Although I was born and raised in Los Angeles, my roots are British. My Manchester-born mother and Glasgow-born father arrived in America to pursue a job opportunity shortly before I was born, leaving their families. Around that same time, my mother’s sister Leonie married my uncle David, a wonderful man from Leeds, England, where they settled down to raise seven children—six boys and a girl. Geography notwithstanding, the sisters remained close, a bond that continues to this day. Their children, the band of cousins of which I am one, always understood that but for the choices our parents made, our geographical location, accents, and lives could just have easily gone the other way. “I could be them and they could be me”—the unexpressed thought that bonds us together.
As a family committed to Judaism, my aunt and uncle sent their children to Jewish day school. Leeds, however, lacked a Jewish high school, so they decided that their children would make the two-hour commute each way, every day, to Manchester’s King David High School. In the fall of 1994, four of them—Jonathan, Benji, Michael, and Rafi—took a trip to school that would change their lives forever.
Getting off the train in Manchester, they decided to walk the final blocks to school, passing a gangly group of seven men sitting on a railing off to the side. Not boys, not teenagers, but grown men began to follow them. Sensing that these men were no ordinary hooligans, my cousins picked up their pace, hoping to create some distance between them and their pursuers. Their King David school blazers identified them as Jewish.
The antisemitic slurs began. The thugs verbally taunted the oldest—Jonathan—while Benji, the second-oldest, tried to defuse the situation, hoping to pacify the men with gentle and no doubt self-deprecating humor. But the sharp words quickly turned into thrown rocks, and before Jonathan knew what was happening, he had been kicked in the back, then was head-butted at full force. The blow broke his nose and rendered him unconscious. The thugs, however, did not let Jonathan fall to the ground. They had other plans; their viciousness had only just begun. One held his limp body up so the others could hit and kick him.
Michael and Rafi, the little ones, ran frantically to the front doors of nearby homes, pleading for help. The residents opened their doors, poked their heads out to see what was going on, then shut the doors on the faces of my thirteen- and eleven-year-old cousins. Benji stood frozen at the sight of his older brother being beaten. Surely, he believed, at some point enough would be enough, the point had been made, the abuse would stop, and the bullies would move on.
Jonathan fell limp to the ground; unconscious, he was unable to curl his body into a protective fetal position as more rocks, bottles, and kicks flew at him. The ringleader of the gang shouted, “Kill the Jew!” Whatever naiveté or hope in humanity Benji held died at the moment. There would be no respite, no help forthcoming, no member of the gang saying “Enough is enough.” Benji threw himself over his brother to absorb the blows—to be badly beaten himself.
The details of what happened next are fuzzy. My cousins recall the boots of the gang members being replaced by those of security guards from the train station, who finally arrived on the scene. Benji carried Jonathan the remaining blocks to the gate of the school, where the receptionist called for an ambulance. When my aunt, his mother, first saw Jonathan after he was brought home, his mangled condition shocked her; his face had been beaten beyond recognition.
The gang members, or at least some of them, were eventually apprehended. The price they paid for their crime was inconsequential: a fine of fifty pounds, rendered in installments over two years.
As for my cousins, their lives were changed forever. Jonathan has suffered from debilitating headaches and general poor health. The year following the attack, he was afflicted with cirrhosis of the liver—necessitating, over the years, four liver transplants. Now a practicing attorney in Leeds, Jonathan has courageously built a life for himself and created a beautiful family. His decision to stay in Leeds, however, was not entirely his own. Given the chronic ailments he has faced since that fateful day, he is, ironically, tethered to the health-care system of the city that inflicted upon him his health challenges in the first place.
My cousin Rafi, from that day forward, feared walking alone outside his house in the UK. A talented musician, he eventually immigrated to Israel, where he settled down and got married. My cousin Michael, now a promotional filmmaker in Brooklyn, developed alopecia soon after the attack, a condition of hair loss that has never interfered with his ability to be in the company of good-looking women. He has thankfully settled down and is the proud father of a little girl.
As for Benji, he spent the rest of high school going to the gym, where he learned how to box and defend himself. Never again, he vowed, would he let himself be pushed around. Benji too immigrated to Israel, serving on the front lines of the Second Lebanon War, and then Operation Pillar of Defense (2012), where his brother Rafi joined him in the infantry.
To this day, when I see my cousins, we share memories of our granny and poke fun at the quirks of the two sisters who are our mothers. In retrospect, that day became a defining pivot of self-understanding. The principles of their existence were upended; the hatred of others shaped who they would become, who they are today, and their sense of what it means to be a Jew in this world.
Uniformly bad, antisemitism is not uniform in expression. Over the course of its history, the world’s oldest hatred has taken different forms. Not a single chapter of the book of Exodus goes by before Pharaoh gives expression to a trope that would be repeated in different guises throughout history:
Look, the Israelite people are too numerous for us. Let us deal shrewdly with them, so they may not increase; otherwise in the event of war they may join our enemies in fighting . . . So they [the Egyptians] set taskmasters over them to oppress them.
(Exodus 1:9–11)
A people bearing ancestry and customs different from those of the rest of the populace is identified. As they grow in number, Pharaoh seeks to limit their power. He plays off the unspoken fears of his people, portraying the Israelites as a threat, a fifth column capable of undermining the nation from within, and he uses this to justify setting a system of oppression in motion.
“History never repeats itself. Man always does,” wrote Voltaire (himself a perpetuator of negative stereotypes regarding Jews and Judaism). From the pyramids of Egypt to the Purim story of ancient Persia, from the theologically fueled blood libels of Christian Europe to the hatreds of Nazi ideology—as varied as the context and symptoms may be, the pathology of the virus of antisemitism remains the same. Difference transformed to fear, fear transformed to hate, hate transformed to violence—whether state sanctioned or not. The story has been repeated through the ages.
Abundant as antisemitism has been throughout history, so too is the literature about its origins, manifestations, and proposed cures. One helpful heuristic was offered by a founding leader of American Jewry as we enjoy it today, Solomon Schechter (1847–1915). The preeminent scholar of Jewish studies of his time, Schechter left his position at Cambridge University in 1902 to become president of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (my alma mater)—a position he held with distinction until his death. To this day, Schechter’s legacy continues to guide not just the institution he led, but by a certain telling, American Jewry as a whole.
Against the backdrop of surging expressions of antisemitism in Europe, in March 1903 Schechter delivered an address titled “Higher Criticism—Higher Anti-Semitism.” In his remarks he coined a distinction between what he termed the lower antisemitism and the higher antisemitism.
Reflecting back on his Romanian youth, Schechter said that he would, much like my cousins, “come home from the Cheder [Hebrew school] bleeding and crying from the wounds inflicted upon [me] by the Christian boys.” This was the “vulgar sort” of antisemitism, the lower kind. He included in his definition of this type of antisemitism his memories of his own bloodied childhood, the Hep Hep riots (a series of anti-Jewish pogroms that swept through Bavarian towns in 1819) and the trumped-up charges of treason leveled against Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jew, in 1894. Just months after Schechter made these remarks, the previously noted anti-Jewish riots known as the Kishinev pogroms broke out; Schechter would have undoubtedly classified them as an expression of lower antisemitism—as he would the violence of October 7th.
The focus of Schechter’s address, however, was not the physical suffering characterizing lower antisemitism, but rather the suffering inflicted by what he called “Higher Anti-Semitism.” A pious Jew and man of the academy, Schechter called out scholars who employed what was then referred to as “higher criticism”—a form of biblical scholarship that, in brief, sought to identify the human rather than divine origins of the Hebrew Bible as understood by traditional Jews. A scholar of the highest rank, Schechter readily acknowledged many different findings of scholarly inquiry, but in “higher criticism” he detected antisemitism, in that it was an attempt to dethrone the Hebrew Bible from its sacred status—and, by extension, prove the spiritual essence of Judaism to be inferior.
Genteel and scholarly as the discourse of the academy may have been, for Schechter it was equally, if not more, nefarious than the thuggery of lower antisemitism. “Our great claim to the gratitude of mankind,” Schechter said, “is that we gave to the world the word of God, the Bible.” In Schechter’s estimation, “the Bible is [the Jewish people’s] sole raison d’être.” Higher (biblical) criticism could be categorized as the higher antisemitism in that it was a venomous form of anti-Jewish scholarship. It denied Jews the sanctity of their religious texts and, by extension, the integrity of their faith.
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REMOVED AS SCHECHTER may be from our present time and circumstance, his language provides a scaffolding to speak about antisemitism. Jew hatred is neither monolithic nor, for that matter, is the study of it a precise science; its varied manifestations cannot be placed into tidy and discrete categories. It is, rather, a spectrum or sliding scale—from the most vulgar to the most genteel. At one end, acts of hate-filled violence, and at the other end, modest and sometimes barely perceptible sleight-of-hand exclusion, often, as in Schechter’s day, cloaked in pseudo-scholarship.
Today, the lower antisemitism remains—violence against Jews because they are Jews: the murder of eleven Jewish souls at the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, the verbal bullying or physical brutality aimed at a Hasid in Brooklyn, and the antisemitic screeds in the dark and not-so-dark corners of the web. The shameless antisemitism emanating from the far right has included violent assaults and chants like those in Charlottesville: “Jews will not replace us.” Lower antisemitism can come from the right or the left, from white nationalists or Islamic fundamentalists. The vicious attacks of October 7th were not just crimes against Israel, or humanity—they were assaults on Jewish lives. Sad to say, lower antisemitism is alive and well in our day.
Closely related to Schechter’s lower form of antisemitism is what I would call a “middling” variety, which includes physical thuggery and also the power of words to do harm—vocal slurs, fear mongering, 9/11 conspiracy theorists’ rants, intimidation of Jews on campus, hate and intimidation expressed online, rude graffiti, and the like. In such instances, one’s physical person or property may not be violated but one’s sense of self and safety is nonetheless compromised by a variety of anti-Jewish hate mongering: graffiti, slurs, online hate and intimidation, and much more.
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) defines antisemitism as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” Tracked by institutions like the ADL, kept to a low burn in law-abiding societies, middling antisemitism has of late had an uptick, shown in anti-Israel rhetoric intended to intimidate all Jews, as well as the verbal and physical confrontations taking place in our country and across the internet.
Identifiable as the “lower” and “middle” antisemitisms may be, it is the higher antisemitism that is arguably most widespread, difficult to discern, and thus most pernicious. In Schechter’s time, the proxy for hatred was the Jew’s claim on a sacred text—the Bible. Today it is the Jew’s claim to a sacred land, Israel, and by extension, the Jewish right to self-determination and self-defense, which is the proxy for contemporary antisemitism. Were Schechter to write today, he would write: “Our [the Jewish people’s] great claim to the gratitude of mankind is that we gave to the world . . . Israel.” Often, what people are saying about Israel is really what they’re saying about Jews.
To be sure, we could make the case that the blurring of lines between criticism of Israel and criticism of Jews is fair game. I pray on behalf of the Jewish state, and the flag of the modern State of Israel sits proudly on the pulpit of my synagogue; I devote an extraordinary amount of my rabbinate to ensuring the well-being of Israel. I readily admit that my Jewish identity and my Zionism are inseparable, the latter wholly emergent from the former. If this is so, why should I be offended or even surprised if non-Jews conflate discussions and criticisms of Israel with criticisms of the Jewish community?
Moreover, as someone who has publicly and privately critiqued Israel, its leadership, its Chief Rabbinate, its inability to house religious pluralism, its inability to realize the ideals of its founding declaration to be a Jewish and democratic state, I fully believe that my criticism is an expression of my love for Israel and Judaism. So too, there have been and continue to be non-Zionist expressions of Jewish life. Misguided and shortsighted as I believe non-statist formulations of contemporary Jewish life to be, they are not in and of themselves antisemitic. I do not begrudge the critics of Israel their right to criticism.
And yet it is an inescapable reality that embedded in anti-Zionism are not-so-hidden expressions of antisemitism. Sometimes they are easy to detect. The use of the prefix “Zio” (“Zio-media,” “Zio-economics,” and so on) can cloak hatred of Jews. The left wing’s critique of Zionism as a colonial project born of sin ignores the thousands of years of Jewish claim to the land, the present-day case for a Jewish nation-state, and cycle after cycle of Arab rejectionism of any Jewish presence in the Middle East. The word Zionist itself is a convenient and fungible term used by antisemites to mask Jew hatred. To the contemporary antisemite, Zionism has become the equivalent of the blood libels of old. Here are a people, they are different from us, this difference gives life to a fear that they will grow too numerous and powerful. It follows the pattern of hatred first expressed in Exodus.
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WHILE THE INCREASED threat of the lower and middle antisemitisms would be enough to raise alarm bells for Jews, the increase in the third, higher antisemitism has, I believe, stung the most and shaken American Jewry to its core. All the woke justifications, moral equivalencies, “yeah buts,” and whataboutisms that arose after October 7th have led to the unnerving realization that perhaps Jews are not quite as secure in America as we had thought we were. This threat is not the exact equivalent of an attack against Israelis, or a horrific shooting by a lunatic-fringe white nationalist, or the disturbed rantings of an NBA point guard or unhinged rapper. We recognize something less physically violent but more nefarious: that in the eyes of many, Jewish lives are worth less than other lives.
This is happening right here on our own front yard, in the institutions we are part of, in our friends’ posts on Facebook, on the boards we sit on, and in organizations that some of us fund. We connect the dots from an antisemitic conference on a campus to the upended tables at a Hillel House, from the silence of a school administration in the face of the loss of Jewish life to the bullying of a Jewish student. We experience moral whiplash when, after Israeli Jews have been murdered or kept in continuing captivity, we hear voices in our society claim that the violence is justified. It’s as if a curtain has been ripped away, revealing an unexpected reality and leaving us to wonder where we, as Jews, fit in.
Not too long ago, I brought a group of synagogue teens to Berlin, a capstone experience for our bright soon-to-be graduates of high school. We went to learn about our synagogue’s German Jewish heritage, interact with German Jews, and, most of all, learn about the origins of our people’s darkest hour—the Holocaust. Having visited Auschwitz, Theresienstadt, and other concentration camps with other groups, I believed, and in many respects still do, that I had already visited a few of the sites of the worst atrocities committed against Jews and all of humanity. The train tracks, the barracks, the selection lines, the crematoria—a window onto the evil that humans are capable of perpetrating against one another.
It was, nonetheless, a disturbing experience of an altogether different kind to visit the Wannsee Conference Center in an idyllic suburb twenty minutes outside Berlin. It was in this lakeside conference resort that fifteen high-ranking officials met on January 20, 1942, to coordinate the implementation of the “Final Solution.” With beautiful views, elegant waitstaff, and bureaucratic efficiency, the highly credentialed officials formalized a plan of genocide against the Jews; without them, the machinery of the death camps would have never been set in motion. Millions of European Jews were murdered in the death camps, but their death warrants were signed long before—before the train tracks, before even Wannsee. Their noose was prepared by way of hundreds of previous acts of dehumanization and exclusion. Excluded from professions, from participating in civic society, they were deemed other, regarded as a threat, made less than human, making their mass murder seem far more mundane than would have been otherwise possible.
My point is decidedly not that the genocide of Jews is around the corner. It’s important to be cautious when drawing historical analogies. I make the more modest but critically important point that the movement from the higher forms of antisemitism to the lower forms can happen easily, imperceptibly, and quickly. The thugs who beat up my cousins no doubt harbored hatreds instilled in them long before they spotted the four visibly Jewish brothers on their way to school.
The perpetrators of those acts, and any hate-based act of violence, have moral agency. And yet without a series of seeders, enablers, and bystanders, the violent acts themselves would not be committed. The institutions molding identity, be it media, schools, houses of worship, or individual homes, all contribute to the shaping of the character of a given society. Political extremism, toxic discourse, and social media are the enablers. Most damning are the bystanders who, at every stage of antisemitism’s continuum of hate, fail to stand up and put a halt before a further stage can be reached. From the highest of highs to the lowest of lows—intellectual hatreds lead to violent expression of hatreds. As the German poet Heinrich Heine famously wrote, “Those who burn books will in the end burn people.”
The progression from one form of antisemitism to the next, then to the next, and so on, is not a necessary one. As the ad on the New York subways reminds us: “If you see something, say something.” Or maybe better yet—do something. From the right, the left, or the higher, middle, or lower, antisemitism must be called out, confronted, and quashed. Not just Jews but all people of conscience should not tolerate baseless hatreds of any kind.
As I grapple to understand where and who we are as Jews today, my thoughts inevitably turn to that day so many years ago in provincial England. I think of my cousins called upon, time and again, to defend themselves and their Jewish heritage. I think of the day when they—yiddische boys in their school blazers—banged in vain on neighborhood doors, crying for help. Never again would they allow their safety and that of their brothers to be dependent on the kindness of strangers. Never again would a naive belief in the goodness of humanity lead them to hesitate in fulfilling their obligations to defend themselves as their attackers prepared their assault. It would be their decision—theirs and their country’s alone—to choose the moment and manner by which their destiny would be shaped and their safety secured. They remain the same cousins, the world has changed, and yet antisemitism, the world’s oldest hatred, remains and continues to shape-shift and proliferate. Who would have believed that on October 7th, and over the months that followed, we would see this hatred, in all its manifestations, emerge with ferocity, diversity, and ubiquity, as it did? My cousins, I must believe, were not surprised. Why were we?