The Western Liberation of Jew-Hatred

Eighty years is a lifetime. In a historical context, it is the mere blink of an eye.

The Second World War, and with it the Holocaust, ended 80 years ago.

After the Inquisition, the blood libels, the pogroms, the dhimmi status in Arab lands, and finally the gas chambers, it seemed, for a fleeting moment, that Jew-hatred had gone out of style.

Germany went through a program of re-education. The Holocaust was taught in schools around the world. It looked as if Jews, especially American Jews in the Golden Medina, had finally overcome two thousand years of persecution.

Then came October 7, 2023.

By October 8, the shift had begun. Nearly two years later, antisemitism or more honestly, Jew-hatred  is not only alive and well, it is flourishing.

The Gaza war, fueled by Qatari and other Arab media and by Jewish naïveté, gave much of the Western world permission to do what they had secretly wanted for decades: free themselves of Holocaust guilt.

For years, the memory of six million murdered Jews sat heavily on Europe and the Christian West. It meant remembering not only the victims but also their own silence, their own complicity, their own guilt. Every museum, every testimony, every commemoration carried the same unspoken message: you were part of it.

What a relief, then, to shrug it off. To say: Look, the Jews are no different. They are the oppressors now. The victims have become perpetrators. We do not need to feel guilty anymore. And what a joy it seems to be  (almost a celebration)  to hate Jews openly again.

The younger generations make it easier. In North America, many know almost nothing of the history. Whatever scraps they learned in school are drowned out by TikToks, slogans, and hashtags.

With their help, the West can not only cast off guilt but also take up a new fashionable cause: a revival of Jew-hatred dressed as social justice.

Even young Jews in the Diaspora, clinging desperately to remnants of belonging, tell themselves it is Zionism that endangers them. If only they criticize Israel loudly enough, if only they distance themselves from the Jewish state, perhaps they will be spared.

They are wrong.

History has shown again and again that Jew-hatred does not distinguish between the Zionist and the anti-Zionist, the religious and the secular, the proud Jew and the apologetic one.

Back in 2021, Dara Horn titled her book People Love Dead Jews. It rang true at the time: the world preferred Jews when they were silent, memorialized, or buried. But now we see that even that was too generous. People do not love dead Jews either. What they love is the freedom of hating Jews, without guilt, whether we are alive or dead.

And once that door is opened, the rest follows. It begins with “Zionists,” then moves to synagogues, to Jews walking down the street, to the old claims of Jewish control over money, media, and governments. The mask has slipped.

I am traveling soon to North America with my eighteen-year-old daughter, and will meet my twenty-six-year-old son and his girlfriend there. My family called with advice: Prepare the kids. You will see protests, signs, bumper stickers. The two older ones have Israeli accents. They will be recognized.

“Recognized?” I laughed it off. “Oh please, it is not 1938.”

My father, born in Budapest in 1942, a child Holocaust survivor, did not laugh. He said only this:

“It is 1938.”