Reviewing the National Review

Will they take to heart the words spoken and tears shed at this solemn assembly, and commit to throwing the weight of the relevant authorities in their lands behind the battle against the scourge of modern-day anti-Semitism that threatens Jewish survival?

Or would the following statement, once made by the late Professor Robert Wistrich, be just as valid today? “Dead Jews, it would seem, can do no wrong. But living Jews bent on ensuring their survival are another matter entirely,” declared Wistrich.

That quote appeared in our Jewish Geography section in Issue #66, in July 2005. Cynical as it sounded, Wistrich didn’t have a contemptuous bone in his body. As head of Hebrew University’s Sassoon Center for the Study of Antisemitism and editor of its Antisemitism International journal, he had just published a new work, European Anti-Semitism Reinvents Itself, in which he asserted that Israel’s emergence as a powerful military and economic power from the ashes of the Holocaust “troubled the European mind.”

Five years later, Wistrich waxed philosophical in an interview with my colleague Yonoson Rosenblum, quoting the 20th-century Catholic theologian Jacques Maritain: “Israel is to be found at the very heart of the world’s structure, stimulating it, exasperating it, moving it. Like an alien body, like an activating ferment into the mass, it gives the world no peace, it bars slumber, it teaches the world to be discontented and restless, as long as the world has not its G-d, it stimulates the movement of history. It is the vocation of Israel which the world hates.”