When Anti-Semitism and Vaccine Refusal Converge

As fears over the delta variant of the coronavirus have risen, so the rhetoric of those who don’t wish to take the vaccine has intensified. In its wake, the anti-vaccine movement brings anti-Semitism. Ben Cohen writes:

To begin with, there is the nauseating use of the Judenstern, the yellow “Jews’ Star” the Nazis forced Jews to wear on their outer clothing, with the word “Jew” replaced by “Not Vaccinated.” This visual appropriation of Nazi genocidal policies towards Jews as an analogue for the social difficulties that vaccine refusers are bringing upon themselves has been alarmingly widespread—so much so that in June, the city of Munich banned the display of the Judenstern from the vaccine-refusal demonstrations that have proven chillingly popular in Germany. Only last week, flyers bearing exactly this imagery were distributed on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

Then there is the comparatively even less subtle rumor mill insisting that Jewish business moguls are getting fat off vaccine profits. A study conducted in June by a group of academics at the University of San Martin in Argentina revealed that more than 30 percent of Argentines strongly agreed with the statement that there are “laboratories of Jewish businessmen who seek to profit financially” from the vaccine with another 7 percent concurring with that statement to a lesser extent.

It would be comforting to believe that in a few months, with a fresh wave of vaccinations in place, these calumnies will have faded from view. While it is reasonable to think that a decline in vaccine refusal will similarly impact pandemic-related anti-Semitic propaganda, these beliefs will always find a ready audience within the hardcore of remaining vaccine refusers, whose rhetoric will become even more violent and apocalyptic.

Read more at JNS

More about: Anti-Semitism, Argentina, Coronavirus, Ger, Germany, U.S. Politics

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society