The Cycle of Antisemitism (Judean Rose)

It’s been said that quashing antisemitic speech isn’t wise, for in forbidding expressions of antisemitism, you only drive the hate underground. Better our enemies should identify themselves by their hate speech, so we know who they are. Better they feel free to say what they really think, so we can gauge the danger to ourselves and our families.

So we can leave before the gates slam shut.

But it’s far more complicated than that. You have only to look at Europe to know this. Europe knows it went much too far with the Holocaust. So now it must look contrite to itself and to the world. It must at least pay lip service to silencing expressions of antisemitism.

How do we know it’s only a show of contrition and not the real thing? We know this because of Europe’s treatment of Israel, the only Jewish State.

Europe’s active anti-Israelism, such as the recent UN vote rejecting U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, is only putting lipstick on a pig, antisemitism in drag. Like Justice Potter Stewart and porn, we know it when we see it: Jew-hate. And Europe’s financial and verbal backing for the enemies of the Jewish State, for terrorism, is just part of the ongoing effort toward the genocide of the Jews.

Now because they don’t speak of the Final Solution or shove us into gas chambers, they think we’re fooled and maybe they’ve even fooled themselves. They think that having created legislation against antisemitism in Germany, they’ve passed the morality test. They don’t speak of hating Jews, so they can claim it’s something other than Jew-hate, though it’s not.

In substituting “Israel” for “Jew” they think they have every right to their hate, that it’s not unreasonable. They think this covert form of antisemitism makes antisemitism okay, polite, Western. They pat themselves on the back, congratulate themselves for this sea change. But antisemitism doesn’t come and go. It’s cyclical, cycling between overt and covert forms of the same thing.

The cycle of antisemitism in its covert form is like a moth inside a cocoon. The moth must at some point, leave the cocoon, for this is part of the life cycle. By the same token, the cycle of overt antisemitism will always out. Just as this current covert form of EU antisemitism necessarily follows the overt antisemitism of the Holocaust.

As individuals, we tend to think of the overt form of antisemitism as being the more dangerous of the two. But the real danger is in failing to see both forms of antisemitism: overt and covert, as part of one continuous cycle, with one following the other with the inevitability of time. The covert antisemitism lulls Jews into thinking they are safe. Since they think they are safe they don’t leave the host country, become trapped, and then suffer and/or die in terrible ways.

Thinking you can stay in a place as long as antisemitism is in its covert phase of the cycle is a crap shoot. You really have no way of knowing if you’ll make it out in time. Your luck isn’t better than the luck of so many who waited too long to get out of Europe, not so long ago. And no matter where you go, you’ll experience the same cycle.

A synagogue in Tehran

These are the thoughts that occurred in relation to the vandalizing of the Chadash synagogue in the Maleh neighborhood of Shiraz, Iran. Reports have been sketchy. What has been reported thus far is that two Torah scrolls were torn to pieces, while the prayer books were found in the bathroom, many of the holy books submerged in toilets.

It’s a horrible story. An overt manifestation of antisemitism that brought to mind an incident of some 17 years ago. A friend I’d made through random chat on AIM was dating a fellow who was originally from Iran. She kept thinking he would propose any minute, but something was holding him back. I volunteered to talk to him, my friend consented.

I made my point: my friend was not getting any younger. She wanted to have children. If he wasn’t going to get serious and pop the question, he should let her move on.

He got the point and they were engaged the next day.

Why had he been dragging his feet?

It was all about his father, back in Iran.

My friend thought her suitor’s parents were divorced. But this was not so. The guy’s father was still married to her mother in-law-to-be, but he was in Iran, while his wife was in LA, for reasons unknown to my friend. My friend’s fiance didn’t want to get married without his father by his side. But it was a difficult and complicated thing to bring him to the States for the wedding.

Somehow, the father did make it over to the States for the occasion and my friend was surprised to see that her in-laws were this fabulous love story. They doted and fawned on each other.

She had assumed they couldn’t get along, which is why dad was in Iran, while mom was in LA.

Nothing could have been further from the truth.

Here is what really happened: they left Iran for a better life in LA. But dad couldn’t acclimate to the American way of life. He was a fish out of water.

He was miserable.

And so, even though he loved his wife and family, HE WENT BACK TO IRAN.

Unfricking real. To leave the safety of America for THAT. To leave his FAMILY for that. But so it was.

Now here he was, reunited with his family in LA, once more, for the sake of his son’s upcoming marriage.

Would he stay? They had all missed each other so much.

He stayed for two months. Pampered his wife night and day, 24/7. Enjoyed his family. Until he couldn’t. Couldn't take it anymore.

And went back to the covert antisemitism of Iran.

Because it’s what he was used to. It’s what he knew, his whole life.

Ever since then, every time there is a report of overt antisemitism in Iran, such as what happened at the Chadash synagogue, I fear for this man, though I never actually met him.

The man who went back to Iran is the prototype of the Jew who fools himself, thinks there is a lull in the hatred, while it is covert. He is the prototype of the Jew who doesn’t make it out when the cycle goes from covert to overt and the gates slam shut.

via GIPHY

He is like the Jewish community in Germany, complaining every time there is an anti-Semitic incident. What are they even doing there in that horrible country with its awful history?? WHY are they still there?

Because they’re used to it. They’ve been lulled into Jewish somnolence, by the polite, covert cycle of German antisemitism. They don’t see what’s coming next. They don’t even know they’re caught in a never-ending cycle.

They don’t want to know.

Now you might wonder: if it happens all over the world, this cycle of antisemitism, even in Israel, then why try to escape it at all? Why make Aliyah?

The answer: Israel is the only place where your life will have meant something. Where if you die because a terrorist cuts you down, you do so defending your land, so your children might stay Jewish and inherit your inheritance. It’s the only place where just walking four cubits earns you a mitzvah.

You can’t escape the cycle of antisemitism. Not the covert and not the overt. Not anywhere. But throwing your lot in with your brethren in Israel, now that’s where you can make a difference by strengthening the Jewish presence in our indigenous land. It’s where you can do something beautiful for your people, instead of toiling for the society of those awful Europeans (or Iranians, etc.).

Isn’t it time you at least considered the notion of Aliyah?

Who knows? You maybe even stop the cycle, cold in its tracks, and change the world for good.

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