Arthur Herman
Mosaic, Oct. 15, 2024
“That which makes the Jews strong is precisely what drives others to fury and envy.”
After the events of last October 7, most of us assumed—naively as it turned out—that the brutal massacre of 1,200 innocent Israelis would trigger a great outpouring of sympathy and support for Israel. We also hoped it would lead to the definitive repudiation of the kind of hatred of Jews and Judaism that inspired Hamas’s terrible atrocities, and that before October 7 had culminated with the Holocaust.
We were wrong.
On the contrary, the reaction to October 7 entailed a frightening surge in anti-Semitism, especially from the political left. We were stunned and appalled to watch violence unleashed not just against Israel and supporters of Israel. There were actual physical attacks on Jews and Jewish students on America’s most prestigious campuses: according to Hillel International, over ten times as many anti-Semitic incidents took place on campuses between July and September 2024 than during the summer of 2023.
This surge was accompanied by ostracism of anyone—no matter how liberal—the anti-Israel mob decided to label Zionist. In effect, any Jew who didn’t denounce Israel’s actions as “genocide” or justify the brutality of Israel’s enemies, including Hamas, became persona non grata on the left.
A year later is a good time to figure out what is going on.
In the piece I published in Mosaic a year ago, I warned that the October 7 attack on Israel was only part of a larger attack on the West and Western values. That view has become fairly standard among my fellow conservatives, if it wasn’t before. Now, it’s important to turn that perspective around and to recognize the inevitable: that systematic attacks on the West and Western values—expressed through critical Marxism, radical feminism, the transgender ideology, and the entire fabric of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)—would eventually turn against Jews and Judaism. … [To read the full article, click here]
