COMPREHENDING JEW-HATRED

Anyone who wants to understand the rise in the persecution of Jews really needs to apprehend what's so unique about it. And to be brutally honest, if we are going to do anything about it—including just coping—it's in our best interest to understand it, something we can only do with some perspective about the unique history of Jew-hatred.

Why do I call it Jew-hatred? Why not antisemitism?

That's just one of the questions I'll be answering over the course of two Shabbat talks on January 16 and 23.

While I’ve spoken about this before and taught two multi-session classes on the topic, I continue to receive requests to address it in other formats. Those requests came with the suggestion that I might distill the most critical elements of that material to speak about on Shabbat. And if I’m going to cover well over 2,000 years of history, two evenings seems like the bare minimum.

The two lectures will be freestanding, and both will be live-streamed and recorded for anyone who can’t attend in person.

Most people are aware of the long-running Christian persecution of Jews, much of it deadly. But our people’s challenges began before Christianity, and we will hear the voices of persecutors—and Jewish defenders—going back more than two millennia.

From there we will move on to learning about the many ways Christians mistreated Jews—how what began as a theological dispute among Jews evolved into almost two millennia of religious harassment, exclusion, and violence. We will also look at the hostile treatment that many Jews suffered in the Islamic world.

At least in sheer numbers, the deadliest form of Jew-hatred was the racialized variety that made escape through religious conversion or assimilation impossible. Perfected by the Nazis, six million Jews were slaughtered less than a century ago. We have still not recovered our numbers.

The third type of Jew-hatred that I will be addressing is the antizionism increasingly shaping the world Jews are living in now. Far from the benign-sounding “criticism of Israel,” today’s antizionism is not opposition to Zionism any more than antisemitism represents opposition to “Semitism” (which, of course, is not a real thing). Like both theological and racialized Jew-hatred, contemporary antizionism operates (from the left and the right) through repetition and re-staging of familiar libels and conspiracy theories—now aimed at delegitimizing the very existence of a Jewish state.

That there are at least three distinctive—though frequently overlapping—manifestations of Jew-hatred underscores something scholars and Jews have long understood: Jew-hatred is a mutating phenomenon. It evolves to meet the needs of those who require a scapegoat.

We are fifteen million people on this planet of 8.23 billion.

And yet we dominate the imaginations and headlines of every nation on earth in malignant narratives and fever dreams that endanger us wherever we live. And chase us away.

The goal of my presentations is not to score arguments, but to cultivate clarity. History does not repeat itself exactly. But it does rhyme — especially when we fail to name what we are experiencing. As Humanistic Jews we are committed to learning from experience and acting upon it.

I hope you'll join us on January 16 and 23, in person and/or streaming live and on-demand at our YouTube channel.