Stephan: I have always found antisemitism a weird kind of hatred. Its origins trace back to the Roman Catholic Church, and the belief that the Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus, deicide it is called. But that is both historically untrue, and irrelevant 2,000 years later. Then there is the belief that Jews control the world's wealth, also untrue. Jews make up such a small percentage of the American population it seems a very odd hatred. There are teenagers who have larger TikTok followings than there are Jews in the U.S.
If it is just wealth that is considered, according to a study from 2015, Christians hold the largest amount of wealth (55% of the total world wealth), followed by Muslims (5.8%), Hindus (3.3%), and Jews (1.1%). In the U.S. even amongst minority religions -- Christianity in its various forms constitutes the largest population in the country -- 6.5 percent of millionaires identified themselves as Muslim, 3.9 percent identified themselves as Hindu, and 1.7 percent identified themselves as Jewish. The Dark Money funders who own the Republican Party have only a very few Jews amongst their number.
But however weird antisemitism is it has become a very big issue in the United States thanks largely to criminal Trump, which itself is odd since his daughter married a Jew and converted (whatever that means in this case) to Judaism. For all its oddness though one thing is clear to me: Honorable people who support the fostering of wellbeing must stand up against this ancient hatred, and purge it from our culture.
A sign at a protest in New York City in 2020. Credit: Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu Agency / Getty
Jews have always been fleeing, but America was the country from which Jews would never have to flee. They fled from Eastern Europe, Germany and the Soviet Union (as my family did in the 1980s). They settled on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and in West Philadelphia. They opened delis in Denver and Indianapolis. They went to Ivy League colleges and played in the NFL.
And now, suddenly, after all this time, after so many waves of assimilation and acceptance, after “Seinfeld” and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, many American Jews have come to feel like strangers in their own home.
“America was our promised land but we might not be safe here anymore,” the artist Deborah Kass recently wrote, expressing a sentiment that is increasingly voiced at synagogues, where armed guards are now commonplace, and at Shabbat tables, where younger American Jews are suddenly facing anxieties that […]
Thank you Stephan, for your eloquent and informed condemnation of antisemitism. I will pass your comments on along with this article. As a Jew, living in the United States, I am shocked and appalled at this prejudice and grateful to you and those like you, who speak up against it.
Dr. Tobi Zausner
Thank you Stephan, for your eloquent and informed condemnation of antisemitism. I will pass your comments on along with this article. As a Jew, living in the United States, I am shocked and appalled at this prejudice and grateful to you and those like you, who speak up against it.
Dr. Tobi Zausner