A day of mourning in a time of fear

Boston Globe

6 days ago

Other disasters have coincided with the 9th of Av. That was when the
No date in the long annals of the Jews is so drenched in grief. For more than 2,000 years, observant Jews have marked the day by abstaining from food and drink for 25 hours. In synagogues worldwide, families will begin the fast at nightfall Saturday by sitting on the floor and reading the biblical
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In a sense, Tisha B'Av encapsulates in a calendar date all the pain and loss that have been inflicted on the Jewish people through the generations by those who hate them. That hatred has ebbed and flowed, but it has never vanished. There
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Tisha B'Av arrives this year as American Jews confront an inescapable and chilling reality: Antisemitism in the United States has surged to levels unseen since before World War II.
The threat has been
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Here in Massachusetts, anti‑Jewish hate crimes
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In response to these attacks, the ADL commissioned a national survey. Its report stressed that a majority of Americans regard antisemitic hatred as a serious issue and oppose violence against Jews. But between the lines, the survey's findings were horrifying.
Asked about the violent attacks in Washington and Colorado, as well as the torching of Shapiro's home, 13 percent of respondents said that such acts were 'justified,' 15 percent believed they were 'necessary,' 22 percent did not consider them antisemitic, and an astonishing 24 percent — nearly 1 in 4 respondents — pronounced the attacks 'understandable.'
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These are no longer fringe views. Raw, antisemitic bigotry is
Young people acquire their opinions from multiple sources, of course. But at least some of this animus against Jews has been
As Tisha B'Av approaches, more than
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For anyone born after 1945, this normalizing of Jew-hatred in the United States represents a chilling reversal. The Cold War era's moral taboo against antisemitism — bolstered by the revelation of Nazi Germany's genocide, and by the success of the Civil Rights and Soviet Jewry movements — used to render overt Jew‑hatred unthinkable in mainstream America. Now that taboo is shredding. Ours has become a society in which antisemitic venom —
As a Jew, and as the son of an Auschwitz survivor, I find all this darkly ominous. So do many Jewish Americans I know. Yet with few exceptions, most of my non-Jewish friends and acquaintances don't seem to understand how frightening it is for Jews to sense history beginning to repeat itself — or how exposed, isolated, and endangered many Jews now feel.
It has been pointed out often that the
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That isn't merely a historical observation. It reflects a pattern first articulated in the earliest pages of the Bible.
As an Orthodox Jew, I believe in the continuing validity of the promise God made to Abraham in
Benjamin Disraeli, who twice served as Britain's prime minister, distilled the biblical pledge into an axiom of statecraft: 'The Lord deals with the nations as the nations deal with the Jews.' Winston Churchill agreed and on multiple occasions quoted his predecessor's maxim. 'We must admit,'
More than 80 years later, the renowned journalist and historian Paul Johnson developed the point in
It happened to Spain after it expelled the Jews in the 1490s, to France in the wake of the Dreyfus affair, and to Czarist Russia following the wave of antisemitic pogroms in the late 19th century. Germany's descent into genocidal madness led to cataclysmic military defeat in 1945 and brought on 40 years of communist dictatorship in the eastern third of the country. And the antisemitic obsessions of the Arab world over the past century have kept it mired in economic and cultural backwardness, when it could have become 'by far the richest portion of the earth's surface.'
Conversely, nations that extended protection and freedom to their Jewish citizens have invariably flourished. Cyrus the Great of Persia liberated the Jews from captivity, and went on to rule the largest empire the world had seen to that time. The Ottoman sultans who welcomed Jewish exiles from Spain presided over a multicultural dominion that thrived for centuries.
Above all, the United States — where Jews enjoyed freedom, opportunity, and safety they had never before known in their long Diaspora — grew into the wealthiest, strongest, and most important nation on the globe. Jewish Americans, making the most of the liberty and equality afforded them, became scientists and doctors, entrepreneurs and entertainers, retail innovators and writers, judges and educators. America's ascent to global preeminence was inseparable from its treatment of Jews as full citizens.
'I will bless those who bless you, and those who curse you I will curse,' God said at the dawn of Jewish history, and history has repeatedly confirmed it. But the ancient promise — or, if you like, Paul Johnson's 'historical law' — is also a reminder and a warning to the American nation. Unchecked antisemitism is not merely a Jewish problem. It is an infection in America's soul and a threat to its future.
George Washington, in his famous
That vision animated America's founding promise and it helped shape the nation's greatness. But today, nearly 235 years after Washington wrote those words, the children of the stock of Abraham are afraid. If that fear is allowed to deepen and spread, the cost will not fall on Jews alone.
Tisha B'Av is a day of mourning for the Jewish people — but it ought to be a moment of reckoning for all Americans. To drive out the virus of antisemitism, to ensure that Jews can live in safety and dignity, is not only to defend a beleaguered minority. It is to recommit to the very ideals that made the United States a light among nations. America has been blessed because it blessed its Jews. May it never learn what happens when it stops doing so.
This article is adapted from the current
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