As a “baby boomer,” born immediately after World War II, I experienced virtually no antisemitism. I attended a public high school that was probably 95% Jewish, so it’s not surprising. At university in the 1960s, it was no secret that I was Jewish, and not only was there no discrimination, but also I was received warmly.
Years later as a young professor at a university about 70 miles away from home, I did meet one openly antisemitic colleague, but the faculty was otherwise welcoming. In fact, it was a Christian dean who asked me to establish a Chair of Jewish Studies, and I had the strong support of everyone on campus.
The situation is very different now. On university campuses in North America and Europe, and in society in general, it is as if someone turned the clock back to my father’s era. It seems as if my life has been a fleeting moment in history.
My father, who also lived through a pandemic in 1918 in which his father died, left a deeply antisemitic Lithuania with the rest of the family in 1930 to settle in a genteel, British-style antisemitic Toronto. In those days, society was equal opportunity racist: Want ads in the Toronto Star read “No Irish need apply” because the Irish were Catholic and the province of Ontario was Protestant.
There was a quota on Jews in the faculty of medicine as there was in professional schools across North America, but it went further than a quota. Jewish graduates were not granted admitting privileges to the hospitals. They had to turn their patients over to Christian doctors. That is the reason there is a Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto and a “Jewish hospital” in major North American cities. Only then could Jewish doctors have admitting privileges.
All of that changed after the full horror of the Holocaust emerged and especially after the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. That was the period that I experienced. Israel’s rebirth in 1948 was celebrated and confirmed by the United Nations. There was clearly a sense of guilt or shame and everything Jewish became fashionable. But fashions go out of style. I should have known. Six million dead Jews only bought us seventy years of quiet.
Six million dead Jews only bought us seventy years of quiet.
I am not suggesting that history is repeating itself exactly and that we are in the same toxic environment as previous generations. Governments in North America and Europe do not enact antisemitic legislation. In fact, they openly protect Jewish communities. Churches no longer preach vilification of Jews. Evangelical Christians are Israel’s best friends.
But Israel is the most reviled country in the U.N. and Jewish students too often feel the need to hide their Jewish identity at universities in North America.
This shift in the perception of Jews and the Jewish state is a reflection of a deeper malaise in the world. Ominous developments reflect a world returning to conflict. Leaders of the non-democratic nations during this period of upheaval revert to dangerous and destructive behavior. Why does Putin think it’s his mission to re-create the Russian Empire? Doesn’t he know what happened to the last one? Why does Iran believe that it has to destroy Israel to Make Persia Great Again?
Bellicose attitudes have always precipitated crises. The idea that “might makes right” dates back to Aesop’s fables, recast by the 17th-century French writer La Fontaine. His fable of the wolf and the lamb depicts an innocent lamb drinking at the water’s edge when a famished wolf appears and claims all kinds of foul deeds committed by the lamb, “whereupon the wolf dragged him through the forest depths and ate him up without further ado.”
In a Russian version, the wolf goes farther, saying, “Your fault lies in the fact that I’m hungry,” making it clear that the powerful will use any excuse to justify their selfish actions but the truth is that they do it because they can.
Those of us raised in the halcyon days after the war believed that the Enlightenment had finally borne its fruit and that reason would characterize people’s lives and govern the conduct of nations. It would be the end of tribalism and the dawn of a new era. And we had every reason to believe so, with the creation of the European Union and the end of the Cold War.
It was a Utopian dream. And a beautiful and cherished one. But we forgot that “utopia” is Greek for “good place” and “no place,” meaning “nowhere.”
The surest sign of the health of the world and the stability of nations is its treatment of Jews. Whenever challenging times come, societies show the depth of their moral strength or lack of it by their tolerance and compassion. Too often the world has failed the test and inevitably everyone suffers.
The surest sign of the health of the world and the stability of nations is its treatment of Jews.
The reason the Jews are the focus of attention is succinctly summarized by the Globe and Mail columnist Robyn Urback: “Jewish identity is so imprecise, it can be portrayed in all sorts of different ways. Light-skinned Jews aren’t white to Nazis and white supremacists but are to most in modern society. To the Soviets, Jews were “rootless cosmopolitans” but in America during the Cold War they were suspected of being communists. Today, Urback points out, the Left “sees Jews as powerful capitalists who control financial networks … while antisemites on the Right see Jews as a poisoning influence on a white ethnosphere.” These contradictions “make anti-Semitism the ultimate adaptable prejudice, which has allowed it to thrive across continents for centuries.”
Yet I remain hopeful if not optimistic. We are not destined to repeat the same folly of the past. It is a Jewish belief that Moshiach, the Messiah, will come when the world is either insufferably bad or finally worthy. Let us work toward the latter and hold fast in the belief, as expressed by Martin Luther King Jr., that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Dr. Paul Socken is Distinguished Professor Emeritus and founder of the Jewish Studies program at the University of Waterloo.
