020 by 44,000 votes and presumably won the Jewish vote by millions."

 :cry:

not optimistic that would change much

it is nearly impossible to change a Jewish Libs devoutness to the DNC.

 :cry:

I am heartbroken at that fact.

DougMacG

  • Power User
  • ***
  • Posts: 19162
    • View Profile
Re: Anti-semitism & Jews
« Reply #1051 on: January 01, 2024, 11:13:12 AM »
"  Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020 by 44,000 votes and presumably won the Jewish vote by millions."
 :cry:
not optimistic that would change much
it is nearly impossible to change a Jewish Libs devoutness to the DNC.
 :cry:
I am heartbroken at that fact.

Voters without a party, some people and some groups are becoming disaffected with the Democratic party. That doesn't make their revulsion of Trump and Republicans go away. One friend in particular is very interested in the no labels movement.  But centrists are not all aligned with each other either.  A Biden voter is possibly lost but not to be a Trump voter.  They search for another way but political parties are hard to form and maintain. Next comes the calculation of a wasted vote and it can become a binary choice once again.

It's going to be a very strange political year.
« Last Edit: January 01, 2024, 11:17:26 AM by DougMacG »

ccp

  • Power User
  • ***
  • Posts: 19433
    • View Profile
wellcome to NJ
« Reply #1052 on: January 04, 2024, 11:05:32 AM »

Body-by-Guinness

  • Power User
  • ***
  • Posts: 2871
    • View Profile
Conservatives & Antisemitic Jiu Jitsu
« Reply #1053 on: January 04, 2024, 11:35:32 AM »
This iron should indeed be struck while hot:

January 4, 2024
Beating the Anti-Semites
By J.R. Dunn

A few years ago, I was nearly shot by a local anti-Semite. I was working at my computer when there was a sharp roar and I looked up to see that a bullet hole had magically appeared in my wall a couple feet above my head. My neighbor, toying with an AR while drunk, popped a cap by accident -- or at least that was his story. This particular individual was a rabid anti-Semite who belonged to a Christian Identity cult group, was an avid reader of the Protocols and similar trash, and had a habit of setting up a desk in front of his house to harangue passersby about the grand Jewish conspiracy.

A few years earlier, I had a female acquaintance who fancied herself a writer. She was a non-citizen, an immigrant of German background. When she learned that I was working on a book about the Holocaust, she went into overdrive in an effort to get me to drop it. As events wore on, certain remarks and references fell into place, making it apparent that Daddy had been an active SS officer, that he had been assigned to one of the camps, and that, in any case, the Jews got what was coming to them. (“They were taking over the banks! Something had to be done!”) She’d hit the immovable object, and spent the next year or so trying her damndest to sabotage the book’s publication and otherwise interfere with my writing career (The heavy irony here is that many of the people she was contacting were themselves Jewish).

You can gather from this that my esteem for these types is less than zero. So you can imagine my thoughts concerning the fact that anti-Semitism is now being mainstreamed by the universities, the Democrats, and the Left in general.

The U.S. will never become a new Reich. In our 250-year history, Jews have been killed by mobs exactly twice – Leo Frank, lynched by a mob in Atlanta in 1915 for a crime committed by somebody else (a Black man who confessed on his deathbed), and Yankel Rosenbaum, murdered by a Black mob egged on by Al Sharpton and David Dinkins in Crown Heights, Brooklyn in 1991. Anti-Semitism is not an American disease (the way anti-Catholicism is). It has required the import of European leftism to bring the ancient evil of Jew-hatred into the mainstream.

Which does not mean that action should not be taken. These people don’t just disappear even after their efforts have been stymied. The shooter was arrested, but pled out to a lesser charge and received probation. He fled the neighborhood shortly afterward. The wannabe writer applied for and got American citizenship (after years of disparaging the U.S. in favor of Deutschland, Canada, and even Yugoslavia). While they’ll never take control of the country (pesthole states such as California or Michigan may be another matter), they can cause plenty of social damage and human misery, particularly since neither the authorities nor the institutions (e.g., Harvard and MIT) show any inclination to control them.

We cannot simply leave it to the Jewish community. Jews survived in the Old World largely by taking their beatings and walking away. They were so outnumbered, and their oppressors so barbaric (the Cossacks, the Cathars, the Prussians, etc.) that they were left with little choice. As a result, Jewish culture has settled for an ingrained quietism, a fatalism that has not yet been left behind even after a century and more of American life.

But the U.S. is a different place, and these are different times. It’s often said that the Jews are canaries in the coal mine, representing the first warning sign of encroaching tyranny. Anti-Semites are threats to us all, whether they ‘re from Harvard, the NAACP, or the East Pancake, Arkansas, Aryan Liberation Front.

The first step is that Jews must abandon the Left. As I’ve mentioned previously, Jews became involved with the Left largely due to historical accident. Jewish emancipation in Western Europe during the 19th century coincided with the rise of the Left. They were natural allies, European Jews looking for support from all quarters while the leftists as political outcasts were eager to recruit anyone. Supporting Jewish hopes was a small price to pay, particularly since they could be cast aside as soon as leftists gained power, which is largely what occurred. Leftists have maintained the loyalty of the Jews by hiding their true feelings.

Anti-Semitism within the American Left is largely the product of intersectionality, the concept that all aspects of leftist activism – Blacks, Latins, gays, Muslims, and whatever -- are interwoven and must be mutually supportive. All leftists must accept and support all left-wing constituencies no matter what contradictions might exist. Civil rights activists must support abortion, union members must support gun control, and gay rights activists must support the Palestinians (despite the fact that they’d one and all be given a brief flying lesson if they were to be caught out in much of the Muslim world). This is how the Left asserts itself and gains power. It’s a Third Millennial version of the Popular Front politics of the mid-20th century, in which liberals, communists, social democrats and what have you were all called to do their part in fighting the bourgeois (which, in practice, meant putting the commies in power).

It follows from this that any leftist who buys into intersectionality – which is all of them – is objectively (as any good Trotskyite would put it) an anti-Semite. You can’t duck this or contradict it. If you support the American Left, then you support Hamas, which supports annihilating Jews “from the river to the sea.” There are consequences for holding such ideas, and those consequences will be forthcoming.

The flip side of this is that no American Jew who supports his community, who values his heritage, can honestly call himself a leftist. This despite the fact that most American Jews (the ultra-orthodox excepted) were raised in liberal-left traditions. It’s a difficult thing to overturn the convictions of a lifetime, but it has to be done. As it stands, American Jews are in the ghastly position of collaborating with those out to destroy them

Conservatives need make it easier. While it’s clear that the American center right has always been open to anyone no matter what their ethnic or religious background – as we saw, for a while anyway, with the neocons -- little effort has been made at outreach (likely because conservatism up until the mid-20th century was a WASP phenomenon, and WASPs just didn’t do outreach, whether to Blacks, Jews, Italians, or – God forbid – the Irish). This is over. The remnants of the WASP ascendancy have largely declared war on MAGA populism, so we won’t be losing much by brushing aside what remains. That includes eliminating the last vestiges of anti-Semitism (which do exist, as anyone who has ever confronted a Zero Hedge comment thread is well aware). We can start by hard-pedaling the simple truth that anti-Semitism is now leftist.

We need to inform the Jewish community as to what we can offer them -- our protection, above all, assurances that we will stand by them, as Americans, against any enemies that threaten them, whether domestic or emerging from some third-world hellhole. We must also make the effort to understand Jewish concerns and considerations. The Jews have one of the longest and deepest moral traditions in the human record, much of it in writing in the form of the Talmud. It wouldn’t hurt anybody to become more familiar with it.

In this, as in much else, the Left has abandoned the moral high ground. Last week they opened up new horizons in hypocrisy and contradiction by accusing Donald Trump of familiarity with Mein Kampf after weeks of failing to let out a peep against the droves of campus punks calling for genocide against the Jews.  (Not to mention even younger ones in grammar schools.) They are vulnerable here. I’ll only add that by allying with the Jewish community, populist conservatism will dominate American politics for the rest of the century.

It’s time for American Jews to walk away, and for populist conservatives to pick up the sword of St. Michael.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/01/beating_the_antisemites.html?fbclid=IwAR1nG-3LpNjGKafiXNxKFuagEF3InGI5Xq4UeLygTZN7FV-QiimyIU34yj8

Crafty_Dog

  • Administrator
  • Power User
  • *****
  • Posts: 71672
    • View Profile
Israeli comedian vs heckler
« Reply #1054 on: January 05, 2024, 07:54:47 AM »

Crafty_Dog

  • Administrator
  • Power User
  • *****
  • Posts: 71672
    • View Profile
WSJ: Give Sinwar the Eichman treatment
« Reply #1055 on: January 12, 2024, 05:37:37 AM »
Give Yahya Sinwar the Eichmann Treatment
A public trial of Hamas’s leader would educate the world about its atrocities.
By Warren Kozak
Jan. 11, 2024 6:39 pm ET


Two top Palestinian commanders—Hezbollah’s Wissam Hassan Al-Tawil and Hamas’s Saleh al-Arouri—were both killed over the past two weeks in suspected Israeli airstrikes.

Hamas’s figurehead and the suspected mastermind of the Oct. 7 attack, Yahya Sinwar, is still at large, but it’s fair to assume he is high on Israel’s list of targets. After the horrific massacres that have galvanized and united the Jewish world, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called Mr. Sinwar a “dead man walking.”

Once found, many expect Israel to dispatch Mr. Sinwar with haste. But what if he were captured alive, brought back to Jerusalem, and put on trial like Adolf Eichmann more than 60 years ago?

Eichmann, a high-ranking Nazi SS officer, was the primary organizer of the mass murder of millions of Jews, a task he appeared to relish. At the end of the war he was captured by U.S. forces, but he escaped and changed his identity. In 1950, with the help of Catholic Bishop Alois Hudal, he escaped to Argentina.

A decade later, Mossad agents confirmed that Eichmann was leading a quiet life near Buenos Aires, working as a factory foreman and taking public transportation to and from work every day. It would have been much easier for Israeli agents to kill this monster quietly on a dark street and be on their way. It certainly would have been justified.

But Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion understood that only 15 years after the gas chambers shut down, the world and Israel itself needed to hear exactly what had happened to the Jews of Europe from 1933 to 1945.

Ben-Gurion saw that young Israelis, who were raised to be fiercely proud of their Jewish identity and willing to defend it, had begun to think of Holocaust victims as weak and didn’t understand the degrading system the Nazis used to exterminate millions of Jews. Ben-Gurion even delayed Eichmann’s trial to wait for television to come into operation in Israel so the entire country would be able to watch.

Mossad captured Eichmann alive in 1960 and brought him back to Israel on an El Al plane—no easy feat. Israel was condemned by much of the world for a governmental kidnapping of a foreigner, notwithstanding his horrific past.

The prime minister’s gamble paid off nevertheless. The 1961 trial drew hundreds of reporters and the world watched as witness after witness described in excruciating detail what it was like to arrive in packed boxcars at Auschwitz, Treblinka or Buchenwald with their families and children. Witnesses told heartbreaking stories of standing in long lines waiting to be separated from their loved ones for the last time. Able-bodied men were sent to the right to work as slave laborers; the elderly, young and women were sent to the left, directly to the gas chambers.

As they listened, all eyes were drawn to Eichmann, a nondescript man sitting in a glass booth, squirming at times, his mouth twitching, as he was forced to hear these accounts.

A similar trial with Mr. Sinwar in the glass booth would give his victims of Oct. 7 an opportunity to confront this man and tell the world stories of the horrors he oversaw. It would also demonstrate Israel’s adherence to international law. One criticism of Israel in the Eichmann trial was that the defendant hadn’t technically committed any crime in Israel itself. This certainly isn’t the case with Mr. Sinwar, who was already tried in an Israeli court and convicted in 1989 for the abduction and killing of two Israeli soldiers and four Palestinians. He received four life sentences but was released in 2011 with more than a thousand other prisoners in exchange for one kidnapped Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit.

Protesters around the world and especially on college campuses have supported and even glorified the Oct. 7 attacks. They should also be forced to hear what happened that day from the survivors, especially the women who were raped by Hamas terrorists. The world should hear what happened to the old people and the babies. The world should be able to judge the small man in the glass booth who perpetrated these disgusting crimes. Then the world might finally understand what really happened.






DougMacG

  • Power User
  • ***
  • Posts: 19162
    • View Profile
Re: Is MY right or is it Anti-semitism?
« Reply #1061 on: February 02, 2024, 10:52:22 PM »
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/texas-border-convoy-descends-into-antisemitism/ar-BB1hFieS?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=4a6b4bf767c94b97873ba28d7fdfca9b&ei=17

If he would substitute the word liberal or leftist for Jewish, it might make a better point. I dont know who they are, soros?, but what does Jewish have to do with it, if true.

You could say they were short or tall too, but what does thay have to do with it. What matters is they are Leftists funding the invasion, if true. My two cents.

Mentioned previously, he lost me in his ad hominem takedown of Gov Abbott. We could all do more but dont conflate friend with enemy, IMHO.
« Last Edit: February 02, 2024, 10:55:51 PM by DougMacG »

Crafty_Dog

  • Administrator
  • Power User
  • *****
  • Posts: 71672
    • View Profile
Re: Anti-semitism & Jews
« Reply #1062 on: February 03, 2024, 08:10:07 AM »
As a lone Cassandra with a remarkable record of ignored-until-too-late prescience, I can understand why MY can go over the top sometimes.   Also, it is fair to remind ourselves that the group which he/the convoy guy criticizes self-identifies as Jewish.

That said, this is a serious error which is not acceptable- as Doug quite rightly points out.

All this is quite frustrating for me as a Jew.

Crafty_Dog

  • Administrator
  • Power User
  • *****
  • Posts: 71672
    • View Profile
Re: Anti-semitism & Jews
« Reply #1063 on: February 03, 2024, 08:50:49 PM »
Posted by MY today:

https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/5219420/https-open-substack-com-pub-michaelyon-p-texas-update

Actually this is even a better rejoinder than mine.

Body-by-Guinness

  • Power User
  • ***
  • Posts: 2871
    • View Profile
Re: Is MY right or is it Anti-semitism?
« Reply #1064 on: February 03, 2024, 10:45:25 PM »
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/texas-border-convoy-descends-into-antisemitism/ar-BB1hFieS?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=4a6b4bf767c94b97873ba28d7fdfca9b&ei=17

If he would substitute the word liberal or leftist for Jewish, it might make a better point. I dont know who they are, soros?, but what does Jewish have to do with it, if true.

You could say they were short or tall too, but what does thay have to do with it. What matters is they are Leftists funding the invasion, if true. My two cents.

Mentioned previously, he lost me in his ad hominem takedown of Gov Abbott. We could all do more but dont conflate friend with enemy, IMHO.

I used to follow him closely because, as Marc notes, he has caught on trends long before others, and isn’t shy about saying so. However his aggressive, dire, and un-nuanced opining too closely mirrors “Progressive” tactics & pronouncements. Aren’t we not only supposed to be better than that, but this equal and opposite stuff starts feeling like a marketing effort: “I’m the antithesis of these awful people so please click here to support my work.”

As for his dire predictions … he’s pretty darn dire about everything he writes about. As much of what he speaks to is ugly to begin with, it’s not much of a surprise when in becomes uglier. And hey, if it doesn’t get uglier … it falls by the wayside and isn’t touted as prescience. A lot of it seems like mix of cocktail party card tricks/cold mind reading sorts of techniques applied to writing.

Throw in some off the cuff stuff he writes when something is breaking or he feels the need to get something off his chest that comes off shrill, poorly written, poorly argued, and seems like he’s channeling Hunter Thompson on a bender … after a stroke affecting his speech center, and I started giving him a pass. His willingness to embrace stereotypes and riff of them shamelessly without clarifying his position or apologizing for prejudices that emerge when writing in haste and I stopped following him regularly.

Body-by-Guinness

  • Power User
  • ***
  • Posts: 2871
    • View Profile
Columbia Law Student Senate Won’t Allow Anti-Semitism Club
« Reply #1065 on: February 09, 2024, 07:45:57 AM »
Columbia won’t allow a student anti-semitism club to be formed. I’ve been on all sides of this issue in my roles over the years, including the faculty sponsor* of a club. There are student clubs for EVERYTHING, some issue oriented, some interest oriented, some farcical, some social, and so on. I never heard of one getting turned down, though I suppose if one was blatantly racist or something they’d have some ‘splaining to do.

Forming a club to battle anti-semitism ought to be a slam dunk. At Columbia Law, alas, it is not:

https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/02/columbia-law-school-rejects-club-formed-to-combat-antisemitism/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=columbia-law-school-rejects-club-formed-to-combat-antisemitism

*Some of my student computer lab employees wanted to form a social club and basically obtain student club funds to do so. They were computer geek types and their club was intentionally farcical, calling themselves the [School Name] Pagans.

As some might surmise, my politics aren’t in line with many I work with. Indeed, there was a nasty flyer circulating around campus quite some time ago that identified me as a “ultra-right wing martial arts expert.” As such I used to enjoy watching the cognitive dissonance cross people’s face when I’d identify myself as the faculty advisor to the Pagan’s club….



Crafty_Dog

  • Administrator
  • Power User
  • *****
  • Posts: 71672
    • View Profile
Re: Anti-semitism & Jews
« Reply #1066 on: February 09, 2024, 06:28:54 PM »
 :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o





Body-by-Guinness

  • Power User
  • ***
  • Posts: 2871
    • View Profile

Crafty_Dog

  • Administrator
  • Power User
  • *****
  • Posts: 71672
    • View Profile
Why the most educated fall for anti-semitic lies
« Reply #1072 on: February 27, 2024, 03:30:13 PM »
Haven't read this yet.  Very long Sent to me by a left of center Jewish friend:
==========================================

WHY THE MOST EDUCATED PEOPLE IN AMERICA FALL FOR ANTI-SEMITIC LIES
At Harvard and elsewhere, an old falsehood is capturing new minds.

By Dara Horn
FEBRUARY 15, 2024
SHARE
SAVE
Photo collage showing Jewish history and persecution
Listen to this article


This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

By now, december’s congressional hearing about anti-Semitism at universities, during which the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT all claimed that calls for the genocide of Jews would violate their university’s policies only “depending on the context,” is already a well-worn meme. Surely there is nothing left to say about this higher-education train wreck, after the fallout brought down two of those university presidents and spawned a thousand op-eds—except that all of the punditry about diversity and free speech and criticism of Israel has extravagantly missed the point.

The problem was not that Jewish students on American university campuses didn’t want free speech, or that they didn’t want to hear criticism of Israel. Instead, they didn’t want people vandalizing Jewish student organizations’ buildings, or breaking or urinating on the buildings’ windows. They didn’t want people tearing their mezuzahs down from their dorm-room doors. They didn’t want their college instructors spouting anti-Semitic lies and humiliating them in class. They didn’t want their posters defaced with Hitler caricatures, or their dorm windows plastered with fuck jews. They didn’t want people punching them in the face, or beating them with a stick, or threatening them with death for being Jewish. At world-class American colleges and universities, all of this happened and more.

I was not merely an observer of this spectacle. I’d been serving on now–former Harvard President Claudine Gay’s anti-Semitism advisory committee, convened after the October 7 Hamas massacre in Israel and amid student responses to it. I was asked to participate because I am a Harvard alumna who wrote a book about anti-Semitism called People Love Dead Jews. As soon as my participation became public, I was inundated with messages from Jewish students seeking help. They approached me with their stories after having already tried many other avenues—bewildered not only by what they’d experienced, but also by how many people dismissed or denied those experiences.

In Congress, all three university presidents offered some version of the platitudes that “Hatred comes from ignorance” and “Education is the answer.” But if hatred comes from ignorance, why were America’s best universities full of this very specific ignorance? And why were so many people trying to justify it, explain it away, or even deny it? Our era’s 10-second news cycle is no match for these questions, because the answers are deep and ancient, buried beneath the oldest of assumptions about what we think we know.

Read: What Claudine Gay got right and the International Court of Justice got wrong

The through line of anti-Semitism for thousands of years has been the denial of truth and the promotion of lies. These lies range in scope from conspiracy theories to Holocaust denial to the blood libel to the currently popular claims that Zionism is racism, that Jews are settler colonialists, and that Jewish civilization isn’t indigenous to the land of Israel. These lies are all part of the foundational big lie: that anti-Semitism itself is a righteous act of resistance against evil, because Jews are collectively evil and have no right to exist. Today, the big lie is winning.

In 2013, David Nirenberg published an astonishing book titled Anti-Judaism. Nirenberg’s argument, rigorously laid out in nearly 500 pages of dense scholarship and more than 100 pages of footnotes, is that Western cultures—including ancient civilizations, Christianity, Islam (which Nirenberg considers Western in its relationship with Judaism), and post-religious societies—have often defined themselves through their opposition to what they consider “Judaism.” This has little to do with actual Judaism, and a lot to do with whatever evil these non-Jewish cultures aspire to overcome.

RECOMMENDED READING

Opening Day at Disneyland: Photos From 1955
ALAN TAYLOR

illustration with an 1820 painting of outdoor feast with people in historical dress fleeing a giant flaming Facebook logo in a colonnaded courtyard
Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
JONATHAN HAIDT

Illustration of two people with happy faces and gifts orbiting them
A Gentler, Better Way to Change Minds
ARTHUR C. BROOKS

Nirenberg is a diligent historian who resists generalizations and avoids connecting the past to contemporary events. But when one reads through his carefully assembled record of 23 centuries’ worth of intellectual leaders articulating their societies’ ideals by loudly rejecting whatever they consider “Jewish,” this deep neural groove in Western thought becomes difficult to dismiss, its patterns unmistakable. If piety was a given society’s ideal, Jews were impious blasphemers; if secularism was the ideal, Jews were backward pietists. If capitalism was evil, Jews were capitalists; if communism was evil, Jews were communists. If nationalism was glorified, Jews were rootless cosmopolitans; if nationalism was vilified, Jews were chauvinistic nationalists. “Anti-Judaism” thus becomes a righteous fight to promote justice.

This dynamic forces Jews into the defensive mode of constantly proving they are not evil, and even simply that they have a right to exist. Around 38 C.E., after rioters in Alexandria destroyed hundreds of Jewish homes and burned Jews alive, the Jewish Alexandrian intellectual Philo and the non-Jewish Alexandrian intellectual Apion both sailed to Rome for a “debate” before Emperor Caligula about whether Jews deserved citizenship. Apion believed that Jews held an annual ritual in which they kidnapped a non-Jew, fattened him up, and ate him. Caligula delayed Philo’s rebuttal for five months, and then listened to him only while consulting with designers on palace decor. Alexandrian Jews lost their citizenship rights, though it took until 66 C.E. for 50,000 more of them to be slaughtered.

In medieval Europe, Jews were forced into disputations with Christian priests that placed Jewish texts and traditions on public trial, resulting in Jewish books being burned and Jewish disputants exiled. Later legal trials expanded on this concept, requiring Jews to defend themselves against the absurd charge known as the blood libel, in which Jews are accused of murdering and consuming non-Jewish children—a claim that has echoes in current lies about Israelis harvesting Palestinians’ organs.

The absurdity of these charges is less remarkable than the high intellectual profiles of those making them: people like Apion, a scholar of Homer and Egyptian history, as well as Christian and Muslim scholars who were among the best-read people of their time. Similarly absurd claims of Jewish perfidy were later endorsed by civilizational luminaries such as Martin Luther and Voltaire. “Anti-Judaism,” Nirenberg argues, “should not be understood as some archaic or irrational closet in the vast edifices of Western thought. It was rather one of the basic tools with which that edifice was constructed.”

protest at Harvard University
Demonstrators at Harvard University on October 14, 2023 (Brian Snyder / Reuters)
I’ve been thinking about Nirenberg’s thesis in the months since the October 7 massacre in Israel, during which Hamas, an openly genocidal organizationwhose stated goal is the murder of Jews, lived up to its mission statement by torturing, raping, and murdering more than 1,200 people in southern Israel and taking more than 200 captives, including babies, children, and the elderly. Shortly after the attacks, a Cornell professor publicly proclaimed the barbarity “exhilarating” and “energizing,” while a Columbia professor called it “awesome” and an “achievement.” Comparable praise percolated through America’s top universities, coming from students and faculty alike. On campuses around the country, students began gathering regularly to chant “There is only one solution: intifada revolution!”—a reference to a suicide-bombing campaign in Israel a generation ago that maimed and murdered well over 1,000 Jews. (If there is only one solution, perhaps one could call it the Final Solution.)

Students took these rallies inside libraries and other campus buildings. They vandalized university property with such slogans as “Zionism = Genocide,” “New Intifada,” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”—referring to a geographic area that encompasses the entirety of the state of Israel, where half the world’s Jews live. (At Harvard, some students opted for chanting an Arabic version: “From water to water, Palestine is Arab.”) On some campuses, the exhilaration escalated into death threats and physical assaults against Jewish students. When a Jewish Tulane University student tried to stop an anti-Israel protester near campus from burning an Israeli flag, protesters attacked him and other Jewish students, breaking one student’s nose.

In Los Angeles, a man invaded a Jewish family’s home before dawn with a knife, breaking into the parents’ bedroom while their four children slept, screaming “Kill Jewish people.”

It wasn’t just universities. Crowds cheering for “intifada” gathered in cities around the country, shutting down and disrupting train stations and airport access roads. Lest their support for Hamas be mistaken for support for Palestinians in general, or for peace, U.S. rally organizers named their efforts “floods” (“Flood Seattle for Palestine,” “Flood Manhattan for Gaza”) after “Operation Al Aqsa Flood,” Hamas’s name for its October 7 butchery. The enthusiasm was hard to contain. Some people tore down or vandalized posters of Israeli hostages. Others targeted synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses, spray-painting them with swastikas and slogans like “Israel’s only religion is capitalism.” In New York City, a Jewish teacher’s online photo holding a sign that said i stand with israel was enough to prompt a schoolwide protest that devolved into a riot during which students destroyed school property; the teacher had to be moved to another part of the building to avoid the teenage mob screaming “Free Palestine!” In Los Angeles, a man invaded a Jewish family’s home before dawn with a knife, breaking into the parents’ bedroom while their four children slept, screaming “Kill Jewish people.” When police arrested him, he shouted, “Free Palestine!”

Criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitic: Jews are now required to recite this humiliatingly obvious sentence, over and over, as the price of admission to public discourse about their own demonization, in “debates” with people who are often unable to name the relevant river or sea. The many legitimate concerns about Israel’s policies toward Palestinians, and the many legitimate concerns about Israel’s current war in Gaza, cannot explain these eliminationist chants and slogans, the glee with which they are delivered, the lawlessness that has accompanied them, or the open assaults on Jews. The timing alone laid the game bare: This mass exhilaration first emerged not in response to Israel’s war to take down Hamas and rescue its kidnapped citizens, but exactly in response to, and explicitly in support of, the most lethal and sadistic barbarity against Jews since the Holocaust, complete with rape and decapitation and the abduction of infants, committed by a regime that aims to eviscerate not only Jews, but also all hopes of Palestinian flourishing, coexistence, or peace.

Read: When anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic

But there are nuances to sadistic barbarity against Jews, we are told, and sometimes gang-raping Jewish women is actually a movement for human rights. It hardly seems fair to call people anti-Semitic if they want only half of the world’s Jews to die. The phrase “Globalize the Intifada,” currently chanted at universities across America, perhaps widens the net a tiny bit—but really, who can say? Even the phrase “Gas the Jews,” chanted at a rally organized by NYU students and faculty, is so very ambiguous. How dare those whiny Jews presume to know what’s in other people’s hearts?

Besides, American Jews had nothing to whine about: Had any of them actually died in the United States from all this exhilaration? That question was answered in November, when a Jewish man died in California after an anti-Israel protester allegedly clubbed him over the head with a bullhorn, the kind used to chant entirely non-anti-Semitic slogans—and of course that question had already been answered repeatedly with other anti-Semitic murders in recent years, some more publicized than others. (One murder even happened on campus: In 2022, an expelled University of Arizona student who repeatedly ranted about Jews and Zionists shot and killed his professor—who wasn’t Jewish, though the student thought he was.) But now the goalposts move again: Those actual murders, along with many other physical attacks against American Jews, are all just one-offs, lone wolves, mental-illness cases, entirely unrelated to the anti-Semitic rhetoric swirling through American life.

It remains unclear why anti-Semitism should matter only when it is lethal, or if so, how many unambiguously anti-Semitic murders would be necessary for anti-Semitism to be happening outside whiny Jews’ heads. A realistic estimate might be 6 million. Even then, Jews have had to spend the past 80 years collecting documentation to prove it.

One confounding fact in this onslaught of the world’s oldest hatred is that American society should have been ready to handle it. Many public and private institutions have invested enormously in recent years in attempts to defang bigotry; ours is an era in which even sneaker companies feel obliged to publicly denounce hate. But diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives have proved to be no match for anti-Semitism, for a clear reason: the durable idea of anti-Semitism as justice.

DEI efforts are designed to combat the effects of social prejudice by insisting on equity: Some people in our society have too much power and too much privilege, and are overrepresented, so justice requires leveling the playing field. But anti-Semitism isn’t primarily a social prejudice. It is a conspiracy theory: the big lie that Jews are supervillains manipulating others. The righteous fight for justice therefore does not require protecting Jews as a vulnerable minority. Instead it requires taking Jews down.

This idea is tacitly endorsed by Jews’ bizarre exclusion from discussion in many DEI trainings and even policies, despite their high ranking in American hate-crime statistics. The premise, for instance, that Jews don’t experience bigotry because they are “white,” itself a fraught idea, would suggest that white LGBTQ people don’t experience bigotry either—a premise that no DEI policy would endorse (not to mention the fact that many Jews are not white). The contention that Jews are immune to bigotry because they are “rich,” an idea even more fraught and also often false (about 20 percent of Jews in New York City, for instance, live in poverty or near-poverty), is equally nonsensical. No one claims that gay men or Indian Americans never experience bigotry because of those groups’ statistically higher incomes. The idea that money erases bigotry apparently applies only to Jews. Again and again, the ostensible reasons for not addressing anti-Semitism in DEI initiatives quickly reveal themselves to be founded on ancient, rarely examined assumptions about Jews as invulnerable villains.

The sordid history of the concept of anti-Zionism vividly illustrates this dynamic—and is particularly relevant for its success in scrambling the radar of well-meaning people. Jewish civilization has been centered for thousands of years, in ways large and small, on its homeland in Israel, where Jews have had a continuous presence since ancient times. The modern political idea of Zionism as Jewish self-determination in this homeland emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries amid many other anticolonial movements around the world, as global power dynamics shifted from empires (Habsburg, Russian, Ottoman, British, French, Japanese) toward nation-states. The large and often violent population upheavals following Israel’s creation, including the displacement of most Arabs from what became Israel and the displacement of nearly all Jews from what became Arab states, paralleled similar population upheavals around the world as new states emerged from receding empires. In this, Zionism was typical.

To borrow the language of DEI, the big lie is systemic.
But anti-Zionism as an explicit political concept has a history quite independent of the actions of Jews. In 1918, 30 years before the establishment of the state of Israel, Bolsheviks established Jewish sections of the Communist Party, which they insisted be anti-Zionist. The problem, Bolsheviks argued, was that Jewish particularism (in this case, Zionism) was the obstacle to the righteous universal mission of uniting humanity under communism—just as Christians once saw Jewish particularism as the obstacle to the righteous universal mission of uniting humanity under Christ. The righteousness of this mission was, as usual, the key: The claim that “anti-Zionism” was unrelated to anti-Semitism, repeated ad nauseam in Soviet propaganda for decades, was essential to the Communist Party’s self-branding as humanity’s liberators. It was also a bald-faced lie.

Bolsheviks quickly demonstrated their supposed lack of anti-Semitism by shutting down every “Zionist” institution under their control, a category that ranged from synagogues to sports clubs; appropriating their assets; taking over their buildings, sometimes physically destroying offices; and arresting and ultimately “purging” Jewish leaders, including those who had endorsed the party line and persecuted their fellow Jews for their “Zionism.” Thousands of Jews were persecuted, imprisoned, tortured, or murdered.

Later, the U.S.S.R. exported this messaging to its client states in the developing world and ultimately to social-justice-minded circles in the United States. A thick paper trail shows how the KGB adapted its propaganda by explicitly rebranding Zionism as “racism” and “colonialism,” beginning half a century ago, when those terms gained currency as potent smears—even though Jews are racially diverse and Zionism is one of the world’s premier examples of an indigenous people reclaiming independence. Facts were irrelevant: Soviets labeled Jews as racist colonialist oppressors, just as Nazis had labeled Jews as both capitalist and Communist oppressors, and just as Christians and Muslims had labeled Jews as God-killers and Prophet-defilers. Jews were whatever a given society regarded as evil. To borrow the language of DEI, the big lie is systemic.

Even naming it—that is, calling out bigotry against Jews—can be classed as yet another sign of assumed evil intent, of Jews attacking beloved principles of justice for all. In an April 2023 lecture, David Nirenberg, the historian, presented the example of an activist with a large following whose boundary-pushing rhetoric met with accusations of anti-Semitism. The activist pointed out, as Nirenberg put it, that anti-Semitism “was merely an accusation that Jews used to silence criticism and squash free speech.” He brought libel lawsuits against newspapers that accused him of anti-Semitism, and won them. It is unfortunate for those making this argument today that this activist was named Adolf Hitler.

Two weeks after the October 7 massacre, I wrote an op-ed for a national newspaper about the intergenerational fears many Jews were feeling, describing a few choice moments from several thousand years of anti-Semitic attacks. A friendly fact-checker followed up, asking me to prove that the Russian Civil War pogroms of 1918–21 involved gang rapes, and appending a judicious reportedly in front of a detail I’d included from the Farhud pogrom in Baghdad in 1941 about attackers taking Jewish women’s severed breasts as trophies. I dutifully provided additional sources, combing through sickening testimonies about mutilated Jewish girls in 1919 and 1941, while simultaneously avoiding videos of mutilated Jewish girls in 2023.

As I piled up evidence to prove that these things happened, I remembered an oral-history interview my sister once did with our grandfather to share with our family at his 97th-birthday party, in which he described his own grandparents’ decision to leave their town in Ukraine after an aunt was attacked during a pogrom. “They raided her, et cetera, et cetera,” my sister’s notes from the interview say. Et cetera, et cetera, I thought over and over, as I hunted down sources on gang rapes of Jewish women to submit to the fact-checker, my vision going blurry. At the time, I hadn’t wondered what those sanitized et ceteras meant.

The same week I spent emailing documentation to the fact-checker of pogroms long past, the newspaper, like many other news outlets, published a banner headline about Israelis bombing a hospital in Gaza and killing 500 people inside. This was quickly proven to be a lie told by Hamas—a lie similar to the medieval blood libel, about Jews deliberately targeting and murdering innocent non-Jewish babies—and a transparent psychological projection of the crimes that Hamas had actually committed in Israel, where Hamas terrorists had deliberately targeted and murdered hundreds of adults, children, and babies, and also repeatedly fired rockets at a hospital. Israel’s military has indeed killed many innocent people in Gaza during its war to destroy Hamas, and deserves the same scrutiny as any country for its conduct in war. But scrutiny is impossible when lies are substituted for facts. The newspaper later issued a regretful editorial note acknowledging its error. Unfortunately, Hamas’s lie had already inspired mass demonstrations around the world; rioters in Tunisia were so incensed by it that they burned a historic synagogue to the ground. I had been rightfully asked to prove that the Iraqi and Ukrainian pogroms happened. But the spokespeople for Hamas were taken at their word.

Shortly after the op-ed was published, I was invited to watch video footage of the October 7 attacks that the Israeli army had compiled from security cameras, online videos, and Hamas terrorists’ GoPro cameras. This grim footage was assembled specifically for the purpose of fighting back against denial. But even this horrifying and humiliating evidence, documented largely by the perpetrators themselves, apparently isn’t enough to prove that Jewish experiences are real. At a screening of the footage in Los Angeles, someone in the audience shouted, “Show the rapes!”

The attackers themselves provided footage of a woman’s naked, mutilated corpse and of a teenager with blood-soaked pants being dragged by her hair out of a truck. Since then, it has become clear that Hamas used rape and sexual torture systematically against Israeli women. Israeli first responders and forensic scientists have found corpses of women and girls with vaginal bleeding and broken pelvises. Teenage sisters were found murdered in their bedroom, one shot in the head with her pants pulled down, covered in semen; one woman was found with nails and other objects in her genitalia, while others were found to have been shot through their vaginas. Eyewitness testimony has included details about a woman who was passed among many men, murdered while one of them was still raping her; at one point, her severed breast was tossed in the air. It’s a detail familiar from the 1941 Baghdad pogrom, just as slicing a fetus out of a pregnant Jewish woman’s body is a tactic Hamas unknowingly replicated from the Khmelnytskyi pogroms of 1648 Ukraine. Et cetera, et cetera. But who would believe it? “Show the rapes!”

Graeme Wood: A record of pure, predatory sadism

I was invited to these screenings multiple times, but never went. I didn’t want to watch people being brutalized. Also, I didn’t want to watch people being brutalized while hearing someone behind me screaming, “Show the rapes!”

On my travels around the country in recent months to discuss my work on Jews in non-Jewish societies, I met many Jewish college and high-school students who seem to have accepted the casual denigration of Jews as normal. They are growing up with it. In a Dallas suburb, teenagers told me, shrugging, about how their friends’ Jewish fraternities at Texas colleges have been “chalked.” I had to ask what “chalking” meant: anti-Semitic graffiti made by vandals who lacked spray paint. Synagogues are often chalked too. Another newly common verb among American Jews is swatting: fake bomb or active-shooter threats that force evacuations and instill fear. (The term is a reference to the SWAT teams that sometimes arrive at the scene, not knowing the threat is a hoax, and instill more fear.) These now happen so often at American Jewish institutions that they’re almost boring; nearly 200 were swatted during one December 2023 weekend alone. (When it happened at my own synagogue in November, forcing a girl’s bat-mitzvah service into a parking lot, the synagogue president warned congregants not to post any specific details about it online, in case people were tracking our evacuation procedures.)

Daniel Torday: What active-shooter trainings steal from synagogues

American Jews in recent years have also developed, at great expense, a robust system of threat detection and “target hardening” to prevent or defuse actual attacks. An organization called Secure Community Network trains Jewish leaders and community members in situational awareness and self-defense; a rabbi in Texas who was held hostage with three congregants for 11 hours by a jihadist in 2022 credited this training with saving his and his congregants’ lives. Another group, Community Security Initiative, tracks threats on social media 24 hours a day; one flagged online threat to attack synagogues in 2022 led to the arrest in New York’s Penn Station of two men carrying illegal weapons, ammunition, and a swastika armband.

Unfortunately, some bad actors find a sweet spot just past the security cameras. In Los Angeles, harassment of Jews walking to synagogue became common enough in recent years that some formed walking groups with volunteer guards; in December, one street harasser there assaulted an elderly Jewish couple, hitting the husband in the head with a belt buckle, causing a head wound—which was tame compared with a previous incident, in which two Jewish men were shot on their way home from two separate synagogues in February of last year. A week after the belt attack, a man in Washington, D.C., sprayed people leaving a synagogue with what police called a “foul-smelling” substance while shouting “Gas the Jews!”

pro hamas demonstrators
Pro-Palestine students gathered at UCLA on October 25, 2023. (Frederic J. Brown / AFP / Getty)
In Minneapolis, a woman who works in communications for a Jewish organization told me how “Free Palestine” had, even before October 7, become a kind of verbal swastika—not because of its meaning, but because of how it is deployed. Apart from its use in political or protest contexts, it has also been used as an online-harassment technique: Trolls tag any post with Jewish content—including material unrelated to Israel—with #FreePalestine, summoning more freedom fighters to the noble cause of verbally abusing Jewish teenagers who dare to post pictures of challah. This verbal vandalism made the jump to real life, the woman explained, and harassers now routinely scrawl it on Jewish communal buildings, shout it at their Jewish schoolmates, and scream it out of car windows at anyone wearing a kippah.

It is remarkable how little any of this has to do with anything going on in the Middle East. This harassment isn’t coming from an antiwar plea, or a consciousness-raising effort about Israeli policies, or a campaign for Palestinian independence, though those pretenses now serve as flimsy excuses. The only purpose of the chalking and swatting and taunting and assaulting and silencing is to dehumanize and demonize Jews. Every time Jews are forced to prove that they didn’t deserve this, or to hide who they are, it is already working.

This new normal for American Jews isn’t just communal, but personal. Many American Jews have quietly dropped friends in recent months after noticing those friends’ posts online casually endorsing the murders of Jews. But even more striking is the low bar for the friends who remain. I’ve seen this most clearly among the young. In upstate New York, a Jewish high schooler told me how a friend of hers regularly passed her cartoons in class. “He just thought it was really funny,” she said, and showed me a sample: a stick-figure caricature of a Hasidic Jew carrying a bag of money. “My friends,” she added, “use my Jewishness to insult me. So they’ll be like, ‘Shut up, you’re just a Jew. Shut up, Jew.’ A couple of my friends say that all the time to me.” I wanted to suggest that she find new friends.

At a Shabbat dinner I attended at one college, students went around the table sharing what they wished they could say to their non-Jewish friends: I wish I could say I want to spend a semester in Israel. I wish I could say I work at a Jewish preschool. I wish I could say I volunteered at a Jewish hospital. I sat at the table stupefied. They were in hiding.

It was during this ongoing nightmare that Harvard administrators recruited me for advice on the anti-Semitism problem on campus. Against my better judgment, I agreed to join the committee. The Jewish Harvard students who desperately shared their horror stories with me backed them up with piles of evidence. They knew they needed to prove it.

The problem at Harvard, it quickly became clear from the avalanche of documentation deposited at my feet, was not small. The night of the massacre, before the blood was dry, more than 30 Harvard student groups proudly announced that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” The campus was almost instantly saturated with enthusiastic anti-Israel rallies, which many in the media depicted as the centerpiece of a free-speech debate.

But these protests were not merely outdoor public events that uninterested students could walk past. They also took place inside classroom buildings during lectures, inside the first-year dining hall and inside the largest campus library and other shared study spaces. Jewish students could no longer expect to be able to study in the library, eat in dining halls, or attend class without being repeatedly told by their classmates, sometimes through a bullhorn, that Jews are genocidal murderers deserving of perpetual intifada. (Civilian casualties in war, however horrific, aren’t genocide—but the demonization was the point. So was the vague romanticization of the intifada that targeted, maimed, and murdered Jewish civilians.) At the law school, hundreds of protesters marched through a classroom building during classes. Jewish students reported being targeted and chased through a building by their screaming peers. One video from the business school showed a Jewish student being physically harassed, accosted by protesters who surrounded him with their kaffiyehs.

This demonization of Jews, whether intentional or not, extended to Harvard’s teaching staff. Instructors who grade Jewish students used university-issued class lists to share information about events organized by pro-Palestine groups; at least one even canceled class so students could attend an anti-Israel rally. This pattern among Harvard instructors predated the current Israel-Hamas war. A third-party investigation conducted before the academic year began found that one professor had discriminated against several Israeli students; Harvard said it took action, but the professor rejected the findings and continued teaching. In a separate incident, one student claimed that a different professor asked her to leave his classroom in the spring of 2023 after learning that she was Israeli, because her Israeliness made people “uncomfortable.”

Jewish students who came to Harvard hoping to take courses in Arabic language or Middle Eastern studies told me they often ended up avoiding those courses entirely, wary of professors and peers who made their lack of welcome clear. One recent doctoral student in a field of study unrelated to the Middle East recounted to me that well before October 7, her fellow Ph.D.s in training (the supply pool for teaching assistants) seldom gathered socially without dropping references to “Zionist dirtbags” and “Israeli scum.” One Harvard student described how a classmate, after learning he was Jewish, told him that “there should be no more Jewish state and no more Jews.”

The mountain of proof at Harvard revealed a reality in which Jewish students’ access to their own university was directly compromised.
After October 7, social-media platforms exploded with unambiguous Jew hatred in comments such as “Harvard Hillel is burning in hell” and “Let ’em cook.” In this environment, many religious Jewish students stopped wearing kippahs on campus or swapped them for baseball hats; someone spat in the face of one kippah-wearing student as he walked down the street. In an echo of medieval disputations, one Jewish student was invited by a Harvard employee to “debate” him about whether Israel plotted the 9/11 terrorist attacks, according to The Harvard Crimson. Later, the employee posted an online video featuring a screenshot from the student’s X account and the employee wielding a toy machete; the student reported the incident to the authorities and was told to file a restraining order.

Amazingly, Jewish students, whose numbers have dramatically declined at Harvard in recent years for reasons no one seems able to explain, did not respond to all this with their own hate-speech campaigns. Instead, both before and after October 7, Harvard Hillel’s students have reached out to their peers among Harvard’s anti-Israel activists—asking not for a cease-and-desist, but for a dialogue, or even just a cup of coffee. Let’s get to know each other, they offered. The anti-Israel activists refused to engage. Jewish students tried again; they were rebuffed again. And again. This was hardly surprising. For some anti-Israel activists, even merely talking to “Zionists” (a label applied to the 80 percent of American Jews who regard Israel as an essential or important part of their Jewish identity) counts as “normalization”—that is, treating Jews as if they were normal humans, rather than embodiments of evil.

Again we are obliged to prove that this matters. No one died; why complain? “Has there been actual violence against Jewish students at Harvard or on other campuses?” one tenured Harvard professor wrote to our advisory committee to inquire. (The answer was yes.) “If Jewish student worries about physical danger are, in fact, exaggerated,” the professor authoritatively continued, “then students that hold these fears should be advised to leave campus and go home.”

But a hostile environment emerges from pervasive minor incidents, even those that don’t target individuals. Imagine that you are a woman in an office where your male colleagues and bosses gather regularly by the photocopier to discuss their favorite strip clubs. You avoid the photocopier, but then they expand their discussions to the break room, the lobby, the watercooler, the conference room. You avoid those spaces too, avoid those colleagues, hide in your cubicle, and wind up not getting promoted. In such a situation, your company would be responsible for a hostile environment that discriminated against you. The company would not be absolved by pointing out that no one had raped you yet, or that these men weren’t talking to or about you. It could not defend itself by advising you that if these conversations bothered you, you should leave and go home. A hostile environment is precisely one where tenured professors advise students to leave and go home.

The mountain of proof at Harvard revealed a reality in which Jewish students’ access to their own university (classes, teachers, libraries, dining halls, public spaces, shared student experiences) was directly compromised. Compromised, that is, unless they agreed—or at least agreed to pretend, as many Jewish students who are neither religious nor Israeli now silently do—that there was nothing wrong with wallpapering America’s premier university with demonization of Jews. Coercing that silent agreement was the goal, and it was achieved not through arguments or evidence, but through the most laughably idiotic heckler’s veto: screaming at, chasing away, freezing out, or spitting on anyone who dared disagree with supporting the most successful Jew-killers since the Nazis. This left the great minds of Harvard debating the finer points of free speech for hecklers, instead of wondering why their campus was populated by hecklers. The question of why Harvard’s hecklers were heckling in favor of Hamas’s barbarism was too disturbing to consider, and so public discussions ignored it completely.

This heckling was not unrelated to the education that Harvard itself provided. Classes existed at Harvard, it turned out, that were premised on anti-Semitic lies. A course at the school of public health called “The Settler Colonial Determinants of Health” looked at case studies from South Africa, the United States, and Israel; its premise—not a topic of discussion, but the premise on which the course was built—was that Israel is a settler-colonialist state. (A Jewish student who wrote to the professor questioning what they saw as the ideological slant of the readings was told that it was “insulting” to suggest that the course had an agenda.) The “Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights” proudly announced that it “utilizes a decolonial framework in program development, leadership, and engagement”—meaning, one might reasonably assume, the “decolonizing” of Israel through the removal of its 7 million Jews. (The program is a partnership between Harvard and Birzeit University, a Palestinian institution where an Israeli journalist was expelledfrom an event in 2014 just because she was Israeli and Jewish.)

An astonishing number of pop-up lectures, panels, and events at Harvard both before and after October 7 were centered on the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza—a worthy topic addressed with almost no mention of Hamas, even though Hamas has ruled Gaza for 17 years. Nor was there much mention of the fact that Hamas was founded in connection with the global Muslim Brotherhood, or of its comically wealthy sponsors in the Persian Gulf. Students had many opportunities to learn about Palestinian suffering from oppression by evil Jews, but far fewer opportunities to learn, for instance, about Hamas’s success in co-opting foreign aid and crushing dissent, or the intifada that students hoped to globalize. Outside of their engagements at Harvard, some guest speakers publicly endorsed extreme anti-Semitic lies, including the straight-up blood libel that Israelis are harvesting Palestinians’ organs or that the Israeli military uses Palestinian children for weapons testing. One could hardly blame students for repeating their educators’ claims.

Hillary Rodham Clinton: Hamas must go

Out of respect for Gay’s request that our committee’s discussions with administrators remain private, I won’t share here anything that we talked about in our many meetings. But I will say that one thing we did not discuss was Gay’s congressional testimony on this topic, for which she and other administrators never asked for the advisory committee’s advice. Instead, they consulted lawyers, a choice that backfired on national television.

The horror that the hearing laid bare was something far worse than a viral gaffe. Harvard was already being investigated by the Department of Education for allegations of violating Jewish students’ civil rights under Title VI, and perhaps the president was advised against admitting any institutional failure. (In January, a group of students sued Harvard, describing the university as a “bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment.”) Still, the only morally tenable position would have been to admit failure, to reveal that the problem was not all in Jews’ heads; that there truly was an anti-Semitic environment at these incubators of American leadership; that these universities, along with far too many other pockets of the country, had reverted, slowly and then all at once, into what they had been a century earlier: safe spaces for high-minded Jew hatred—not in spite of their aspiration that education should lead to a better world, but because of it.

It is fairly obvious what Harvard and other universities would need to do to turn this tide. None of it involves banning slogans or curtailing free speech. Instead it involves things like enforcing existing codes of conduct regarding harassment; protecting classroom buildings, libraries, and dining halls as zones free from advocacy campaigns (similar to rules for polling places); tracking and rejecting funding from entities supporting federally designated terror groups (a topic raised in recent congressional testimony regarding numerous American universities); gut-renovating diversity bureaucracies to address their obvious failure to tackle anti-Semitism; investigating and exposing the academic limitations of courses and programs premised on anti-Semitic lies; and expanding opportunities for students to understand Israeli and Jewish history and to engage with ideas and with one another. There are many ways to advocate for Israeli and Palestinian coexistence that honor the dignity and legitimacy of both indigenous groups and the need to build a shared future. The restoration of such a model of civil discourse, which has been decimated by heckling and harassment, would be a boon to all of higher education.

Harvard has already begun signaling change in this direction: The university recently reiterated and clarified rules regarding the time, place, and manner of student protests. For Harvard to take more of these steps would be huge, but I have struggled to understand why all of them still feel so small. Perhaps it’s because the problem is a multi-thousand-year fatal flaw in the ways our societies conceive of good and evil—and also because somewhere deep within me, I know what has been lost. There was a time, not so very long ago, when we didn’t have to prove our right to exist.

Among the mountains of evidence that Jewish students sent me, one image has stayed in my mind. There are videos of crowds chanting “Long live the intifada!” inside Harvard’s Science Center, and “There is only one solution: intifada revolution!” in Harvard Yard, along with other places equally familiar from my student days. But I keep coming back to the crowds marching and screaming in front of Harvard Law School’s Langdell library, because Langdell is a sacred place for me. On my 22nd birthday, in 1999, when I was a senior at Harvard, a law student I’d met at Hillel took me up through Langdell’s maintenance passageways to the library’s rooftop, where he asked me to marry him. I said yes.

I watched the video of the students marching and screaming in front of Langdell, and in an instant I remembered everything: studying in campus libraries for my Hebrew- and Yiddish-literature courses, talking for hours with Muslim and Christian and progressive and conservative classmates, inviting friends of all backgrounds to join me at Hillel, scrupulously following the Jewish tradition of “argument for the sake of heaven” in even the most heated debates, gathering for Shabbat dinners crowded with hundreds of students—and over those long and beautiful dinners, falling in love. My classmates and I often disagreed about the most important things. But no one screamed in our faces when we wore Hebrew T-shirts on campus. No one shunned us when we talked about our friends and family in Israel, or spat on us on our way to class. No crowds gathered to chant for our deaths. No one told us that there should be no more Jews. That night, my future husband and I worried only about getting in trouble for sneaking up to the library roof.


Body-by-Guinness

  • Power User
  • ***
  • Posts: 2871
    • View Profile
Universities Recruiting Antisemites
« Reply #1073 on: February 29, 2024, 08:39:06 AM »
One of the unsung hustles in the ed biz is recruiting out of state students, as they pay out of state tuition rates much higher than the in-state one, at least at public universities. Even if you are a private college inserting your hand deeply into the pockets of all students—and their parents, trust funds, etc.—locating particularly deep pockets can come in handy on the donation and endowment front.

Enter international students. By definition they have deep pockets attached, be they familial ones or the tax coffers of a foreign government. I’ve witnessed entire dorm rooms full of furniture shipped via UPS, IIRC, from a Middle East country. Imagine what that cost. Anyhoo, along with the money, furniture, cars et al these kids tote along also come some very unsavory beliefs now on full display at some schools:

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/foreign-money-international-students-american-campuses

ccp

  • Power User
  • ***
  • Posts: 19433
    • View Profile
Soros rare talk to Jewish audience as of 2003/
« Reply #1074 on: February 29, 2024, 09:59:13 PM »
https://www.jta.org/archive/in-rare-jewish-appearance-george-soros-says-jews-and-israel-cause-anti-semitism

Dissecting The Soros agenda :

https://www.israeltoday.co.il/read/dissecting-the-george-soros-agenda/

Weird guy for sure.
Lived through the Holocaust.  Helped Nazis find Jews during the most "exciting" [I think was the word] time of his life
now is agnostic
supports anti Israel causes
hates the capitalism that made him rich.
foments division in US  and elsewhere.

Even realizes he is the stereotype for the rich behind the scenes Jew .....

and continues doing it just the same for what end game I don't know.

one world government?  open society

From a left wing author (I surmise):

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jul/06/the-george-soros-philosophy-and-its-fatal-flaw


Body-by-Guinness

  • Power User
  • ***
  • Posts: 2871
    • View Profile
Feeding Palestinians: The New Blood Libel
« Reply #1076 on: March 08, 2024, 07:06:15 AM »
The US and UK are demanding aid that will provide succor to Hamas and is frequently unneeded, assisting Hamas in its propaganda efforts along the way:

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/the-scapegoating-of-israel?r=1qo1e&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&fbclid=IwAR2uZEUOegeue7v-ty8wqe03WWDUamYRcxLX_6Ya-NtUxadaUNlfMJ5vYIE&triedRedirect=true



Crafty_Dog

  • Administrator
  • Power User
  • *****
  • Posts: 71672
    • View Profile
A serious effort lacking in self-awareness
« Reply #1079 on: March 12, 2024, 07:50:16 AM »
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/04/us-anti-semitism-jewish-american-safety/677469/?gift=HcIvwN7vqIOoUYRFm4oX3eMP5zpta3QZ_wDsS474Pqo

THE GOLDEN AGE OF AMERICAN JEWS IS ENDING
Anti-Semitism on the right and the left threatens to bring to a close an unprecedented period of safety and prosperity for Jewish Americans—and demolish the liberal order they helped establish.

By Franklin Foer
MARCH 4, 2024
SHARE
SAVE
photo-illustration with 18 photos of Jewish celebrities including Bob Dylan, Henry Winkler, Barbra Streisand, + more plus lines of text in red and blue
Listen to this article





00:00

1:15:49

Listen to more stories on Curio

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

1
stacey zolt hara was in her office in downtown San Francisco when a text from her 16-year-old daughter arrived: “I’m scared,” she wrote. Her classmates at Berkeley High School were preparing to leave their desks and file into the halls, part of a planned “walkout” to protest Israel. Like many Jewish students, she didn’t want to participate. It was October 18, 11 days after the Hamas invasion of southern Israel.

Zolt Hara told her daughter to wait in her classroom. She was trying to project calm. A public-relations executive, Zolt Hara had moved her family from Chicago to Berkeley six years earlier, hoping to find a community that shared her progressive values. Her family had developed a deep sense of belonging there.

Magazine Cover image
Explore the April 2024 Issue
Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

View More
But a moral fervor was sweeping over Berkeley High that morning. Around 10:30, the walkout began. Jewish parents traded panicked reports from their children. Zolt Hara heard that kids were chanting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a slogan that suggests the elimination of Israel. Rumors spread about other, less coy phrases shouted in the hallways, carrying intimations of violence. Jewish students were said to be in tears. Parents were texting one another ideas about where in the school their children could hide. Zolt Hara placed a call to the dean of students. By her own admission, she was hysterical. She says the dean hung up on her.

By the early afternoon the walkout was over, but Zolt Hara and other Jewish parents worried that it was a prelude to something worse. They joined Google Groups and WhatsApp chains so they could share information. Zolt Hara organized a petition, pleading with the school district to take anti-Semitism more seriously. It quickly received more than 1,300 signatures.

Most worrying was what parents kept hearing about teachers, both in Berkeley and in the surrounding school districts. They seemed to be using their classrooms to mold students into advocates for a maximalist vision of Palestine. A group of activists within the Oakland Education Association, that city’s teachers’ union, sponsored a “teach-in.” A video trumpeting the event urged: “Apply your labor power to show solidarity with the Palestinian people.” An estimated 70 teachers set aside their normal curriculum to fix students’ attention on Gaza.

Even classes with no discernible connection to international affairs joined the teach-in. Its centerpiece was a webinar titled “From Gaza to Oakland: How Does the Issue Connect to Us?,” in which local activists implored the kids to join them on the streets. They told the students—in a predominantly Black and Latino school district—that the Israeli military works hand in glove with American police forces, sharing tips and tactics. “Repression there ends up cycling back to repression here,” an activist named Anton explained. Elementary-school teachers, whose students were too young for the webinar, were given a list of books to use in their classes. One of them, Handala’s Return, described how a “group of bullies called Zionists wanted our land so they stole it by force and hurt many people.”

The same zeal was gripping schools in Berkeley. Zolt Hara learned from another parent about an ethnic-studies class in which the teacher had described the slaughter of some Israelis on October 7 as the result of friendly fire. She saw a disturbing image that another teacher had presented in an art class, of a fist breaking through a Star of David. (Officials at Berkeley High School did not respond to requests for comment.) In her son’s middle school, there were signs on classroom walls that read teach palestine.

Zolt Hara didn’t need to imagine how kids might respond to these lessons. After October 7, her son, who is 13, began coming home with stories about anti-Semitic jibes hurled in his direction. On his way to math class, a kid walked up to him playing what he called a “Nazi salute song” on his phone. Another said something in German and told him, “I don’t like your people.” A Manichaean view of the conflict even filtered down to the lowest grades in Berkeley. According to one parent complaint to the principal of Washington Elementary School, a second grader suggested that students divide into Israeli and Palestinian “teams,” and another announced that Palestinians couldn’t be friends with Jews.

On November 17, the middle school that Zolt Hara’s son attends staged its own walkout. Zolt Hara was relieved that her son was traveling for a family event that day. But she heard about video of the protest, recorded on a parent’s phone. I tracked down the footage and watched it myself. “Are you Jewish?” one mop-haired tween asks another, seemingly unaware of any adult presence. “No way,” the second kid replies. “I fucking hate them.” Another blurts, “Kill Israel.” A student laughingly attempts to start a chant of “KKK.”

photo of graffiti reading "Annihilate ISRAEL! stolen land"
Graffiti in Oakland, January 2024 (Franklin Foer)
On a damp morning this winter, I joined about 40 kids assembled in a classroom at a public high school in the East Bay for a meeting of the Jewish Student Union. I promised that I wouldn’t identify their school in the hopes that they might speak freely, without fear of retribution from teachers or peers. The first boy to raise his hand proudly announced that he supported a cease-fire. But as the conversation progressed, students began to recall how painful their school’s walkout had felt. Their classmates had left them alone with teachers, who they suspected would think less of them for having stayed put. At every stop in their education in this progressive community, they had learned about a world divided between oppressors and the oppressed—and now they felt that they were being accused of being the bad guys, despite having nothing to do with events on the other side of the world, and despite the fact that Hamas had initiated the current war by invading Israeli communities and murdering an estimated 1,200 people.

At the end of the session a student in a kippah, puffer jacket, and T-shirt pulled me aside. He said he wanted to speak privately, because he didn’t want to risk crying in front of his peers. After October 7, he said, his school life, as a visibly identifiable Jew, had become unbearable. Walking down the halls, kids would shout “Free Palestine” at him. They would make the sound of explosions, as if he were personally responsible for the bombardment of Gaza. They would tell him to pick up pennies. As he was walking into the gym to use one of its courts, a kid told him, “There goes the Jew, taking everyone’s land.” I asked if he’d ever told any of this to an administrator. “Nothing would change,” he said. Based on how other local authorities had responded to anti-Semitism, I didn’t doubt him.

RECOMMENDED READING

The Fading Battlefields of World War I
ALAN TAYLOR

A person rests between two clock hands and allows smiley faces to fall out of his hand.
Stop Spending Time on Things You Hate
ARTHUR C. BROOKS

Kayvan Novak stands in a grocery-store aisle, in "What We Do in the Shadows."
20 Perfect TV Shows for Short Attention Spans
SHIRLEY LI

2
like many american jews, I once considered anti-Semitism a threat largely emanating from the right. It was Donald Trump who attracted the allegiance of white supremacists and freely borrowed their tropes. A closing ad of his 2016 presidential campaign flashed images of prominent Jews—Lloyd Blankfein, Janet Yellen, and George Soros—as it decried global special interests bleeding the people dry.

Trump’s victory inspired anti-Semitic hate groups, long consigned to the shadows, to strut with impunity. Less than two weeks after Trump’s election, the white nationalist Richard Spencer came to Washington, D.C., and proclaimed, “Hail Trump! Hail our people!” as supporters responded with Nazi salutes. In August 2017, angry men carried tiki torches through Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” In 2018, the consequences of violent anti-Semitic rhetoric became tangible: At the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 11 people were fatally shot. The following year, on the last day of Passover, at a synagogue in a San Diego suburb, a gunman killed one and wounded three others, including a rabbi.

After each incident, my anxiety about the safety of my own family and synagogue would spike, but I consoled myself with the thought that once Trump disappeared from the scene, the explosion of Jew hatred would recede. America would revert to its essential self: the most comfortable homeland in the Jewish diaspora.

From the May 2023 issue: Is Holocaust education making anti-Semitism worse?

That reassuring thought required downplaying the anti-Semitism that had begun to appear on the left well before October 7—on college campuses, among progressive activists, even on the fringes of the Democratic Party. It required minimizing Representative Ilhan Omar’s insinuation about Jewish control of politics—“It’s all about the Benjamins baby”—as an ignorant gaffe. And it meant dismissing intense outbreaks of anti-Zionist harassment by pro-Palestinian demonstrators, which coincided with tensions in the Middle East, as a passing storm.

Part of the reason I failed to appreciate the extent of the anti-Semitism on the left is that I assumed its criticisms of the Israeli government were, at bottom, a harsher version of my own. I opposed the proliferation of settlements in the West Bank, the callousness that military occupation required, and the religious zealotry that had begun to infuse the country’s right wing, including its current ruling coalition.

photo of people hugging in street with uniformed police behind
In October 2018, a gunman killed 11 people and wounded six at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Brendan Smialowski / AFP/ Getty)
Such criticisms were not those of a dissident—the majority of American Jews share them. The Palestinian leadership has a long record of abject obstructionism, historical denialism, and violent irredentism, but American Jews heap blame on recalcitrant right-wing Israeli governments, too. Polling by the Pew Research Center in 2020 found that only one in three American Jews said they felt that the Israeli government was “sincere” in its pursuit of peace. But whatever criticism American Jews leveled against Israel, the anger was born of love. Eight in 10 described Israel as either “essential” or “important” to their Jewish identity. And they still held out hope for peace. In that same poll, 63 percent of American Jews said they considered a two-state solution plausible. Jews were, in fact, more likely than the overall U.S. population to believe in the possibility of peaceful coexistence with an independent Palestine.

Among the brutal epiphanies of October 7 was this: A disconcertingly large number of Israel’s critics on the left did not share that vision of peaceful coexistence, or believe Jews had a right to a nation of their own. After Hamas’s rampage of rape, kidnapping, and murder, a history professor at Cornell named Russell Rickford said Palestinians were understandably “exhilarated by this challenge to the monopoly of violence.” He added, “I was exhilarated.” A student at the same university was arrested and charged with posting online threats about slitting the throats of Jewish males and strafing the kosher dining hall with gunfire. In Philadelphia, a mob descended on a falafel restaurant, chanting about the Israeli American co-owner’s complicity in genocide. Over the three-month period following the Hamas attacks, the Anti-Defamation League recorded 56 episodes of physical violence targeting Jews and 1,347 incidents of harassment. That 13-week span contained more anti-Semitic incidents than the entirety of 2021—at the time the worst year since the ADL had begun keeping count, in 1979.

I don’t want to dismiss the anger that the left feels about the terrible human cost of the Israeli counterinvasion of Gaza, or denounce criticism of Israel as inherently anti-Semitic—especially because I share some of those criticisms. Nor do I believe that anti-Zionist is a term that should be considered axiomatically interchangeable with anti-Semite. The elimination of Israel, in my opinion, would be a profound catastrophe for the Jewish people. But I have read idealistic critics of Israel, such as the late historian Tony Judt, who imagined that it could be replaced by a binational state, where Jews and Palestinians live side by side under one democratic government. That strikes me as naive in the extreme—especially after the Hamas pogrom of October 7—and very likely the end of Jewish existence in the Levant. But not everything that is terrible for the Jews is anti-Semitic.

Anti-Semitism is a mental habit, deeply embedded in Christian and Muslim thinking, stretching back at least as far as the accusation that the Jews murdered the son of God. It’s a tendency to fixate on Jews, to place them at the center of the narrative, overstating their role in society and describing them as the root cause of any unwanted phenomena—a centrality that seems strange, given that Jews constitute about 0.2 percent of the global population. Though it shape-shifts over time, anti-Semitism returns to the same essential complaint: that Jews are cunning, bloodthirsty, and mad for power. Anti-Zionism often takes a similar form: the dehumanization, the unilateral casting of blame, and the fetishizing of Jewish villainy.

Liberal Jews once celebrated Israel as the lone democracy in a distinctly undemocratic region. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition of theocrats and messianists seems bent on shredding the basis for that claim. But many governments in the world share these undesirable traits. Still, no one calls for the eradication of Hungary or El Salvador or India. No one defaces Chinese restaurants in San Francisco because Beijing imprisons Uyghurs in concentration camps and occupies Tibet.

The anti-Zionism that has flourished on the left in recent years doesn’t stop with calls for an end to the occupation of the West Bank. It espouses a blithe desire to eliminate the world’s only Jewish-majority nation, valorizes the homicidal campaign against its existence, and seeks to hold members of the Jewish diaspora to account for the sins of a country they don’t live in and for a government they didn’t elect. In so doing, this faction of the left places itself in the terrible lineage of attempts to erase Jewry—and, in turn, stirs ancient and not-so-ancient existential fears.

Nowhere is this more fully on display than in the Bay Area. After October 7, protesters flooded city-council meetings, demanding cease-fire resolutions and rejecting any attempt to include clauses condemning Hamas for the rape and murder of Jews. One viral video compiled enraged citizen comments at an Oakland city-council meeting. These citizens weren’t just showing solidarity for the people of Gaza, but angrily amplifying wild conspiracy theories. One woman declared, in the style of a 9/11 truther, that “Israel murdered their own people on October 7.” Another, in the manner of a Holocaust denier, described the events of that day as a “fabricated narrative.”

For months, the Berkeley city council resisted the pressure to pass a cease-fire resolution; the mayor regarded foreign policy as far beyond its jurisdiction. But the pressure grew so intense that the council could hardly conduct any other business. Protesters disrupted official meetings, forcing the mayor to keep adjourning deliberations to another room where the public was not allowed. Police offered to escort council members to their cars after meetings. The mayor’s unwillingness to condemn Israel was anomalous, even in his own city. On December 4, the Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board voted to endorse a cease-fire.

Impassioned support for the Palestinian cause metastasized into the hatred of Jews. Anti-Semitism has become part of the landscape. In 2021, a community space in San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood, owned by a progressive gay Jewish activist, was defaced with messages including zionist pigz. After October 7, the windows of Smitten Ice Cream, owned by a Jewish woman, were smashed and spray-painted with the words out the mission.

photo of two people looking at debris from Oakland menorah on grass and sidewalk
In December 2023, a large menorah on public display in Oakland, California, was destroyed. (Jane Tyska / Digital First Media / East Bay Times / Getty)
During Hanukkah, a menorah sponsored by Chabad Oakland and perched on the shore of Lake Merritt, in the center of the city, was torn apart by its branches and hurled into the water, replaced by graffiti reading your org is dying, we’re gonna find you, you’re on fucking alert. Oakland Public Works quickly painted over the message and other anti-Semitic graffiti. But when I walked the trail around the lake several weeks after Hanukkah, I found a weathered metal box, built to display a work of public art. On its side was a laminated message titled “The World We Wish to See.” What followed was a lyrical vision of liberation that imagined a future in which “all beings are treated with dignity.” But whatever display had once existed in the box had been removed. What was left were the etched words zionist killer.

In the hatred that I witnessed in the Bay Area, and that has been evident on college campuses and in progressive activist circles nationwide, I’ve come to see left-wing anti-Semitism as characterized by many of the same violent delusions as the right-wing strain. This is not an accident of history. Though right- and left-wing anti-Semitism may have emerged in different ways, for different reasons, both are essentially attacks on an ideal that once dominated American politics, an ideal that American Jews championed and, in an important sense, co-authored. Over the course of the 20th century, Jews invested their faith in a distinct strain of liberalism that combined robust civil liberties, the protection of minority rights, and an ethos of cultural pluralism. They embraced this brand of liberalism because it was good for America—and good for the Jews. It was their fervent hope that liberalism would inoculate America against the world’s oldest hatred.

For several generations, it worked. Liberalism helped unleash a Golden Age of American Jewry, an unprecedented period of safety, prosperity, and political influence. Jews, who had once been excluded from the American establishment, became full-fledged members of it. And remarkably, they achieved power by and large without having to abandon their identity. In faculty lounges and television writers’ rooms, in small magazines and big publishing houses, they infused the wider culture with that identity. Their anxieties became American anxieties. Their dreams became American dreams.

But that era is drawing to a close. America’s ascendant political movements—MAGA on one side, the illiberal left on the other—would demolish the last pillars of the consensus that Jews helped establish. They regard concepts such as tolerance, fairness, meritocracy, and cosmopolitanism as pernicious shams. The Golden Age of American Jewry has given way to a golden age of conspiracy, reckless hyperbole, and political violence, all tendencies inimical to the democratic temperament. Extremist thought and mob behavior have never been good for Jews. And what’s bad for Jews, it can be argued, is bad for America.

3
i grew up at the apex of the Golden Age. The nation’s sartorial aesthetic was the invention of Ralph Lifshitz, an alumnus of the Manhattan Talmudical Academy before he became the denim-clad Ralph Lauren. The national authority on sex was a diminutive bubbe, Dr. Ruth. Schoolkids in Indiana read Anne Frank’s diary. The Holocaust memoirist Elie Wiesel appeared on the nightly news as an arbiter of public morality. The most-watched television show was Seinfeld. Even Gentiles knew the words to Adam Sandler’s “The Chanukah Song,” which earned a place in the canon of festive music annually played on FM radio. Jews accounted for roughly 2 percent of the nation’s population at the time, but I’d estimate that my undergraduate class at Columbia University was one-third Jewish; soon, a third of the justices on the Supreme Court would be Jewish as well. In 2000, Joe Lieberman, a Shabbat-observant Jew with a wife named Hadassah, fell 537 votes short of becoming vice president. None of these occurrences sparked a backlash worthy of note.

photo of Jerry Seinfeld and Jason Alexander walking and talking on set with cameras
Jerry Seinfeld and Jason Alexander film the Seinfeld pilot, 1989. (NBCU Photo Bank / NBCUniversal / Getty)
By the mid-’90s, experts had declared the end of anti-Semitism. It persisted, of course, in the dark corners of American political culture—in the wacky cosmology of the Nation of Islam and in the malevolent rantings of David Duke, the ubiquitous ex-Klansman—but that proved the point. The only Jew haters to be found were hopelessly fringe; anti-Semitism disappeared from polite conversation. Leonard Dinnerstein, a historian who devoted his life’s work to studying anti-Semitism, concluded his magnum opus, published in 1994, with the admission that his scholarly obsession was becoming a relic: “It has declined in potency and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.”

That last sentence was an expression of triumphalism, rendered in the spirit of the times. Like the end of history, the end of anti-Semitism was a post–Cold War reverie, a naive declaration of a golden age without end. American Jews now worried that they might become too accepted. The great anxiety of the fin de siècle was intermarriage.

The threat of assimilation had frightened the Orthodox Jews who came to the United States during the great wave of immigration in the last decades of the 19th century. Fathers who had fled the Pale of Settlement feared that their sons would trade ancestral traditions for the allure of American culture. (A quite popular, very American musical is energized by these anxieties.) One of those sons, however, made it his intellectual project to find a way for Jews to enjoy the bounties of American society without having to fully abandon their Jewishness.

Born in Silesia in 1882, the eldest of eight, Horace Kallen had a preordained calling: to become a rabbi like his father. But a Boston truant officer forced him, against his parents’ wishes, to attend a secular grammar school. This set him on the path to Harvard, where he paid his way by reading meters for the Dorchester Gaslight Company. Kallen never felt at ease with patrician classmates like Franklin D. Roosevelt, though the philosopher William James embraced him as a protégé.

Kallen’s breakthrough came in the course of an argument with another Jew. In 1908, the British-born playwright Israel Zangwill had a hit called The Melting-Pot, a melodrama about a pogrom survivor who sets out to marry a Christian woman in the hopes that he will no longer be haunted by his identity. This vision of assimilation was a warmed-over version of the devil’s bargain that Western Europeans had offered Jews ever since Napoleon: In exchange for the rights of citizenship, Jews would have to give up their distinctive identity.

Yair Rosenberg: How to be anti-Semitic and get away with it

Kallen didn’t want to surrender his identity. He wasn’t religious, but he had read Spinoza and devoured the works of the early Zionist thinkers. At Harvard, he co-founded the Menorah Society, a Jewish affinity group. His rebuttal to Zangwill took the form of unabashed patriotism. In essays that were intellectual bombshells at the time, Kallen extolled the mongrel nature of American society, the phenomenon known as hyphenation. Harvard’s Brahmin elite believed that newcomers must assimilate in full, commit to what they called “100 percent Americanism.” But to Kallen, the hyphen was the essence of democracy. He described America as a “symphony of civilization,” an intermingling of cultures that resulted in a society far more dynamic than most of the countries back in the Old World. The genius of America was that it didn’t coerce any minority group into abandoning its marks of difference.

photo of man in glasses and bow tie
Horace Kallen, who encouraged American Jews to embrace their adopted country without sacrificing their Jewish identity (Courtesy of the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio)
That argument was idealistic, though also self-interested. Kallen’s polemics implicitly targeted the Protestant monopoly controlling academia, politics, and every other corner of the establishment, which reverted to desperate measures to block the ascent of Jews, imposing quotas at universities and restrictive housing covenants in well-to-do neighborhoods. His ideas were emblematic of an emerging strain of Jewish political philosophy, a set of arguments that would define American Jewry for generations.

The sons and daughters of immigrants may have dabbled in socialism, but in the 1930s and ’40s, liberalism became the house politics of the Jewish people. Walter Lippmann, a descendant of German Jews, first used the term liberal in the American context, to describe a new center-left vision of the state that was neither socialist nor laissez-faire. Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish justice on the Supreme Court, conceptualized a new, expansive vision of civil liberties. Lillian Wald and Henry Moskowitz co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in the belief that all minorities deserved the same protections. Jews became enthusiastic supporters of the New Deal, which staved off radical movements on the left and the right that tended to hunt for Jewish scapegoats. As a Yiddish joke went, Jewish theology consisted of die velt (“this world”), yene velt (“the world to come”), and Roosevelt.

The historian Marc Dollinger titled his 2000 narrative of Jewish liberalism Quest for Inclusion. Jews set out to achieve that goal procedurally—opposing prayer in public school, knocking down discriminatory housing laws, establishing new fair-employment rules. But it was also a project of mythmaking and dream-casting. Widely read mid-century intellectuals such as Louis Hartz, Daniel Boorstin, and Max Lerner wrote books reimagining America as the home of a benevolent centrism—tolerant, cosmopolitan, unique in the history of nations.

Reality began to resemble the myth: In the years following World War II—and especially as the world began to comprehend the extent of the Nazi genocide—a liberal consensus took hold, and anti-Semitism receded. After Auschwitz, even three-martini Jewish jokes at the country club felt tinged by the horrors. In 1937, the American edition of Roget’s Thesaurus had listed cunning, rich, extortioner, and heretic as synonyms for Jew. At that time, nearly half of Americans said Jews were less honest in business than others. By 1964, only 28 percent agreed with that assessment. It became cliché to refer to America as a “Judeo-Christian nation.” Quotas at universities fell to the side.

As anti-Semitism faded, American Jewish civilization exploded in a rush of creativity. For a time, the great Jewish novel—books by Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, and Bernard Malamud, inflected with Yiddish and references to pickled herring—was the great American novel. Under the influence of Lenny Bruce, Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, Elaine May, Gilda Radner, Woody Allen, and many others, American comedy appropriated the Jewish joke, and the ironic sensibility contained within, as its own.

During the Golden Age, Jews created new genres of Americana, and in turn remade America’s image of itself, through the idealized vision of the heartland found in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!; the folk revival popularized by Bob Dylan, Art Garfunkel, and Paul Simon; the movies mythologizing the decency of the American Everyman produced by David O. Selznick, Louis B. Mayer, and Jack Warner. (To say that “the Jews” run Hollywood is conspiratorial; to say that Jews founded it is factual.) Only in America could Jews—Irving Berlin, George Wyle, Sammy Cahn—write the Christmas songbook.

It wasn’t just mass culture. The New York Intellectuals, a group with a name as euphemistic as it sounds, acquired a priestly authority in the realm of aesthetics and political ideas, and included the likes of Alfred Kazin, Clement Greenberg, Irving Howe, and Susan Sontag. Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg ushered second-wave feminism into the world. Jews became the prophetic face of American science (J. Robert Oppenheimer) and the salvific one of American medicine (Jonas Salk). The intellectual rewards of Jewish liberation could be measured in medals: Approximately 15 percent of all Nobel Prize winners are American Jews.

In the Golden Age, Jews in America embraced Israel. Enjoying their political and cultural ascendance, they looked to the new Jewish state not as a necessary refuge—they were more than comfortable on the Upper West Side and in Squirrel Hill and Brentwood—but as a powerful rebuttal to the old stereotypes about Jewish weakness, especially after the Israeli military’s victory in the Six-Day War of 1967. As The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman has put it, American Jews “said to themselves, ‘My God, look who we are! We have power! We do not fit the Shylock image, we are ace pilots; we are not the cowering timid Jews who get sand kicked in their faces, we are tank commanders.’ ”

A now-obscure cultural event captures, for me, this newfound sense of self and self-confidence. In 1978, ABC aired The Stars Salute Israel at 30, a kitschy prime-time variety show filmed in front of a full house at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, in Los Angeles, the same venue that hosted the Oscars. Like the Oscars, it featured an A-list slate: Barry Manilow in a white suit, surrounded by backup singers in sequins; Henry Winkler, the Fonz himself, playing a rough-hewn Israeli in a sketch; and, of course, Sammy Davis Jr. Near the conclusion, Barbra Streisand emerged in a white gown to talk via remote hookup with Golda Meir as a camera filmed the former prime minister in a book-filled room in Israel—the two most celebrated Jewish women of the century kibitzing on American TV.

photo of Barbra Streisand in white gown on stage singing into microphone with orchestra in background
Barbra Streisand performs during The Stars Salute Israel at 30 in 1978. (Wally Fong / AP)
In the early decades of Hollywood, Jewish stars had hidden behind stage names—Emanuel Goldenberg performed as Edward G. Robinson; Issur Danielovitch transformed himself into Kirk Douglas. Streisand had also changed her name, dropping the a from Barbara, but that was an instance of a diva’s bravado, not a sop to the goyim. What made her stardom so emblematic of the Golden Age was that she never allowed herself to be bullied into suppressing her Jewish identity. Her crowning achievement was Yentl, an adaptation of an Isaac Bashevis Singer short story. For the grand finale of the ABC telecast, Streisand sang “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem, for 18.7 million viewers. “The good feelings and the love will always remain,” she told them.

4
the jewish vacation from history ended on September 11, 2001. It didn’t seem that way at the time. But the terror attacks opened an era of perpetual crisis, which became fertile soil where the hatred of Jews took root. Though Osama bin Laden claimed credit for the plot, that didn’t stop some people from trying to shift the blame. One theory explained in exquisitely absurd detail how Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, had toppled the Twin Towers.

But there was also a more sophisticated version of this conspiracy theory, one that had a patina of academic respectability. On the left, it became commonplace to fulminate against the neoconservatives, warmongering intellectuals said to be whispering in the ear of the American establishment, urging the invasion of Iraq and war against Iran.

This wasn’t fully untethered from reality: The neocons were a group of largely Jewish think-tank denizens and policy operatives, some of whom held top posts in President George W. Bush’s administration. But the angry talk about neocons also trafficked in dangerous old tropes. It inflated their role in world events and ascribed the worst motives to them. Men like Paul Wolfowitz, the second-highest-ranking official in Bush’s Pentagon, and William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, were portrayed by critics on the left as bamboozlers undermining the national interest in service of their stealth loyalty to Israel. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, for one, took exception to the idea that Jews were pulling the strings of the United States government. “I suppose the implication of that is that the president and the vice president and myself and Colin Powell just fell off a turnip truck to take these jobs,” he said.

In 2007, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, professors at Harvard and the University of Chicago, respectively, spelled out what others implied in The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, a book published by a venerable house, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, that soon arrived on the New York Times best-seller list. This was the opposite of the schmaltzy Streisand tribute—the Jewish state as not a friend but a villain surreptitiously manipulating American power to further its own ends.

One year later, Lehman Brothers, a bank founded in 1850 by the son of a Jewish cattle merchant from Bavaria, collapsed. That news was followed by the revelation that Bernie Madoff had masterminded the largest-known Ponzi scheme in history. Although politicians, on the whole, refrained from casting Jews as the primary culprits of the 2008 financial crisis—which was, in fact, systemic—a sizable portion of the public harbored this thought. Stanford University professors conducted a survey that found that nearly a quarter of the country blamed Jews for crashing the global economy. Another 38.4 percent ascribed at least some fault to “the Jews.”

In the era of perpetual crisis, a version of this narrative kept recurring: a small elite—sometimes bankers, sometimes lobbyists—maliciously exploiting the people. Such narratives helped propel Occupy Wall Street on the left and the Tea Party on the right. This brand of populist revolt had long been the stuff of Jewish nightmares. A fear of the mob suffused masterworks of the Golden Age—Theodor Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality, Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-intellectualism in American Life. Haunted by the Holocaust and inherited memories of pogroms, these writers warned how a society might fall prey to a demagogue who tapped into prejudice.

After 2008, a version of their prophecy came to pass. The right settled on a Jewish billionaire as their villain of choice: George Soros. An idea took hold, and not just on extremist blogs. The mainstream of the Republican Party seeded the image of Soros as the “shadow puppet master,” in the words of the former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly. In elevating the figure of Soros and invoking him so frequently, Fox News and Republican politicians were also, intentionally or not, drawing on the deeply implanted imagery of the Jewish financier bankrolling the destruction of Christian civilization.

In 2018, Fox News began carrying images of migrant caravans headed from Central America toward Texas, a tide of humanity it described as an “invasion.” Though they had no evidence to bolster the charge, Republican politicians insinuated that the caravans were paid for by Soros. Representative Matt Gaetz tweeted a video of two men handing out cash to a line of Honduran migrants, accompanied by the question “Soros?” When President Trump was asked about Soros’s role in funding a caravan, a week after a pipe bomb was found in Soros’s mailbox, and days after the Tree of Life shooting, he told reporters, “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

Soros was a central character in a new master narrative, much of it adapted from European sources. The spine of the story was borrowed from a French author named Renaud Camus, a socialist turned far-right reactionary who wrote a 2011 book called The Great Replacement, warning that elites intended to diminish the white Christian presence in Europe by flooding the continent with migrants. The Jews weren’t a central feature of Camus’ theory. But when elements of the American right embraced it, they inserted Soros and his fellow Jews as the masterminds of the elite plot. This became the basis for the chant “Jews will not replace us.”

Jews were the antagonists of the conspiracy theory because they occupied a special place in the bizarre racial hierarchy of American ethno-nationalism. Eric Ward, an activist who is among the most rigorous students of white supremacy, has put it this way: “At the bedrock of the movement is an explicit claim that Jews are a race of their own, and that their ostensible position as White folks in the U.S. represents the greatest trick the devil ever played.” That is, Jews were able to pass as white people, but they were really stealth agents working for the other side of the race war, using immigration to subvert white Christian hegemony.

This notion planted itself in the mind of Robert Bowers, a loner who lived in a suburb of Pittsburgh. He became obsessed with the work of HIAS, originally the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. It was formed in 1902 with the intention of easing the arrival of Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms. The group’s evolution was emblematic of the trajectory of Jewish liberalism. As American Jews settled into a comfortable existence in their new land, HIAS’s mission expanded. It has field offices in more than 20 countries, including a branch on a Greek island to tend to Syrian, Iraqi, and Afghan migrants. On October 19, 2018, the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh was participating in a National Refugee Shabbat, which was the brainchild of HIAS.

The event stoked Bowers’s rage. “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people,” he wrote on Gab, the Christian-nationalist social-media site. Just before he entered the synagogue’s sanctuary, armed with three semiautomatic pistols and an AR‑15 rifle, he posted, “Open you Eyes! It’s the filthy EVIL jews Bringing the Filthy EVIL Muslims into the Country!!”

archival photo of room full of people sitting at tables paying attention to man lecturing and pointing to American flag
A citizenship class conducted by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, 1952 (Bettmann / Getty)
A faith in immigration—the idea of America as a sanctuary for the refugee, the belief that subsequent groups of arrivals would experience the same up-from-the-shtetl trajectory—was a core tenet of Jewish liberalism. A Jewish poet had written the lines about huddled masses inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty. If America was a nation of immigrants, that made Jews quintessential Americans. But now this ideal was the basis for Jews’ vilification. At the Tree of Life synagogue, it was used to justify their slaughter.

5
in the old Jewish theory of American politics, the best defense against the anti-Semitism of the right was a united left: minorities and liberal activists locking arms. When I was young, rabbis and elders reverently told us about the earnest young Jews in chunky glasses who had jumped aboard the Freedom Rides; about Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, in his unmissable kippah, marching right next to Martin Luther King Jr.; and about the martyrdom of Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, two Jews who had been murdered alongside James Chaney, a Black Mississippian, for their work registering Black Americans to vote. A coalition of the tolerant pressed the country to live up to its ideals.

Later, I would learn that those memories were a bit gauzy. In the late 1960s, former comrades began to quietly, then brusquely, discard this spirit of common cause. Younger activists in the civil-rights movement took a hard turn toward Black Power and dismissed the old liberal theory of change as a melioristic ruse. Anti-war protesters embraced the decolonization struggles of the developing world. After Israel captured the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in 1967, many came to view the Jewish state as a vile oppressor. (This was well before right-wing Israeli governments saturated the occupied territories with Jewish settlers.) Even as Israel’s shocking victory in the Six-Day War, 22 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, filled American Jews with pride and confidence, a meaningful portion of America’s left turned on Israel.

The turmoil of the late ’60s presaged the rupture that has occurred over the past decade or so. A new ideology has taken hold on the left, with a reordered hierarchy of concerns and an even greater skepticism of the old liberal ideals.

This rupture was propelled by the menace of Donald Trump. His election jolted his opponents to take emergency measures. The left began describing itself as the Resistance, which implied a more confrontational style than that of Nancy Pelosi floor speeches or Center for American Progress white papers.

Even before Trump took office, the Resistance announced a mass protest set to defiantly descend on the capital, what organizers called the Women’s March on Washington. In an early planning meeting, at a New York restaurant, an activist named Vanessa Wruble explained that her Judaism was the motivating force in her political engagement. But Wruble’s autobiographical statement of intent earned her a rebuke. According to Wruble, two members of the inner circle planning the march told her that Jews needed to confront their own history of exploiting Black and brown people. Tablet magazine later reported that Wruble was told that Jews needed to repent for their leading role in the slave trade—a fallacious charge long circulated by the Nation of Islam. (The two organizers denied making the reported statements.) That moment of tension never really subsided, either for Wruble or for the left.

When the march’s organizers published their “unity principles,” they emphasized the importance of intersectionality, a theory first introduced by the law professor Kimberlé W. Crenshaw. It would be insufficient, she argued, for courts to focus their efforts on one narrow target of discrimination when it takes so many forms—racism, sexism, homophobia—that tend to reinforce one another. Her analysis, incisive in the context of the law, was never intended to guide social movements. Transposed by activists to the gritty work of coalition-building, it became the basis for a new orthodoxy—one that was largely indifferent to Jews, and at times outwardly hostile.

When the Women’s March listed the various injustices it hoped to conquer on its way to a better world, anti-Semitism was absent. It was a curious omission, given the central role that Jews played in the conspiracies promoted by the MAGA right, and a telling one. Soon after the march, organizers pushed Wruble out of leadership. She later said that anti-Semitism was the reason for her ouster. (The organizers denied this charge.)

The intersectional left self-consciously rebelled against the liberalism that had animated so much of institutional Judaism, which fought to install civil liberties and civil rights enforced by a disinterested state that would protect every minority equally. This new iteration of the left considered the idea of neutrality—whether objectivity in journalism or color blindness in the courts—as a guise for white supremacy. Tolerance, the old keyword of cultural pluralism, was a form of complicity. What the world actually needed was intolerance, a more active confrontation with hatred. In the historian Ibram X. Kendi’s formulation, an individual could choose to be anti-racist or racist, an activist or a collaborator. Or as Linda Sarsour, an activist of Palestinian descent and a co-chair of the Women’s March, put it, “We are not here to be bystanders.” To be a member of this new left in good moral standing, it was necessary to challenge oppression in all its incarnations. And Israel was now definitively an oppressor.

photo of MLK in suit and tie holding up picture of three slain civil rights activists
Martin Luther King Jr. holds the photos of three civil-rights workers murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Philadelphia, Mississippi, during 1964’s Freedom Summer. Two of them—Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman—were Jewish. (Bettmann / Getty)
The American left hadn’t always imposed such a litmus test. During the years of the Oslo peace process, groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine had no problem attending events with liberal Zionists. Back then, the debate was over the borders of Israel, not over the fact of its existence. But that peace process collapsed during the last days of the Clinton administration, and whatever good faith had existed in that brief era of summits and handshakes dissipated. Hamas unleashed a wave of suicide bombings in the Second Intifada. And in the aftermath of those deadly attacks, successive right-wing Israeli governments presided over repressive policies in the West Bank and an inhumane blockade of Gaza.

Palestinian activists and their allies began the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, pushing universities to divest from Israel. The new goal was no longer coexistence between Arabs and Jews. It was to turn Israel into an international pariah, to stop working with all Israeli institutions—not just the military, but also symphonies, theater groups, and universities. In that spirit, it became fashionable for critics of Israel to identify as “anti-Zionist.”

Within the Jewish establishment, there’s a tendency to impute anti-Semitism to anyone who describes themselves that way. That has always struck me as intellectually imprecise and, occasionally, as a rhetorical gambit to close down debate. But there’s a reason so many Jews bristle at the thought of anti-Zionism finding a home on the American left: Zionist can start to sound like a synonym for Jew. Zionists stand accused of the same crimes that anti-Semites have attached to Jews since the birth of Christianity; Jews are portrayed as omnipotent, bloodthirsty baby-killers. Knowing the historical echoes, it’s hard not to worry that the anger might fixate on the Jewish target closest at hand—which, indeed, it has.

In 2014, dorms at NYU where religiously observant Jews lived received mock eviction notices—“We reserve the right to destroy all remaining belongings,” read the flyer slipped under doors—as if intimidating college kids with unknown politics somehow represented a justifiable reprisal for Israeli-government action in the West Bank. The same notices appeared at Emory University, in Atlanta, in 2019. At the University of Vermont and SUNY New Paltz, groups that helped sexual-assault survivors were accused of purging pro-Israel students from their ranks. “If you don’t support Palestinian liberation you don’t support survivors,” the Vermont group exclaimed. Years before October 7, students at Tufts University, outside Boston, and the University of Southern California moved to impeach elected Jews in student government over their support for Israel’s existence. This wasn’t normal politics. It was evidence of bigotry.

Among the primary targets of the activists were the Hillel centers present on most college campuses. These centers occasionally coordinate trips to Israel and, on some campuses, sponsor student groups supportive of Israel. Those facts led pro-Palestinian activists to describe Hillel as an arm of the “Israeli war machine.” At SUNY Stony Brook, activists sought to expel Hillel from campus, arguing, “If there were Nazis, white nationalists, and KKK members on campus, would their identity have to be accepted and respected?” At Rice University, in Texas, an LGBTQ group severed ties with Hillel because it allegedly made students feel unsafe. What made this incident darkly comic is that Hillel couldn’t be more progressive on issues of sexual freedom. What made it so worrying is that Hillel’s practical purpose is not to defend Israel, but to provide Shabbat dinners and a space for ritual and prayer. To condemn Hillel is to condemn Jewish religious life on campus.

Gal Beckerman: The left abandoned me

As exclusion of Jews became a more regular occurrence, the leadership of the left, and of universities for that matter, had little to say about the problem. To give the most generous explanation: Jews simply didn’t fit the analytic framework of the new left.

At its core, the intersectional left wanted to smash power structures. In the American context, it would be hard to place Jews among the ranks of the oppressed; in the Israeli context, they can be cast as the oppressor. Nazi Germany definitively excluded Jews from a category we now call “whiteness.” Today, Jews are treated in sectors of the left as the epitome of whiteness. But any analysis that focuses so relentlessly on the role of privilege, as the left’s does, will be dangerously blind to anti-Semitism, because anti-Semitism itself entails an accusation of privilege. It’s a theory that regards the Jew as an all-powerful figure in society, a position acquired by underhanded means. In the annals of Jewish history, accusations of privilege are the basis for hate, the kindling for pogroms. But universities too often ignored this lesson from the past. Instead, they acted, as the British comedian David Baddiel put it in the title of his prescient book about progressive anti-Semitism, as if “Jews don’t count.”

6
in the death spiral of liberalism, extremism on the right begets extremism on the left, which begets further extremism on the right. To protest the censoriousness of the new progressives, right-wing edgelords and trolls attempted to seize the mantle of liberty.

The most powerful of the edgelords was Elon Musk, who purchased Twitter ostensibly to save discourse from the woke mob. To make good on his noble aims, he reversed bans that the platform’s previous regime had imposed on the most vile anti-Semites, including the white nationalist Patrick Howley, the comic Sam Hyde, and the Daily Stormer’s founder, Andrew Anglin. By restoring them to the site, Musk was, in essence, conceding that their words shouldn’t have been considered taboo in the first place. He legitimized their claims of victimhood, the sense that they had been excluded only because they’d offended the wrong people.

In fact, Musk hinted that he shared this conspiratorial view of censorship. In May 2023, he retweeted an aphorism that he attributed to Voltaire: “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” Those words were actually uttered by a neo-Nazi named Kevin Alfred Strom, not the French philosopher. It shouldn’t have been hard to imagine that the words had dubious origins, because they captured a view of the world in which shadowy forces furtively censor their enemies.

Nor was it hard to imagine that those shadowy forces might include the Anti-Defamation League, which relentlessly called attention to the proliferation of Jew hatred on Twitter under Musk’s ownership. Musk threatened to sue the group, accusing it of trying to “kill this platform by falsely accusing it & me of being anti-Semitic.” The Jews, he all but spelled out, were those who couldn’t be criticized—which, by the logic of the Strom quote, made them society’s secret masters.

Musk wasn’t alone in this argument. In 2022, Dave Chappelle used the opening monologue of Saturday Night Live to muse about the cancellation of the hip-hop artist Ye (formerly Kanye West), who had lost a deal with Adidas after he promised, among other things, to go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.” Chappelle exuded empathy for Ye. “I don’t want a sneaker deal, because the minute I say something that makes those people mad, they’re going to take my sneakers away … I hope they don’t take anything away from me,” he said, adding with a smile and a conspiratorial whisper: “Whoever they are.” There was no mystery about his use of pronouns: “I’ve been to Hollywood … It’s a lot of Jews. Like, a lot.” He went on, “You could maybe adopt the delusion that the Jews run show business.”

photo of Dave Chapelle with microphone opening SNL with band in background
Dave Chappelle opens Saturday Night Live, November 2022. (Will Heath / NBC / Getty)
Chappelle practices shock comedy as a form of shock therapy: The authoritarian impositions of the left justify offensive comments, which are a form of defiance. He has taken a genuine problem—anti-liberalism on the left—and used it as a pretext for smuggling anti-Semitism into acceptable discourse.

That Chappelle and Musk see fit to indulge anti-Semitism in order to protect freedom of speech contains a dark irony. In the 20th century, starting with Louis Brandeis’s dissents on the Supreme Court, Jews stood at the vanguard of the movement to protect “subversive advocacy,” even when it came at their own expense. This could be understood as a defense of the Talmudic tradition of disagreement, what Rabbi David Wolpe calls the “Jewish sacrament” of debate. The movement culminated in Skokie, Illinois, in 1977, when the ACLU deployed the lawyer David Goldberger to sue to allow neo-Nazis to march through the Chicago suburb, which was filled with Holocaust survivors. The Jewish community was hardly unanimous on the Skokie question—unanimity would have been inconsistent with the tradition—but the ACLU position reflected a commitment to free speech officially espoused by major Jewish communal institutions in the postwar years.

In the Jewish vision of free speech, open interpretation and endless debate mark the path to knowledge; the proliferation of discourse is the antidote to bad ideas. But in the reality of social media, free speech also consists of Jew hatred that masquerades as comic entertainment, a way to capture the attention of young men eager to rebel against the strictures of what they decry as wokeness.

When I asked Oren Segal, who runs the ADL’s Center on Extremism, to point me to a state-of-the-art anti-Semitic hate group, he cited the Goyim Defense League. The spitefully silly name reflects its methods, which include pranks and stunts broadcast on its website, Goyim TV. Its leader sometimes dresses as an ultra-Orthodox Jew, calling himself the “Honest Rabbi.” In one demented piece of guerrilla theater, he apologizes on behalf of the Jewish people for fabricating stories about the Holocaust. The group has attempted to popularize the slogan “Kanye is right about the Jews,” hanging a banner proclaiming it on a freeway overpass in Los Angeles and projecting it on the side of a football stadium in Jacksonville, Florida, as 75,000 fans filed out. GDL hecklers have stood in front of Florida synagogues and Holocaust museums, shouting, “Leave our country. Go back to Israel” and “Heil Hitler.”

In a short span, as the edgelords successfully pushed the limits, American culture became permissive regarding what could be said about Jews. Anti-Semitism crept back into the realm of the acceptable.

7
for a brief moment, it felt as if the October 7 attacks might reverse the tide, because it should have been impossible not to recoil at the footage of Hamas’s pogrom. Israel had yet to launch its counterattack, so there was no war to condemn. Still, even in this moment of moral clarity, the campus left couldn’t muster compassion. At Harvard, more than 30 student groups signed a letter on October 7, holding “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Days later, the incoming head of NYU’s new Center for Indigenous Studies described the attacks as “affirming.” This sympathy for Hamas, when its crimes were freshest, was a glimpse of what was about to come.

On the afternoon of October 11, Rebecca Massel, a reporter at the Columbia Daily Spectator, received a tip. She was told that a woman, her face wrapped in a bandanna, had assaulted an Israeli student in front of Butler Library in a dispute over flyers depicting hostages held by Hamas. The woman’s alleged weapon was a broomstick. Her battle cry was said to be “Fuck all of you prick crackers.” After striking him with the broomstick, the man said, she attempted to punch him in the face. By the end of the fracas, she had bruised one of his hands and sprained a finger on the other.

Massel began to report out the story. She spoke with the victim, who told her, “Now, we have to handle the situation that campus is not a safe place for us anymore.” She spoke with the NYPD, which confirmed that it had arrested the woman, who was charged with hate crimes and has pleaded not guilty. Massel and her editors curbed their impulse to quickly score a scoop, double-checking every sentence. They didn’t publish the story until 3 a.m. on October 12.

Later that morning, Massel, a sophomore studying political science, was sitting in her Contemporary Civilization seminar when her phone lit up. It was her editor, calling her back. She had texted him to get his sense of the response her article had elicited, so she stepped out of class to hear what he had to say. She had already caught a glimpse of posts on social media, harping on her Jewishness and accusing her of having a “religious agenda.” She’d worried that these weren’t stray attacks. The editor told her the paper had been inundated. The messages it had received about the article were vitriolic, but he didn’t give her any specifics. Before returning to class, she checked her own email. A message read, “I hope you fucking get what you deserve … you racist freak.”

Read: The juvenile viciousness of campus anti-Semitism

For as long as she could remember, Massel had wanted to be a journalist. She’d founded the newspaper at her elementary school. During high school, she’d read She Said, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s book about investigating Harvey Weinstein’s sexual assaults. The New York Times reporters insisted that they were journalists, not feminist journalists. Massel vowed to take the same approach. The accusations of bias, therefore, didn’t just feel anti-Semitic. They felt like an attack on the integrity that she hoped would define her work.

But anger was an emotion for another day. At that moment, she was overwhelmed by fear. She thought about what the Israeli student had told her the day before. A dean had apparently advised him to leave campus because the university couldn’t guarantee his safety. Now Massel felt unsure of her own physical well-being. She decided that she would stay with her parents until she could get a better sense of the fury directed at her.

In her unnerved state, Massel threw herself into her journalism. She decided to interview Jewish students, from all corners of the university, to gauge their mood. After the office of public safety assured her that she could return to campus, she parked herself in the second-floor lounge of Columbia’s Hillel center. When she overheard a student mention an incident, she would approach them and ask to talk.

Over the course of two weeks, Massel spoke with 54 students. What she amassed was a tally of fear. Thirteen told her that they had felt harassed or attacked, either virtually or in person. (One passerby had barked “Fuck the Jews” at a small group of students.) Thirty-four reported that they felt targeted or unsafe on campus. (At one precarious moment, the Hillel center went into lockdown, out of concern that protesters might descend on the building.) Twelve said that they had suppressed markers of their Jewish identity, wearing a baseball cap over a yarmulke or tucking a Star of David necklace into a sweatshirt. She learned that a group of students had created a group-chat system to arrange escorts, so that no Jew would have to walk across campus alone if they felt unsafe.

Perhaps even more ominously, Massel uncovered incidents in which teachers expressed hostility toward Jewish students. One Israeli student told Massel that a professor had once said to him, “It’s such a shame that your people survived just in order to perpetuate another genocide.” When I made my own calls to students and faculty, I heard similar stories, especially instances of teaching assistants seizing their bully pulpit to sermonize. One TA wrote to their students, “We are watching genocide unfold in real time, after a systematic 75+ years of oppression of the Palestinian people … It feels ridiculous to hold section today, but I’ll see you all on Zoom in a bit.” One student left class in the middle of a professor’s broadside against Israel in a required course in the Middle East–studies department. Afterward, he sent an email to the professor explaining his departure, to which the professor wrote back, saying they could discuss it in class later. When the student returned, the professor read his email aloud to the whole class, and invited everyone to discuss the exchange. It felt like an act of deliberate humiliation.

When I talked with Jewish students at Columbia, I was struck by how they, too, tended to speak in the language of the intersectional left. They described their “lived experience” and trauma: the pain they felt on October 7 as they learned of the attacks; the fear that consumed them when they heard protesters call for the annihilation of Israel. They sincerely expected their university to respond with unabashed empathy, because that’s how it had responded in the past to other terrible events. Instead, Columbia greeted their pain with the soon-to-be-infamous concept of “context,” including a panel discussion that explained the attacks as the product of a long struggle. This historicizing felt as if it not only discounted Jewish students’ suffering but also regarded it as a moral failing. (In early November, in response to criticism, Columbia announced that it would create a task force on anti-Semitism.)

photo from back of student in kippah and backpack facing protest and people in street
A Jewish Columbia student watches a pro-Palestine demonstration outside the gates of the university, November 2023. (Andrew Lichtenstein / Corbis / Getty)
There are many reasons for the unusual intensity of events at Columbia, which is located in a city that is a traditional bastion of the American left; its campus is where the late Palestinian American literary critic Edward Said achieved legendary status. But Columbia is also a graphic example of the collapse of the liberalism that had insulated American Jews: It is a microcosm of a society that has lost its capacity to express disagreements without resorting to animus.

The events on campus that followed October 7 were a sad coda to the Golden Age. When I was a student at Columbia, in the ’90s, the Ivy League was a primary plot point in a triumphalist tale. During the first half of the 20th century, Columbia had deployed extraordinary institutional energy to limit the presence of Je

Crafty_Dog

  • Administrator
  • Power User
  • *****
  • Posts: 71672
    • View Profile

Crafty_Dog

  • Administrator
  • Power User
  • *****
  • Posts: 71672
    • View Profile
Woke Anti-semitism
« Reply #1081 on: March 14, 2024, 03:01:44 PM »

ccp

  • Power User
  • ***
  • Posts: 19433
    • View Profile
blame Hamas not Israel and not Netanyahu
« Reply #1082 on: March 15, 2024, 06:40:40 AM »
https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/news/the-zone-of-interest-executive-producer-danny-cohen-on-jonathan-glazer-s-oscar-speech-i-just-fundamentally-disagree/ar-BB1jXezG?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=38ba40ac27eb406c9f3cff1ce8177884&ei=15

Cohen added: "I just fundamentally disagree with Jonathan on this. The war and the continuation of the war is the responsibility of Hamas, a genocidal terrorist organization, which continues to hold and abuse the hostages, which doesn't use its tunnels to protect the innocent civilians of Gaza but uses it to hide themselves and allow Palestinians to die. I think the war is tragic and awful, and the loss of civilian life is awful, but I blame Hamas for that."

But our partisan Sen. Schumer sells out Netanyahu for Muslim votes in Michigan.




Body-by-Guinness

  • Power User
  • ***
  • Posts: 2871
    • View Profile
The Japanese Abraham
« Reply #1085 on: March 18, 2024, 09:38:59 AM »
Fascinating story about a little known Japanese gent that journeyed from Shinto and Bushido to Christianity and ultimately Judaism, saving many Jews from the pogroms the Gestapo sought to impose in Japan:

The Japanese Abraham

Jewish Commentary

by Meir Y. Soloveichik

There’s a bestselling book by the psychologist Robert Cialdini titled Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade. In one point in this largely non-Jewish book, we are shown a photograph from 1941 of two rabbis from Eastern Europe who found themselves in front of the Japanese foreign ministry in Tokyo. They were two of the leaders from a group of thousands of yeshiva students who had been given transit visas by the Japanese consul in Kovno, Lithuania. His name was Chiune Sugihara. The visas allowed the students to flee across Europe and Asia and land in Kobe, Japan. Two of them were my maternal grandparents, Rabbi Shmuel Dovid and Nachama Warshavchik.

Germany was, of course, then allied with Japan. Cialdini writes, “The Nazis had sent Josef Meisinger, a colonel in the Gestapo known as ‘the Butcher of Warsaw’ for ordering the execution of 16,000 Poles, to Tokyo. Upon his arrival in April 1941, Meisinger began pressing for a policy of brutality toward the Jews under Japan’s rule—a policy he stated he would gladly help design and enact. Uncertain at first of how to respond and wanting to hear all sides, high-ranking members of Japan’s military government called upon the Jewish refugee community to send two leaders to a meeting that would influence their future significantly.”

Two rabbis came down from Kobe to Tokyo, and, in what must have seemed a surreal moment, met with the Japanese generals. The rabbis received an utterly unanswerable question: Tell us, why do the Nazis hate you so much? One of the rabbis was frozen, terrified, but the second, Shimon Kalisch, known as the Amshinover Rebbe, remained calm. Cialdini writes:

Rabbi Kalisch’s knowledge of human nature had equipped him to deliver the most impressive persuasive communication I have encountered in over thirty years of studying the process: “Because,” he said calmly, “we are Asian, like you.”
The older rabbi’s response had a powerful effect on the Japanese officers. After a silence, they conferred among themselves and announced a recess. When they returned, the most senior military official rose and granted the reassurance the rabbis had hoped to bring home to their community: “Go back to your people. Tell them we will provide for their safety and peace. You have nothing to fear while in Japanese territory.” And so it was.
The photograph featured in Cialdini’s book is (at least in my Kindle version) incomplete, cut off; in the original, there is a Japanese gentleman standing to one side of Rabbi Kalisch. This man’s name is Setsuzo Kotsuji, and his tale is told in his extraordinary 1962 autobiography, From Tokyo To Jerusalem, which is entirely out of print. Kotsuji’s obscurity is an enormous shame, because the book is much more than a memoir. It is, in a certain sense, a religious classic, the story of a man raised in the religion of his ancestors who turned to the Jewish faith while still retaining a deep respect for his own Japanese past. These elements merged together to form one of the great heroic personalities of the 20th century.

Kotsuji was truly an Asian Jew: From Tokyo to Jerusalem is not published under the name Setsuzo Kotsuji, but rather Abraham Kotsuji, the name he would ultimately adopt in converting to Judaism. This is apt, as one of the mesmerizing themes of the book is how his own life mirrors that of Abraham, and how his heroism allows for the Abrahamic journeys of so many others to come to fruition. Discovering Kotsuji’s story has given me a better understanding of my own Abrahamic familial identity.

Setsuzo Kotsuji was born in Kyoto in 1899 to a family that was bound up with the Shinto faith and with the Kamo Shinto shrine of Kyoto, where for many generations his own family had served as priests. “I was raised,” he tells us, “in that ancient religion of Shinto, a religion existing already at the dawn of the history of Japan.” He adds that the “Kotsuji family, according to tradition, dates back to 678 A.D., when the Kamo shrine in the Kamo section of Kyoto was dedicated.” By his generation, the Kotsujis were no longer priests, but his father did dedicate himself, and then train his son Setsuzo, to perform for the family one of the major rites of Shinto, the “lighting of the sacred fire.”

Writing about himself in third person, he describes one of the earliest and elemental memories of his life:

The first of these images is symbolic and prophetic. The baby Setschan is perhaps four. He sees two flickering lights—whether they are oil lamps or candles he cannot tell. He hears a voice reciting words unintelligible to his small mind, but it’s recognizable as the voice of his father. The image is a pair of oil lamps, wavering on the Shinto altar, and the voice is the short prayer of evening. The image will haunt Setschan for the rest of his life. He needs merely recall it to invoke a mood of solemnity, of awe, a deep religious feeling which neither teacher nor preacher could ever have taught him.
What this means is that even as Kotsuji would ultimately embrace a different faith, the experience of Shinto as a child, and his reverence for the past, would continue to guide him on his journey. The same can be said, he tells us, for the moral code he encountered in his community and his family: Bushido. This is “the way of the samurai,” and Kotsuji insists it is misunderstood as relating merely to military matters, for it is actually a code of honor and chivalry. Bushido is far more than a code of war,” he writes. “It is difficult not to love and respect the man who adheres to the genuine Bushido code.”

This, then, is the early life of Setsuzo Kotsuji. But suddenly an Abrahamic element introduced itself. Though Abraham was called by God at the age of 75, the rabbinic tradition describes how his own religious journey to monotheism began through his own questioning as a child. The same can be said for Kotsuji. He happened to come upon a Bible in a bookstore and started to read. He was, he tells us in his memoir, confused by its description of a single God creating the world, but then, he writes, one passage in particular suddenly moved him.

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” What God? I asked myself. What does the combination “Lord God” mean in the second chapter?… I skipped a few pages, turning at random, and stopped without plan or design at Chapter 12. There my eyes fell upon the words, “Now the Lord said unto Abram. Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto the land I will shew thee. And will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee. I will bless those that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee; and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.”
At that moment something great and deep took hold of my empty mind. I knew almost nothing about Israel and her destiny, nothing of the history of the Jewish people. Yet the pages of the book I read to that point seemed to culminate in this great call…. I did not understand it exactly, and I was not sure precisely what was meant by the blessing. Yet the notion of Abraham breaking away from his home to go on a journey from which he could not return, as the chosen instrument of the Lord, inspired me and moved me deeply.
Thus did Setsuzo Kotsuji discover the beginnings of the Jewish people, when Abram is asked in Mesopotamia to journey to a faraway land, to a holy land. While this Bible he had discovered contained both Jewish and Christian scripture, he was drawn particularly to the texts of the Old Testament, because “there was something familiar about it to my young Japanese mind.”

One of the most striking aspects of Kotsuji’s memoir is the fact that he was particularly inspired by the section of the Hebrew book that many modern Jews, let alone non-Jews, find irrelevant. That is Leviticus, which describes the ritual to be performed in the Tabernacle, and ultimately the Temple in Jerusalem. The rituals involve an altar, incense, and the kindling of the oil lamps in the temple candelabra. It is therefore not surprising, given his own past, that the book struck him. “Leviticus,” he writes, “reminded me of Shinto,” adding that in Shinto, “there is a distinction made between holy and unclean, equivalent to the Hebraic kodesh and tame. It is not an exaggeration to say that the religion is a kind of Hebrew Shinto.”

In discovering this Hebrew faith, he knew he wished to embrace it. Weeping, he told his mother that he could not participate in Shinto rituals because he found what he called “the Shinto of Israel.” While his mother had never heard of “Israel,” her response was striking. “Well,” she said, “whatever the name and whatever the religion I have faith in your good nature. You cannot grow up to be a bad man.” His father responded likewise. His mother told him: “Your father admits that you are doing well these days. He thinks it may be due to the book you are so eagerly reading. He says that if this is so, it must be an excellent book, and the religion in it is good. And if God is only One, he would have it only that way. You may go ahead with your new faith, only remember your ancestors, and be proud of your great heritage.”

This, in turn, had an impact on Setsuzo for the rest of his life: “My parting from the Shinto ritual was a grave loss for both her and my father; yet out of love for me they found the goodness to make it a peaceful one, one which did not rupture our relationship. Their intelligent attitude left me forever with a good feeling about Shinto.”

Kostsuji originally embraced Christianity, the only biblically based faith he found in Japan. In 1916, he went to Kyoto, where he studied in an American Presbyterian college for seven years. There he learned English, Latin, German, and Greek—but not the language of the people with whom he had been for so long fascinated. He then journeyed to Hokkaido, the northernmost of the four islands of Japan, and met and married a woman of the Christian community there, Mineko Iwane.

As a Christian, Kotsuji embraced the role of a minister of the Gospel in Gifu, a town in central Japan, but his ultimate dreams led him to America, where he felt he could find someone qualified to teach him Hebrew. And here another amazing parallel to the original Abraham emerges. The original covenantal Abraham, as we know, had a covenantal partner, Sarah; and Kotsuji’s own wife Mineko sought to support his journey with her one source of wealth: exquisite kimonos that her father had given her through the years. He describes the conversation with his wife:

I will sell my kimonos.
No, I said, I can’t allow you to give up anything  so important to you.
Did Abraham’s wife carry many kimonos with her when she followed her husband from Ur? she demanded.
No, I admitted.
Then I will follow the example of Sarah, she said.
Thus, just as Abram in Genesis went with Sarai his wife far away from his father’s home in Mesopotamia to the other end of the known earth, Setsuzo and Mineko went far away from the land of their forefathers.

In 1927, they sailed for San Francisco, where he first learned of Judaism existing in communal form. “To me, this simple fact was a stirring piece of news,” he writes. “It was confirmation that the religion of the Old Testament was alive, was immediate, and was practiced in some measure at least as it had been thousands of years before.” He then went on to Auburn Theological Seminary in New York. Hebrew was not part of the required curriculum, so he had to take that as an addition, or as he put it, “I resolved to study my Hebrew from eight at night until two in the morning.”

He finished all Auburn had to offer in a year and a half, and then chose to study with a Semitics scholar at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley. He learned to drive and bought an old Oldsmobile for forty bucks. It could barely move, and driving with his wife through Gallup, New Mexico—known in American musical lore as one of the places you can stop if you want to “get your kicks on Route 66”—with only 16 cents left to their name, the car died on the main street. And then, as with Abraham, a miracle occurred:

Despair in my heart, I looked around and saw that I had been vouchsafed a miracle. The car had given up the ghost directly in front of a Japanese restaurant. During the several days we spent in Gallup, waiting for money to come from a friend in Berkeley, the townspeople received us cordially and took good care of us. If they still live, my gratitude goes out to Mr. Yoshimi and Mr. Hayashi, of Gallup.
Thus were they saved by two Japanese Americans living in Gallup, and another biblical parallel was made manifest. For if there is any element that appears in the biblical tale of Abraham’s family, it is that angels, literal angels or human messengers of the Divine, present themselves at various moments to help figures on their journey.

In Berkeley, Kotsuji finished his thesis on Semitics. He and his wife returned to Japan in 1931 and taught Old Testament and Semitic languages at Ayoma Gakuin University in Tokyo. Soon, however, he was struck with typhoid, which led him to lose his job. In 1934, he founded his own institute in Tokyo, the Institute of Biblical Research. In 1937, he published what was the first Hebrew grammar in Japanese and set the stage for his becoming the greatest Hebrew authority in Japan—or in a certain sense, the only Hebrew authority in Japan.

Then, at the end of the 1930s, he was offered a job by a man by the name of Yosuke Matsuoka, who was the head of the South Manchuria Railway. Knowing that there was a substantial Jewish presence in Manchuria, Matsuoka felt he needed a guide to Jewish issues. Of course, Kotsuji didn’t know any Jews at the time, but in Manchuria he actually found himself among a vibrant Jewish community. Soon after, however, he lost his job, when Yosuke Matsuoka became the foreign minister of wartime Japan; because Matsuoka had hired him, he writes, he was bound by tradition to depart as well. Again, we might have thought this would have been a professional setback for Kotsuji, but the fact that he had gotten to know the future foreign minister of Japan would prove providential.

Kotsuji moved to Kamakura, a town in Tokyo Bay. It was then that he heard of the arrival of the Jews in Kobe: Jews who, having received the visas from Sugihara in Kovno in the beginning of the 1940s, suddenly found themselves on an Abrahamic journey of their own. They, too, had been called to leave their home and to make their way across the ends of the earth to a place Providence had prepared. Jews who had never been anywhere in their lives boarded the trans-Siberian railway, crossed Europe and Asia to Vladivostok, and then for three days took a ferry across the Sea of Japan.

We have to imagine what it was for these Jewish rabbinical students and rabbis to discover Japan, how different from Poland it was. And perhaps one difference stood out above all: In Japan, trains left and arrived on schedule. The ferry arrived at the coastal city of Tsuruga on Friday afternoon, with the Sabbath only several hours away. As Marvin Tokayer describes in his book The Fugu Plan, the Amshinover Rebbe refused to board. Tokayer tells us of one of the Jews who had come to greet him: “Rebbe,” he said, “you needn’t worry about not being safely in Kobe by 5:23. Japanese trains are extremely punctual. We will arrive at 4:15, in plenty of time.” Tokayer adds, “The old man had no experience with Japanese trains, but he had had a great deal of experience with Polish trains.” They never went anywhere on time.

As the train began pulling out at exactly the time for which departure had been called, the Rebbe changed his mind:

With more hope in his heart than confidence, he stepped aboard the train as it inched forward. As if suddenly released from an invisible force, the refugees raced for the train, jumping through the doors, scrambling through the windows, clinging to the railings as it slowly gathered momentum. By the time the final car had passed the end of the platform, even the slowest had managed to get aboard. The engineer shook his head in amazement at the customs of these strange foreigners and accelerated to normal departure speed.
Thus did these Jews arrive in Kobe. But they faced a terrible problem. Sugihara’s visas were transit visas, officially given for those traveling to Curaçao (in the Eastern Caribbean, off the coast of Venezuela) as an ultimate destination. But these transit visas would expire after 10 days. Of course, they had nowhere to go. Thus it was that in desperation these Jews, arriving in Japan, turned to a Japanese person who had had experience with Jews.

Kotsuji tells us that “the Kobe Jewish committee had heard of me through my work in Manchuria…was it possible, they asked, for me to intervene.” To represent foreigners in Japan was at this point dangerous. But in perhaps the most important passage in his memoir, one that reveals profoundly who this remarkable man was, Kotsuji tells us his two sources of inspiration in deciding to take action. First, the Bushido, the samurai moral code his parents had taught him; and second, the Hebrew Bible: “There is a Bushido saying which goes ‘it is cowardice not to do, seeing one ought’; running way from the trouble went against the grain of my youthful samurai trained notions of honor. Further supporting me were words of the Old Testament: ‘the grass withereth, but the word of God shall stand forever.’”

We must pause to ponder the passage, to marvel at the merging of two different cultures and traditions in this act of heroism, the small boy merging with the profound moral adult.

Kotsuji went to the foreign ministry and met everyone, but in vain. Then he met his former boss, the foreign minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, and said, “Now I have come to the minister himself, to tell him of my sorrow.” Matsuoka asked to meet for lunch, far away from the foreign ministry. During this meeting, he advised Kotsuji that if he really wanted to extend the Jewish visitors’ visas, he should seek instead the approval of local authorities in Kobe, the police there. Thus, for a period of several months, Kotsuji became the most unusual of commuters, traveling from the Tokyo suburbs every 10 days, wining and dining the local officials. In so doing, he became an intimate of the Eastern European Jews who had arrived there. As he tells us, “I traveled from Kamakura to Kobe—a trip of twelve hours—once or twice a week….The police became most cooperative. They allowed the refugees to open a Talmud Torah [a Jewish school] and were as helpful as they dared to be.”

Thus did Kotsuji help ensure the well-being of my grandparents and so many others, until, later in the year, when they were moved by Japan to occupied Shanghai. Throughout, he tended to their needs, including when the lay leaders of the Jewish community were telephoned in Tokyo and asked to send some of their most prominent figures to meet with the department of military affairs. Incredibly, Kotsuji then chose to publish a book in Japan during the war, a book responding to Nazi calumnies against the Jews. He titled his book The True Character of the Jewish People—which led to much hardship and great risk to his life during the war.

At the end of the 1950s, he chose to convert to Judaism, journeying to Jerusalem to do so:

Some of my Jewish friends questioned my decision. Why adopt a religion which is so likely to bring troubles and sorrow? My response was that I would come to Judaism with joy and pride. From my suffering for the Jewish cause, my attachment to Judaism had grown and grown, and with it had grown my affection for the Jewish people. My unshaken belief in One God lived together in my heart with the love of his people. It seemed only natural for me to become one of them.
Kotsuji was circumcised when he was almost 60, taking the Jewish name of Abraham. As documented by David Mandelbaum in his book From Lublin to Shanghai, after his conversion, Kotsuji was welcomed as a Jew by one of the most famous rabbis in Israel, whom he had first met in Kobe, Chaim Shmuelevitz. Then Kotsuji delivered a speech in Hebrew, the Hebrew he loved, citing Ruth: “My people shall be your people, and your God my God.”

When he passed away 50 years ago, Kotsuji was buried on a mountain in Jerusalem, known as Har HaMenuchot. On another mountain in Jerusalem lies the grave of my grandfather, who after the war went from Shanghai to America and then Israel. Both of them—Kotsuji and my grandfather—had made journeys of faith around the world, journeys from their original home, just like the original Abraham. And just like the original Abraham, both their journeys ended in the Holy Land. And the intersection of these Abrahamic journeys had a direct effect on my own life.

Here we have a man raised to honor his ancestral heritage but who cherished the scripture of Israel; a man who knew Japanese and Hebrew; a man who loved Abraham’s journey and suddenly found Jews on a miraculous journey of their own; a man inspired to act by the combination of samurai sayings and Semitic scripture; a man who paved his own unique path and suddenly was providentially positioned to help thousands of others in one precise moment.

Do I not owe Kotsuji the gratitude, as a descendant of those Jews, to include him in the picture that is my own life, my own sense of self? If Kotsuji is cut out of the picture of Cialdini’s book, if he is largely unknown, does that not make me all the more obligated to include him in the picture that is my own family history?

The story of Kotsuji, interestingly, has been recently more publicized in Japan than in America, thanks to the gifted Japanese actor Jundai Yamada, who recently wrote a book about him. And in 2022, a member of the Israeli Knesset traveled to Japan to bestow a letter of recognition upon Kotsuji’s then 91-year-old daughter.

But we in America need to remember Kotsuji again, especially in the difficult time facing the Jewish people, when the anti-Semitism that Kotsuji stood against is rearing its ugly head around the world. We also know that Kotsuji would have seen, in the Jewish resiliency and unity now reflected in the Holy Land, in Israel, and around the world, what he called in his book the “true character of the Jewish people.” Thanks to his book, I will remember Abraham Kotsuji, a beacon of moral clarity in a dark time, illustrating how, then as now, we Jews remember who stood against anti-Semitism, who stood with us at difficult moments.

It is reported that when Setsuzo Kotsuji passed away he recognized the complexity of his story by leaving this final statement to his family: “Perhaps in a hundred years, someone will understand me.” It is now 50 years since his death. Let us seek to understand, and commemorate Kotsuji’s life with gratitude and reverence.

We want to hear your thoughts about this article. Click here to send a letter to the editor.

https://www.commentary.org/articles/meir-soloveichik/setsuzo-kotsuji-japanese-abraham/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=website&utm_campaign=SocialSnap

Crafty_Dog

  • Administrator
  • Power User
  • *****
  • Posts: 71672
    • View Profile
Re: Anti-semitism & Jews
« Reply #1086 on: March 18, 2024, 02:53:07 PM »
What a wonderful find!

Crafty_Dog

  • Administrator
  • Power User
  • *****
  • Posts: 71672
    • View Profile

ccp

  • Power User
  • ***
  • Posts: 19433
    • View Profile
trump: jews hate their religion
« Reply #1088 on: March 19, 2024, 11:42:51 AM »
https://www.breitbart.com/middle-east/2024/03/19/trump-jews-who-vote-democratic-after-schumer-hate-their-religion/

I am thinking

some jews with regards to Gaza may truly be sympathic to the images of so many people dying, but ignoring the reality there is no choice (IMO)

but I think Trump also misses this point:

for the liberal American Jews their religion is not Judaism as much as it is love of the Democrat party.
for them the party is first foremost. 

for me this is beyond frustration.
look at CD's recent post about scum Weissman.  He is a front and center example of the Jews who live breath and die for the DNC.

I find it difficult to understand them and can only conclude it is self righteous virtue signaling and also definitely a from of narsicissm

" I am a better human being, a better citizen then thou"
since I vote with the poor the downtrodden those with less means ...blah blah blah

the fact the DNC does far more harm then good they refuse to see .   like a race horse with side blinders.





« Last Edit: March 19, 2024, 11:46:52 AM by ccp »

ccp

  • Power User
  • ***
  • Posts: 19433
    • View Profile
Robert Reich
« Reply #1089 on: April 23, 2024, 09:06:30 AM »
I don't recall ever hearing or reading anything this little fool has said that is right:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/protesting-slaughter-like-students-in-the-us-are-doing-isn-t-antisemitism/ar-AA1nwwUk?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=308683414e42404ac2d9405723ef6740&ei=18

I dare this idiot to put on a Yarmulka and go walk among the Columbia protesters.

ccp

  • Power User
  • ***
  • Posts: 19433
    • View Profile
Re: Anti-semitism & Jews
« Reply #1090 on: April 25, 2024, 08:03:43 AM »
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2024/04/25/france-jewish-woman-kidnapped-and-threatened-with-sex-slavery-and-murder-by-man-vowing-to-avenge-palestine/

listen between 1:28 and 1:31

Mark for the first time to my knowledge finally comes out with the obvious.  ( I don't listen to him by any means all the time but this is the first I heard it)

He finally calls out the liberal Jews (though he does not say Jews, but clearly that is who he is referring to)

Their party is more important than their faith, their country.

Yup.

The Democrat Partisan Jew -
their Eleventh Commandment:

Though shall serve the Democrat Party above all else.

indeed Mark points out some of them are funding the Palenstinians, Iran, the Marxists etc.

If the Jerusalem Post is correct and Jews are funding 50% of the Democrat Party then they are clearly destroying America.  How foolish.  They think they are immune with all their money.  Just they wait.
« Last Edit: April 25, 2024, 08:05:59 AM by ccp »

DougMacG

  • Power User
  • ***
  • Posts: 19162
    • View Profile


Body-by-Guinness

  • Power User
  • ***
  • Posts: 2871
    • View Profile
Biden v. Trump on Antisemitism
« Reply #1093 on: May 06, 2024, 08:08:13 PM »
Not sure how Jews can vote for the Big Guy in view of contrasts such as this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GCfLuWMpDU

ccp

  • Power User
  • ***
  • Posts: 19433
    • View Profile
Re: Anti-semitism & Jews
« Reply #1094 on: May 07, 2024, 03:29:57 AM »
"Not sure how Jews can vote for the Big Guy in view of contrasts such as this:"

I agree but,

I will still be shocked, shocked if most Jews do not vote for Biden.  Maybe it will go down 2 to 5% not more.

One must understand the religion is less Judaism and more their beloved Democrat Party.

Plus they despise Trump beyond description

Look at all the Jewish lawyers happy as larks rather then ashamed of subverting the law to GET orange man.

Look at all the Jewish donors.

A few came out publicly and stated they would stop donating to some of the universities, but have you seen a single one come out and say that they along with others will reduce the 50% total donations to the DNC?

If any have, I have not read about it.

I have not read Katzenberg has slowed down gathering up every penny he can for the "big guy" and party.
They are spending and lawyering like banshees to keep Trump out and to win back Congress and Senate.


Body-by-Guinness

  • Power User
  • ***
  • Posts: 2871
    • View Profile
American Jews: Stay Tuned In to this Pogrom?
« Reply #1096 on: May 08, 2024, 04:12:03 PM »
A fine essay contemplating the implications of current anti-Semitic spasms occurring in America:


Is the Writing on the Wall for America's Jews?

Smiling at my visible distress, my neighbor said he was surprised: did I really not know what was going on to Jews around us? But it’s our responsibility to stay.

 Anti-Semitic graffiti on the Beth Jacob Congregation of Irvine on October 31, 2018 in Irvine, California. Allen Berezovsky/Getty Images.

RUTH R. WISSE
AUG. 8 2022

About Ruth
Ruth R. Wisse is professor emerita of Yiddish and comparative literatures at Harvard and a distinguished senior fellow at Tikvah. Her memoir Free as a Jew: a Personal Memoir of National Self-Liberation, chapters of which appeared in Mosaic in somewhat different form, is out from Wicked Son Press.

Ruth Wisse's column is made possible by the generosity of Rob Friedman.
 
KEEP UP WITH MOSAIC'S COVERAGE OF ISRAEL'S WAR WITH HAMAS HERE

I did not think anything in American Jewish life could surprise me—until an Upper East Side neighbor said to me recently that his daughter, who had moved to Israel a dozen years ago, “was the first to see the handwriting on the wall.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I know that you’re an optimist about America,” he responded. “But at a certain point, Jews have been driven from every place where they’ve settled.”

I was stunned. “You don’t mean she thought Jews were so endangered that it was time to leave America as they’ve been leaving France and Russia?”

Smiling at my visible distress, my neighbor said he was surprised: did I really not know what was going on?

A few weeks later, unable to get this conversation out of my mind, I shared it with a professional adviser, another Jew in our neighborhood, who was similarly amused by my reaction. “Did you see the man who just left my office?” he asked. “One of the top lawyers in his field. That’s just what he was telling me he’d been hearing from some of his clients.”

Had I really fallen so far behind on a subject I’ve been tracking for decades? Everything about the upsurge of anti-Jewish politics in the United States troubles me: the role of universities, media, and cultural elites in abetting anti-Zionism, the successor and incorporator of anti-Semitism; the organization of grievance brigades against the allegedly privileged Jews; the ease with which the Arab and Islamist war against the Jewish people has found a home on the left; the electability of known anti-Semites to government; the lone shooters who choose Jews for their targets; the underreported street attacks on visible Jews; and the timidity and stupidity of some American Jewish spokesmen in response to all this aggression.

It wasn’t the escalation of anti-Jewish activity that surprised me, but the idea that it’s therefore time for Jews to give up on America altogether.

Let me try to make this as clear as I can. Aliyah, the voluntary move of Jews to Israel, is an honorable Jewish imperative. The Jews’ return to their homeland—“to build and be rebuilt by it”—is one of the most hopeful developments in the history of civilization. No attempts to sully Israel’s reputation can lessen the magnitude of that achievement.

On a more mundane level, just as some Israelis may wish to live in the United States, some American Jews may prefer to live in Israel. A young Israeli relative of mine once illustrated the concept of Americans who successively “ascend and descend” from Israel in a picture of two muscular shleppers hauling boxes up the stairs for an Israeli-owned moving company. He intended to puncture the ideal of aliyah by focusing on some of its grimier real-life particulars. Yet, though the ideological urgency of that ideal may have waned over the decades, the summon of Jews to Zion will never cease.

In any case, moving to Israel does not necessarily imply seeing the “handwriting on the wall”—a potent phrase with its own heavy Jewish associations. In the biblical book of Daniel, the Jews are in exile, surviving by their wits at the whim of their Babylonian conquerors. Daniel, who had prophesied accurately for King Nebuchadnezzar, interprets the mysterious phrase on the wall—MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN—to the king’s successor Belshazzar: “God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end. . . . You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.”

In its context, this was to be the punishment specifically for the Babylonians’ having desecrated the items taken from the Temple in Jerusalem. In the broader historical context, an augury of civilizational doom has indeed repeatedly correlated with damage or danger to the Jews.

Millennia of evidence support this link between political durability and treatment of the Jews. Because of the way Jews have lived among the nations, as a self-defined, high-functioning minority without independent means of self-defense, they fared differently in accordance with whether societies welcomed or resented their presence. It is no mere cliché to call Jews “canaries in the coal mine”; societies that organized against the Jews were indeed defeated, or crumbled from within. Conversely, toleration of the Jews demonstrated cultural and political qualities of openness and poise that translated into extended achievement.

The United States is a case in point of the latter disposition. When Moses Seixas, warden of the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, wrote to George Washington in 1790 asking for religious freedom for Jews, he, too, invoked the book of Daniel:

Permit the children of the stock of Abraham to approach you with the most cordial affection and esteem for your person and merits. . . . With pleasure we reflect on those days—those days of difficulty, and danger, when the God of Israel, who delivered David from the peril of the sword, shielded Your head in the day of battle—and we rejoice to think that the same Spirit who rested in the Bosom of the greatly beloved Daniel, enabling him to preside over the Provinces of the Babylonish Empire, rests and ever will rest upon you. . . . [emphasis added]

Associating Washington not with the fate of Belshazzar but with the deliverance of Daniel, Seixas asserted that the Jews, hitherto deprived of the “invaluable rights of free citizens,” felt all the more grateful to the Almighty for a government of the people that gave “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” Indeed, Washington’s reply to the rabbi included these same phrases, going one step farther to repudiate mere toleration “as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.” Jews were henceforth to know that citizenship was their right. Welcome to the Land of the Free.

Flash forward to the 1960s, when Jews were both agents and beneficiaries of the civil-rights movement that finally extended the legal promise of America to all of its citizens. Jews meant it when we sang Woody Guthrie’s anthem, “This land is your land, this land is my land/ From California to the New York Island/ From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters/ This land was made for you and me.” We meant it when we belted out Irving Berlin’s anthem: “God bless America, land that I love/ Stand beside her and guide her/ Through the night with the light from above.” American Jews have been no doomsaying Daniels at Belshazzar’s feast but equal partners in this great experiment, and we bear our share of responsibility—no more and no less—for the Republic whose benefits we reap. If America fails us, it fails itself, but the failure is equally ours.
 
With that in mind, it was interesting to watch the conservative media figure Ben Shapiro greeted recently in Tel Aviv by a crowd that roared its approval when the interviewer pressed him on his readiness to make aliyah. Shapiro, a religious Jew, Zionist, and American patriot, held nothing back in his appreciation of and thankfulness for Israel, but said that since the “fundamental principles of the United States are good and worth upholding,” Jews could continue to live there as one of the places where they can do “the most good.” In the celebratory moment it really did seem that the American and the Israelis together actually compounded the security of the world, and as a loyal American Shapiro was right to praise his country of citizenship. Yet anyone listening to him back in Florida might be forgiven for wondering whether he might not be about to hedge his bets. In Israel, on the most serious questions of the day, the center holds, perhaps better than it has since 1948. Back in America, Jews are more nervous than ever, and they are not the only ones spreading alarm.

Some of the most thoughtful and articulate Americans have trouble holding back their anger. About the universities, Roger Kimball writes:
All the old liberal virtues—disinterested inquiry, due process, colorblind justice, advance according to merit and not by some extraneous racial, ethnic, or sexual quota—all that has been rebranded as the invidious patent of reactionary and therefore impermissible vice. In sum, the educational establishment in its highest reaches is today a cesspool, contaminating the society it had been, at great expense, created to nurture.

For his part, Victor Davis Hanson, scrolling through the actions of the present administration, sees “the rapid destruction of most wisdom as we once knew it.” In short, although the cultural battle is still being waged, some warriors have already begun to speak in the language of defeat.

Jews have been taught that though the task is not ours to finish, neither are we free to desist from it. In this most consequential struggle, our experience is instructive, and we are duty-bound to share with our fellow Americans the secrets of our creative survival. The primary Jewish obligation through the millennia since the granting of the law at Sinai has been to maintain and secure our constitution, the Torah: the “tree of life to those who cling to it.”

American Jews may be an ethnic group, born into a people, but the Jewish way of life can be perpetuated only by a rigorous education that starts in infancy and continues throughout a lifetime; on a larger scale, a similar responsibility for the American way of life devolves upon alarmed Jews and non-Jews alike. To ensure that no one takes for granted their civilizing structure, Jews have ceaselessly conserved, transmitted, and reinforced the teachings of their tradition. How can we lately have allowed some of our own to forget, shunt aside, or repudiate their Jewish legacy? How can we have let our fellow Americans become so careless about conserving theirs?

A second Jewish insight, gained belatedly and at greater cost than any people has ever paid, is never to underestimate the will of those who rise to destroy us. Having reclaimed its national sovereignty after millennia under foreign occupation, the modern Jewish state is acquiring the skills, developing the strategies, and above all, building the stamina needed to protect its citizens in the millennia to come. Sadly, democracies with no incentive to aggress against others become the easiest target for aggressors—including aggressors from within—who claim or seek to destroy what others have built. May the people with the poorest record of self-defense in history inspire the world’s still strongest nation before it is too late.

By all means, my Jewish neighbors who are feeling the full brunt of the general rot in the particular form of attacks against them and the Jewish homeland must warn against the self-destruction that accompanies anti-Jewish behavior. But they and the rest of us must also do everything possible to preserve the exceptionalism that is America. In the fateful parable that continues to sound through the ages, we are both Daniel and, here, part of Babylon. It, too, is our responsibility.

https://archive.ph/ox6Fl
« Last Edit: May 08, 2024, 04:14:34 PM by Body-by-Guinness »

ccp

  • Power User
  • ***
  • Posts: 19433
    • View Profile
Far Right and Far Left antisemitism
« Reply #1097 on: May 10, 2024, 05:50:34 AM »
I can' say about Europe or elsewhere
but in the US the Left is demonstrating >>>> more antisemitism than the Right.

meaning the Democrats.

When is the last time we saw a group of about a dozen white supremacists or KKK denouncing Jews on 200 college campuses?

I don't like the headlines which as usual seem to minimize Democrat responsibility with the admonishment "they are all doing it on both sides" schtick.

https://www.ynetnews.com/magazine/article/sk7hjldma


Crafty_Dog

  • Administrator
  • Power User
  • *****
  • Posts: 71672
    • View Profile
Re: Anti-semitism & Jews
« Reply #1099 on: May 10, 2024, 10:17:46 AM »
Steyn is a potent writer.   I read his "America  Alone" when it came out-- he has been very prescient on
the realities of demographics in Europe and America.