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Anti-Semitism Is Thriving in America

I assumed that, after the Holocaust, the world recognized where anti-Semitic rhetoric can lead. I was wrong.

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Deborah Lipstadt

Professor of Holocaust history at Emory Universi

In my neighborhood, there are a number of synagogues and churches. The church doors are open, welcoming all. The synagogues have armed guards, fences, door codes, and people who will stop strangers as they enter. Ostensibly these are welcomers, but their real job is to check whether these strangers wish to do the people inside harm. Our children look at the church across the street and recognize that, while Jews need protection, the kids there do not.

The attack on a Chabad synagogue in Poway, California, has reminded Jews—yet again—that their houses of prayer are not safe spaces. But for the fact that the assailant’s gun jammed, the attack could have been far worse than the October attack in Pittsburgh, which claimed 11 lives.

In the wake of the Poway attack, law-enforcement officers, government officials, and the media kept stressing that the gunman had acted alone. They may have been trying to reassure the public, and in the narrowest technical terms, they may have been correct.

But this assailant was no lone wolf. He is part of a nexus of haters. The shooters in Charleston, Pittsburgh, Christchurch, and now Poway all relied on similar language and memes. The Christchurch and Poway shooters both posted manifestos prior to their rampages. They referred their social-media followers to some of the same websites and offered similar justifications for their actions.

These gunmen may not have received direct orders from a leader, but social media have eliminated the necessity for a leader to issue orders, facilitating their radicalization. And though there is no reason to think they’ve ever met, they are deeply connected, one with the other.

White supremacism—which has at its core anti-Semitism—is nurtured by the extremist rhetoric that has become almost commonplace within the United States. It is growing and flourishing. Had this act of terror been committed by an individual influenced by ISIS or al-Qaeda, it would quickly have been labeled terrorism. Government agencies must recognize white-supremacist attacks as a form of domestic terrorism, and treat them as such.

Our president’s claim that these attacks are coming from a “small group of people” and present no “rising threat” is contradicted not only by Charleston, Poway, and Pittsburgh, but also by recent assessments by law-enforcement entities. Both the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security have warned of the threat of violence from white supremacists. In recent years, white supremacists have been responsible for more homicides than any other extremist group.

Ben Judah: Europe’s ubiquitous anti-Semitism

The federal government needs enhanced powers to regularly assess and share data on the activities of these individuals and groups. Federal law-enforcement agencies must be empowered to regularly assess this threat and train officers on how to address it.

But anti-Semitism itself is an equal-opportunity hatred, even if the violence it sparks is not evenly distributed. It also comes from the political left. On my own campus, a pro-Palestinian group recently called for the boycott of all Jewish groups, including Hillel and Chabad. That’s anti-Semitism.

In truth, when it comes to anti-Semitism, the right and the left often find common ground. The far right talks about the federal government as ZOG, the Zionist Occupation Government; the left sees AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, as a behemoth of unbelievable proportions, driving American policy in ways that are antithetical to America’s best interests. This absence of a dividing line between left and right when it comes to anti-Semitism was evident when the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke clicked “like” on Representative Ilhan Omar’s tweet claiming that American support of Israel is “all about the Benjamins baby.”

How can this hatred find such hospitable circumstance at diametrically opposed ends of the spectrum? Part of the answer lies in the ubiquitous nature of anti-Semitism. Jew hatred can best be compared to a herpes virus for which there is no cure. It is adaptable and thrives in a welcome environment. Anti-Semitism flourishes when anti-Semites feel emboldened and think that what they are doing will be welcomed and not looked upon askance. That is true of people on the right and the left.

Certainly the government must act, but in the interim, what can we as individuals do? Though it sounds prosaic, we must speak out against the rhetoric that gives rise to and eventually legitimizes such acts of hate. We must shame people who, though they may never, ever contemplate acting on their hate and prejudices, express Jew hatred. And, above all, we must be willing to criticize—directly and not gingerly—our political allies when they cross the line into anti-Semitism.

Acts of terror never begin with actions. They begin with words. We must place this kind of talk well outside the pale of legitimate discourse. There is nothing fine or legitimate about these views.

For the past seven decades, it has been shameful to be an open anti-Semite. We assumed that, after the Holocaust, the world recognized where anti-Semitic rhetoric can lead. We were wrong.

We must strive to banish open anti-Semitism so that we will no longer need armed guards screening worshippers as they enter their synagogues.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to [email protected].

How Should Americans Tackle Anti-Semitism?

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Europe’s Ubiquitous Anti-Semitism It’s like the flu: uncomfortable, occasionally deadly, but constantly with us.FEB 21, 2019 Ben Judah Author of This Is London Growing up, I used to think anti-Semitism was like the black death: tragic, nightmarish, and historic. It had wiped out millions of people. It was theoretically terrifying. But only occasional outbreaks in poor and faraway countries remained. It had ruined the life of my grandmother, but it would not be part of mine.But now I realize that anti-Semitism is actually like the flu: uncomfortable, sickly, occasionally deadly, but constantly with us. Every few decades, it mutates into an epidemic. The rest of the time it lingers, producing headaches, sweats, and dizzy spells. Not killing us, just wearing us down.Get the latest issue now.Subscribe and receive an entire year of The Atlantic’s illuminating reporting and expert analysis, starting today.Subscribe Issue cover image As a British Jew, with dual French citizenship and Jewish family in Paris, I have felt the cold now for some time; I’m trying to remember when I first felt it coming on. Was it when the Labour splitter George Galloway was elected as a member of Parliament in East London on the back of an anti-Semitic campaign in 2005? Or was it when Ilan Halimi was abducted and murdered by anti-Semites in Paris in 2006?Read: The Labour party was once a haven for British Jews—what happened?I don’t remember. But I know I kept on telling myself that it would pass. It was an itch. It wasn’t going to make me a refugee, like my grandmother from Hitler’s Germany in 1933. It wasn’t even going to block me from this or that job, like the lost family she would, very occasionally, talk about, living in Hamburg and Berlin, before she was born in imperial Germany. Anti-Semitism, I kept thinking, is just not that important, unless for whatever reason I decide to live and work in Cairo or Tehran. I kept thinking that even after I was pinned to a wall, throttled, and punched in the head by Galloway supporters in 2015 shouting, “Get out, you fucking Jew.”I made a mistake. Just this week, eight Labour MPs have left their party to become independent, in no small part because of the protracted and bitter anti-Semitism crisis that has dogged Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. I felt a creeping horror watching the heavily pregnant Luciana Berger call the Labour Party she was leaving “institutionally anti-Semitic.”But it wasn’t about the Labour Party.I felt it again, stronger, like a cold sweat, when I saw the footage of the Jewish intellectual Alain Finkielkraut being mobbed by gilets jaunes—the yellow-vested protesters—who had crossed his path. They yelled, “Palestine,” “France belongs to us,” “Dirty Zionist,” and “The people will punish you.” Because, yet again, something that should have nothing to do with the Jews—a parliamentary split, or a protest movement sparked by fuel prices—was now all about the Jews. But the insults themselves were not the thing troubling me. What troubled me was what this said about being a European Jew. There was no escaping the flu; it had taken over.Both Berger in Britain and Finkielkraut in France were telling the same story—the days that European Jews could lead public lives not defined by anti-Semitism were over. We were back, not to the days of Hitler, but to the days of Benjamin Disraeli and Pierre Mendès-France, when being a Jewish public figure was a constant struggle. Not deadly, not insurmountable, just exhausting. A process of endlessly navigating an ever-mutating conspiracy theory against you.Read: Is it time for the Jews to leave Europe?This goes just as much for figures on the left as for figures to their right or in the center. To watch Jon Lansman, the Jewish founder and chair of Momentum, the pro-Corbyn movement, endlessly defend his leader whilst condemning his most fevered supporters is to watch a man whose public life is now defined by anti-Semitism, too.Countless British Jews on Twitter, from the fuming columnists condemning the left to the leftist comedian and Corbyn-supporting director David Schneider, are now tirelessly trying to parse anti-Semitism from anti-Zionism. Facebook is rife with vigilante anti-anti-Semitism accounts obsessively highlighting every anti-Semitic Labour comment. These are lives taken over, hijacked, by anti-Semitism.And I hate this. I hate seeing lives taken over by anti-Semitism. I hate seeing people’s minds taken over like this. I hate the psychological damage I can see it causing, to so many Jewish people of all stripes.I hate how it creates a state a mind so relentlessly negative, so embattled, so insecure. I hate how it turns the happiest, calmest people into furious Twitter warriors, into single-issue advocates. I hate the ugliness, the unhappiness, in the Jewish experience that it creates. I hate the paranoia, and how it makes Jews turn on Jews.I hate how it seems to blot out everything else. How it makes Jewish life, the Jewish conversation, defined by others, not by its own terms. I don’t want to live like this.It took me a long time to realize this, but I feel I have learned that the key to living with the flu is not to let my Jewish identity be defined by anti-Semitism. A Jewish life defined only by anti-Semitism, even the righteous fight against anti-Semitism, is a curse.For Jews confronting the disease, the most important thing to remember and to share is the beauty of Judaism. Tweet a recipe, a book, a novel, not just your fury. Attend a Shabbat dinner, host one, light the Sabbath candles. Don’t just sit there seething; slip into the morning prayers, if only to meditate; say a blessing over a glass of water, as a point of mindfulness; or do whatever it is that you most identify with from Jewish culture or tradition. A bagel, an old song, even a joke. It all has healing power.Ira Forman: Viktor Orbán is exploiting anti-SemitismDon’t let your Jewish identity be defined by those who hate you. Instead make it a source of strength, something they can never touch, what our ancestors wanted Jewish life to be. They saw the rituals, the togetherness, the songs of the Sabbath as a palace in time, not a cage, a way of life whose purpose was to bring the deepest calm.And the deepest confidence. Because whenever a Jew wanders around the British Museum in London, or the Met in New York and sees the Roman, Egyptian, and Assyrian remains, they can think, I was there. We are the people of forever. Not only the people killed by Hitler.I think too many Jews have forgotten this. You can only live with anti-Semitism by not living by anti-Semitism. Etz Chaim is not only the name of the synagogue in Pittsburgh where the massacre took place last October. It is also one of the most beautiful phrases in our morning prayers, a description of the vitality of Judaism: “A tree of life”—Etz Chaim—“to those who seize it.”We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to [email protected] VideoBEN JUDAH is a contributing writer at Politico and the author of This Is London and Fragile Empire.MOST POPUL

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