School may be out for the summer, but elsewhere in the U.S. anti-Israel protests emerged with renewed ferocity last weekend: throwing smoke bombs outside a Democratic fundraiser in midtown Manhattan, shouting pro-Hamas slogans in a Chicago suburb in the middle of the night, and setting up an encampment in a public park in a Massachusetts town. But none of this compares to the routine violence seen in European cities, including the recent anti-Semitic rape of a twelve-year-old girl (by three boys barely older) in Paris and the brutal beating of Jewish schoolchildren in a London subway station. Ben Cohen comments on the situation:
There are structural reasons that explain why the 2020s are different from the 1930s in significant ways. For one thing, European societies are more affluent and better equipped to deal with social conflicts and economic strife than they were a century ago. Laws, too, are more explicit in the protections they offer to minorities, and more punishing of hate crimes and hate speech. Perhaps most importantly, there is a Jewish state barely 80 years old which all Jews can make their home if they so desire.
If Israel represents the greatest achievement of the Jewish people in at least 100 years, small wonder that it has become the main target of today’s reconstituted anti-Semites. . . . Hence, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that while the 2020s may not be the 1930s, they certainly feel like the 1930s.
[T]he situation in Europe increasingly reminds me of the observation of the Russian Zionist Leon Pinsker in Autoemancipation, a doom-laden essay he wrote in 1882, during another dark period of Jewish history: “We should not persuade ourselves that humanity and enlightenment will ever be radical remedies for the malady of our people.”
More about: Anti-Semitism, European Jewry
