When Synagogues Burn….. |
Before the arguments begin, before the explanations arrive, before the debates over language and intent, it is worth confronting a simple and disturbing fact.
Synagogues are burning.
Over the past fifteen months, Jewish houses of worship have been targeted by arson or attempted arson across the globe.
Closer to home, in Brooklyn, a car was intentionally driven into a Chabad center multiple times, turning an automobile into a weapon against a Jewish institution in one of the most Jewish cities in the world. This was not rhetoric. It was not vandalism. It was physical force directed at a place of Jewish life. The message did not require interpretation.
Different continents. Different political systems. Different cultures. One constant. Jewish institutions targeted because they are Jewish.
These are not isolated incidents, and they are not the work of a single organization or ideology. But they are unmistakably the product of a climate in which Jewish spaces have once again become legitimate targets. Antisemitism today does not always arrive with crude symbols or explicit declarations. It arrives with justification.
Just days earlier, the world marked January 27, Holocaust Remembrance Day. The occasion invites solemn reflection and rare moral consensus. Nazis are safely confined to history. The villains are unambiguous. The lessons appear settled.
That consensus is also its weakness.
As commentators such as Melanie Phillips have warned, the danger today is not Holocaust denial so much as Holocaust distortion. We remember the catastrophe, but in a way that trains us to recognize antisemitism only when it resembles the past. If antisemitism looks like 1939, we know how to name it. If it looks anything like the last two years, we debate definitions while synagogues burn.
For decades, Western societies have reassured themselves that antisemitism is primarily a right wing pathology, a relic of fascism associated with neo Nazis and fringe extremists. That belief is comforting. It is also incomplete.
While antisemitism on the right never disappeared, antisemitism on the left adapted.........