Time to remove the masks and stand up to antisemitism - opinion

• Published date: 21 March 2024
• Author: AVI LEWIS
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

Hamas's barbaric attack against Israel on October 7 unleashed a global wave of antisemitism unprecedented since the Holocaust, puncturing the illusion that antisemitism is a marginal intolerance relegated to the extreme Left, Right, or pockets of the Muslim world. What we've seen in the past five-plus months is an eruption of Jew-hatred across the civilized world from our neighbors, colleagues, academics, and otherwise normative people

It's hard to be the object of such hatred, and Jews and Israelis around the world have been caught completely off guard by this proverbial tightening of the noose.

Antisemitism on the rise around the world

At the University of Alberta, the head of the Sexual Assault Centre signed an open letter that denied allegations of rape by Hamas terrorists against Israeli women on October 7.

In Melbourne, Australia, a popular writer released a list of 600 local Jews who had joined a communal Whatsapp group to combat antisemitism and hate against Israel. Many of those local Jews received death threats.

In Zurich, Switzerland, an ultra-Orthodox man was stabbed and severely injured outside a synagogue by a teenager reportedly shouting "Death to all Jews."

In the United States, a cafe in San Francisco denied entry to "Zionist" customers; an academic from Columbia University urged low-income tenants to stop paying rent to landlords with "ties to Israel"; a history professor at Cornell called the Hamas massacres "exhilarating" and a "breath of fresh air"; and the local city council in Oakland, CA aired blatant conspiracy theories claiming that October 7 was a "Zionist false flag operation" committed by the IDF.

It's easy to talk about antisemitism as a phenomenon and to forget that prejudice and hate crimes against Jews are perpetrated by people: regular, everyday people.

Whether or not these people claim that their underlying motives are innocuous, innocent or simply manifestations of "anti-Zionism and not antisemitism" is a moot point.

Jews feel the hate, and each of these examples contributes to the climate of hate.

As Jewish people worldwide prepare to celebrate the festival of Purim, they commemorate a distant time and place when genocidal antisemitism threatened to destroy them. The story detailed in the Book of Esther no longer feels so distant.

In the multicultural milieu of ancient Persia, a high-ranking official named Haman is singularly obsessed and engulfed by his hatred of the Jews. He plots their destruction with the approval...