Michael Oren
Clarity with Michael Oren, Nov. 19, 2024
“Unwittingly, perhaps, the interviewer drew on timeless tropes and transformed them into unassailable truths. Hers was the Altneu antisemitism.”
The spike in antisemitism globally, and most piercingly in the United States, is hardly news. Neither is the realization that the Jew-hated we now see all around us would have been readily recognizable to our forebears, that the reprieve from it we enjoyed in the decades after the Holocaust has ended, and that the world has simply reverted to form. And yet, there is something about contemporary antisemitism that sets it apart from its earlier and even ancient versions. The distinction dawned on me during an interview with a major American network, brought home by a young and otherwise courteous journalist, on the one-year anniversary of October 7.
“Israeli soldiers in Gaza are obviously seeking revenge,” she began. “Wouldn’t you agree?”
I didn’t. “No, they’re defending their families, their country, their homes.”
“But revenge does play a prominent role…”
“Understandably some of them are angry.” I tried to control myself but failed. “If someone broke into your home, nailed your sister’s legs apart, raped her, then shot her in the head. If that someone also burnt your parents to death in front of you and threw your younger brother into an airless tunnel for a year, beat and starved him, you might be a little angry, too.”
Yet she remained undeterred. “But vengeance is certainly a factor. How else can you explain the devastation? The 41,000 deaths? The women and children…”
