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Irwin B. Levin

The Banality of Hate: When the Unthinkable Becomes a Soundbite

That Monday evening, I joined nearly a thousand members of the Indianapolis Jewish community and others in a solemn gathering to mark the one-year anniversary of the October 7 massacre in Israel. The day when Hamas terrorists descended upon Israeli towns with a medieval barbarism that left 1,200 dead, thousands more wounded, and 251 people—men, women, children, from ages 6 months to 85 —dragged into Gaza as hostages. We remembered and prayed for the dead, for the living, and for those still languishing in Hamas’s underground dungeons. Indiana’s governor and Israelis who had survived the atrocities addressed the audience, but no words could truly capture the weight of the day.

Before the event, I was asked to join a handful of others in a press conference. A semicircle of reporters waited in a conference room, cameras fixed, microphones properly placed, the modern tools of mass storytelling at the ready. It was routine until it wasn’t.

The usual questions came: how do we honor the memory of the dead? What more can be done to secure the hostages’ release? What does October 7 mean for the future of Israel?

Then, as the session was winding down, a young reporter, barely out of her twenties and dressed in blue jeans and a sweatshirt, asked a question delivered with a casualness that left me cold, felt like a punch to the gut:

“What would you say to people who say Jews aren’t human?”

The question took me back to those scenes we’ve seen too often on college campuses: mobs chanting, placards held high, calling for the “liberation” of Palestine in terms that erase not just a state, but a people. The very essence of this rhetoric dehumanizes. “Jews aren’t human”—isn’t that the unspoken message behind such calls? And isn’t it the same rhetoric we heard in the run-up to the Holocaust?

I need you to understand something. It’s not about whether this young reporter believes that statement or not. The shock was that she had heard it. Somewhere. Maybe once. Maybe often. But the fact that she even thought to ask it revealed something profoundly disturbing– that this idea, that Jews are less than human, had enough traction in her world that she felt it worthy of public discussion. She threw it out there, like it was another question, like asking for the weather. It was a stark reminder of how much the old poison of anti-Semitism, that most persistent of hatreds, has resurfaced in our current moment; that it is hardly confined to history books or distant lands.

Across university campuses, you can hear chants of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” – a slogan that isn’t about statehood or justice, but a genocidal call for the eradication of Israel and the 7 million Jews who live there. It is a call for the complete elimination of the entire Jewish people, premised on the same belief that Jews aren’t human. And you don’t call for that unless, in some part of your soul, you’ve decided that Jews aren’t human.

My answer to the reporter was simple: I wouldn’t waste my breath. If someone thinks Jews aren’t human, they likely feel the same way about Blacks, about Asians, about LGBTQ people. People who deny the humanity of others are not open to rational conversation. It’s not a matter of persuasion, but of pathology. And that’s the truly terrifying part – the realization that such dehumanizing views are not only alive but thriving in corners of society we once considered enlightened. That’s the terrifying reality we face right now.

Antisemitism, like all forms of hate, just needs a foothold. Jews take comfort in the support of those who stand with them, but we also recognize that the hatred never went away – it just learned to hide itself better until it didn’t have to anymore. We’re watching the world, sliding backward, step-by-step, chant by chant, question by question. The reporter’s words, the ones that haunted me that night, were not just a question. They were a signal that we are still fighting to be seen as human – and when we allow anyone’s humanity to be questioned, when we tolerate such hate, we lose something essential. We risk not only the lives of Jews, but the moral foundation of our world.

And that is the legacy of October 7. Not just the grief, not just the mourning, but the unsettling knowledge that the hate which fueled that attack is not as far from home as we might like to think.

About the Author
Irwin Levin is an American lawyer who has been involved in legal issues involving Jewish interests for decades. He served on the Executive Committee of ligation against Swiss Banks on behalf of Holocaust victims and other Holocaust-related cases and has provided legal advice regarding campus activities post October 7. He is a long time activist for Israel and has held leadership positions in AIPAC and Birthright among other Jewish and Israel related organizations.