Anti-Semitism Returns

Matti Friedman asks the right question in his column on the Free Press. Given the fact that we have all learned of the horrors of the Holocaust and the abominations committed in the name of anti-Semitism, how does it happen that the Western world is awash in Jew hatred?

Wasn’t all that enhanced consciousness supposed to ensure that it never happen again? 

Friedman writes:

It has now been nearly 80 years since the Holocaust, and generations of kids across the West have been taught terms like Zyklon B and crematoria. Films like Schindler’s List have been earnestly canonized. Countless Holocaust museums have been built at a cost of billions of dollars. 

Yet never since the Holocaust have anti-Jewish ideologies been so potent, so close to the surface, or so dangerous. 

Readers with access to shelves of Auschwitz books find themselves, since last October 7, accustomed to mass rallies against the Jewish state and its supporters; to elite colleges teaching that the world is afflicted by a malevolent force called Zionism; and to mobs outside synagogues and Jewish-owned restaurants in cities like Toronto and Los Angeles. 

One of the victors in French elections this week was the leftist leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who has called French Jews and their communal organizations “aggressive,” “arrogant,” and “sectarian,” and once worked a mention of Jewish deicide into an ordinary TV interview. Across the Channel, the British election bestowed a seat upon Jeremy Corbyn, who called Hamas and Hezbollah his “friends”; he’ll be joined in parliament by a politician from Yorkshire calling for a boycott of “every brand and every product that has been supporting Israel and Zionism from the beginning of time.”

Learning about the Nazis was supposed to prevent any of this from recurring, or at least help us understand when it did. Neither has happened. 

As it happens, our culture, thanks to therapy, has told us that enhanced consciousness of a problem works to eliminate the problem. But, what if it aggravates the problems? 

Unfortunately, all of this Holocaust awareness tends to paint Jews as victims. There is a reason for this. If Jews are innocent victims, that means that what happened to them was a grave injustice. And that they deserve everyone’s sympathy, if not pity. 

But this is only part of the story of modern Judaism. Alongside the Holocaust awareness industry is the fact of the state of Israel. The people who built Israel into a great nation succeeded against all odds. They built a modern nation with a thriving economy and a world class military-- out of nothing.

Hamas fighters can commit the most cowardly terrorist actions, but they cannot defend themselves or their people against the Israeli military. And they are incapable of building a nation. 

Ever since Israel invaded Gaza, the better to defend itself and to punish those who would destroy it, serious thinkers and unserious politicians have chosen to gang up on Israel. As though the Jewish state did not have a right to defend itself or to fight for its survival. 

Worse yet, some Jews are afraid to succeed, because they believe that their disproportionate success feeds the radical narrative and makes it seem like they deserved to be persecuted. 

And the dominant narrative, Friedman explains, made the Nazis look like men of action. Would you rather be a victim or an action man?

One of the blithe assumptions of Holocaust narrative has always been that no one would identify with the Nazis, but this is wrong. They’re villains, to be sure, but also strong figures, men of action. 

But, that’s not all. We must not discount the role of stupidity. To those of feeble mind the war against anti-Semitism is a war against the radical political right. Thus, Jews have unfortunately chosen to ally themselves with the radical left, to combat the danger of right wing whatever.

So we find people thrilling to the fact that the radical right was defeated in France by an alliance of Communists, Socialists and Islamists. Whereas the right wing group, led by Marine Le Pen, had denounced anti-Semitism and had supported Israel, the left accepted Islamist anti-Semites into their midst. And the leader of the French Socialist Party, Jean-Luc Melenchon had notably made anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli statements.

Failing to understand that today’s anti-Semitism derives from the Islamist left has allowed certain members of the Jewish community to support it, because they believe that their enemy is the far right.

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