Claire—David Bezmozgis has written an article in the Globe and Mail expressing a sentiment I’ve heard recently from almost every Jew I know. “The Jews of my generation thought they’d be exempt from history,” he writes. “They were wrong.”
In the weeks since Hamas massacred some 1,400 Israelis and abducted more than 200 others into Gaza, Jews around the world, including in Canada and the United States, have come to the shocking realization that a significant number of their fellow citizens are indifferent to their pain, openly celebrate it or, under the right conditions, would inflict more. Not only Jews have come to this realization, but all people of conscience who had believed that antisemitism was a stale anachronism—not entirely vanquished but practiced by a depraved minority of extremists. Evidence to the contrary, offered up at university campuses, public marches, and in statements made—or conspicuously not made—by various groups and institutions, has revealed that many people one did not expect to detest Jews seem to detest Jews. This has been particularly painful for Jews who align themselves with the political left, since much of this animosity has come from people whom they considered friends and allies.
There is a set of suppressed premises here. To witness this recrudescence of lust for Jewish blood causes every Jew to wonder if antisemitism is simply ineradicable, like a genetic defect.
That antisemitism was ineradicable was Theodore Herzl’s conclusion, of course, except that the existence of a Jewish state has done nothing to mitigate it, as he believed it would. And so, many Jews now suspect, we are doomed. The world’s antisemitism at times goes into remission, but it will always return, vile and murderous as ever, and nothing can be done about it.
But if it is understandable for Jews to suspect that antisemitism is somehow an idea with supernatural immortality, it is also superstitious and fatalistic. It prevents us from looking at this problem clearly. The idea that antisemitism is ineradicable makes no sense. There is no such thing as an antisemitism gene. There is no antisemitism instinct.
