Wandering Jew

Thirty years ago, two French vulcanologists, a husband and wife team, died during a catastrophic eruption doing what they loved. I am imagining that their last thoughts during the observation of this event were something along the lines of, “Holy cow, we were right, this is what happens.”

Perhaps this is not a great analogy, but all my life I have been fascinated with history, with the Holocaust, and the path the Jewish people have taken through millennia of history. But, even as a late baby boomer Jew born and living in America, I always feared the rise of antisemitism and the consequences.

Like Katia and Maurice Kraft, I am standing on the edge of what I believe is a dangerous eruption, not just in the U.S., but worldwide. I won’t continue with this analogy, useful for a freshman English composition (can anyone say “bubbling caldera”?).

Earlier this year, I took my last graduate course, “Antisemitism in America”. This was, of course, before October 7, and around the time the latest ADL report documented the dramatic increase in antisemitic events in the U.S. As an exercise to document the journalism around an antisemitic topic, I chose the reporting on the war in Ukraine (remember that?) a test case in how the U.S. would respond). I thought I was stretching, but was shocked to find that there is a right wing element in the U.S. that sees Ukraine and the war though traditional tropes of ‘Zionist” world control. Both Ukraine and Russia were variously mentioned as controlled by Jewish interests, and Putin put forth an argument that cleansing Ukraine was ridding it of Nazis. The fact that Ukraine has a Jewish President both bolstered and confused the narrative. The Jerusalem Post reported that the New Hampshire Libertarian Party attacked the idea of aid to Ukraine with a photo of President Zelenskyy with a Hitler mustache painted on. [1]

Is this a digression? Maybe. Why care about Ukraine (don’t get me started). Even earlier this year, aid to Israel was tied to aid to Ukraine, though now the order has switched.

Charlottesville provided us with a clear example of the vitality of the far-right “White Replacement” theory — “Jews will not replace us.”

War in Israel now provides us with the left side of the antisemitic pincer — antizionist antisemitism as a liberal cause célèbre. The net result is to have the brains of young, liberal adults, many on college campuses, spinning in an attempt to rebut the rhetoric.

Enough lecture for today. I write because I welcome discussion on what I am seeing in my America. An America in which in the 1990s antisemitism seemed to be a relic, like Fukuyama’s “End of History.” Is was merely the pause.

Circumstances provide I get to travel across the country. Hannukah week, a happy coincidence. Yes, I will eat. I travel on my stomach, and it will give me a chance, perhaps, for some interaction. Fifteen years ago, I and two family members stopped at a small cafe in Topeka, Kansas, renowned on Food TV for chili. It was about 1 pm. We walked in. There were four of five people, mostly middle aged men. Stone silence. Glares. We walked out. Message received. At the turn of the 20th Century, Topeka had a modest but lively Jewish presence including a synagogue. Most were “peddlers” as that trade had evolved at that time. NetGen went to college and the big city, and the community died (this is true of many places in “flyover country”. I never got my chili but I got an education.

[1] Staff, By Jerusalem Post. “New Hampshire Libertarians Tweet Image of Zelensky with Hitler Mustache.” The Jerusalem Post | JPost.com, September 6, 2022. https://m.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-716454/amp.