The bombing of Neve Shalom and Beth Israel synagogues in Istanbul is but the latest indication that the “never dormant dragon of anti-semitism” has arisen from the slime to which it had been consigned in the West after the Holocaust. For a long time rabbis didn’t discuss anti-Semitism. It had become a nightmare to be forgotten in the bright light of a new day. But now anti-Semitism has surfaced again even in the United States. I learned that from youngsters I taught in Columbia, Maryland, and from college and graduate students describing their experiences. We all know it from the sporadic bombings and synagogue and cemetery defacements that have defaced our country. These developments sadden me. I grew up in a time when the barriers Jews faced in the United States crumbled, anti-Semitism became socially unacceptable, and anti-Semitic violence virtually disappeared. I hoped that my children and grandchildren would live out their lives free from its curse. I still do. Nevertheless, anti-Semitism has reached a fever pitch in many Islamic countries, and is rising again in Western Europe even in the citadels of democracy where one might have expected never to see it again. It’s natural that even in America, where anti-Semitism is still an exceptional departure from what is a general pattern of acceptance, some of us are again asking “Why do they hate us?” and wondering what we might do to counter it.
The prevailing theory has been that anti-Semitism is just another manifestation of the racism and xenophobia that plagues the human species. It is of a piece with the hatred and occasional murderous violence against the Chinese minorities in some parts of Southeast Asia, and the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia at the turn of the century. When some people face difficulties they act upon their racist and xenophobic impulses. Jews were victims because throughout much of our history —and murderous anti-Semitism first surfaced in Alexandria in 38 C.E., if not in Maccabeean times— we have lived apart in the midst of other civilizations. That assumption underlay two important responses to anti-Semitism in the nineteenth century: Assimilation and Zionism. Both failed, as we know. When the Nazis came for the Jews they drew no distinction between those who had and those who hadn’t sought to become model citizens of their countries. And Herzl’s main argument, with which he galvanized the nascent Zionist movement of his day, was that only if the Jews had a land of their own where they were “normalized” would they at last be rid of the ancient curse of Jew hatred.
Given its origins, Zionism has had an ironic impact, at least in the eyes of some. The creation of the Jewish State and its struggles with the Arab World have themselves generated the new wave of anti-Semitism, they argue. Natan Sharansky, the famous refusenik1 and now an Israeli cabinet minister, considered this assertion in “On Hating the Jews,” published in November’s Commentary magazine.2 Israel, he says, has become “the world’s Jew,” a pariah nation, whose every real and imagined shortcoming is obscenely magnified, and which is judged by standards no other member nation is expected to meet. Only Israel is targeted for campaigns of divestment; only Israel has ever been the subject of a joint session of the signatories to the Geneva Convention; only Israel’s Magen David Adom is excluded from membership in the International Red Cross; and Israeli scholars alone are denied grants and publication in learned journals. Only Jewish nationalism, Zionism, has ever been equated with “racism,” most recently in the World UN Conference at Durban. Sharansky points out that “ it is only democratic Israel, not any of the dozens of tyrannies represented in the United Nations General Assembly, that that body singles out for condemnation in over two dozen resolutions every year; it is against Israel, not Cuba, North Korea, China, or Iran that the UN human rights commission ... directs nearly a third of its official ire.” Sharansky then collects the verbal and cultural assaults European elites have made upon Israel, ranging from the assertion by a Nobel Prize-winning author that “We can compare [Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians] with what happened at Auschwitz”, to a cartoon published in an Italian newspaper showing “the infant Jesus lying at the foot of an Israeli tank, pleading ‘Don’t tell me they want to kill me again.’” The Arab world has been awash in state sponsored anti-Israel hatred cast in classic anti-Semitic terms since the founding of the State, Sharansky points out, a campaign that most recently captured the headlines when the Egyptian government t.v. network broadcast a 4-part series based upon the infamous “Protocol of the Elders of Zion” throughout the Islamic world.
Sharansky claims that the recent demonization of the United States on the part of some in Europe and throughout the Islamic World is cast in terms surprisingly paralleling the anti-Semitic campaigns against Jews and Israel, often by the same groups (Muslim fundamentalists, certain groups on the left, and lately some European leaders). He argues that these twin hatreds stem from a similar source. Both the Jews and the United States proclaim and frequently act upon a set of ideas that are revolutionary in the most profound sense. The Jewish prophets argued passionately that we should be a “light unto the nations,” and demanded justice and fairness for the poor and the downtrodden and an end to violence (“the lion shall lie down with the lamb”). The United States has thought of itself as a shining “city on a hill,” serving as a beacon to the rest of the world. In pursuit of that vision the United States has established a polity based upon economic and political freedom and democracy, and Israel similarly has a free press, an elected government, vigorous, brash dissenters, and a marked degree of free enterprise. These examples and the underlying ideology are always and everywhere profoundly upsetting to tryants and "an immense force for good in the world," holding out hope to the hopeless. Tyrannies must suppress those realities, and one way to do that is to demonize us. As tyrants (and not they alone) have learned, the masses are readily duped and inflamed.
Space considerations prevent me from laying out Sharansky’s thesis here, but it is intriguing and may partly explain what we are seeing. It certainly is correct that our opponents are flooding the world with hatred. And if the thesis is even partly correct, then we American Jews are likely to find ourselves doubly targeted here and abroad.
How are we to deal with the rise of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism? First, we must steep ourselves in the principles and the experience that enables us to be a force for good in the world. Second, we need to be certain that we teach our children to rejoice in their dual identities as Americans and Jews, lest they revert to the self-hatred that plagued earlier generations, and thus prepare them to face the extremists who seem everywhere ready to grab a microphone and spew out their message of hate. Third, we must carefully avoid falling into the trap of adopting the rhetoric of those who curse us. We Americans may have overestimated the immediacy and the quality of the danger Saddam Hussein posed to his neighbors (though hardly to his people), but we are not imperialists intent on stealing Iraqi oil. We Jews are not racists because we wish to maintain a society that will put our cherished beliefs into practice, even if our hopes for peace have been frustrated, partly by our own mistakes. In short, we must keep our balance. And finally we must give the lie to our traducers. We must not remain silent while our country and our people are demonized, while Gaza is likened to Auschwitz, and while President Bush is likened to the Butcher of Baghdad. We should remind ourselves and the world, in Sharansky’s words, that in the past century we Americans, "acting in fidelity to [our] inmost beliefs, have confronted and defeated the greatest tyrannies ever known to man," Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. And that the lot of the Palestinians would have been vastly better if Yasser Arafat had chosen peace rather than “armed struggle” after Camp David and Taba. Above all, we must remain faithful in word and deed to our noblest aspirations and confident that in time the demons that plague us will be replaced by leaders more addicted to hope than hate.
1. "Refusenik" was the encomium conferred upon Jewish citizens of the Soviet Union who refused to withdraw their requests to emigrate to Israel to escape virulent discrimination against them. Sharansky was imprisoned, tortured, and sent to Siberia for many years before finally being released and permitted to leave.
2. 116 Commentary No. 4, p. 26 (Nov. 2003).
Rabbi George Driesen