Bret Stephens
NY Times, Oct. 19, 2023
“Where does all this hatred come from? If your answer is Israel, then, to borrow a line I once heard from Leon Wieseltier, you aren’t explaining antisemitism; you’re replicating it.”
This will be my last column for the year, and it will be more personal than most. It’s an effort to explain, to myself as much as to readers, why I can’t stop writing about Oct. 7 and its aftermath.
A few weeks ago, my mother was watching footage of a Jewish student being taunted and mobbed by anti-Israel demonstrators at Harvard after he tried to film them. “I was born in hiding,” she told me. “I don’t want to die in hiding.”
My mother was born in Milan in 1940, to a family that had fled the Bolsheviks in Moscow and then, a few years later, the Nazis in Berlin. She was baptized to avoid suspicion; one of her earliest memories is of being abruptly hidden under a nun’s habit. It was only after the war, after she arrived in New York as a refugee, that she learned she was Jewish. America, to her, was the land in which you didn’t have to hide.
That’s no longer true. Well before Oct. 7, Jews were tucking their Stars of David under their collars or hiding their kipas under baseball caps to avoid being shunned or harassed. Synagogues and Jewish community centers were under constant armed guard. The ultra-Orthodox — who, courageously, do not hide their identity from anyone — were routinely assaulted in their communities by bullies who think it’s fun to sucker-punch a Jew. But that reality was shamefully underreported by news organizations that otherwise see themselves as champions of the marginalized and oppressed.
Everything that was true before Oct. 7 became more so after it. Hate crimes against Jews, which had nearly quintupled in the previous 10 years, also quintupled from Oct. 7 to Dec. 7 compared to the same period in 2022. Subtext became text: “Gas the Jews” was the chant heard from protesters at the Sydney Opera House, “From the river to the sea” from the quads of once-great American universities. The same students who had been carefully instructed in the nuances of microaggressions suddenly went very macro when it came to making Jews feel despised.
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