Anti-semitism

Suppose you explain to someone spouting racist, sexist, or otherwise discriminatory ideas that they are prejudiced. You may begin by giving them the benefit of the doubt. You tell them you are sure they do not realise how badly they are behaving. You assume they are decent people at heart who have merely made a mistake they will be more than happy to rectify once you set it out. Then you attempt to enlighten them. You tell them why they are prejudiced and why their prejudices lead to hatred and death. You tell them repeatedly, again and again, until your arguments become so familiar you can mouth them in your sleep and you are sick of the sound of your own voice. And they don’t change. They carry on as before.

How should we remember the Holocaust? In the next decade or so, many of the last living Holocaust survivors will pass away. It will then fall to us later generations to confront what Hannah Arendt called ‘the abyss that opened up before us’ by telling their stories. In doing so, we aim to guard against the spectre of Holocaust denial. But when we vow to ‘never forget’ the terrible crimes of Nazism, what exactly is it that we seek to remember? What is sometimes forgotten is that the way we remember the Holocaust is as much a historical process as the event itself. Though the term ‘holocaust’ was used already in the 1950s, it was popularised (and capitalised) only in the 1970s, serving to distinguish the Nazi genocide from other wartime atrocities.

Last week, the Chicago Tribune’s most prominent writer, John Kass, wrote a column decrying the rise in urban violence. Its compelling title: ‘Something grows in the big cities run by Democrats: an overwhelming sense of lawlessness.’ In today’s woke world, it is risky to speak such hard truths about gang shootings, unprosecuted shoplifting, looting, carjackings and more. This rising lawlessness is often cloaked in the language of protest, racial justice and income equality. Speaking out against it runs real risks. You might be doxxed, your home tagged with graffiti, or your family threatened.

Though you wouldn’t know it from most American media outlets, the phenomenon of vandalizing and burning religious sites which is accelerating in Europe has, like a virus, jumped an ocean and is now among us. Over the past month, statues of Christ and the Virgin Mary have been damaged in states as far apart as Colorado, Missouri, New York, Tennessee, and Massachusetts. On July 11, a vehicle was driven into a Catholic church in Florida with the clear intent of burning the building to the ground while congregants were inside. But it’s not just Catholic symbols and edifices being targeted. America’s Jewish community has received similar treatment.

History has not usually been kind to the Jews. But even by its low and morbid standards, the 14th century was a time of chaos. From 1348 to 1351 between 30 and 60 per cent of Europe’s population died from the Black Death, a plague that strafed continents. Hundreds of Jewish communities perished too, their inhabitants slaughtered out of hatred and fear. It was a time of mass death and horror, too; and of scapegoating. Bad times for Jews then. And because once a year, we cleaned out our grain supplies for Passover, Jews flushed out the rats that carried the plague and lowered our death count. So they burned and killed and wiped out the settlements and villages and towns. The contagion, you see, it just had to be contained. Now the plague is here again.

The defeat of Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party has afforded little respite to British Jews. Residents of Hampstead and Belsize Park woke on Sunday to storefronts and a synagogue daubed in the Star of David and ‘9/11’, apparently invoking the conspiracy theory that Jews were behind the September 11 attacks. December has been sweeps month for anti-Semitism across Europe. Two teenagers were charged after allegedly beating a rabbi in Stamford Hill while shouting ‘kill Jews’. A man was arrested on suspicion of racially or religiously aggravated assault after a United Synagogue official was attacked near his east London home. An Israeli student was assaulted on the Paris Metro for speaking Hebrew.

An American pogrom is going on in the New York metropolitan area. I use the word deliberately. A pogrom — the word comes from Russian — is a murderous assault on Jews, either incited by or connived at by the authorities. The machete attack that wounded five people in a rabbi’s home in Monsey, New York on Saturday night follows eight reported attacks in the week of Chanukah, the massacre at a kosher store in Jersey City earlier this month, a stabbing in Monsey, and a rising tide of assaults over the last three years.There is more than enough Jew-hatred to go around in our sick times. I have no doubt that soon enough we will be back to parsing the digital stormtrooping of the white nationalists or the apocalyptic perversions of the Islamists.