Hanukkah Under Fire: the Test for Free Societies |
A Holocaust survivor shielding his wife during a Hanukkah attack exposes how the world’s oldest hatred adapts to modern democracies, and what Jewish continuity and civic responsibility now demand.
He was a Holocaust survivor.
She was his wife.
In a moment that should never exist in a modern democracy, he did what Jews have been forced to do across too many centuries. He shielded the person he loved with his own body.
That image should stop us. Not only as Jews, but as citizens of free societies.
Because nothing about that moment belongs to the past. It has happened now, in the present.
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“The oldest hatred in the world announces itself in new language, but it advances through permission.”
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A public Hanukkah celebration near the beach in Sydney was exactly what it should have been: visible Jewish life. Families gathered. Children came with their parents. Candles were lit in public, as they have been for generations. In contemporary culture, antisemitism rarely announces itself as hatred. It arrives clothed in the language of morality and politics, of context and complexity. It speaks of power and resistance, of selectively told histories and endlessly explained grievances. It reframes Jewish visibility as provocation and Jewish continuity as something to be debated. This language does not yet shout. It persuades. It delays It hollows out the very values democratic societies claim to defend.
Then one day it no longer arrives as language at all.
It arrives with fire. Then with bullets.
The oldest hatred in the world announces itself in new language, but it advances through permission. Permission granted through explanation. Through exhaustion. Through institutions hesitating to draw clear lines. Through people insisting that this hatred is different, contextual, complicated, political. It gains legitimacy while moral clarity is delayed and responsibility is deferred. When violence finally comes, it is treated as tragic and inevitable, severed from the words that made room for it. Timed not only to kill, but to humiliate, to sabotage a holy day, to turn public gathering into fear.
This is why what happened in Australia matters far beyond Australia: it happened in a democracy, where violence is meant to be prevented, and incitement is meant to be confronted, not explained away.
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