How the West Became a Hostile Environment for Jews
I now feel what earlier generations of Jews felt – a sense of belonging to a marginalised and constantly imperiled people. During Hanukkah, I went to as many public lightings as possible, my small act of defiance. But many others stayed away, particularly after the Bondi Beach attack in Australia.
Looking at American Jews today, one observer notes, is ‘akin to watching a shriveled brown leaf fluttering aimlessly in the wind in the midst of a cold and bitter winter’. Anti-Semitic incidents in the United States have risen nearly ninefold over the past decade. In Canada, Australia and especially Europe, casual anti-Semitism now appears everywhere – from leading newspapers to graffiti in coffee-shop toilets to college campuses.
Anti-Semitism’s resurgence has many roots. Some clearly stem from Soviet-style indoctrination of young people – particularly on college campuses – against Zionism, a trend that easily bleeds into anti-Semitism. This is amplified not only by the Qatar-funded broadcaster, Al Jazeera, but also by once-respected institutions like the BBC.
This new anti-Semitic wave differs from that of the Nazi era. Jews are no longer marginalised and politically weak, living in impoverished shtetls in places like Poland. Instead, today’s flashpoints of anti-Semitism are often centres of Jewish success, at levels not seen since the golden age of Spanish Jewry during the Middle Ages.
After the Holocaust, most Jews, as historian Paul Johnson observed, ‘accepted oppression and second-class status’ outside the ghetto in exchange for being left alone. In the decades that followed, however, the formerly marginalised entered what Yuri Slezkine famously called the Jewish Century. Jews became disproportionately represented among Nobel Prize winners, and in the arts, media, Hollywood and leadership circles. After centuries of restraint, there emerged a sense of confidence, even chutzpah, among diaspora Jews, which draws also from Israel’s remarkable, albeit controversial, technological and military triumphs.
Today, this very success has helped fuel the rise of anti-Semitism. The pattern is not new. As historian Ivan Marcus has shown, early medieval anti-Semitism was often sparked by resentment toward Jews as ‘assertive agents’ – a community that combined economic power with an unshakable belief in being God’s chosen people. Spain’s Jews, after all, were not expelled because they were poor or burdensome, but in part because they were skilled in medicine and the trades, and wielded influence even at court.
Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: Tree of Life Synagogue – Memorials to Victims, via Wikimedia. A memorial outside the Tree of Life Congregation Synagogue in Pittsburgh, by Andrea Hanks, in Public Domain.
