If You Prick Us, Do We Not Bleed?

Antisemitism is on the rise on both the political left and right. Here's how your Jewish friends may feel about that.

Jul 06, 2025

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A note to my readers: I’ve recently started recording voiceovers for my posts and have added self-read voiceovers to most of my previous posts. Today’s post is pretty impassioned and is one you may want to listen to—especially if you want to hear my attempt at Shakespeare.

I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?

- William Shakespeare, “The Merchant of Venice,” Act 3, Scene 1

Welcome to my newest essay, friends. This week, I’m going to discuss a very personal and sensitive topic.

I first considered writing about Independence Day because it’s topical, our nation’s core values are under threat, and, of course, everyone else would be writing about it.

I considered writing about Alligator Alcatraz because it’s topical, it’s a crime against humanity, and, of course, everyone else would be writing about it.

I considered writing about the Big, Belligerent, Bastard of a Bill because it’s topical, it’s devastating to millions upon millions of Americans, and, yes, everyone else would be writing about it.

What I really wanted to do was write something funny this week. I really did. We all could use some humor in our lives right now. But, sadly, I’m not feeling particularly humorous at the moment.

Instead, I’m going to write about something that’s been on my mind because it’s topical, it’s incredibly dangerous, and far too many people are avoiding writing about it: Antisemitism, both implicit and explicit, casual and targeted.

Sometimes, we need to write about the things that not enough people are willing to write about.

Rest assured, I’m expecting to get blasted by both sides for this. I’m going to piss off some progressives here (I know, because I am one), but this essay isn’t friendly to conservatives either. And that makes sense, because both sides are guilty of coddling antisemites and promoting antisemitism.

Before I tear into my fellow progressives, let me be clear where I’m coming from. If I had to label myself, I’d probably say I am a non-religious, Jewish American who is politically progressive and holds a predominantly secular humanist worldview. My political and moral sensitivities predispose me to be sympathetic to the Palestinian cause; my cultural and religious upbringing predispose me to be sympathetic to the Israeli cause. I can see both sides of this struggle. I feel pain for the suffering of both the Israeli people and the people of Gaza.

But the message that I, and many other Jews, are receiving from the so-called compassionate and humanistic left is that Jewish pain doesn’t matter. It’s dismissed. If it’s perceived to exist at all, it does so only on a hierarchy of pain, and, oh, so sorry, but Jewish pain doesn’t rank high enough on the pain-o-meter. Because, you know, Israel is the oppressor, and, sorry, oppressor suffering doesn’t measure up. Gaza has it worse. Israel deserves what it gets. You guys had it coming. Get over it.

That’s not an exaggeration. That’s what it feels like every time someone throws out a “what about” response amidst any discussion I’ve been involved in of Jewish pain and suffering. Such rhetoric results in the wholesale negation of the trauma experienced by Jews around the world in the wake of the October 7 terrorist attacks. Consider it the gaslighting of an entire population—the cruel manipulation of the reality of a group of people and the attempted obliteration of their subjective, lived experiences in the wake of a violent trauma.

Rather than “gaslighting,” two Jewish trauma therapists from the greater Boston area apply a different name to this behavior and to the pain many Jews have felt since October 7: “traumatic invalidation” (Silow-Carroll, 2025).

As noted by Silow-Carroll (2025), in an article published by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, traumatic invalidation is:

a common term in [the trauma] field, describing when, for example, rape victims are told they have “misinterpreted” events or even brought them on themselves.
[The authors, Bar-Halpern and Wolfman,] apply the term to what Jews have reported in the months after the Hamas attacks: “Rather than being met with compassion and care,” they write, “many were instead met with a stunning mix of silence, blaming, excluding, and even outright denying the atrocities of Oct. 7 along with any emotional pain stemming from them.”

This negation of the emotional experiences of Jewish people occurs in private conversations, group discussions, and the broader public discourse. It began immediately following the terrorist attack on Israel on October 7 and continues to this day. Jewish pain in response to the kidnapping, rape, and murder of thousands of Israelis is minimized, silenced, and discredited.

Keep in mind that I support Palestinian self-determination and a two-state solution, despise the hard-right leaning Netanyahu governing coalition, and believe that the Israeli response to the October 7 terrorist attacks has become excessive, indiscriminate, and a violation of the basic human rights of the people of Gaza.

But I still love Israel. Love for Israel has and always will be a part of my identity as a Jewish-American. Moreover, I despise Hamas and their ilk. That is a part of my identity as a moral human being.

Allow me to share with you some of the hurt that I’ve experienced from the dominant discourse on the left—the hurt inflicted when others deny and minimize the experiences and feelings of Jewish people and the expression of traumatic Jewish pain.

It hurts me, deeply, when I post something supportive of Gaza and/or critical of Israel online and friends and allies support my statement by responding: “Fuck Israel,” “I hate Israel,” and “Death to Israel.” My support for the people of Gaza does not mean I wish harm and destruction on Israel. Israel is not, nor will it ever be, my enemy.

It pains me when I hear people paint the IDF as indiscriminate murderers without acknowledging the murderous behavior of Hamas. There are both good and bad actors on both sides. Atrocities have occurred on both sides. It’s invalidating when one is not permitted to discuss the harms committed against the Jewish people in Israel without also quickly qualifying that the harms against the people of Gaza are worse. I have experienced this invalidation directly.

The same “what-about-ism” that acts as intellectual and political cover for the MAGA faithful whenever someone questions the actions of the fascist Trump regime1 is employed by far too many progressives when discussing the tragedy of the Israel-Gaza conflict. It becomes reduced to a dick measuring contest of comparative pain and suffering.

Israel is the home of my people, both the Jews of ancestry and their modern descendants. I may dislike the current Israeli government, but I love the country. So, when I hear people spouting hatred against Israel, it is painful to me. It’s like those times when you were a kid and your friend called out your Mom for being a hard ass—remember your response to that? It was probably something like: “Uh-uh. No way. You’re not allowed to say that. She’s my Mom. I can complain about her, but you can’t. You don’t know her like I do. You don’t have the relationship that we have.”

So let me emphasize what my upbringing, worldview, and life experiences have taught me: I disagree with and disapprove of the actions of the Netanyahu governing coalition and with Netanyahu as a leader, but I struggle to conceive of a world where Israel is the bad guy. I don’t excuse their recent actions, but I also don’t view the state of Israel as a failed experiment in ethno-nationalism or a Western colonial interloper on the Middle Eastern stage.

When I criticize Israel, I don’t do so from a place of hatred; I do so from a place of love, just as I criticize the United States from a place of love. I desire the success and well-being of these nations, and their ability to live up to the promise of their founding. I may want Donald Trump and his MAGA/Project 2025 agenda to fail, but I do not want the United States to fail and falter. Likewise, I may want Bibi to fail—I want that corrupt man out of power, but I do not wish to see the state of Israel displaced, disempowered, or destroyed. There is a place for the state of Israel in our modern world.

This is not always an easy stance to maintain, because both the founding of the U.S.A. and the founding of Israel are stories not just of triumph, but also of tragedy. There are two sides to each tale. The births of these nations were not without controversy; they required the displacement and decimation of other existing peoples. These are the realities we face in a post-colonial world. So, we criticize, we challenge, we attempt to correct and make reparations, but we do so out of love—because we want the best for our country and its people, not the worst. We constantly strive to be and do better.

Let me be honest: it’s hard to be a progressive who inherently supports Israel. It’s painful when people who align with you on so many other global priorities wholly reject your perspective and lived experience in one, specific, and extremely complex situation.

These days, people on the left throw around the word “Zionist” like an enraged lynch mob uses the N-word. It’s expelled from their lips with disgust, like poison, the syllables dripping with hatred and disdain.

But in the strictest sense, what is a Zionist? It is someone who supports and advocates for the self-determination of the Jewish people in a nation state within their ancestral homeland. It’s a person who believes in the right to the existence of the state of Israel in the Levant. Period.

Like most things (American patriotism, for instance), Zionism can be taken to extremes. I strongly disagree with those whose definition of Zionism includes permanent Israeli occupation and settlement of the West Bank and Gaza. If your definition of Zionism includes these territorial captures, then I would tell you I am not a Zionist. But if you ask me if the state of Israel has a right to exist in the Middle East, the ancestral land of the Jewish people? If that is how you define Zionism, then, yes, I am a Zionist. Do you hate me now for my beliefs? Is it that black and white?

How do you think it feels when friends and allies repeat, refuse to condemn, or try to excuse chants of “Death to Zionists?” How do you think I feel? The term means too many things to too many people. Does the phrase “Death to Zionists” include me? Or am I excluded? Am I one of the “good ones?”

More significantly, it’s far too easy to conflate the term “Zionists” with “Jews” in general, because most Zionists are themselves Jewish. It’s hard to disentangle the two. Calls for harm to Zionists very quickly and too conveniently become calls for harm to all Jews. Those who express these sentiments don’t differentiate between Zionist Jews and non-Zionist Jews. No one says: “Death to Israel, death to Zionists, but, hey, the Jews in America and Europe who oppose the Israeli government are okay by me.” Hatred is never that nuanced.

Consider also the recent discourse around New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. I am far from an expert on Mamdani’s statements and stances, public or private, throughout his adult life. Based on what I have heard and read, though, I’m fairly comfortable saying Mamdani is not a friend of Israel. Just as my upbringing and worldview have resulted in my instinctive leanings towards Israel, Mamdani’s leanings are with those who have historically aligned against the Jewish state. But I’m less comfortable labeling Mamdani an antisemite. I firmly believe the man does not hold ill will towards the Jewish people. However, he’s also not inclined or predisposed to favor Jews; he comes from and subscribes to a different worldview, one that favors Islam and opposes many 20th-century Western stances.

The influence of Mamdani’s worldview and his predisposition is apparent with regard to the pro-Palestinian rallying call, “Globalize the Intifada,” a sentiment Mamdani has yet to reject. The word “Intifada” means “uprising” in Arabic. To many on the left, the phrase “Globalize the Intifada” represents a defiance of and opposition to Western colonialism, dominance, and influence. They view it as a statement of strength and solidarity and a call for Palestinian resistance in the face of decades of oppression.

But consider this phrase through the lens of an Israeli, or any Jewish person across the globe. What many people, particularly amongst the under-40 crowd, fail to recognize is that the term “Intifada” is also used to refer to two specific periods of violence against Israel and the Israeli people, two Intifadas against the Jewish people—the first from 1987-1993, and the second from 2000-2005. So, while for some, the term may have initially carried connotations of nonviolent resistance, in reality, both Intifadas involved a mix of nonviolent and violent tactics, with the second Intifada seeing a notable increase in armed conflict and suicide attacks.

“Intifada” is a term that carries strong hostilities towards the Jewish people. As such, while some on the left may view the term as a call for non-violent resistance in support of the Palestinian people, others, particularly Jews, hear it as a call for violence, not only against Israel, but against Jews around the world.

Consider also the popular chant “From the river to the sea (Palestine will be free).” Many see this as a call for the establishment of a Palestinian state, the long-sought-after goal of an oppressed and displaced people. However, the phrase is not just a call for Palestinian statehood; “From the river to the sea” implies that a Palestinian state should stretch from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea; for such a thing to occur, the state of Israel would have to be annihilated.

So, while many Palestinian people and their supporters view the phrase as an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence throughout the region, many Israelis and Jewish people interpret the phrase as a demand for the destruction of the state of Israel and the removal of Jews from the geographic region.

“From the river to the sea” is more than just a chant for Palestinian liberation and self-determination. It’s an absolutist chant that leaves no room for a two-state solution. It’s a chant that doesn’t support the peaceful coexistence of the Jewish and Palestinian people. It’s a chant that is inherently hostile towards Israel, and by extension, hostile towards many Jews. Too many progressives refuse to consider the multiple connotations of the phrase and its impact on Jewish allies of the Palestinian cause.

Language such as this is one of the things that makes me hesitant to be more vocal in my support for Gaza and the Palestinian people. I don’t want to be at a rally supporting Palestinian self-determination and relief for Gaza if chants of “From the river to the sea” or “Globalize the Intifada” are used as rallying cries. These sentiments read as hostile to me. But no one on the far left seems to care. Such is traumatic invalidation.

As I frequently express, the Israel-Gaza conflict is a situation far too complex for simple binaries. It’s more complicated than “good guys versus bad guys,” despite attempts to reduce it to such. The conflict stretches back further than October 7, 2023. Further back than the 2005 Intifada, the 1988 declaration of the Palestinian National Council, the Six-Day War of 1967, the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the 1920 British Mandate for Palestine, and any other compounding factor that has contributed to the Gordian Knot that is the Israel-Palestine/Arab conflict. This conflict has deep roots, stretching back centuries, millennia even, reflecting various complicating factors, from Western colonial interference, to antisemitism by surrounding Arabic nations, to global guilt over the horrors of the Holocaust, to the historic othering and disenfranchisement of the Jewish people, to the blind eye turned to the suffering of those in Gaza. It can’t be reduced to a simple social media post or slogan, but that seems to be what we’ve attempted to do.

To quote from Silow-Carroll (2025) again:

The greater problem amidst all this is that antisemitism has become conflated with the divisive politics of the current Israel-Hamas war. It is certainly true that criticism of the Israeli government is not the same thing as antisemitism. Israel’s reflexive defenders are wrong, and they hurt their own cause when they equate all such arguments with antisemitism [emphasis added]. But some Americans have gone too far in the other direction. They have engaged in whataboutism regarding anti-Jewish hate. They have failed to denounce antisemitism in the unequivocal ways that they properly denounce other bigotry.

Here’s an indisputable truth: for the better part of the last three-quarters of a century, public opinion, particularly U.S. public opinion, has been very much in the corner of the Jewish people and the state of Israel. In the 21st century, that stance is much less monolithic than it was 25 years ago and much more politicized. The past two decades have seen a growing awareness of and attention to the needs not just of the Palestinian people, but of oppressed and underprivileged peoples around the globe. What was once a predominantly pro-Western worldview across the American political spectrum is now being challenged by many on the progressive left who have come to understand the harms of 500 years of European and American colonialism.

A man like Mamdani brings an entirely different worldview to his political and personal activity than the one most in the U.S. are accustomed to—not just one that reflects socialist thought and policy (not that there’s anything wrong with that; I have strong socialist tendencies myself), but one that views the world primarily through a non-Western lens that reflects the priorities and interests of other, non-Western peoples, including the Arabic and Palestinian people. Again, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with this worldview, just that it was a less common stance in the West until the last decade or two.

The result of this awakening to social justice and the oppressive actions of the dominant monoculture (both intentional and incidental) is, in part, a giant “Fuck You” to Western-European colonialism on the part of the progressive left. And the state of Israel and the Jewish people have been lumped into that narrative of the dominant, Western, colonial oppressor.

What people forget, or fail to understand, is that until the latter half of the 20th century, the Jewish people were not seen as part of the dominant Western culture and are still excluded from it by many on the political far right. Throughout history, Jews have been outsiders everywhere we went. In Shakespeare’s England, we were cast as Shylock. In Inquisition-era Spain, Jews, along with Muslims, were heretics. In pre-Soviet Russia, Jews faced discrimination, persecution, and pogroms (the organized massacre of a particular ethnic group, often Jews). In 1950s America, Jews were labeled as communists. To the nationalist far right in America today, we are globalists. Until the second half of the 20th century, which saw the rise of Jewish acceptance and the mainstreaming of Jewish culture in the United States, the Jewish people had consistently been singled out as “other” and as enemies of the state and of the people.

The Jewish people are a people of diaspora.2 Throughout history, we have been chased and displaced around the globe from our original homeland. Jews originated in the Levant, but we were driven from the land first into Europe and Asia, and later to the Americas, where we sought freedom and opportunity along with immigrants from dozens of other nations and cultures.3

Despite assertions otherwise, the Jewish people in Israel are not European colonizers. Jews have always been and will always be a people of the Middle East. Yes, many of the Jews who came to populate the state of Israel in the 20th century were Ashkenazi Jews who came from diaspora lands in Central and Eastern Europe. But Ashkenazi Jews account for less than half of the Jews in Israel. The other half are primarily Sephardic Jews (Jews of Spanish and Portuguese origin) and Mizrahi Jews (those with roots in West Asia, Central Asia, and North Africa).

Ashkenazi Jews have come to be seen by many as “white” over the past half century, particularly in the U.S. But this is less true for the noticeably darker-skinned Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, who are more closely tied, both geographically and genetically, to their ancestors from the Levant. As such, attempts to reduce the Israel-Gaza conflict to a simple narrative of white European people dominating brown indigenous people are incorrect.

The Jewish people deserve a home in their ancestral homeland just as much as any other people of the Middle East, including the Palestinians. If ethnostates are going to exist in that region of the world, both groups are deserving of them.

Sadly, the modern association of the Jewish people with “whiteness,” European colonialism, and the dominant Western culture has resulted in the dismissal not only of Jewish pain and suffering in the wake of recent traumas, but also in the perceived legitimacy of the Jewish state. As such, rather than allowing for Jewish mourning and the recognition of Jewish loss following the terrorist attacks of October 7, progressives have used the “white/brown, oppressor/oppressed, colonist/indigenous” narrative as an excuse to minimize trauma experienced by the Jewish people. This narrative has also encouraged the resurgence of anti-Jewish tropes and rhetoric and increased violence against Jews, not just in the United States and Israel, but worldwide.

As cited in a New York Times editorial (2025):

The United States is experiencing its worst surge of anti-Jewish hate in many decades. Antisemitic hate crimes more than doubled between 2021 and 2023, according to the F.B.I., and appear to have risen further in 2024. On a per capita basis, Jews face far greater risks of being victims of hate crimes than members of any other demographic groups [emphasis added].

In just the past two months:

two Israeli embassy employees were killed in a shooting outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., and the attacker reportedly said he did it for Gaza and to "Free Palestine" (May 2025).
an attack in Boulder, Colorado, targeted a group supporting Israeli hostages, involving Molotov cocktails and injuries. The suspect reportedly expressed a desire to kill Zionists (June 2025).

There are far too many other instances I can cite of antisemitic violence committed by actors on both the far left and the far right over the past decade. Instead, here’s an illustration of the prevalence of hate crimes from the New York Times editorial:

Image source: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/14/opinion/antisemitism-jewish-hate.html?smid=nytcore-android-share

If you can’t tell, this is bad for the Jewish people. Very, very bad. We Jews know how quickly public sentiment towards us can sour. Although it seems the specter of antisemitism is never far, lurking in the darkest corners of people’s hearts and minds, we remember, for instance, the religious, cultural, and personal freedoms allowed to the Jews of the German Weimar Republic (1919-1933), as well as how quickly those freedoms were erased and replaced with the death sentence levied by Hitler’s Third Reich.

And, as the New York Times Editorial (2025) reminds us:

…history offers a grim lesson: An increase in antisemitism often accompanies a rise in other hateful violence and human rights violations. Societies that make excuses for attacks against one minority group rarely stop there.

I know I’ve been very critical of progressives in this essay. But the hatred and violence towards Jews isn’t coming only from the far left. Oh, no. The far right is just as guilty. If Jew hate on the American political left is a newer phenomenon, on the American far right it has festered for a century amongst the ranks of white nationalists, Klansmen, neo-Nazis, and other hate groups. To see this, we need look no further than the U.S. President, a man whose false support for the Jewish people includes decrying antisemitism on the left while coddling and playing footsie with it on the right.

As the Times editorial board (2025) observed:

While [Trump] claims to deplore antisemitism, his actions tell a different story. He has dined with a Holocaust denier, and his Republican Party has nominated antisemites for elected offices, including governor of North Carolina. Mr. Trump himself praised as “very fine people” the attendees of a 2017 march in Charlottesville, Va., that featured the chant “Jews will not replace us.”

Here’s where things get confusing in trying to differentiate between anti-Israel sentiment and antisemitic sentiment. Remember when I said I had no doubt that Zohran Mamdani was not a friend to Israel, but I was less convinced that he was antisemitic? The opposite is true with Trump.

I have no doubt that Trump is a friend to Israel, at least for as long as it remains useful for him to be one, but I am also more certain that he is antisemitic and a danger to the Jewish people than Mamdani, even if his anti-Jewish sentiment is not made explicit. In fact, I’d say Trump is worse than antisemitic—he’s completely indifferent to the needs and concerns of the Jewish people. I don’t think he harbors direct hatred towards Jews, but he is more than willing to use us to advance his own personal and political desires. Antisemitism only becomes a problem for him when it is useful to him for it to be a problem—decrying antisemitism at universities to disguise his attempts to control institutes of higher education while allowing it to flourish among both his rank and file and his leadership (ahem, Stephens Miller and Bannon)—it’s dishonest and disgusting.

Bannon and other adherents to the Great Replacement Theory don’t just believe white people in America are being replaced by black and brown minorities; they believe Jews are behind this supposed replacement of white people. These individuals speak of vague threats by globalists—another code word for the Jewish people—who desire to create a New World Order. Rubbish! But, as dangerous as these beliefs are, at least we know where the people who hold them stand; they have a consistent ideology and are forthright in their hatred.

Trump’s only ideology is the more insidious, “I win.” In keeping with this ideology, he’ll use the Jewish people and anyone else he comes in contact with to achieve his nefarious ends. He is a friend to Israel because it benefits him to be a friend of Israel, and it will continue to benefit him for the foreseeable future. I can trust his intentions there because I trust the consistency of his self-interest—too much of his MAGA coalition is held together by an underlying support for the state of Israel, although for various and at times contradictory reasons.

But Trump’s broader intentions for the Jewish people? They are forever shifting. He speaks out of both sides of his mouth. He’ll defend the Jewish people when it’s useful to him, but only when it’s useful to him. He’s proven that time and time again by his warm embrace of far-right antisemites. Jewish people are nothing but pawns in his quest for dominance and revenge.

So… antisemitism. It exists unchecked on the far left because to challenge the left’s antisemitism is to risk ostracization, deplatforming, and traumatic invalidation. Resisting antisemitism doesn’t fit the dominant progressive narrative—that Jews are white oppressors. The left will not police itself in this regard. And it exists unchecked on the far right because to challenge it risks alienating the violent extremists who make up Trump’s shadow army of loyalist enforcers who desire nothing short of white Christian dominance. Resisting antisemitism doesn’t fit the dominant far-right narrative—that Jews secretly control the world and are here to replace us. The right will not police itself in this regard.

As a Jew, this is all very hard to swallow. But at least I expect it from the far right. I know where they stand, and it is in opposition to me and to my beliefs about the world. It’s much harder to hear such talk from the left, from progressives, the people I most align with politically. You are the ones who view the world through a similar lens as I. That’s why it hurts so much—the silence, the gaslighting, the traumatic invalidation of the Jewish experience post-October 7. Because the truth is, Jews, whether left- or right-leaning, are entitled to the pain we feel now, to the confusion and conflicted feelings, without our experience of trauma and suffering being compared to that of another group. Without being told that our traumatic response is invalid… because we deserve what we got. Because we had it coming. “Because Israel is the oppressor. Israel is the colonizer,” so our pain is undeserved.

And as for those whose actions extend beyond harmful rhetoric—the perpetrators of actual physical violence? What do I want to say to the man who gunned down two young Jewish people in Washington, DC, to “Free Palestine?” To the man in Boulder, Colorado, who wanted to kill Zionists? How about this:

Taking a tragedy like the leveling of Gaza and conflating it with the idea that “all Jews are bad” is like saying all Germans are bad because of the Holocaust.

It’s like saying all Americans are bad because of the actions of the Trump Administration.

Here’s an indisputable truth: The Jewish people are representative of and responsible for the actions of the Israeli government only so much as the Palestinian people are representative of and responsible for the actions of Hamas. There are supporters and enablers on both sides, and also many who disapprove of these actions. The decisions and actions of a nation’s leaders do not reflect the actions of the entire populace of that nation. They don’t represent the soul of a nation, nor the soul of a people. That logic paints with too broad a brush.

Progressives allow for so much nuance, in so many areas; why are we unable to do so when it comes to Israel and the Jews? Does the answer lie in deep-seated antisemitism, in implicit bias, and in centuries-old prejudices against the Jewish people that simmer just below the level of conscious thought? Does it lie in knee-jerk, over-simplified reactions to Jewish “colonialism” and a rush to identify with the underdog and the oppressed? Or is it another recurrence of the cyclical and familiar response to the Jewish people wherever we may go in this world? What happens when the people used as scapegoats by countries and rulers across generations amass too much power, become too dominant, and too culturally influential? The answer, it seems, is that the instinct of the general populace to tear down, blame, minimize, and “other” them resurfaces with a vengeance.

It leaves me weeping.

Words over Swords

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