- If you asked most Westerners today
whether they oppose Antisemitism,
most would likely say yes.
And yet, whenever something terrible happens in the world,
it seems like it's only a matter of time
before someone blames the Jews for it.
No, seriously. Those are all real.
The problem is not just words.
It's conspiracy theories that have deadly consequences,
as massacres of Jews from Pittsburgh to Paris demonstrate.
- At lunchtime today,
a man armed with machine guns
walked into this kosher supermarket
and took more than a dozen people hostage.
- The gunman was killed,
but tragically so too were four of the hostages.
- Far from fading away,
anti-Jewish prejudice seems as resilient as ever.
So if we agree that Antisemitism is bad,
why is it still such a big problem?
That's where this series comes in.
By answering some of the biggest questions
about Antisemitism, the sort that confuse many people
and keep them from seeing and confronting the hate.
We'll learn together
how to effectively tackle Antisemitism,
what it actually is, how to recognize it,
and what to do about it.
Didn't Antisemitism go away after the Holocaust?
- Jews will not replace us!
- Apparently not.
Yet a surprising number of people think
that anti-Jewish bigotry was stamped out
after the horrors of Nazi Germany.
After all, didn't we make a bunch of Holocaust movies
and get past this stuff?
But while it's comforting to imagine
that Antisemitism largely disappeared after World War II,
it's far from accurate.
And if we make the mistake of reducing Antisemitism
to the Holocaust, its most extreme manifestation,
we're likely to miss much of the problem today.
That's because the Holocaust
wasn't an Antisemitic exception;
it was Antisemitism's culmination.
The systematic murder of six million Jews across Europe
didn't happen in a vacuum.
It came after years of religious, scientific, cultural,
and political Antisemitism.
For centuries, European Jews were barred
from most professions, forcibly converted to other faiths,
and subjected to murderous rampages, constant expulsions,
and periodic inquisitions.
In other words, the mass murder of European Jewry
would not have been possible without many centuries
of anti-Jewish ideas and assumptions.
Take the Holocaust away, and you still have this massive
Antisemitic foundation underneath.
In fact, we are still living with it.
Put another way, just as slavery's abolition in America
didn't end racism,
the defeat of Nazi Germany didn't end Antisemitism.
The statistics bear this out.
According to the F.B.I., American Jews are annually subject
to the most hate crimes of any religious group,
despite making up only 2% of the U.S. population.
Not only that, but since the F.B.I.
began tracking these crimes,
more of them have been committed against Jews
than all these groups combined.
Hate crimes statistics are an imperfect metric.
But they give you a sense
of the ugly anti-Jewish undercurrent
that has always lurked beneath the surface.
Recently, more people have started to notice
this unsettling reality,
as American Jews have been subjected
to a series of Antisemitic terrorist attacks and massacres.
These include the mass shooting
at Pittsburgh's Tree of Life synagogue in October 2018.
- Contact! Contact!
Shots fired! Shots fired!
- The April 2019 attack on a synagogue
in Poway, California;
the shooting at a kosher supermarket
in Jersey City, New Jersey in December 2019.
(gun firing)
- Three people inside that store were killed
by flying pieces of metal during the gun fire.
- There is no question that this is a hate crime,
and Antisemitism should be called out
aggressively and firmly immediately for what it it.
- And the mass stabbing of religious Jews
at their Hanukkah celebration that same month
by a machete-wielding assailant in Monsey, New York.
Yet, as bad as this is,
the picture is considerably darker in Europe.
In 2018, CNN surveyed European attitudes
towards Jewish people.
They found that more than a quarter of Europeans
believe that Jews have too much influence in finance.
Nearly one in four said that Jews had too much influence
in wars and conflicts around the world.
One in five Europeans said that Jews had too much influence
in the media, and almost the same number claimed
they have too much influence in politics.
These conspiracy theories about vast Jewish power
are particularly ludicrous when you realize
that Jews constitute less than 0.2%
of the entire European population.
And most Europeans have never even met one.
The consequences of this widespread hostility
towards Jews, however, are severe.
In 2013 and 2018, researchers at the European Union's
Agency for Fundamental Rights
asked Jews about their experiences of Antisemitism.
What they found was alarming.
Nearly 40% of European Jews were afraid
of publicly identifying as Jewish.
Nearly half were worried about being the victim
of Antisemitic harassment in the next 12 months.
And one-third feared being the victim of a physical assault.
And for good reason.
In recent years, Jews have been the victims
of brutal Antisemitic attacks
at schools and synagogues across Europe.
Put together, it's easy to understand
why so many of Europe's Jews still live in fear
75 years after the Holocaust,
why nearly 40% of them say they've considered leaving
because they don't feel safe,
and why millions of them already have.
The same is true in many non-Western countries.
Jews in Arab and Muslim lands
once numbered nearly a million,
but now number only a few thousand,
having been persecuted to the point of expulsion
or flight in the last century.
And anti-Jewish prejudice has persisted
throughout the region, even in the absence of Jews.
Why does this matter to us?
Because if we only see and confront Antisemitism
when it looks like the Holocaust
or is committed by obvious actors like neo-Nazis,
we're likely to miss much of it.
Which means that society will only notice the problem
when it explodes into deadly violence,
as in Pittsburgh or Paris, and it's already too late.
Instead, we should understand the Holocaust
as a cautionary tale for what happens
when more common outgrowths
of Antisemitism go unchecked,
and resolve to beat those back together.
As for how to do that,
well, first we need to settle the biggest question
about Antisemitism of all.
Whose fault is Antisemitism?