"I Stand with the Jews"
What does that mean?
First of two parts
The other day, an
antisemitic comment came through my social media feed. I didn't want to debate
the poster. People who say abysmally stupid things do not deserve the respect
implied by debate, nor do they deserve the attention that debate generates. But
I did not want his comment to go unanswered. All I said was, "I stand with
the Jews."
"What does that
mean?" the antisemite challenged.
This essay offers my response to his question.
In 1987, in Krakow, Poland,
I attended the first Kosciuszko Foundation session on Polish-Jewish relations.
I've been involved in that dialog ever since. The Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth (1569 to 1795) was one of the largest states in Europe. It was for
two centuries the largest Jewish population center in the world, home to
roughly one third of all Jews. An estimated eighty percent of American Jews
have some ancestry there.
The Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth was relatively friendly to Jews, as had been the previous Polish
kingdom. There was an international saying variously stating that Poland was
"Heaven for the nobles, paradise for the Jews, purgatory for the merchants,
and hell for the peasants." The 1264 Statute of Kalisz granted rights and
protections to Jews in Poland. Poland was proud that it was a "state
without stakes," that is, according to this phrase, people were not burned
at the stake for their beliefs as in the rest of Europe. The Warsaw
Confederation of 1573 voiced support for religious freedom. The Council of Four
Lands (c. 1514 – 1764) granted Jews a great deal of self-rule. Moshe Rosman, a
professor in the Department of Jewish History at Bar Ilan University, writes "The
Council of Four Lands ... was the most elaborate and highly developed
institutional structure in European Jewish history … [its] decisions affected
the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews."
My thoughts about
antisemitism and how to respond to it are very much informed by my study of
Polish-Jewish relations and my interactions with many people interested in this
topic. My parents' homelands are in Slovakia and Poland. As a young person, I
met friends and relatives who were survivors of Nazi occupation and the terror
and disgust in their eyes when they talked about that occupation had a strong
affect on me. My Catholic relatives were harmed and killed by Nazis. Other
friends and relatives offered some resistance to Nazis and Soviets and paid a
heavy price.
I felt a strong need better
to understand evil. I felt that to understand the kind of evil my ancestral
homelands unwillingly played host to, I needed to understand not just what
Germans do or what Poles do or what Jews do, but to understand what people do.
I understand antisemitism as a human problem, and in my response, below, I
speak of many nationalities, and many periods of history. I place antisemitism
in an international context because I think that hate and atrocity are human
problems. We are all related to victims, and we are all related to
perpetrators. We must all resist the temptation to succumb to hatred, and we
all benefit from actively resisting evil in the wider world. Studying hate and
atrocity internationally helps us in our efforts to be on the right side of
history.
In our own era, as in every
era, we are offered an opportunity to be active resisters of hatred. There has
been a recent upsurge in antisemitism. This is not just a matter of opinion;
many dire metrics support this observation. See, for example, ADL numbers here, Combat
Antisemitism Numbers here, NYPD numbers here, Israeli embassy
numbers here, and New York
Times reports here, and here.
Even non-Jews, and, in fact,
even people who don't much like or care about Jews, should care about the
recent upsurge in antisemitism. In 1946, Lutheran pastor Martin Niemoller wrote
words often translated thus:
"First they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist …
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out."
Niemoller's words are not
just poetry; they point to historical reality. Upsurges in antisemitism are
both symptoms of systemic societal disease and they are also straws in the
wind. They are indications of cracks in a society, cracks that require fixing
for everyone's welfare, not just for Jews, and these upsurges are also, if
societal problems are not addressed, precursors of bad things to come – bad
things for everyone, not just Jews.
Think of the rise of Nazism.
Previous to that rise, Germany had been exceptional in its modernization,
education, and emancipation, including for Jews. Upheaval in German society
during and after World War I rendered society dysfunctional and thus vulnerable.
The work to fix a broken society is slow, difficult, and boring. Rather than
responding rationally, too many Germans succumbed to extremism. Conspiracy
theories, like the "stab-in-the-back"
conspiracy theory, proliferated. Rather than looking in the mirror, Germans
told themselves that Jews were responsible for Germany's many problems. Once
too many Germans surrendered to the dark seduction and false promises of
Nazism, catastrophe was inevitable. Up to eighty-five million people died
during World War II, a war fueled in no small part by the irrational hatred of
one demented and evil but charismatic man.
Late nineteenth-century and
early twentieth-century pogroms in the territory of what was once the Russian
Empire took the lives of tens of thousands of Jews. These pogroms are
historically intertwined with the Russian Revolution. That revolution was the result
of a sick society, where illiterate former serfs toiled barefoot while the
czars toyed with bejeweled Faberge eggs costing tens of millions of dollars.
The czarist government deflected criticism of its own failures and spread
rumors that Jews, most of them very poor, somehow were responsible for
peasants' poverty. The czarist government supported The Protocols of the
Elders of Zion, a publication that disseminated antisemitic conspiracy
theories. The czarist regime's refusal to address the empire's moribund
state made an explosion all but inevitable. The revolution and the subsequent
USSR resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people.
Torture and massacres of
Jews during the 1648 Chmielnicki Uprising in Ukraine were accompanied by
tortures and massacres of Polish Catholics. Three hundred years later, there
were new massacres of Jews and Polish Catholics in the same region. Some Ukrainians
collaborated with the Nazis in the mass murder of Jews. In 1943-45, Organized
Ukrainian nationalists in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or UPA, massacred
100,000 Poles, often in brutal ways. Some Orthodox and Greek Catholic priests
blessed weapons used to kill Roman Catholic Poles. One such priest allegedly
said to Ukrainian women who had married Polish Catholics, "Mother, you're
suckling an enemy – strangle it." Polish-American poet John Guzlowski
writes, "My Polish mother was 19 years old … The UPA raped and killed her
sister. They kicked her baby to death. They raped my mom's mom and killed her.
They raped my mother … I will never forgive the UPA."
King Edward I's 1290 Edict
of Expulsion drove Jews from England. That edict was accompanied by crises
affecting non-Jews: the onset of the Scottish Wars of Independence and the
draining of the royal treasury by wars with France and Wales. The expulsion's
aftermath was felt negatively by non-Jews. Credit markets were disrupted and
taxes were raised. Jews had been moneylenders. Christian moneylenders, often
Lombards and Cahorsins, created social tension no less than Jewish ones.
Historian Rowan Dorin's 2023
book, No Return: Jews, Christian Usurers, and the Spread of Mass Expulsion
in Medieval Europe documents the expulsion of not just Jewish, but also
Christian moneylenders. The fate of some Christian moneylenders was worse than
expulsion. In 1307, France's King Philip IV avoided paying his debts to the
Knights Templar by destroying them. The Knights Templar were an international
Christian banking brotherhood. Philip invented religious slanders against them,
tortured them, and executed them. Clearly, in the Middle Ages, a spendthrift,
indebted, power-hungry monarch plus debts plus a primitive banking system often
equaled a hideous fate for moneylenders. The problem was not Jewish identity.
In 2025, The Commission on
Security and Cooperation in Europe said,
"Antisemitism is often the terminal phase of conspiratorial thinking and
finds fertile ground when adherents already distrust public institutions and
have lost touch with reality." Rabbi David Kosak writes "The more
broken the structures around us, the more tempting it becomes to blame a
perceived outsider … [Jews are] history’s coal mine canaries … both Jews and
non-Jews will be swept beneath the rising tide of antisemitism." So, yes.
Even if you are not Jewish, it makes sense to pay concerned attention when
antisemitism increases.
Antisemitism is not evidence
that there is something wrong with Jews qua Jews. In fact there is nothing
wrong with Jews that is not wrong with every other human population. Jews are
not cursed by God. They aren't supermen. They are human beings like the rest of
us, and the persecution they have faced is, alas, very much part of the human
experience.
Both virulent antisemites
and even some Jews often say some variation of the following: "Jews are
the most persecuted group in history." Historian Peter Eisenstadt remembers singing, as
a child in Hebrew school, that he and other Jews were "children of the
martyr race."
I reject this formulation
for at least three reasons. Any such assertion would be difficult to prove. I
also reject it because it is an idea that helps, not hurts, antisemites. I have
frequently encountered online antisemites who say some version of the following:
"Jews are the most persecuted group. This is because Jews are especially
bad. That's why every country has to kick out Jews." The nadir of this
belief: Jewish suffering is evidence that God hates or wants to hurt Jews.
Finally, those Jews I know who insist on this formulation often feel powerless
and doomed. They fear that any given non-Jew might turn on them at any moment.
That attitude does not help them strategically, psychologically, or socially.
Dr. Shaul Magid is a Harvard
professor and a rabbi. He critiques the "Judeopessimistic" view in this article. Dr.
Alexander Jabbari is identified online as of Jewish-Persian descent. He is
certainly left-wing and I disagree with what of his work I've read, but I
appreciate his critique of the "worst persecuted" identity. "If
antisemitism is so inevitable … what would be the point in fighting it? …
[Antisemitism] is a real and serious problem, one worth fighting against – and
worth historicizing. Understanding the contexts that help produce racist hatred
and persecution … is a crucial tool for struggling against them."
Jabbari recommends
"historicizing" outbreaks of antisemitism. "To historicize"
means to place events in changing and changeable historical circumstances.
Think of a car accident. Someone rear-ends your car. You could decide that he
rear-ended your car because that person is essentially bad. You could decide
that he rear-ended your car because you were born to be a victim or because God
has cursed you. Or, to "historicize" the event, we could, through
analysis, discover that the accident occurred because the driver behind you
didn't allow a safe following distance, and because you slammed on the breaks
to save a squirrel running across the street. If the squirrel had stayed on the
sidewalk, even with the other driver's tailing you, the accident never would have
happened. Mentioning these facts "historicizes" the accident.
Historian Yosef Yerushalmi
praised Salo Baron as "undoubtedly the greatest Jewish historian of the
20th century." Baron mounted a "relentless protest" against the
"lachrymose" view of Jewish history. "Lachrymose" comes
from the Latin for "tearful." "It is in the nature of historical
records to transmit to posterity the memory of extraordinary events, rather
than of the ordinary flow of life," Baron writes. In other words, it is a
human tendency to focus on horrors and to neglect awareness of the richness of
daily life. Historian Ismar Schorsch sums up the
"lachrymose" view this way, "According to this reading of the
past, Jewish history in the Diaspora is little more than the dark consequences
of Christian contempt. Oppression, persecution and expulsion are the
staple." I think if Baron were alive today, he would encourage those who
cling to the exclusively "lachrymose" view of Jewish identity to
immerse themselves in study of Jewish lives and life.
The length of my response,
below, to the "lachrymose martyr race" view is my attempt to provide
support for what may be my shocking assertion that the suffering Jews have
faced is not proof of some supernatural force; it's not caused by the antisemitic
concept of karmic cooties; nor is it outside of the human experience. My
placing antisemitism and atrocities against Jews in the context of all human
prejudice and atrocity is not part of any effort to minimize the evil of
antisemitism or the very real suffering Jews have endured. It is, rather, an
invitation to jettison the idea that Jews are uniquely deserving of punishment,
that Jews are uniquely or inevitably doomed, or that some supernatural curse
dictates suffering for Jews. Placing the suffering of Jews in context, I
believe, is one of the best routes to finding ways to address antisemitism. I
believe that "historicizing" – to use Jabbari's word – empowers those
of us who want to resist antisemitism. It helps us to find the cause of the car
accident, to use the above analogy.
The acceptability of public
expressions of antisemitism and other prejudices is not eternal and unchanging.
Such acceptability has risen and fallen dramatically in the United States over
time. "The past" was not necessarily worse and "the present"
is not necessarily better. Americans were probably more antisemitic one hundred
years ago than they were two hundred years ago. Changing and changeable
historical conditions caused antisemitism to rise and fall. Antisemitism's rise
was often accompanied by virulent prejudice against other groups.
One hundred years ago,
prejudices that no responsible person would voice today were not just popular,
they were enshrined in law. Admission at elite universities and jobs, access to
home ownership, laws dictating immigration, and, yes, tragically, even forced
sterilization were all functions of widely accepted prejudices that were
supported by the best science of the day. For just one example of the kind of
"scientific" prejudice that circulated one hundred years ago that no
responsible person would voice today: New England residents of French Canadian
descent were targeted for government-mandated forced sterilization. The goal
was to "breed a better Vermonter."
As incredible as it may seem
today, Italians were once barred from home ownership in some New Jersey
suburbs. Poles and other eastern European peasants were relegated to the worst
working conditions, as recounted in Out of this Furnace and The
Jungle; in Lewis Hine's photographs documenting working conditions, for
example this
one; and Jacob Riis' photographs of living
conditions, see here. My dad remembered coal mine bosses shouting out, "Get
me a Hunky; I need a donkey." Poles, Italians, and other immigrants were
subjected to lynchings, fatal shootings by government agents, and riots forcing
expulsions, for example in Missouri's Lead Belt in 1917.
One hundred years ago,
America was in the midst of massive immigration from impoverished populations
from eastern and southern Europe. Catholic peasants from Poland and Italy were
often dirty, illiterate, and without any history of self-determination. Jews
from Poland were also dirty, and they dressed and behaved differently than
previous Jewish immigrants from wealthier and more sophisticated Germany. These
latter German Jews – sometimes called "Yekke," – often did not
embrace their Polish "Ostjuden" co-religionists.
The then-popular social
Darwinism was used to "explain" the new, poor immigrants from eastern
and southern Europe. Social Darwinism reassured Americans who recoiled from
immigrants that their revulsion and contempt had a scientific basis. These new
immigrants, social Darwinists insisted, were a lesser race of human. They could
never become American.
Lothrop Stoddard wrote a
1926 booklet entitled A Gallery of Jewish Types. The "gallery"
of "types" depicts Jews as physically ugly. Madison Grant wrote The
Passing of the Great Race. Hitler would come to call this 1916 book his
"Bible." Grant argued that Slavs make perfect slaves. "the
Slovak, the Italian, the Syrian and the Jew" were "social
discards." "Swarms of Polish Jews" were "literally"
pushing Americans off the street. Grant also argued for "a rigid system of
selection" that would "eliminate" the "weak or unfit"
in order to empty "hospitals and insane asylums."
Kenneth L. Roberts' articles
were published in The Saturday Evening Post, America's most popular and
influential magazine. The Post is still famous for its charming,
wholesome Norman Rockwell cover art. Here's a quote about eastern European
peasants from a 1920 Post article by Roberts:
"They are dirty people, and the stench that rises from them
is strong enough to be used as a substitute for gasoline ... [They are] the
most backward, illiterate, dirty, thickheaded peasants … it is no more possible
to make Americans out of a great many of them than it is possible to make a
racehorse out of a pug dog … They wear clothing that seems to have ripened on
them for years, and they sleep in wretched hovels with sheep and cows and pigs
and poultry scattered among them."
Roberts again:
"The Jews of Poland are human parasites, living on one
another and on their neighbors of other races by means which too often are
underhanded … they continue to exist in the same way after coming to America …
they are therefore highly undesirable as immigrants."
All three of the above
authors were bestsellers. They were all praised by elites and the masses alike.
Presidents Harding and Hoover both praised Stoddard. President Woodrow Wilson
condemned Italians, Hungarians, and Poles as the "lowest class" with
"neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence."
President Teddy Roosevelt said that southern Italians were "the least
desirable population of Europe."
After World War II, many
Americans recognized that the social-Darwinism-inspired racism that was popular
just before the war was not just wrong, it was evil. It provided justification
for the Nazi genocide of six million Jews and the mass murder of handicapped
people. Many Americans wanted to change. Hollywood wanted to provide role
models for this change.
During Nazism's rise,
Hollywood approached criticism of Nazism with timidity. Moguls, who were
themselves often Jewish, didn't want to risk becoming victims of American
antisemitism, and they didn't want to lose the German market for their films.
They also, like most people, didn't realize how bad things would get under
Hitler. After the war, filmmakers gingerly began to address antisemitism and
other prejudices. The 1947 film Gentleman's Agreement, released two
years after the end of the war, depicts an America that wants to be better, but
isn't quite sure how to get there. Handsome Gregory Peck, a practicing Catholic
who had previously played a priest, leads the way in the film's fight against
antisemitism. Gentleman's Agreement was a box office success, and it won
three Academy Awards, including for best picture, best director, and best
actress. A mere generation earlier, this film and its reception would have been
impossible.
In short, yes, we are
witnessing a rise in antisemitism right now. We have also, in many of our
lifetimes, seen a lessening of antisemitism in America. This rise and fall was
accompanied by prejudice against other groups. This rise and fall was not due to
any essential characteristic of Jews, nor was it divinely ordained. It was
caused by changing and changeable historical circumstances. Americans responded
badly, investing in social Darwinism. We saw how wrong that was, and we
repented.
There's a second reason I
mention the pervasive social-Darwinism-inspired racism of one hundred years
ago. Our leftist friends often speak as if, and often teach the next generation
that, only white Christians harbor deadly prejudices, and only those most
different from white Christians are victims of prejudices. In this leftist
approach, Jews are persecuted because they are not Christian, and Jews are
persecuted because they are, allegedly, darker-skinned than Christians. I have
encountered this "explanation" of prejudice hundreds of times, in
scholarly texts, from NPR, in university classrooms, from Holocaust scholars,
and in social media. The solution in this worldview is to demonize, shame, and
disempower white people and Christians. This explanation is inaccurate, as
previous examples have shown and as subsequent examples will further
demonstrate, and it does not do the work necessary to combat hate.
Humans often hate those most
like themselves, because those are the closest targets. Non-whites, as well as
whites, have been racist committers of atrocities. Whites have themselves been
victims of atrocities committed by non-whites. There are parallels between
various expressions of prejudice, including atrocity. We can learn from these
parallels.
No matter what your
background is, someone, somewhere, once thought or currently thinks that you or
your ancestors were irredeemable, only partially human, and the scum of the
earth. No matter who you are, no matter how superior you believe your group to
be, you have ancestors who were hated, who were ethnically cleansed, and who
were enslaved.
Even groups we now think of
as on top of the world have their histories of oppression, and those histories
of oppression parallel Jewish suffering. Racism, dehumanization, misuse of
religion, expulsion, torture, and genocide occur again and again.
Scottish subsistence farmers
were kicked out in the "Highland clearances" of 1750 – 1860. The
Englishman, George Granville Leveson-Gower, 1st Duke of Sutherland, and his
wife as well, played leading roles. Landlords burned farmers' humble cottages
to the ground, sometimes with farmers inside. Some farmers died of starvation
and exposure. As night follows day, the Highland Potato Famine and mass
migration followed the Clearances.
Harvey Dimond writes, "Racism
and eugenics played a significant part" in the Highland Clearances.
"One Lowland newspaper … reported: 'Ethnologically the Celtic race is an
inferior one and, attempt to disguise it as we may, there is ... no getting rid
of the great cosmical fact that it is destined to give way ... before the
higher capabilities of the Anglo-Saxon.'" Not just racism, but also
religion was harnessed to justify the Clearances. Historian Alexander Mackenzie
writes, "The clergy all this time were assiduous in preaching that all the
misfortunes of the people were 'fore-ordained of God, and denouncing the
vengeance of Heaven and eternal damnation on all those who would presume to
make the slightest resistance' … [clergy] assured the people that all their
troubles were but part of the punishment inflicted on them by Providence."
As for those
masters-of-the-universe, the Anglo-Saxons, they have suffered, too, not just
thanks to England's rigid class system but also, under William the Conqueror,
during the "Harrying of the North." William's looting, burning,
slaughtering, and starving of Anglo-Saxons is sometimes labeled a genocide.
We think of Germans as
powerful and privileged. Under Stalin's NKVD Order No. 00439, thousands of
ethnic Germans were sent to the Gulag. More than forty thousand were executed.
In the US, in 1918, an Illinois mob publicly humiliated, beat, and lynched 29-year-old
baker and coal miner Robert Paul Prager for being German-born during a period
of anti-German sentiment. His killers were tried and found not-guilty.
History is replete with
examples of humans massacring those most like themselves, and convincing
themselves that their victims are utterly unlike themselves. Examples include
Tutsi and Hutu, Cambodians, and the tens of millions of Chinese people killed by
their fellow Chinese people in Communist China's Maoist campaigns. Hamed bin
Mohammed el Murjebi, a black African, enslaved at least 10,000 black African
victims. The Imperial Japanese committed so many unspeakable atrocities against
the Chinese that researching this topic contributed to historian Iris Chang's
suicide. Japan's Unit 731 committed atrocities so twisted that only the best
prepared scholar should research them. Victims were primarily Chinese, but also
included Russians and Koreans. Staff referred to the victims as
"logs."
To outsiders, Serbs, Croats,
and Bosniaks look and sound alike. In 1991, during the violent breakup of the
former Yugoslavia, I asked a Serbian student why the various Yugoslav ethnic
groups hated each other so much. He said that during World War II, the
Croatians who allied with Hitler "used to gouge out Serbs' eyes, and make
them squeeze their eyes in their hands till the crushed eyeballs ran through
their fingers like eggs." Another student, Azur, a Muslim Bosniak, said
that one day his father came home from work, put a pack of cigarettes on the
kitchen table, prepared for dinner, came back to light a cigarette, and
suddenly had to duck automatic weapons fire. His Serb neighbors, people he'd
previously considered friends, were trying to kill him. Another Serb, Ratko
Mladic, said, "My son is the first in many generations to know his father.
Because there have been so many attacks on the Serbian people, children do not
know their fathers." Mindful of the sad history of Serbs under Ottoman
Turkish rule, Mladic referred to Bosniaks as "Turks." In fact
Bosniaks are not Turks and they are genetically related to Slavs like Mladic
himself. In 1995, Mladic ordered the Srebrenica massacre of over eight thousand
Bosniak men.
The leftist idea that only
Christians or only Europeans commit atrocities is nonsense. Julius Caesar, a
Pagan, boasted of committing what is now assessed as genocide in Gaul. The
Comanche, Inca, and Aztecs enslaved, tortured, sacrificed, and cannibalized, or
merely slaughtered their fellow Native Americans. Tamerlane, the Sword of
Islam, a Turco-Mongol, killed perhaps five percent of the world's population.
Leftists conflate "white" and "Christian" with
"empire" but the largest contiguous empire in history was not
European, it was not white, and it was not Christian. Medieval Mongol conquests
killed between thirty and sixty million people – that is, eleven percent of the
world population. Mongols killed a million or more people in eastern Europe. In
Poland, after the Battle of Legnica, Mongols tallied their conquest by cutting
off ears of those Poles killed in battle and filling nine large sacks with
them. Mongols mercilessly exploited the Christian peasants under their heel. No
one knows how many in the Indian subcontinent were murdered and enslaved by
invading Muslims. One modern estimate puts the number at eighty million. This
estimate is disputed. Better regarded is a famous quote by historian Will
Durant, beginning, "The Mohammedan conquest of India is probably the
bloodiest story in history." And Hindus oppress each other. There are two
hundred million Untouchables in India, and their lives can be horrendous.
The above-cited facts
demonstrate conclusively that Jews are not alone in having been hated, and
having been victims of abuse. To say this is not to dismiss the toxicity of
antisemitism. It is, rather, to demystify antisemitism. There is no mystical
curse behind, or justification for, antisemitism. Antisemitism is a
manifestation of human behavior in response to changing and changeable
historical circumstances. We can't allow the current resurgence of antisemitism
to affect us the way a horror movie affects us. We can't assume that
uncontrollable, supernatural forces are at work. The forces behind hate may
well be demonic, but we all have the power to stand up to them and to exorcise
them. That "bump in the night" is not something we have to recoil
from in fear. We can approach that "bump in the night" fearlessly,
investigate, understand the physics behind that bump, and we can address that
physics with action of our own. We can call out hate for what it is, and use
time-tested tools to decommission it, or actively to fight it.
Historical triggers
determine when background differences become inflamed into hatreds or when the
tendency arises to carry out atrocities. Let's look, again, at something that
won't get most readers worked up, because it is little discussed today, and remote
from most of us. The Highland Clearances were excused with nasty racist
stereotypes – Scots are racially inferior to the superior English – and
classist stereotypes – subsistence farmers are a lesser form of life than the
land-owning upper class – and the misuse of religion – poor farmers have sinned
so God is punishing them. These ideas may have existed for a long time. They
were only marshaled because of an historical impetus. Landlords got into debt.
Sheep were more profitable than subsistence farmers. Farmers had to go, and
sheep replaced them. Racism, classism, and religion were harnessed to make a
cruel and murderous process seem justifiable. The question for us now is, what
are the triggers resurrecting antisemitism today? And how do we address those
triggers?
I hope that what I've
written so far has inspired questions. I'll try to answer some of these
questions in part two. These questions include:
Why did Ukrainians murder
Polish Catholics and Jews in the seventeenth century and also in the twentieth
century? And what have these two events got to do with antisemitism today?
Sure, one hundred years ago,
Poles and Italians were hated and mistreated, but it is Jews who are being
targeted today. What's behind that?
Is Christianity at the root
of antisemitism? If so, why are secular people and non-Christians often
antisemitic?
Human history is replete
with horrors. Reading about it all causes me to lose hope. Where is the light
at the end of the tunnel? What can one person do about any of this?
Before I close this, part
one of what my words "I stand with the Jews" meant in the context of
that antisemitic social media post, I'll say the following.
For me, "I stand with
the Jews" doesn't mean that I like or agree with every Jewish person I
meet. Again, Jews are people, just like other people, and I don't like or agree
with every person I meet. It doesn't mean that I agree with every decision made
by an Israeli leader. It doesn't mean that I think the Jews are exempt from the
kind of hellish behavior I list, above. As a student of Polish and eastern
European history, I'm aware of bad characters like Lazar Kaganovich and Jozef
Rozanski. Again, Jews are human beings just like you and me. We are all related
to victims, and we are all related to victimizers. This is part of the human
condition.
Rather, "I stand with
the Jews" means that I would have to be blind, or malicious, not to
recognize that Jews are vulnerable right now in a way that many other groups
are not vulnerable. Since Russia's invasion, I have been walking around with a
Ukrainian flag decal on my bag. Not a single person has hassled me for that. If
I were to place a Star of David on my bag, I have to assume I would be hassled
if not seriously hurt.
I care about, and I'm
invested in, many oppressed groups. I'm heartbroken about what's happening in
Sudan, and I donate to aid groups there. I donate to aid groups working in
Ukraine. I donate to Catholic Charities that work with the poor in my own country.
And, yes, I care about and donate to groups working with the needy in Israel.
Anyone with a conscience
recognizes the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel as a giant warning that Israel
faces an enemy that is purely evil and a threat not just to Jews but to the
entire world. Anyone who exposes themselves to news learns of murderous attacks
on Jews in the United States. Anyone who has a social media account sees the
poison of antisemitism seeping in to conversations.
When I post, "I stand
with the Jews," I'm saying that I recognize in Hamas' genocidal sadism and
in casual comments about Jews controlling the media the sickness of hatred and
scapegoating. I'm saying that I won't remain silent and I won't go along. I'm
saying that I know enough to recognize that antisemitism is a symptom of deeper
problems. I'm saying that I care enough to investigate what those deeper
problems might be. And I'm saying that I will take the awareness with me into
conversations with friends, into my donations, and into the voting booth.
I'm asking you to do that
same.
See you in part two.
Danusha
V. Goska is the author of God
through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery
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