The New Antisemitism Is the Oldest Kind
(snip)
How innocent the moment seems. That was the postwar “Gentleman’s Agreement” version of American antisemitism—gentiles relaxing up-island, on their fourth glass of Chablis. The word “Jew” wasn’t mentioned. In the Martha’s Vineyard iteration—post-Auschwitz—American antisemitism often had a discreetly covert quality. It emerged from a kind of sly politesse because, after all, everyone at some time or other had seen the films from the Nazi camps—the ones that Gen. Eisenhower had ordered his troops to watch. In Elia Kazan’s 1947 movie based on the Laura Hobson novel “Gentleman’s Agreement,” desk clerks fidget and look away when Gregory Peck, as a journalist pretending to be Jewish, pushes them about renting a room.
(snip)
The antisemitism that has poured forth onto the country’s streets and campuses in the autumn of 2023 is a different thing—a reversion to a politics of aggressive, unapologetic hate. The ominous historical regression at work in the latest Jew-hatred takes up the themes of the mid-1930s, the spirit of Hitler’s brown shirts and Kristallnacht. Of course, the new Jew-haters—especially young people on campuses—think of themselves as perfectly virtuous. What is a thousand times worse, they think of their Jew-hatred as righteous. It’s morally fashionable among them.
(snip)
Why did Hamas attack on Oct. 7? Israeli oppression? Hamas has ruled Gaza since 2007, two years after the Israelis withdrew. Under decent, intelligent leadership—with a touch of vision, with investment by oil-rich Arab states—Gaza might now be a Mediterranean Singapore. Instead, Hamas has maintained Gaza as an anguished slum, an ongoing dramatization of the Palestinian victimhood that is the source of Hamas’s power and raison d’être.
(snip)
Students at Harvard and Columbia don’t protest the region’s routine inhumanities. They do so only when there are Jews around to blame and to hate. It’s the Israelis’ Jewishness that brings the demonstrators out. This isn’t “a new antisemitism.” Antisemitism is never new. It’s an ancient beast that awakens from time to time and exhales such filth as “Gas the Jews” and “Hitler was right.”
https://archive.is/UGLCd
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I learned quite a lot. He writes about how all the old tropes keep morphing into what is acceptable as cultural norms change but that it is still the same thousands years old Jew hate.
I’ll look into Jewish Space Lasers….
You know, we kind of have our own little book club going on. 
