Not much has changed

My sister just sent me a video that was aired on a major television network in Vienna. It was a five minute report about the Stibl, the small synagogue my father attended throughout his lifetime.

The interviewer, who had met my father before, listened as my father made a statement that struck me with particular force.

Why?

Because only today, I had come across almost the identical observation in Dara Horn’s book, The Final Solution to the Jewish Question.

I still have a few pages left to read, but before finishing the book, I felt compelled to share these thoughts with the readers of my blog.

How astonishingly ignorant so many people remain.

When I first picked up the book and began reading, I was ready to put it aside. It was simply too painful to revisit the horrors of October 7.

Those terrible days, when the images would not leave our minds and sleep seemed impossible, are still painfully close. To be confronted once again with those atrocities, juxtaposed with the horrors of the Holocaust, was more than I could bear.

So I closed the book.

But that very same week, on Shabbat morning, Rabbi Perlstein, the assistant rabbi of our shul, delivered a riveting speech in which he mentioned the very book I had abandoned.

He loved it.

His enthusiasm persuaded me to give it another chance.

This time I skipped the pages that were simply too difficult for me to absorb and continued reading.

And suddenly, I could not get enough.

I found myself turning page after page, eagerly anticipating what the author might offer as a solution to that ancient and seemingly incurable disease called antisemitism.

But then I came to a passage that made me stop.

Dara Horn described visiting Harvard University, her alma mater, and listening to students who were supposedly among the brightest young minds in the country, selected from thousands of applicants.

They were asked a simple question:

What percentage of the world’s population do you think is Jewish?

These bright young minds at Harvard, supposedly among the best and brightest, gave an answer so far removed from reality that I found myself staring at the page in disbelief. How could students of such a prestigious university be so astonishingly misinformed about the Jewish population of the world?

Only moments earlier, I had watched my father make an almost identical observation in that television interview in Vienna.

He had said:

“Why don’t you ask anyone walking through the streets of Vienna how many Jews live in Austria? They will tell you 300,000 or even half a million.”

Yet the reality is that Austria has only approximately 10,000 Jews.

My father understood something that these highly educated students apparently did not.

The Jewish people represent approximately 0.2 percent of the world’s population.

Not even one percent.

And yet, in the imagination of so many, we are everywhere.

Too numerous. Too influential. Too powerful.

2011. Vienna.

2026. Harvard.

Fifteen years have passed. Different countries, different generations, different levels of education.

And still, the same astonishing misconceptions.

My father, a survivor of Auschwitz and other concentration camps, had witnessed where such beliefs could lead.

He understood that antisemitism does not always begin with violence. Sometimes it begins with ignorance, with exaggerated numbers, with the conviction that Jews are somehow controlling a world in which they constitute only a tiny minority.

And that is what troubles me most.

We have advanced in science, technology, and education beyond anything my father could have imagined.

Yet when it comes to the Jewish people, some of the oldest prejudices remain stubbornly alive.

My father recognized them in Vienna in 2011.

I am reading about them at Harvard in 2026.

Not much has changed.