Nothing New Under the Sun: 1925 and 2025

It is sometimes said that Jews are the ‘canary in the coal mine’ — an early indicator of bad things to come. It is especially often heard these days, mostly in connection with dark premonitions about the past repeating itself. While mostly used by well meaning people, I have always found this dictum a little unnerving. As if Jews are merely a litmus test on whom people can see early the bad thing that is about to befall them, the actual populace. But that’s beside the point at the moment, because this article is about the sentiment behind the statement: are the mines of 2025 going to be like those of 1925? Is the canary getting lightheaded? 

The parallels between now and the first-roaring-and-then-weeping 20s of the last century are many: a global pandemic, the promised return of American dynamism (and the corresponding limits on immigration to it). A rightward move in politics across Europe, a revolt in Syria. Failure of the “return to normalcy”, the threat from Russia, the threat from Fascism. Innovations in the liquid-fueled rocket arena, the film All Quiet on the Western Front winning an Academy Award. People going crazy for an American in Paris, and the ’24 Olympics being held there. Both decades brought life changing new technology: the 1920s gave us automobiles, phones and film, while a century later we got AI, Tesla and TikTok.

But soon, the Great Depression shattered the 1920s into pieces, and eventually lead to the terrible thirties and fatal forties: WWII and the Shoah. The signs of this were evident in 1925. Mein Kampf was published that year, and while antisemitism had been on the rise up to that point, things certainly heated up around the middle of the 1920s. The decade was soon engulfed in a maelstrom that, in just ten years, would lead to the Nurnberg Laws (via scores of pogroms, the institution of quotas, blood libels and witch-hunts). So, are we there yet? Is it, in some crucial way, 1925 again? 

While it is always easier to connect the dots after the fact, events of the last couple of years do read like the lyrics to a Billy Joel song about starting fires, and the “criticism of Israel” banner apparently provides cover for open antisemitism and violence against Jews. Israeli football fans are getting beaten in Amsterdam, a synagogue burns in Australia, and vandalism affects kosher stores all over the West. “Zionists” are being banned from events, antisemitic hate crime stats are in the triple digits all over the world, and the shocking, but apparently socially acceptable, reactions to October 7 run the gamut from indifference to actual pride and joy. University protests turn violent, gunmen approach Jewish schools and Israeli embassies. Ireland, Thailand, Chabad in Dubai. Hostage posters are ripped down, a BLM chapter uses paraglider imagery, people search for Jews at an airport in Russia. Bricks are thrown through windows of shops and homes. There are accusations of genocide, and old conspiracies regarding Jewish world domination are resurrected; antisemitism is trending with the youth. Literal Holocaust denial swarms like darts from the mouths of the figureheads of terror straight into the minds of the online West. 

One hundred years after it was cordially invited into the fancy coffee houses and distinguished salons of Europe, the oldest hatred in the world returns with fresh vigor, rebranded as anti-zionism. And all of this set to the tune of deafening silence.

Why is there silence, exactly? When covid was blamed, entirely unjustly, on Asians in New York, didn’t the city go to great lengths to celebrate the Chinese new year? Don’t Islamophobes never have a place in the world? Does systemic racism and discrimination not need to be rooted out wherever it may sprout? So, then, where are the speeches, the gestures, the helping hands, and why aren’t they anywhere? Here is the hard truth: because it isn’t politically expedient, just like it wasn’t in 1925. 

Looking at the two decades, a century apart but much too close for comfort, one thing is thankfully obvious: the one crucial difference between 1925 and 2025 is the existence of Israel. And while many chalk all of the antisemitic events above up to precisely that, we need only to set the clock back a hundred years for these same sort of things to be seen, minus the apparent cause of it, a tiny patch of land in the Levant. Because what Israel actually does instead of creating antisemitism is shield against it. And therein lies the major difference for Jews today compared to those of a century ago: their fate, no matter how precarious it may seem, no longer hangs in the balance, no longer is at the mercy of masses out for their destruction. 

And yes, even for those Jews who today publicly, loudly and proudly disavow Israel to join the screaming crowds in rising up against it, or fashion themselves entirely disconnected from it and light Hanukkah candles just for the glow, even for those who cast their lot with people who will turn on them when push finally comes to shove, Israel will be there. Because that is what it does. So today, unlike in 1925, the canary is free to simply fly out of the coal mine and settle in its native land.