Every Saturday before Services, private security arrives to take their places at the doors, and a police car sits, conspicuously, close by. After Tree of Life, after Colleyville, after Charlottesville, after countless MAGA attacks on George Soros and the dog whistle references to ‘cosmopolitan elites’, after Trump’s attacks on American Jews, after tranches of threats, after who knows how many individual attacks, this is how the congregants’ worship at a friend’s synagogue. Anti-Semitism, always an undercurrent in American life, has been renewed in all its venom by Trump, by MAGA, by conspiracy theories that cut across racial boundaries, and by right wing movements worldwide.
Anti-Semitism’s fever has surged in the US and Europe among right wing and fascist groups, but Anti-Semitism itself is not a fever, a crisis of infection in an otherwise healthy body politic. Instead, it is a 2000-year-old chronic pathology, and fever is a symptom, its flash of animation as it surges forth once again.
Anti-Semitism is a philosophy of hatred directed against Jews. It is “protean” in nature. The hatred is malleable. It shifts to whatever motivation is needed: Jews killed Christ. Check. Jews are malefic by nature. Check. Jews are racially offensive. Check. Jews are corrosive “to good order.” Check.
The logic of Anti-Semitism is inexorable and implacable: The Jews are capable of any crime, any misdeed, any sin. Therefore, they can be blamed for everything.
Jews remain Jews no matter what. Therefore, their menace is unalterable, unfixable. Therefore, the elimination of Jews from the body of the nation or from the body politic is the only solution.
We know how this “eliminationist” conclusion played out in Nazi Germany and in too many pogroms to list over hundreds of years in both Russia and Europe. Ordinary men (and women) committed mass murder and enabled the murderers. There is nothing in Americans that makes us exempt from reclaiming such a past and making it our own. You don’t think that we too have beasts and their followers among us? Congress, Twitter, Fox News and right wing talk shows are filled with them. Look around you. We too have plenty of people all too willing to believe in conspiracies, brandish their guns, hate who they are told to hate and who yearn to escape their boredom and purposelessness. And right now, hating Jews is trending.
The quotations are found in Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
