A Convenient Place to Hide

Not long ago I was texting with a colleague I have known for years, a serious person who has spent a long career in and around public life. We were talking about the antisemitism rising inside his own party, the kind now coming from newly elected officials who no longer bother to whisper. His response arrived quickly, almost with relief: “I told you Bibi was going to hurt you.”

I wrote back a question. “If Bibi resigned tomorrow, would those same officials drop the hateful speech?”

The conversation changed topics. There was no answer.

I have thought about that ever since, because I believe the non-answer is the answer, and because my colleague is not a bad man. He is something more common and more dangerous. He is a wishful thinker.

Wishful thinking is the most underdiagnosed condition in the fight against antisemitism. We spend our energy on the haters and almost none on the people who explain the haters away: the good, decent, well-positioned people who need to believe this hatred is about something. About a prime minister. About a policy. About a war. Because if it is about something, then it’s rational, and if it’s rational, it’s negotiable, and if it’s negotiable, it will end. Change the policy, change the government, and the hate resolves itself like a fever breaking.

It’s a comforting theory. History has tested it many times. It has failed every time.

The Haggadah tells us b’chol dor vador, in every generation they rise against us. We usually read that line as fatalism, a shrug across the centuries. I have come to read it as pattern recognition. When the age was religious, we were the Christ-killers. When the age was racial, we were the contaminating race. When the age was economic, we were the bankers and the Bolsheviks, somehow both at once. Now the age is geopolitical, and so we are all agents of a government most of us do not vote for, in a country most of us do not live in. The costume changes. The target never does.

Let me be careful, because caution here is honesty, not weakness. Criticism of the Israeli government is not antisemitism. Israelis criticize their government with a ferocity that would make an American blush. Israel may have distasteful politicians, people in power who say horrific things. But using that as a reason to ban Jews from your coffee shop is not political protest. That is antisemitism.

That legitimate distinction has become a convenient place to hide. The test is not what people say they oppose; the test is where the anger lands. And lately it has been landing on Jews: in New York, in Washington, in Colorado, in California. I do not need to recite the details. You know them. No one spray-paints a Chinese restaurant to protest Beijing. No one demands that Russian émigrés denounce the Kremlin before joining a coalition. Only Jews are handed the loyalty test.

So, it’s time to look this evil in the eye and call it what it is. We cannot hide from it, and we should stop trying. Nor is it helpful to keep providing cover for people who do not want cover. We have become a community of generous interpreters, forever explaining that people who say one thing out loud actually mean another. They don’t. These antisemites are vocal, and now they are powerful. They mean what they say and say what they mean. And clamoring to stay in a club that does not want you, a political party or group that has espoused antisemitism, is worse than futile. It’s unseemly, and it will not end well.

Here is what makes this hard to write. Wishful thinking is not the sin of our enemies. It’s the sin of our friends, and of ourselves. My colleague was not excusing hatred out of malice. He was protecting his map of the world, a map in which his political home is the safe ground and the danger that always comes from somewhere else. To answer my question honestly, he would have had to redraw that map. Most people, given the choice between redrawing the map and ending the conversation, end the conversation.

I understand the temptation. I feel it too. The Jews of every prior generation believed the hatred was about the moneylending, the accent, the politics, the “something”, and that once it was gone, they would at last be regarded as neighbors. The something was always a pretext. We were the point. This sickness has not yet reached every corner of American life. That is no comfort. Just because the disease has not infected every cell does not mean the body is not sick.

So, I return to my phone, to a question still sitting there, unanswered, in a conversation that moved on to other things.

“If Bibi resigned tomorrow, would the hate stop?”

My colleague could not bring himself to type “no.” The change of subject typed it for him. We know the answer. It is time to say it out loud.