This post is in two parts. The first part is an essay that I wrote in my notebook on January 10, 2024 shortly after the illegal excavation at the Chabad compound on Eastern Parkway was discovered.
The second part is a small batch of photos of the candle lighting at the Radomer Mutual Culture Center's Holocaust Memorial service.
Reading this essay the day after attending the service I decided to post it. Some current news events are foreshadowed here and I found ti worth rereading. I hope you do too.
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| Radomer Mutual Culture Center Holocaust Menorah |
1/10/2024
The sudden appearance in the news of Chabad, events at its headquarters and the division between the Messianists and the Chabad mainstream – who may or may not be crypto-Messianists but have some sympathy for Schneerson as Messiah serves as inspiration for the antisemites who’ve come crashing out from beneath their rocks recently. There is a confluence of events that begins with the eternal undertone of Jew hatred and fear in the US, Europe and the Middle East and beyond, there is the joyful reaction to the Hamas terror attack on 10/17 followed by a joyful and hateful outpouring of antisemitism and philo-Palestinianism since the Israeli counterattack into Gaza, there is the anonymity of social media where the worst of many people’s thoughts get expressed without repercussions.
Among all of these things, only the Israeli’s military’s killing of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians is open to condemnation though the unbalanced reaction is something else. It can be argued that Hamas is to blame for the civilian deaths, better though to say they share in the blame for spurring the events with their terror attack and then make it worse by using civilians as shields, by hiding their military infrastructure within hospitals, schools, apartment blocks and so on, and by standing as eternal enemies of the rights of Jews everywhere as well as the Jews of Israel to live in Israel.
I decry and plan on speaking to the unbalanced anti-Israel movement that’s sprung up in parts of the USA and globally and how this is a very thinly disguised form of antisemitism, and at another time I will discuss the long-term failure of Netanyahu’s policies toward the Palestinians and the occupied territories. But not right now.
Here I want to discuss the ugly antisemitism that social media in particular has fostered. The isolation of the hater is gone as the haters find community online and their communities provide a safe place to express ideas that fester in an individual but grow like a fungus when given approval by like-minded haters. They become a mob and the mob inspires hateful acts upon the innocent.
We live now at a time when Palestinian lies bear their ugly fruit and find allies among the Nazis, the neo-Nazis, the Christian nationalists, Aryan brotherhoods and self-hating Jews as well. A tunnel illegally dug between two buildings in Crown Heights by militant Messianists becomes fodder for conspiracies that revive the blood libel, revive Medieval hatred that attributed the plague to wells poisoned by innocent Jews, to a piece of bizarre paranoia called grand replacement theory and to the irrational belief that all Jews are behind a conspiracy to rule the world by ruling banking at the same time they desire to destroy the banks as avowed Marxists.
Is there no way to deal with these libels? These conspiracies? Is there a way to marshal rational allies who will work arm in arm to combat the virulent lies?
On a side note, I harbor some sympathy for the innocent on all sides of the conflict but I have zero sympathy for the politicians, the military and the criminal terrorists who refuse to see their opponents as humans and then call for massacres, ethnic cleansing and conquest. Do I feel the Palestinians and the Israelis share responsibility for the massacres, for the ongoing war, for the misery and death? Yes, as it proceeds but there was a time when this could’ve been avoided, when peace was possible but the people of good will were pushed aside by militants and fanatics.
Antisemitism can be confronted and quashed. If we Jews and our allies stand together and fight back when necessary, mock the weak illogic and irrationality of the hate we might drive them back into their holes. We cannot let them go unanswered. Our lives, our security and that of our children and grandchildren depend on how we fight back.
Antisemitism is a problem that is also personal to me. While I stand against racism, agism, sexism, anti-queer attitudes and actions and generally abhor religious intolerance it is antisemitism that matters to me here. I am a Jew and proud to say it. While I am not a religious person, I honor the traditions of my faith. My parents were victimized by some of the worst Jew Hatred in history yet in surviving the Holocaust they rose above it to raise their family as proudly Jewish and eternally watchful against the Jew hater. They were correct when they told me that antisemitism was and is a chronic problem.
When I see Jew against Jew as I see in Israel now in the strife between the religious and the secular, in Chabad between the overt messianists and the crypto-Messianists, when I am directly confronted by someone who is as nonobservant as I saying to me that the synagogue I attend is not one but is a church I find it easy to speak up because we are kindred, even if it is disturbing. Judaism is forever tearing itself apart yet it’s managed to survive because when it matters Jews who are polar opposites in belief or observance still recognize their common Jewishness. If this stops then we are doomed.
