What Starts in Europe

“I was born in hiding, and I don’t want to die in hiding.”

Bret Stephens’ mother, who survived the Holocaust as a child in hiding, said that to him a year ago, after “watching footage of a Jewish student being harassed and surrounded by anti-Israel protestors at Harvard, a once great university,” said Stephens at Temple Emanu-El’s Streicker Center on Dec. 3.

“She couldn’t believe it. My mother, who came to this country at 10 and reveres America and our great institutions, she couldn’t believe that sight.” She responded by putting an Israeli flag on her door.

Stephens was in dialogue with ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, focused on the fact that the war in Gaza has been merely an excuse for the global surge in violent, normalized anti-Semitism.

The gorgeous sanctuary of Temple Emanu-El was packed on that cold Tuesday evening, with an additional 8,000 watching virtually. In general, the temple has leaned left, as do all Reform (and most Conservative) congregations in NYC. But that night there was no left and right in the audience. There were Jews. And we were all there because we’re scared.

Greenblatt talked about his first trip to Europe as CEO, a decade ago. After seeing the high walls surrounding synagogues and Jewish day schools in Paris, he spoke with a well-armed member of the French Foreign Legion, who told him that he went from “fighting ISIS in Mali to fighting ISIS in Paris.”

“What starts in Europe ends up in America,” a friend told Greenblatt at the time. “Objects in the mirror are closer than they may appear,” said Nicole Mutchnik, vice chair of the ADL’s Board of Directors.

A decade later, Greenblatt flew to Amsterdam to meet with Dutch leaders after the pogrom last month. “They told me they knew that this was planned long before the Israelis showed up. And yet, we were gaslit and told: The fans caused it. There are intense rivalries in soccer, but they don’t lead to a series of coordinated attacks across an entire city. Six hours of people getting chased down and assaulted with pipes and clubs and knives.” 

“I’m sick and tired of being told that what’s happening on college campuses or at K-12 schools or at a soccer game is our fault. We should all be sick and tired of being told that we caused it because we didn’t cause any of it.”

I’m sick and tired of being told that what’s happening on college campuses or at K-12 schools or at a soccer game is our fault. We should all be sick and tired of being told that we caused it because we didn’t cause any of it.” – Jonathan Greenblatt

Greenblatt also met with leaders from the local Jewish community. “They were asking me, is it time to leave? Communities that withstood the Crusades, the Inquisitions, and the Shoah are now saying, is it time to go?” 

Stephens was equally horrified by the reaction of European leaders. “Immediately, there was an effort at almost every level to explain away what had happened. What are the intellectual and cultural assumptions in which so much bigotry, which would not be permissible against any other minority, becomes permissible when it comes to Jews?” 

“What do I want to see from leaders in Europe?” asked Greenblatt. “I want them to show courage. I want them to go after the radicals, whether they’re in the mosques or in the schools, or in their own political parties. And I want them to finally address the propaganda that is radicalizing these young people.”

“And this jihadi Islamism,” he added, “it’s coming here like a freight train.”

“Antisemitism,” Stephens explained, “is always going to find its roots and power not in the most bigoted and ugly expressions, but in the willing compliance of people who are prepared to go along with anti-Semitic explanations for the harm that’s done to Jews.” 

How did we get to this place? “We have allowed anti-Zionism, this ideology of nihilism rooted in racism, to become legitimized,” Greenblatt said. “It is incredibly poisonous and problematic. We need to have the moral clarity and, frankly, the moral courage to call anti-Zionism for what it is: anti-Semitism. Period.”

“Viruses mutate to adapt to their host,” explained Stephens. “And the host today is uniquely susceptible to totally fallacious arguments about so-called settler colonialism. In fact, there’s one state that has this extraordinary connection to its ancestral homeland. And there’s one movement in the world that has the longest continuous anticolonial struggle in history.”

“The longest anticolonial struggle in history is Zionism,” Stephens stated. Zionism was in fact founded as a liberation movement from colonial powers.

“What is Hanukkah about? Who were we fighting? Who were we being colonized by? Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Ottomans, the British. Over that space of 2,500 years, Jews never lost sight of the fact that they would resist colonialism and establish sovereignty on their own land.”

Greenblatt then delved into the damage DEI has done. “This kind of oppressor/oppressed framework, this derivative of the DEI industrial complex, has created the view that Jews are ‘oppressors.’”

“What worries me is this idea of privilege,” said Stephens. “We used to speak in America about success and the proper emotion when it comes to the success of others is admiration. When you talk not about success, but about privilege, the suggestion is that it is unearned. Unearned success doesn’t beget admiration, it begets envy. And envy is the most toxic political emotion in the world.”

European Jews “always suffered because there was a profound streak of envy that ran through a lot of European culture, and America was free of that,” said Stephens. “I’m not so sure we’re free of it now, which is what makes me so alarmed that we are on the cusp of replicating some of the patterns we see in Europe.”

“And let’s be honest about what’s happening at Columbia,” Stephens continued. “It isn’t just a bunch of idealistic students upset about what they’re seeing in Gaza, but not in Syria, Sudan, Burma, Russia, or anywhere else, because that double standard is plain, clear antisemitism. When it comes to Israel, there’s zero nuance, zero history, zero context, zero curiosity about how this came about. It’s an abomination, not simply when it comes to the Jews. It’s an abomination when it comes to pedagogy. 

“How did our elite universities get taken over by this utterly unthinking ideology that asks its students to do nothing but mouth stupid slogans that happen to rhyme?,” Stephens asked.

“We cannot expect the cavalry to come,” Greenblatt warned. “You are the cavalry. You are the ones who are going to ensure that Bret’s mom doesn’t die in hiding. Anyone who thinks that all of this is a function of some natural law, that it could never happen here, you’re kidding yourselves. America is an experiment in democracy bound together by invisible values and morals that tie us together and root us. And it’s up to us to hold onto those.”

We left that evening, still feeling scared but, perhaps, a little less alone. “All of us are aching,” Greenblatt said, “and all of us are heartbroken.” But here were two strong Jewish leaders who were not afraid to ask and answer the tough questions. And perhaps most important: both want to finally ditch the toxic partisanship that has only made everything a thousand times worse.

Karen Lehrman Bloch is editor in chief of White Rose Magazine.