The October 7th massacre was different from the usual and all-too-familiar history of Jewish pogroms across the centuries. First, it happened not in the Jewish diaspora but in Israel, the Jewish homeland which had been founded on the idea that here, at last, Jews would be safe. Second, it has been cheered on and celebrated, largely, by the left. Though, as Cecile Kuznitz points out in her article in the Jewish Review of Books, this is not entirely without precedent:
The pogroms of 1881–1882 in the Russian Empire constituted the most sustained wave of anti-Jewish riots in the modern period up to that time. Their horrors partly inspired both mass immigration to America and the Zionist movement. Yet their importance as a turning point in Jewish history and their relevance to the Hamas massacre lie less in the violence itself than in the reaction of Russian society. The right-wing press cited Jewish exploitation as the root cause of the disturbances, and the government showed more enthusiasm for prosecuting members of Jewish self-defense groups than the pogrom instigators.
These reactions were, sadly, unsurprising; what was truly demoralizing was the response of the more radical elements in Russian society, whom Jews had considered to be beyond antisemitic canards and sympathetic to their plight. Most of the intelligentsia remained silent, while much of the left endorsed the pogroms as a healthy expression of grassroots anger at an oppressive system. The leaders of the revolutionary socialist movement Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) addressed “the peasants who rise up in Elizavetgrad, Kiev, Smela [sites of pogroms] to free themselves from their enemies”:
You have begun to rebel against the Jews. You have done well. . . . We have no right to react with indifference, still less with hostility, to a true popular movement.
The third difference from the familiar history of Jewish persecution is in America - a place where Jews had thrived, and which they liked to think was immune to the antisemitic hatreds of the Old World and the Middle East. Not so...
This betrayal by the left has clear echoes today, as liberal and progressive Jews find many of their erstwhile political allies condoning violence against their Israeli counterparts and minimizing evidence of antisemitism in the United States. The first response to the Hamas massacre issued by the Democratic Socialists of America, the largest socialist organization in the United States, proclaimed “our solidarity with Palestine. Today’s events are a direct result of Israel’s apartheid regime. . . . End the Occupation. Free Palestine.”
Yifat Bitton, president of Achva Academic College in Southern Israel, a law professor, and an advocate for women’s rights, has spoken of the “deafening silence” she encountered from activists abroad who work on issues of sexual assault: “Unwillingness to listen to Israeli women victims because they are on the occupying side is simplistic and shocking. . . . This is a progressive argument that is completely regressive.” Such left-wing antisemitism has forced many American Jews, the great majority of whom identify as liberal, to confront hatred in a much more direct way, often among ostensibly close friends and colleagues....
Looking for historical analogies in times of crisis is inevitable, yet if many of them fall short, it may be a sign that we are truly now in uncharted territory. Basic assumptions about the modern Jewish experience have been called into question, both the Zionist belief in the security offered by political sovereignty in Israel and the diasporic belief in bedrock American tolerance.
A year after the Hamas massacre and the ensuing war, we may be standing at an inflection point whose significance we cannot yet grasp.
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