“Hatred targeting Jews and Judaism remain disproportionately high,” writes the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in an article on the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, observed every January 27th. I’m not, by the way, sure what a “proportionately high” degree of hatred would be. This is why writers need editors. In any case, Rabbi Abraham Cooper gives several examples, including
Egypt Everyone is courting the electorally victorious, supposedly “moderate” Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Yet the group’s first move was to block Jewish prayers at the graveside of a saintly scholar and its Arabic language webpages tout Holocaust denial while a spokesmen observes that the Shoah is “a tale” exploited for politics, and that “the entire world, and Germany in particular, has become yearly scapegoats of world Zionism, and has capitulated to the greatest political extortion in history.” No western democracy has condemned the Brotherhood’s religious intolerance.Latvia A Riga court removed the city council’s ban on “Legion Day” paving the way for a march down main street honoring 140,000 Latvians who fought in the Waffen SS during WWII.
There is a gap between lamenting the murder of Jews back then and rejecting anti-semitism today. The latter may have costs people don’t want to pay. In my experience, people who are normally very sensitive to the slightest expression of prejudice wherever they are found are often weirdly insouciant about expressions of prejudice against Jews. Imagine if an Afrikaner group in a city in South Africa tried to organize a march celebrating the Apartheid years and the howls we’d hear. But Latvians marching in memory of the SS. I didn’t hear any squeaks, much less howls. That insouciance is good reason to be more than usually alert to such things.
One of the examples Cooper gives is from the Friends Seminary, which is just a few blocks from the First Things office. Here’s Alan Dershowitz’s article on the event and the Seminary’s response .
