I took most of this summer off from these margins.
It wasn’t planned. The truth is, every time I sat down to write about some awful antisemitic incident that occurred—either here in Colorado, some other state, or some other country—it was already “old news” before I could finish it. Because some other awful antisemitic incident had already occurred. And while I’m glad to see most of these things get some level of coverage, nothing changes. It continues to get worse. Here. Canada. Europe. Everywhere.
That doesn’t mean I’ve tuned out though. My feeds are curated to ensure I see it all. Every day. I wake up to it. I see it throughout the day. It’s often the last thing I’ll see before I turn off the light on my nightstand and try to fall asleep. The news cycle is never-ending. I had to switch my Google alerts to daily digests, because if I just had them ping me with every new occurrence, the resulting cortisol spikes would probably land me in a cardiac care unit.
For most of my journalism career, I’ve tried to keep my focus on antisemitism without engaging in the Israel/Palestine conflict. It’s been a consistent red herring in the discourse because most people can’t separate the two. They see no daylight between the Jewish State and Jews in the diaspora. Anything they see is ingested and composited into a singular tapestry of “The Jews.” There was a time I thought maybe the mainstream was past that.
But as a result of the Israel/Palestine crisis of 2021 and the ensuing wave of Jew-hatred that washed over the shores in the United States, it became clear to me that the world is still the same place for Jews that it was in the time of the Jews under Assyrian oppression. The same place it was for Jews under the yoke of the Babylonians. The same place it was for Jews under Hellenistic law and the Maccabean Revolt. The same place it was a century before the Common Era, when Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio Hispanus exiled us from Rome, and the conquest of Pompey shortly thereafter, and Cicero’s reign shortly after that. The same place it was during the pogrom of Alexandria. The same place it was 30 years later when Tiberius Alexander slaughtered 50,000 Jews in the Alexandria riot. The same place it was after the destruction of the Second Temple. The pogroms of Damascus. The Bar Kokhba revolt that slaughtered more than half a million of us. The codification of the charge of Jewish Deicide when Constantine converted to Christianity. The Roman laws banning Jews from mingling with Christians, making intermarriage punishable by death. The same place where thousands of us were slaughtered under Constantius Gallus’s rule. The first forced conversion under Bishop Severus of Menorca. The establishment of the Codex Theodosianus, banning Jews from myriad professions. The slaughtering of thousands of us in Isfahan in 469 AD. The laws passed by Justinian The Great effectively removing citizenship from Jews throughout the Byzantine Empire. The 2-year-long pogrom from 608–610 in the Byzantine Empire, slaughtering thousands more of us. The Massacre of Banu Qurayza under Muhammed and his Arab Conquest. The slaughter at Khaybar (that gave rise to the chant heard at myriad anti-Israel protests today, “Khaybar, Khaybar, ya yahud!” referencing Islamic conquest of the Jews and the subsequent slaughter and subjugation therein). Scores more examples of expulsion, enslavement, executions, synagogue burnings, bannings. The Inquisition. The Crusades. The rise of the ghettos. Riots. Burnings at the stake. Massacres. Forced conversions to Islam in the Arab world, to Christianity in the West. Myriad blood libels to justify more pogroms, riots and massacres. The publishing of Entdecktes Judenthum (“Judaism Unmasked”) by Johann Andres Eisenmenger in 1711—the earliest work to shape the form of modern antisemitism. Expulsions from Bavaira and Gibralter and Carnola and Styria and Carinthia and Radom and Ukraine and Riga and Breslau and Berlin and Bohemia and Kaunas, and Rhode Island and Torun and Morocco and Jeddah. Massacres in Basra, Alsace, Uman, Libya, Algeria, Tlemecen, Tabriz. The looting and riots of Safed and Allahad. The Damascus Affair. The publishing of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
And yes, it’s still the same place filled with the kinds of hate that led to the Holocaust.
So little seems to have changed except for one thing. There is a Jewish State now. They hated us because we were stateless. Now they hate us because we have a state.
There’s no country on Earth where I think “that country should simply not exist.” I’d wager most people feel the same way. But when it comes to Israel, the standard changes, and somehow all Jews must bear responsibility for anything the government does. When I meet someone from Syria, or Iran, or Russia, or North Korea, etc., my first instinct is curiosity. I’m interested in who they are and what stories they have to tell. I don’t blame Russians as individuals for Putin’s actions. And while I’m certainly not drawing a straight line between Netanyahu and Putin—it’s certainly reasonable to debate the approaches and actions Netanyahu has taken, regardless of your stance. But the double standard here is glaring in terms of the loud drumbeat for Israel’s dismantling that simply doesn’t get applied to any other nation, regardless of that nation’s leader’s actions. Put another way: you can’t fight jihadism with fascism and you can’t fight fascism with jihadism.
Certainly, no one is demanding the dissolution of Pakistan—also created by partition in 1947—and whose crackdown on recent protests has been brutal and oppressive. Yet, for years, people have continued to challenge me when they find out I’m a Jew, saddling me with a purity test out of the gate: what’s my stance? Not, “Hey these are weird times, what’s it like for you?” Not, “I’m interested to know more about who you are as a person.” It’s just, “if you don’t toe my party line about how Israel should be dismantled, then you’re the enemy. You support genocide.” None of them are demanding the dissolution of Iran or any other nation on Earth. Just Israel (and often the United States, but always in relation to Israel).
It’s unbelievably exhausting.
But that’s only one example of the double standards that are applied to Israel and the vast majority of Jews who support its simple existence. When it became evident very early on that rape was wielded against Israelis in the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack of 2023, I witnessed another example that cut deeply. I had a close friend, a woman who had been the victim of sexual violence on multiple occasions. She’s a fierce and outspoken feminist who I admired for her courage and willingness to share her personal stories. And yet, when there was a tidal wave of propaganda flooding social media denying the accounts of women who came forward after the attack, she didn’t bat an eye. She rushed to defend Hamas, embracing the lies; she demand I personally provide her with video evidence of these “so-called rapes.” I was stunned. And it was far from an anomalous experience. It took nearly two years for the United Nations to acknowledge sexual violence was wielded in the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas and has been inflicted on many hostages since. And in that time, the prevailing sentiment I witnessed in the pro-Palestine movement and its associated Leftist spaces was: “Believe all women. Unless they’re Jews.”
The left-most edges of the side of the aisle I reside within have long since abandoned many of their fundamental stances in pursuit of an agenda that eschews historical accuracy, logic and reason in favor of something far more sinister, dressed up in an “oppressed v. oppressor” cloak, steeped in colorism, and disbursed via the most effective misinformation campaign of this century. And it took no time at all, evidenced by the Hamas lies about the explosion at Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza on Oct. 17, 2023, and the subsequent rush to print them by myriad news outlets. By the time those were walked back, the damage had been done. And despite that, the cycle continued numerous times. The most damaging recent example would be the New York Times publishing a misleadingly cropped photo of Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, a Gazan child suffering from a disease that has destroyed his body’s ability to process nutrients, in relation to a story about famine in Gaza. Of course, the original photo was front-page news, while the Times retraction was buried. And there have been dozens of other examples in between.
We live in a post-truth era. The fears of the escalating fascist tendencies of many governments—especially our own—have catalyzed an environment of reactionism, where we only embrace the narratives of those who expertly wield our confirmation biases against us.
Much like how so many of the MAGA faithful would rather deny the obvious Caligulan appetites of their small-fisted mascot than simply acknowledge he does and says the things they like AND is a terrible human being, there are many on the left who will refuse to believe that the side they’re cheering on has been victimized by its own leadership, pays millions every year to Palestinians who murder Jews, and whose focus is not self-determination and nation-building but the absolute destruction of Israel and every Jew the world over. And these groups on the American left do this despite centuries of history that bear out deeply entrenched Jew-hatred since the Arab conquest.
In every instance of the long history of Jew-hatred over the last couple of millennia I abbreviated above, one thing has remained consistent: Antisemitism was the canary in the coal mine, even when the word had yet to be conjured up. It was a bell ringing that signaled the eventual decline of an empire as it succumbed to base bigotry. A bell that tolls for us all.
Two very big social movements are taking place on U.S. soil: the rise of our most fascist regime in modern history, and the loudest and most vicious cycle of antisemitism since Henry Ford published the Dearborn Independent.
What happens next is easy to forecast.
And it’s heartbreaking beyond words.
