Antisemitism says more about the haters than it does about Jews

It’s often called the “world’s oldest hatred.” And rightly so. Antisemitism — Jew hatred — predates Christianity by more than a thousand years and Islam by longer still. This odious mindset finds sanctuary within every nation and among adherents of all political affiliations.

While those who malign Jews and Israel today unconvincingly claim otherwise, Jew hatred past and present doesn’t arise from what Jews do. Rather, it spawns from the fact that Jews exist and have outlived those who seek our death or subjugation. In every era, justification of antisemitism mirrors only the malice of those who advance it.

A recent report from The Ohio Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights documents the rise of antisemitism in my home state but its findings are broadly applicable. It notes that “The first quarter of the 21st century has seen the greatest level of antisemitic animus in [United States] history.” Considering that history, that’s quite a serious condemnation.

The U.S. restricted immigration of Jews fleeing the pogroms in Eastern Europe more than a century ago, my paternal grandparents among them. They found sanctuary in Argentina for three years before they were allowed to come here but lost their first child there in a tragedy they believed to be the result of antisemitism.

The U.S. government also restricted immigration of Jews fleeing what became the Holocaust that murdered half of all Jews alive at that time in the world. Even those born here saw many U.S. universities enforcing quotas that limited Jewish admissions. Jews were also banned from membership in many social and civic institutions well into the 1970s. The authors of the report surely knew this history yet concluded that Jew hatred is even worse today.

The latest pretextual excuse is that most of the current animus toward Jews and the world’s only Jewish majority nation stems from Israel’s war against Islamic terrorism embodied by Hamas, Hezbollah, and their Iranian sponsors. It doesn’t.

For decades, these groups have engaged in terrorist attacks targeting Israeli civilians, culminating in the Hamas rampage on October 7, 2023 — the greatest murder of Jews, just for being Jews, since the Holocaust. Pro-Palestinian (and therefore inescapably pro-Hamas) protests began in Western cities and university campuses on October 8, before any Israeli military response. Those who marched that day weren’t protesting a war because there wasn’t one yet. They were celebrating a massacre.

Even using Hamas’s own inflated casualty figures, the number of military and civilians killed in Gaza is dwarfed by those in Muslim nations slain at the hands of other Muslims. The same activists who’ve bemoaned a non-existent genocide in Gaza have sat on their coddled backsides while more than a million civilian deaths from Islamist bloodlust filled graveyards in Syria, Sudan, Yemen, and Iran.

The silence of Western activists about these cases is matched only by their ignorance. Many of the blame-the-Jews crowd can’t name the river from which, or the sea to which, all of Israel’s Jews should be driven. 

More than two-thirds of current United Nations member states have been recognized since Israel’s founding in 1948, including 40 with Muslim majorities. Many of those new members were previously colonial territories, yet only Israel is demonized as an illegitimate, “settler-colonial” enterprise that has no right to exist.

This is a 21st-century Marxist framing of world affairs from a contrived victim-oppressor perspective. Hatched within the halls of Western academia, it places white people of European ancestry at the center of all modern ills. It’s a guilt-ridden exercise of self-flagellation that ignores all human history before it and excuses the barbarous hordes of Hamas and Hezbollah as justified “resistance.” It’s ahistorical garbage that belongs in the dumpster, not the curriculum.

The point isn’t that Jews are perfect. No humans are. But those who see only Jews as the cause of their or our country’s problems are antisemitic by default. Those who deem only Israel unworthy of nationhood, secure borders, and the resources to defend itself from those overtly calling for its annihilation are equally antisemitic. They aren’t objecting to Jews’ or Israel’s actions; they’re objecting to our existence. That’s why anti-Zionism is antisemitism.

And this is where the report’s recommendation for anodyne “education about the history of all racial and religious bigotry in America” falls short. The report’s dissent, written by Professor David Forte, joined by the committee chairman and another member, makes the case:

“First, the recommendation undervalues the particular virulence of antisemitism today, homogenizing the Jewish experience with others and thereby devaluing it. Second, and most disturbingly, it perpetuates the narrative of the victim and perpetrator, the evil that the United States has been to minorities throughout its history, and validates the kind of culture so prevalent on university campuses of hatred for the other. If followed, it will not ameliorate antisemitism but strengthen the very cultural grounding of it.”

Of course education is necessary. But teaching grievance about our imperfections rather than inculcating gratitude for all we have achieved to overcome our flaws will consistently fail to teach us how to discern right from wrong. That’s how so many have come to look at the medieval savagery Hamas gleefully broadcast to the world on October 7, and still conclude that somehow Israel and the Jews deserved it.

Jews are so often the target of hate because for our entire history we’ve intentionally stood apart from the crowd, following our own path. With no tradition of proselytizing or forcing others to our faith, we’ve always been ‘the other.’ That made us an easy target. No longer.

We’ve long known that too often our neighbors tolerated our differences when it served their interests until their own failures demanded a scapegoat. The mechanized murder of the Holocaust and the cowardice of those who watched it happen taught us that never again would we put our lives at the mercy of others’ tolerance.

Three-quarters of a century since then, the successes of barely more Jews in the tiny nation of Israel than were slaughtered in the Holocaust have made the failures of the neighboring cultures too much for them to bear. And the failure of most Western nations to appreciate and teach the successes of their own cultures has clouded their views. 

Antisemitism is one of those hatreds that reflects only the inadequacies of the hater — and the mirror never lies.