The anti-Semitism we hoped to never see again: Column

Just one day after the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, Donald Trump was talking about “international banks” and “global financial powers.” His race against Hillary Clinton, he said in West Palm Beach, Fla., “will determine whether we're a free nation, or whether we have only an illusion of democracy but are in fact controlled by a small handful of special global interests rigging the system ... The establishment and their media neighbors wield control over this nation through means that are very well known.”

Those who are familiar with the language of anti-Semitism have seen this particular trope before: Hitler used it to great effect. The only difference is that Hitler was honest enough to pinpoint the “small handful” as being composed of Jews.

It’s been decades since the motley American Jewish community has been deeply unsettled by anti-Semitism. But such is the state of things that even at my own synagogue, in an idyllic, leafy, and largely progressive New Jersey suburb, the rabbi wrapped a sermon around it.

An adult student came to him with great anguish, asking for guidance about how Jews might respond to what he described as growing violence and increasingly freer expressions of hate. His answer: compassion and loving-kindness, as prescribed by the Torah.

But compassion and loving-kindness have not been front and center for some time. In fact, a certain brand of Jew-hatred, one that is tinged not with right-wing paranoia but with left-wing sanctimony, has for some years now been quite the in-thing on American campuses.

Undergraduates at some of our most prestigious universities and colleges in the nation, gathering under the banner of progressive humanism, have taken to barring Hillel (the largest student Jewish organization operating in the United States) from taking part in campus events that have nothing whatsoever to do with religious, ethnic, or national issues, and demonizing Israel.

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Yup: It’s back, and not only is it back but becoming fashionable. I’m not talking about Europe, where anti-Semitism from the left has long been ascendant, but America.

The most recent movement to join this swelling chorus of hatred on the left is — tragically, I think— Black Lives Matter, which recently adopted a platform charging Israel with genocide.

Not ISIL (thousands of Yazidis murdered). Not North Korea (where untold millions, including children, have been killed by famine, imprisonment in slave camps, and torture.) Not Syria, where Bashar Assad's forces continue to kill Syrian citizens by the hundreds of thousands. Nope: it’s Israel that some misguided folks at Black Lives Matter have singled out for accusations of genocide, even though Israel applies capital punishment only for crimes against humanity, and in practice Israel hasn’t sought the death penalty in decades. In other words, Israel, alone among the nations in its neighborhood, has never practiced state-sponsored bloodshed.

But none of that matters: not the facts, not the figures, not the bloody history of Israel’s neighbors, not the bloody history of Europe, not that Israel was born out of desperation, not any of it — because that’s how it is with anti-Semitism, whether from the left or the right. Because when it comes to hating Jews, normative reality has nothing to do with it. The only thing that matters is the narrative of hatred.

Given the current license-to-hate climate, it's no surprise that the number of anti-Semitic assaults, while hardly in league with those suffered by Jews under fascist or militaristic regimes, has suddenly swerved upwards. Last year, a Jewish frat house at Emory University was defaced with swastikas, while in liberal Madison, Wis., some 30 Jewish homes were similarly defaced. The number of anti-Semitic assaults has gone up — dramatically — from coast to coast.

Many synagogues have been vandalized, spray-painted, or subjected to bomb threats. And legions of apparently anti-Semitic Trump supporters have targeted Jewish journalists with everything from vulgarity to threats, and nary a discouraging word from their loud-mouthed hero.

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Look, I myself am a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, a tree-hugger, a lover of all-things-Obama, and a card-carrying member of the ACLU to boot. But when it comes to sheer outright Jew-hatred, I simply don’t see any difference between anti-Semitism coming from the right, as in the case of Nazi Germany or Saudi Arabian propaganda depicting Jews as bloodthirsty child-murderers, or from the left, as in the case of the BDS movement (Boycott, Divest, and Sanction) now raging on American campuses.

After the Holocaust, anti-Semitism wasn’t supposed to be something to worry about. Sure, the civilized world thought: there’d always be your occasional anti-Semitic nut-job. Nut-jobs happen. But outright, pure, public and organized antisemitism? Hard to fathom. Not here, in America. Not in post-war, Europe, either.

And yet, chaverim, like Freddy Krueger in the Halloween movie franchise, it’s baaaaack!

There’s a photo making its way around the internet of an elderly woman holding up a sign that says: “I cannot believe I still have to protest this s--t." The “s--t” in question is the rash of anti-woman laws and restrictions that have been fielded in recent years, including a push to shut off funding for Planned Parenthood. And sure, the sign is funny. But it also points to something most of us know but don’t want to: When it comes to quelling hatred, you can never rest.

Jennifer Anne Moses is the author of four books, including Bagels and Grits: A Jew on the Bayou.

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