A Liberal Veneer |
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
An article appeared in an online newspaper that serves the southern Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts: “Fighting a hate with no boundaries: Jewish Federation of the Berkshires looking for support in its ‘Hate has no home here’ campaign” (Berkshire Edge, February 7, 2025). I agreed with the article’s premise that hate is a negative. The latter conclusion was fairly straightforward. The article’s main focus is about the rising tide of antisemitism, but then the article goes completely off the rails when it notes that “… since the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel, antisemitic incidents have increased throughout the country, including Berkshire County.” Then the article fell flat and left me searching for reasons why the article would, by what I consider a gross omission, place the October 7th attacks, which were horrendous, in a total historical vacuum. The article does mention other kinds of hate such as against immigrants and the LGBTQ community. But there is no discussion of Zionism and its effects on the Palestinian people.
But here, from the perspective of someone who has major credits in history and a graduate degree in........