“Hatred targeting Jews and Judaism remain disproportionately high,” writes the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in an article on the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, observed every January 27th. I’m not, by the way, sure what a “proportionately high” degree of hatred would be. This is why writers need editors. In any case, Rabbi Abraham Cooper gives several examples, including
Egypt Everyone is courting the electorally victorious, supposedly “moderate” Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Yet the group’s first move was to block Jewish prayers at the graveside of a saintly scholar and its Arabic language webpages tout Holocaust denial while a spokesmen observes that the Shoah is “a tale” exploited for politics, and that “the entire world, and Germany in particular, has become yearly scapegoats of world Zionism, and has capitulated to the greatest political extortion in history.” No western democracy has condemned the Brotherhood’s religious intolerance.
Latvia A Riga court removed the city council’s ban on “Legion Day” paving the way for a march down main street honoring 140,000 Latvians who fought in the Waffen SS during WWII.
There is a gap between lamenting the murder of Jews back then and rejecting anti-semitism today. The latter may have costs people don’t want to pay. In my experience, people who are normally very sensitive to the slightest expression of prejudice wherever they are found are often weirdly insouciant about expressions of prejudice against Jews. Imagine if an Afrikaner group in a city in South Africa tried to organize a march celebrating the Apartheid years and the howls we’d hear. But Latvians marching in memory of the SS. I didn’t hear any squeaks, much less howls. That insouciance is good reason to be more than usually alert to such things.
One of the examples Cooper gives is from the Friends Seminary, which is just a few blocks from the First Things office. Here’s Alan Dershowitz’s article on the event and the Seminary’s response.
January 27th, 2012 | 6:09 pm
Mr. Mills,
Thanks for this. My father-in-law was Jewish, and this has made me far more sensitive to these issues than I was at one time, I am sad to say. I would also add that many of the groups involved in anti-Semitism are targeting Christians as well. We must stand together with our Jewish brethren, not only because it is the right thing to do, but as history has proved, because if we tolerate the persecution of our neighbor, the same may soon come to ourselves.
January 28th, 2012 | 4:31 am
Many people who are anti-Israeli may be philo-Semitic or at least indifferent to Judaism. But it’s becoming increasingly clear, and painfully so, that the reason some people add anti-Israelism to their ideological wardrobe is not just that it’s fashionable — it’s also convenient for covering up how their psyches have been disfigured by anti-Semitism. Well, mostly cover up. The anti-Semitism often shows through anyway, as Alan Dershowitz explains.
What about those who adopt anti-Israelism only to make a fashion statement? It introduces them into company where the anti-Semitism virus lurks. They’re liable to catch it. This is a problem particularly on college campuses.
David, I think “a disproportionately high degree of hatred” can mean a couple of things. It can mean that the hatred is more common and more intense than the world’s Jewish population is large, which, at 15 million, it isn’t. (And most of that population lives in Israel or the United States, not in places where anti-Semitism seems to be most out of control.) Or it could mean that many, many ethnic and religious groups are targets of hatred but that hatred directed against Jews is stronger by an order of magnitude.
Still, I agree with you that writers need editors.
January 28th, 2012 | 2:34 pm
Nick: But in either case “disproportionate” is the wrong word. What, as I said, would be the “proportionate” amount of hatred directed to a people simply for being a particular people?
January 29th, 2012 | 9:55 pm
David, I suppose the first question is what anti-Semitism is proportionate or disproportionate to. My guess is that the author means to compare it to the sum total of all the hatred directed against particular religions in the world.
What percentage of that hatred is anti-Semitism? I’ll answer “Significant.” Now what percentage (a number that really can be calculated, at least approximately) of the world’s population who belong to religions that are hated are Jewish? To that I’ll answer “Pretty small.”
So one way that anti-Semitism in the world would be “proportionate” is if it were a “pretty small” component of the sum total of all the hatred directed against particular religions in the world.
I’d suggest “incommensurate,” but that would be no better than “disproportionate,” for the same reason: Hatred can’t really be measured or quantified.
“Inordinate” would work at least in that it doesn’t imply a ratio of two non-subjective numbers, but then it wouldn’t work because it would suggest that there’s such a thing as an acceptably moderate level of hatred against a people or religion.
Your instinct to cut it out when in doubt, the “it” here being the word “disproportionate,” may be entirely sound. For some reason I feel called to defend the word choice of Rabbi Cooper. Plus, it’s a weekend, and for once I have time (too much?) on my hands.
One thing we can both agree on without question is that it should be “remains” instead of “remain” (“hatred . . . remains”). Of course, in another sense it should be “hatred has ceased,” the state of affairs prophesied in Isaiah 11.
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