You know it’s bad when even The New York Times is worried. Or pretends to be.
There, front page, it features Tom Stoppard, the British dramatist, lamenting the rise of antisemitism, calling it a virus. He is alarmed.
Yes, Stoppard is Jewish. So correctly British, and yet when the reckoning is done, the pintele Yid (the Jewish spark) emerges…admirably.
So what’s to be done?
I called my sister, who was there with the family when Hitler came to Toulouse. Maybe she has the answer. I don’t. Nobody does. Do you?
We’ve only discussed this a thousand times, only this time seems to be different. Worse.
“Worse?” she says, “It’s always like this.”
Can’t argue that point, and Sarah has her own theories, which I can’t argue, either. But let’s pretend it is worse. Everybody says so. Even Mayor Adams of New York City.
Sarah says we live in demonic times, the godless age that preludes Mashiach, when things go from bad to worse, until the Messiah finally comes.
No way would any Jewish person go public with, “I’m going Death Con 3 on Black people.” As did Kanye West on Jewish people.
Go argue. I can’t.
But, over the past few weeks, I’ve been studying up on the craze, yes, antisemitism. Americans…we go in for fads.
Remember the yo-yo? There was also the hula hoop, and Davy Crockett, and Elvis, and rock and Roll, the longest fad of all, unless you count antisemitism, brought over by Peter Stuyvesant.
That’s going back to the 1600s.
In each generation it starts all over, a new Pharaoh arises, and thank goodness, it is not the American Way. So far.
But we can never count ourselves safe, entirely.
We have a history going back more than 3,500 years that teaches us never to relax. At the UN, they’ve endorsed Nakba again.
Rap mogul Kanye West got this one started, or maybe it was this seven-foot basketball player, or that other one…anyway, Blacks are in, Jews are out.
Rather, no way would any Jewish person go public with, “I’m going Death Con 3 on Black people.” As did Kanye West on Jewish people.
Which is not to say that he speaks for all Black people. Think rather of Harris Faulkner, the elegant Fox News commentator who serves her race so honorably.
Trouble is, big time rappers and athletes have millions of followers, so what they say counts and often quickens Jew-hatred…especially among the gullible.
I read somewhere that Jews are too touchy about this. You bet we are, when we remember the Six Million who weren’t touchy enough, and stayed, until it was too late.
My family left, in the nick of time, with help from a Catholic priest, Father LaRoche. There’s that story, too.
But for this story, today in America, I turn to this Yiddish expression, roughly, “Svet goornish helfen.” Or, “Ain’t nothing gonna help.”
In other words, we’re on our own.
All this talk about reaching out, meetings, conferences, studies…can’t hurt. Can’t help, either.
I remember a while back the ADL, run by Jonathan Greenblatt, when for a moment he is not celebrating BLM, announcing a comprehensive study on antisemitism.
As if we need more studies. I wrote: “You’ve been doing these studies for more than 100 years, and learned what? Nothing.”
Talk instead of action is what our enemies want, to keep their hatreds headlining. That is what NYC Mayor Adams means when he says antisemitism has become “popular.”
Let there be no hope for antisemites.
Rather, stop the kvetching. Toughen up. Take a page from Torah. Learn from Pinchas.
Enroll in Krav Maga.
Other than that, G-d bless America. Am Yisroel Chai.
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.
He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal,” the authoritative newsroom epic, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” followed by his coming-of-age classics, “The Girls of Cincinnati,” and, the Holocaust-to-Montreal memoir, “Escape from Mount Moriah.” For that and his 1960s epic “The Days of the Bitter End,” contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Email Jack here.
