The morning after October 7 was troubling in a way that I still have trouble putting into words. Even before many Israelis could find their missing loved ones, before the full death toll was known, and before anyone could really grasp what had taken place, explanations had already flooded the world.

People started protesting in big cities all over the West, not in a few weeks or months after the troubling event took place, but right away. And if you went online, especially on social media, you couldn’t avoid people’s takes. Pretty much no one knew what the actual facts were yet. I was in London at the time and found myself endlessly scrolling through responses to what had happened. I was disturbed, not just by the tone everyone was using when shouting at each other, but also at the speed at which everyone had seemed to decide what the event “meant.” I noticed something else, too: how often those “meanings” almost immediately placed Jews as the moral problem.

No one had even counted the bodies yet or begun telling the stories of the dead. People had barely been given time to mourn, yet the victims already seemed to be turning into chess pieces inside other people’s moral and political narratives. It felt as though many had already decided what the killings “meant” before we had even fully absorbed that the killings had happened at all.

I’m not saying that antisemitism began on that day nor that violence against Jews began then. History is replete with examples of enough massacres and expulsions and ideological fanaticism and political cruelty to never make that claim. What struck me was not the chronology of antisemitism itself, but the speed with which Jewish suffering was absorbed into interpretive frameworks that already seemed prepared to explain it away before the mourning had even begun. In many cases, the massacre itself seemed almost incidental to the interpretations ready to greet it. This stuck with me because it demanded from me a reconsideration of what antisemitism comprises, and how antisemitism does fit into the modern moral universe.

The thing that really bothered me was not just seeing everyone argue about what had happened. After something huge goes down, it is natural for there to be a bit of back and forth. But it was how quickly everyone seemed to move on from what actually happened and........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)