Today’s Antisemitism: Liberal Jews Face Harsh Reality

by Roger L. Simon

Way back in the Early Paleolithic Days of Nov. 13, 2023, but five weeks or so after the horrific Hamas invasion of Southern Israel, Charles Fain Lehman wrote at City Journal:

“After the October 7 terrorist attack, many American Jews have stomached two shocks: the shock of Hamas’s brutality, and the shock of their putative political allies’ support for the brutes. Liberal Jews are not only horrified by campus chants of ’there is only one solution: Intifada, revolution.’ They are also surprised.”

Surprised? Really? What planet do these “liberals” actually live on?

Planet Liberal, I suppose. I have some idea what that’s like. I lived there myself until approximately the mid-1990s and can attest that orb is made almost entirely of sand—so you can stick your head in it and avoid knowing what’s actually happening in the real world. The corollary is you don’t have to have your wonderful, often remunerative, life disrupted in any way.

Meanwhile, antisemitism has been growing in America pretty much non-stop for the last 30 or 40 years. Much of it was on the right years ago, but recently, and for quite a while actually, it has been predominantly on the left.

This too is bewildering to the so-called liberals and progressives who are more comfortable in an increasingly distant past, when the right were the bad guys. They act and vote as if things had not changed. And yet they have to an extraordinary extent.

Just yesterday (April 10), we learned that bags with antisemitic flyers accompanied by what looks like poison, possibly rat poison, are being found all over Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. It’s apparently the second time this has happened.

A couple of days before some character not in Tehran but in Michigan was leading his followers in boisterous chants of “Death to America! Death to Israel!”

It was a dominant story on (some parts) of cable television, but nothing much happened.

I could go on—myriad such incidents have been happening recently with more than 3,000 antisemitic acts (up 361 percent) being reported since Oct. 7—but this is for an article, not a book.

At the same time, inflation is rocketing up and has been, more or less, for several years. Just yesterday (April 10), it reached new, frightening levels. The stock market is crashing. Ever heard of that before?

You probably have, but if not, have you read any books or seen any movies about the Weimar Republic lately? Perhaps playing this little number from “Cabaret” will refresh your memory. (“Fatherland, Fatherland, show us the sign. Tomorrow belongs to me”—only whose Fatherland will it be this time?)

In those days, the Jews were the proverbial “canaries in the coal mine.” They are again now. My evangelical friends seem to know that, but not all my Jewish friends.

If it seems I am angry at a number of my fellow American Jews, I have to acknowledge that I have been for some time. Their blindness astounds me.

Devout Christians and Jews have at the heart of their faiths a call to charity. They also have the foundations of their faith (“nature’s God”), which is the basis for the United States of America, which we find in those magnificent documents, the Declaration and the Constitution.

Leaving aside that “classical liberalism” is an 18th-century idea closer to today’s libertarianism than anything we would recognize as modern liberalism, it’s fair to ask if today’s liberals believe in anything anymore.

They appear to ride around passively on the coattails of “progressives” who are more or less socialist-communists of one stripe or another. Their ideas are as old as the Fabian hills and have never made for anything resembling progress. On the more communist extremes, they have created a lot of something resembling, in fact, more than resembling, mass death.

My message to those “Liberal Jews” is, yes, you can change. Although you probably hate me for saying so, you can wake up in the real, not the phony “woke” sense. It will actually make you happy, also not in the fake sense of the globalist’s lie. As Hillel said, “If not now, when.”

First published in the Epoch Times.