Anti-Semitism Is Getting Me Down

My Tishah B’Av reading consisted of Simcha Bunem Unsdorfer’s The Yellow Story: A Boy’s Story of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Written very shortly after the war, The Yellow Star records in excruciating detail the daily life in the extermination camps, including the unrelenting sadism of the SS guards and officers. Like Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the narrow focus on every aspect of the ordeal forces us to confront the enormity of the whole.

In the midst of my reading, a disturbing thought came to me: This is what those who accuse Israel of “genocide” mean. That thought soon gave way to outrage. The comparison of Israel’s efforts to halt Hamas missile barrages on Israel’s civilian population by destroying Hamas’s military infrastructure, almost all of which is deliberately located in civilian neighborhoods, to the industrial-scale, deliberate murder of 10,000 Jews a day in Auschwitz is obscene.

Chants of “Jews to the gas” or “Hitler was right” that were once heard only in European rallies against Israel have made their way to American campuses as well. On a daily basis, one reads of another assault upon identifiable Jews and Jewish institutions, from Poway to Pittsburgh to Monsey to Fort Lee to Boston.

But the physical threats are only part of the story — and I’m not sure the worst part. Anti-Semitism has gone mainstream, or is at least tolerated, in institutions that once would have been thought to be bastions against it. Here is a very small sample of some recent emails.