A hatred ancient and vile
Jews around the world today celebrate Purim with parties, treats and drinking, to commemorate the Jews of ancient Persia being saved from destruction at the hands of the evil vizier Haman. It’s the story of anti-Semitism, the hatred that has its own special name — and that disgracefully is resurgent in the greatest, freest country that has ever been.
No, no one in America today is marked for state-sanctioned destruction by virtue of their religion. But in 2017, the sudden and savage spread of thuggish threats and age-old smears is alarming.
We are suffering an unprecedented national wave of bomb threats against Jewish institutions from Brooklyn to California.
And the toppling of gravestones in Jewish cemeteries.
And a spike in bigotry online, including the devious use of pictures of people being burned in ovens and other Holocaust tropes.
It must stop. Not because 100 U.S. senators rightly demand action, as does the President, the governor and the mayor, but because it is the disease of a sick society.
Since antiquity, from the end of the Jewish commonwealth until the founding of the modern State of Israel in 1948, Jews have been minorities in every country. They have also been scapegoats and targets.
America was different, with Jews granted full political rights at the birth of the Republic.
In 1790, his first year in office, before the Bill of Rights was ratified, George Washington wrote to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, R.I.:
“May the children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
To be clear: Not every seeming act of anti-Semitism is motivated by animus against Jews. Indeed, the first man arrested for a rash of bomb threats was driven mostly by a grudge against an ex.
But the few acts to which that suspect has been attached were a small fraction of the total — a total that grows seemingly every day.
It would be dangerously ahistorical to liken today’s outburst of American anti-Semitism to its murderous foreign antecedents, from the czar’s pogroms to the Germans’ genocide.
But it is undeniable that those who seek to stereotype Jews and sow fear and hatred toward them feel emboldened in recent months.
On Purim, Jews spin noisemakers to drown out the name Haman. We cannot silence anti-Semitic bigotry in America today, but we can and must defeat it.