"If you’re in a position to have a not-yet-frum Shabbos guest or two for a Shabbos or Yom Tov meal, just do it"
Thank you for Gedalia Guttentag’s excellent — and terrifying — exploration of the anti-Semitism that has metastasized as Israel defended itself from an onslaught of Hamas’s rockets. He skillfully described the violent assaults and horrifying shouts of mobs, the vile hate and threats spreading across social media.
And then there is the less blatant, but no less frightening, anti-Semitism found in New York Times op-eds and AP articles, in the hundreds of accompanying comments vilifying Israel, and in tweets and quotes from your average young, woke professional too genteel to engage in blatant profanity or hate, but whose one-sided condemnation of Israel is no less frightening. Jews being blamed, investigated, condemned for actions like no other country ever has been? Stop this story now; we’ve heard it before and we know how it ends.
Seeing this hatred, I’m not sure how to react. My gut reaction is to do something: Tweet! Write an op-ed! Call out in self-defense! But is anyone listening? Does anyone care? And is this what we’re meant to be doing? Maybe I’ve just forgotten — or am lucky and young enough not to have experienced much of — Eisav sonei l’Yaakov. Maybe I should be taking more of a historical perspective, realizing that this is only the latest iteration of the hate that has stalked us for thousands of years. As a wise friend told me, “We’re pretty spoiled these days in our expectations of the non-Jews — not only shouldn’t they kill us, put us in ghettos, tax us into poverty, or draft our sons into their armies, we also want them to say nice things about us?”
Still, the feeling of that tightening vise is hard to ignore. “I came to American in 1949,” my grandmother told me last week. “And I can’t remember any time when the anti-Semitism was so bad.”
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