Happy Purim?
Sometimes it's a struggle
I'm often something of a Purim grinch, but this Purim I'm feeling particularly depressed. Israel is neither getting our hostages away from Hamas or at active war with them. The explosion of left-wing antisemitism in academia and the streets of America is about to be matched by an explosion of right-wing antisemitism led by people such as Tucker Carlson and facilitated by people such as Joe Rogan. Qatar, sitting behind much of the anti-Israel campaigning worldwide, is untouchable; Trump won't utter a word of criticism, just like he won't criticize Putin.
Meanwhile, due to the situation with Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and the pressure-cooker of the West Bank, there is an enormous shortage of soldiers. But the "security-strong" government of Israel is paying off a huge sector of the nation to avoid serving; last night, our so-called “Minister of Defense” announced that he won’t be “harming the Torah world” by enlisting them. Instead, the government is instead continually increasing the insane pressure on the reservists, attempting to soothe them by offering hotel coupons (!).
Anyway, my wife insists that I get into the spirit of Purim, so I joined my family in this year's dress-up theme. And then maybe I'll get drunk enough to not be able to distinguish between those who want Israel to be destroyed but aren't yet strong enough to overcome it, and those who don't want Israel to be destroyed but are determinedly weakening it economically and militarily until its destruction will be inevitable.
Happy Purim!
"The explosion of left-wing antisemitism in academia and the streets of America"
It was always there. It was far worse a century ago. The federal government had deported thousands of radicals (most of whom actually *were* communists, anarchists, or held similar far left views) who were disproportionately Jewish (and many of whom would eventually be murdered by the Nazis). These raids focused on immigrants who had committed no crimes. They were led by A. Mitchell Palmer, Attorney General under President Wilson, who had previously been a supporter of civil liberties, but had sold out his principles to improve his chances for a successful Presidential campaign. His assistant in this was a young attorney named J. Edgar Hoover, who would spend the next fifty years violating civil liberties of Americans.
There was a big backlash to this and it was one of many things that led directly to the Republican blowout victory in the 1920 elections. The Republicans decided that the way to deal with undesirable foreigners (translation: Jews, Italians, and others from Southern and Eastern Europe) was to prevent them from coming to the US in the first place. In less than ten weeks after taking office, the Republicans enacted draconian quotas on immigration, and they were further tightened in 1924. (Interestingly, there were never any quotas on immigration from any Western Hemisphere country until 1965; had that aspect of the pre-1965 law been maintained, there would be no "border crisis" today.)
At the same time The Ku Klux Klan was getting more and more support, and not just in the South -- in 1924, prominent Klan members were elected Governors of Indiana and Colorado. Both President Coolidge and his eventual Democratic opponent, John W. Davis, quietly sought KKK support. Democratic candidates Oscar Underwood and Al Smith were bitter opponents of the Klan but lost the nomination to Davis; bigotry hurt Underwood and Smith because Underwood was from Alabama and Smith was Catholic.
And at the same time most universities slapped strict quotas on the number of Jewish students. Columbia was particularly bad; it had been the leader in imposing such quotas and among those rejected by Columbia were future Nobel Prize winners Richard Feynmann and Jonas Salk; they attended MIT and City College of New York instead. Columbia President Nicholas Murray Butler, who was also sufficiently prominent in Republican circles to have received the Republican electoral votes for Vice President in 1912. Butler welcomed the Ambassador from Nazi Germany to speak at the university in 1933 and also expelled an anti-Nazi student whose strident protests were too loud. (This blatant discrimination eventually led Jews to found Jewish academic institutions including what would become Yeshiva University, Brandeis University, Touro University, and Albert Einstein College of Medicine. I have been on the faculty of Albert Einstein College of Medicine for 23 years and in addition to being a nice supportive place to work I can honestly say that I have never suffered from anti-Semitism at any point in my academic career.)
As a very wise man once wrote, there is nothing new under the sun.
The left wingers are very loud but few in number. The right wingers are much much louder, have bigger audiences and have a much larger base, and they are the ones I would worry about.