A Convert’s Brutal Awakening to Antisemitism

Growing up in Hong Kong during the ’80s and ’90s, antisemitism was as immaterial to me as the animosity between the Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda. I knew it existed. I knew many people were persecuted and killed because of it. I knew the course of history was altered by it. Still, my teenage self was too preoccupied living my own historic moment to pay it any mind.

In the summer of 1997, the sovereignty of Hong Kong was handed over to China after 156 years of British colonial rule. The sense of uncertainty and angst the decolonization process provoked among the island and territories’ six million people was all consuming. So when Professor Robert Stone of my photojournalism class recounted stories from his war reporting days in the Middle East and explained the history of antisemitism to a roomful of freshmen, I was only half listening.

It was not until 2004 when I met my now husband, David, that I dabbled in learning about antisemitism again. Disputative and unyielding, I spent hours debating with him the rights and wrongs of Israelis and Palestinians. David argued from a staunch Zionist position while I took the simplistic and, it pains me to admit, poorly-informed “what do you expect the Palestinians to do?” attitude. He gave me Robert Kagan’s “Of Paradise and Power,” which argues that the U.S. and, by extension, Israel have very different philosophical outlooks on the use of power than the more passive nations of Europe so I could “educate myself” on the complexities of the conflict. I returned fire by giving him Desmond Tutu’s “No Future Without Forgiveness” to highlight his lack of vision where the most vicious conflict can be resolved through truth and reconciliation. Looking back, dueling gifts notwithstanding, this was when I became cognizant of my ignorance when it came to antisemitism.

During my process of converting to Judaism in 2019 and 2020, one of my goals, besides accomplishing the required learning that went with conversion, was to truly understand what antisemitism is, its origin, its evolution and its contemporary manifestations. After all, what could demonstrate a more ardent desire or a more clear-eyed determination to convert than tying my fate to the Jewish people fully aware of the enduring hatred waiting on the other side of the mikveh?

Prior to Oct 7, 2023, I would say I had a solid intellectual grasp of contemporary antisemitism, from its variants on the far right to the far left, and everything in between. I read Bari Weiss, Deborah Lipstadt and more articles on the subject than I can count. I attended numerous conferences and webinars on the topic. I even spent a week in Oxford, England this past summer to learn from a panel of antisemitism scholars and experts.

Nothing prepared me for what happened on Oct 7 and the ensuing events in the following weeks.

For no written word can adequately describe a hatred so vast it swallows a person’s humanity and enables them to rip a baby out of its mother’s womb, killing them both, or to tie children up to burn them alive. As I heard about these atrocities, antisemitism morphed from an idea to wrestle with into a living, breathing organism.

For no written word can adequately describe a hatred so vast it swallows a person’s humanity and enables them to rip a baby out of its mother’s womb, killing them both, or to tie children up to burn them alive.

And overnight, all the antisemitic themes and trends I had been reading about but not truly comprehending jumped from the pages of a book to the chants of protests, the headlines of the news, the violence in the streets and the ghastly memes on Instagram. The expansive history of antisemitism was compressed to a single week.

First, there was the massacre. There has been enough said and written about the details of what happened on October 7th for me to skip recounting the horrors here. Suffice it to say that the Hamas perpetrators exceeded the brutality of their antisemitic forebears who committed the Kishinev Pogrom in the early-twentieth century and the Farhoud four decades later. Just three weeks after the Hamas attacks, an antisemitic mob stormed an airport in southern Russia’s Republic of Dagestan intending to murder Jewish passengers on a flight from Tel Aviv. The genocidal impulse against Jews was not confined to one group of people or one geographical location.

Second, there was the glorification of violence. The writer Ben E. Freeman recently observed that “the Jews are the only people in the world demonised for experiencing genocide.” There were the Instagram memes lionizing the Hamas terrorists flying in on hang gliders to murder teenagers dancing at a rave, and other memes pledging allegiance to “The Resistance” and committing themselves to the “liberation of Palestine.” If I wasn’t certain about what they meant by “liberation of Palestine” before October 7th, now it was made abundantly clear in the ecstasy over the carnage. Karen Attiah, an International affairs columnist for the Washington Post,  “liked” a post by the journalist Najma Sharif who justified the murder of Israelis. “What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers,” wrote Sharif. As someone who lived through an actual, peaceful decolonization process in Hong Kong 25 years before, her rationalization of the Hamas massacre as resistance to colonization—repeated by so many others—struck me as both deeply ignorant and malevolent.

Third, there was blood libel. Blood libel refers to the accusation that Jews kill Christian children using their blood for Jewish ritual purposes, such as for the matzahs eaten on Passover. Blood libels have frequently sparked pogroms and mob violence against Jews. In this instance, however, the blood libel was in the accusations that Israel intentionally fired a missile into a Gaza hospital killing 500 people. Most major newspapers immediately fell for the Hamas PR stunt. The New York Times even published a picture of a demolished building to bolster the false claim while the hospital itself was still standing, largely unscathed. The false reports set off major, often violent protests across the Arab world, Europe and the U.S. As soon as the evidence came in showing it was an Islamic Jihadist rather than an Israeli rocket, the media lost interest in the story. As journalist Becket Adams wrote, “The media will never forgive Israel for not bombing that hospital.” The fact that many people seemed disappointed to find out 500 Gazan civilians were not killed cannot be more revealing: The world is all about being anti-Israel and little about being pro-Palestine. Like the bogus claims against Jews for murdering Christian children, these charges put Jewish lives in grave danger.

Fourth, there was denial. Holocaust denial has long been a feature of the antisemitic imagination, claiming that the Holocaust was invented or exaggerated by Jews as part of a plot to advance Jewish interests. Before Oct 7, in a world saturated with smartphones and live streamers, I was certain denial was one manifestation of antisemitism that had lost its charm. How wrong was I? Here I was in October 2023, hearing denial of horrific atrocities committed by Hamas against Israelis. The Hamas terrorists went the extra mile to wear bodycams to record their brutality, yet many still refuse to acknowledge the depth—or even the reality—of their depravity. I was witnessing in real time the making of a new denial narrative. Seemingly normal everyday Americans emerged across the country to rip down posters demanding the return of kidnapped Israeli children, denouncing them as Jewish propaganda with glee and contempt. It is frightening to realize how thin is the veil of civility behind which antisemites hide.

Fifth, there were the double standards. Why, I wondered, were there so many specious charges of genocide against Israel leading up to and during Israel’s military response compared to other wars? Saudi Arabia has killed 100,000 people in Yemen. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has killed 300,000 civilians, more than 3000 of which were Palestinian. In the past six years, the Chinese government has detained more than one million Uyghur Muslims and placed them in reeducation camps, killing and raping many. None of these atrocities have created a fraction of the moral hand-wringing of Israel’s defensive military actions in Gaza. While the world yells ceasefire at Israel, no one wants to point out Hamas broke the ceasefire on Oct 7. While the world demands that Israel leave Al Shifa Hospital alone, no one demands that Hamas move out of the tunnels below the hospital and stop using the infirmed as their human shield. While the world demands to know what Israel’s military objectives are, it all but ignores Hamas’: to eliminate the Jewish state and its people. What could possibly explain this egregious hypocrisy other than ill will toward the Jewish people and Jewish sovereignty?

In this brutal awakening to the reality of antisemitism, I found myself returning to the teachings of Viktor Frankl whose philosophy was forged in the hellfire of Auschwitz. “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” What could I do to make meaning of this awful moment?

A few weeks ago, at the Jewish Priorities Conference in Philadelphia, a distraught audience member in her twenties asked the panelists how she could help her non-Jewish friends understand antisemitism. “They just don’t get it,” she said on the verge of tears. As a newcomer to the Jewish experience, I’m not equipped with a built in antisemite detector. However, I’ve discovered, this distance affords me the insight on how to explain antisemitism to non Jews in a way that’s easy to grasp. Sharing it is part of my search for meaning in the face of incomprehensible hatred. This is my contribution.

Dipika Cheung lives in the Washington, D.C. area.