Anti-Semitism as an Eternal Truth

The Jews of this generation have enjoyed the great luxury of believing that the horrors of anti-Semitism were confined to history.

Anti-Semitism is woven into the fabric of reality.

The Jews of this generation have enjoyed the great luxury of believing that the horrors of anti-Semitism were confined to history. We believed that after the horrors of the Nazi regime, who murdered 6 million of our brothers and sisters, the world would never be fooled again into hating the Jews. We believed that after such a display of sheer evil and human malevolence, the world finally understood the dangers of succumbing to the seductions of the mob. We believed that after surviving these horrors, after Western countries everywhere condemned the German Nazis for their sins and after Eichman himself stood trial before the Jerusalem District Court, that we had risen above the fate of our Jewish forefathers.

And here is the tragic truth: it takes only but one pogrom to catapult us back to the reality of our forefathers, squaring us off with the reality that, no, our generation is no exception. The fate of our forefathers is our fate.

How, then, can the 21st-century Western mind, educated against racism's evils and taught that the Nazis were the epitome of such evil - how can such a mind comprehend and, inadvertently, perpetuate anti-Semitism?

Today, modern anti-Semitism masquerades under the label of anti-Zionism. Elie Wiesel aptly noted that “the State's existence is the oxygen of the image and ideas of the new anti-Semitism." The eternal reality of Jew hatred has found a new spin, one that brands Zionist Jews as the new Nazis - an unimaginable insult added to injury that could only have been conjured by the devil himself. Aligned with the oppressor-oppressed narrative of the progressive Left, the new fashionable anti-Zionism decries Israel as an occupying and apartheid state, dishonestly twisting the facts to afford themselves moral license for their hate.

Within this narrative, Jew haters are further able to maintain their sense of moral righteousness, as they fanatically signal to the world how deeply they care for the Palestinians. It is important to note that these individuals had never so much as shed a tear or wasted a thought on the Palestinians before the massacre of October 7th. To them, Israel’s legacy of building a thriving Western nation amid hostile enemies is twisted into a story of colonization by the White Jewish overlords. By branding the Jews as colonizers and oppressors, the progressive Left has been able to resurrect anti-Semitism while keeping their moral cognitive dissonance at bay.

What today’s Jewish generation painfully learned, both within Israel and abroad, is that anti-Semitism is a fact of life. It has simply laid dormant, quietly festering, waiting to resurface. It shape-shifts and morphs, but it is an ever present reality. In a recent piece, Konstantin Kisin shared the experience of some of his friends on October 7th, who said “I woke up a Liberal, and went to bed a conservative.” I believe that what they really meant to say was: “I woke up Woke and went to bed Jewish.” The fact of their own Jewishness was suddenly viscerally apparent to them - an unescapable embodied reality.

American Jews who just 3 years ago marched in solidarity for Black Lives Matters were utterly stunned that the sympathy directed towards them after the October 7th massacre waned swiftly, if any sympathy was conjured at all. Even in the civil rights movement of the 60s, leaders of the Jewish faith joined their African-American brothers and sisters in their marches. A harsh realization dawned when the benefactors of the civil rights movement did not return the favor. Human rights are not the same as Jewish rights, apparently. We are clearly not exempt from the eternal reality of anti-Semitism. For better or worse, it is our birthright.

From the earliest pages of Exodus, we meet the Jewish people’s first encounter with anti-Semitism.

“Now a new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph. He said to his people, “Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we. Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, or they will increase and, in the event of war, join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land.” (Exodus 1:8)

Already the seeds of envy and mistrust were sown against the Jewish people. The Egyptian nation, as the story goes, survived seven years of famine - thanks to a Jew. In Genesis, Joseph interprets Pharaoh’s dream, in which he foresees seven years of prosperity, followed by seven years of famine. Following Joseph’s premonition, Pharaoh appoints him as his Chief of Operations, commissioning him to oversee the nation’s preparation and storage of grains for the hard years ahead. Egypt survives the famine thanks to Joseph’s insight, discernment, and leadership.

The Hebrews’ success was quickly twisted against them. Is a little gratitude too much to ask for? As history has shown us - yes, yes it is.

Jordan Peterson recently commented on anti-Semitism in an appearance on the Piers Morgan show, making the observation that the Jews are a “successful minority” and have always served as “canaries in the coal-mine”. I wholeheartedly agree with this assessment. If a successful minority is no longer tolerated within a society, we know that something is “rotten in the state of Denmark”. We know that corruption has found its way into the society’s systems and that its institutions are tilting much too far towards tyranny.

Why are successful minorities not tolerated in a society turned sour? In one word - envy. Ayn Rand defines envy as “hatred of the good for being the good.”

She goes on to explain that “this hatred is not resentment against some prescribed view of the good with which one does not agree. . . Hatred of the good for being the good means hatred of that which one regards as good by one’s own (conscious or subconscious) judgment. It means hatred of a person for possessing a value or virtue one regards as desirable.”

It is precisely this resentment that is at the heart of anti-Semitism, dating back to the Biblical days of Exodus, when the new Pharaoh could no longer permit a successful minority to thrive in his midst. Much like the policies that allowed Hitler to orchestrate a mass-scale genocide under the campaign banner of national socialism and the good of the German people, it is the resentment towards the Jews that serves as the fuel for the atrocities committed against them. It is the despising of the Jews for their ability to whether any storm, to find economic prosperity in most every period, even with laws and regulations stacked against them. It is wanting what they have, and not wanting them to have it.

Mihail Sebastian's poignant words echo the cyclical nature of anti-Semitism: “However much you’re assimilated in a hundred years, you’ll be set back ten times as much by a single day’s pogrom. And then the poor ghetto will be ready to take you back in.” No matter how long anti-Semitism lays dormant, another pogrom always lurks around the corner.

Yet, there is an important way in which the pogrom of October 7th contrasts with the past. This time, we have a country. We have an army. We have a homeland. We will not be shepherded back into the ghetto, never again, as long as Zion stands tall between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean sea.

Anti-Semitism isn’t going away. It isn’t going away because it has never been about the Jews. Not really. It has always been about the evil lurking in every human heart. As long as envy, resentment, and bitterness still plague the human spirit, anti-Semitism will exist. The mob is always ready to seduce those who have been quietly nursing their resentments, quietly counting the ways in which the world has mistreated them.

How can we Jews live in the midst of this ever-present evil? We must stand tall with the knowledge that we have always survived and thrived, even in the face of the most difficult of adversities. We must remain humble and remember that we are not exempt from the fate of our forefathers, so that we may never be surprised on such a scale again. And most importantly, we must always remember a simple truth - that the only way to overcome darkness in the world is with light.