I came across an article about how many Jews there are in the world today. Take a guess.
It’s about 14.7 million, according to Haaretz. You can expand that to as much as many as 17 million if you include a lot of people who are half Jewish, or a quarter Jewish (and as such would have been candidates for Hitler’s concentration camps) and might not even consider themselves Jewish. There are more Mormons!
Did you know that in 1939, there were 16.8 million of us? Here we are, 80 years later, and we still haven’t recovered from the Holocaust. Contrast that with these stats; the world’s population was 2.3 billion before the war and has more than trebled to 7.7 billion today. Less than 0.2% of the world’s population is Jewish.
These Jews get an awful of attention for such a teeny group of people.
I’m struck by the rise of anti-semitism, of course, the focus on it, and it’s use as a tool by haters, lovers, and politicians to gain affections of disparate groups for their own purposes. I am offended by Ilhan Omar’s comments of late and think she got too easy a pass from the Democrats. I’m offended by a lot of the BS from the GOP on the topic of Jewish tropes, such at those who lie and say George Soros somehow betrayed fellow Jews during the war. He was just 14 when it ended!
There is little doubt in my mind that those who critique Zionism, which as a term only means that Israel is the Jewish homeland, is just anti-semitism. You can believe in a two-state solution, for example, and still be a Zionist. But, again, the hyper focus on Jews vs, say, China in Tibet, strikes me as more than just a political view, but a raw prejudice to exploit.
Take Britain’s Labour party. Really, do you think its overt anti-semitism, which it claims is merely anti-Israeli views, fools any of its core supporters? They’re smiling the same way white supremacists smile at Donald Trump’s unsubtle panderings.
I have over the course of my adult years, which began when I was eight and ended when I was 16 just as I entered never-ending adolescence, tried to understand anti-semitism and never could. And still can’t. Of course it bothers me, scares me, and I suspect a lot of my survival mindset — from bow drills to guns — has its roots in it.
I can intellectualize. I can say, well, Christians used Jews as scapegoats because of the Jesus thing until you scratch the surface and recognize Jesus was quite the Jew. I know many Christians who are surprised to hear he was Jewish.
I get that when the Romans kicked the Jews out of Israel they became strangers in distant lands and so a minority distinct from the mainstream that held to its differences. In other words, an easy group to be suspicious of.
But that doesn’t explain it really, given how few are out there. I’m studying archaeology at a local community college and one of the critiques of a traditional approach is that it describes history, identifies things, but doesn’t explain the mindset of change, or the historical process. So it is with anti-semitism. We know what it is through history, can identify it, but can we understand it or any other prejudice or how it’s lasted through the ages?
I always felt it comes down to envy. If I read history correctly, ancient Jews were quite literate when most other cultures were not. Men had to read the Torah, for instance. When they left in the diaspora, they left with that skill and were too transient to be farmers or serfs. So they became merchants, vendors, and, by European Catholic law, money lenders and the like. As Europe and the Middle East developed, those were talents that made them urban and better off than the lot. And more literate. And more multi-lingual. And always a small minority.
And here were are again, with these tropes about money, power, influence and the like. Well, yeah. Doesn’t that come with being educated, well-off, literate? And doesn’t all that reek of being an educated elite which is exactly what populists are trying to blame for all the ills of the world?
I suppose it comes down to people, the masses, being pretty stupid. Blame someone. It’s curious that the rise of anti-semitism now comes with more racism in general, even though the ‘crimes’ of Jews are rather different compared to, say, illegal immigrants or inner city blacks and hispanics etc. The Nazis accused Jews of being at once capitalist bankers and Bolsheviks; the contradiction didn’t seem to bother them.
I don’t feel that enough is being done or said. I think the thing that passed Congress is a nicety, but carries the same onus saying “All Lives Matter” to black people vs. “Black Lives Matter.” A simple restatement of the Bill of Rights would have achieved at least a much. I don’t think the Democratic Party is at all anti-semitic, just too politically correct. I don’t think most Republicans are anti-semitic, either. But I think they both are overly willing to use prejudice to political ends — whether condemning the other party for allowing it (GOP with these Muslim Reps or Dems with Stephen King and the like) or simply not saying prejudice can be a specific problem targeted to a specific group.
I have no solutions or easy answers. I think Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar are not so naive when they choose their words and should be held accountable. Ditto to GOP politicos, like Trump when he says the Democrats are anti-Jewish. Thing is that Jews, with all that literacy and education, won’t be so persuaded.
It’s hard. I condemn the Democrats for the divide and conquer identity politics that have failed so far to ignite the majority of voters and didn’t exactly bring in the smaller groups in question and hear I am asking for more in the case of anti-semitism. Maybe it’s because the latter comes from the much lauded diversity those two Muslim reps bring in. Yet where is hypocrisy condemned when Tlaib said of Israel-supporting politicians, ‘They forgot what country they represent’ in the context of her support for Palestine? Neither she nor Ilhan Omar have suggested boycotting a Muslim state for human-rights abuses.
Maybe I should take pride that no one has mentioned that thousands of Americans have died at the hands of Muslims and none, zero — search Google — have been killed by Jewish terrorists. Something irks me about that.