The Shock of Facing American Anti-Semitism Jews thought America was a safe haven, but Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities revealed hatred here at home. By Joel Engel
It’s a long story how I came to be standing some years ago in Archbishop’s Palace in Naples alongside six Italian-Americans from New York—four academics, a monsignor, and a New York Supreme Court judge—to meet with the cardinal. Each of the others kissed his ring as he went down the line. I, at the end, turned his hand vertically and shook it. His eyes widened. Someone explained that I was Jewish, which delighted him, and for the next hour he directed all his answers to me, regardless of who had posed the questions.
Outside afterward one of the academics asked why I didn’t kiss the cardinal’s ring. Before I could explain that we kiss liturgical objects, not men, the judge shouted: “They only kiss a—.”
They.
Two of the others physically restrained me from drop-kicking his family jewels into the Bay of Naples. I was in my 40s, and this was my first authentic, unambiguous anti-Semitic comment from the mouth of another American.
I assumed that it was a one-off and rarely thought of the judge for years. But now I can’t stop thinking about him—that is, how much company he has and apparently always did. How could I have missed that? How had we all?
There isn’t an American Jew I know whose worldview wasn’t trampled by the anti-Semitism that has been displayed in this country with such fervor and pride since the barbaric attacks in Israel on Oct. 7. Millions more Americans than we ever imagined consider us less than human and would like to see us dead. That’s a lot to deal with so suddenly and unexpectedly.
Every conversation I’ve had with American Jews since then has eventually reached the point of trying to describe accurately this sudden and now unrelenting anxiety and unease none of us had felt before, which all of us agree is located deep in our kishkes, suggesting it’s epigenetic in origin: an inherited memory of the Holocaust and all the lesser pogroms that preceded it that we didn’t know we were carrying.
Here in 2023 America, not 1938 Germany: Jewish students hiding in a college library from a mob; Jews being told not to “look Jewish” in public—or, better yet, to stay home; Hamas supporters trying to break down a door to Grand Central Terminal without a policeman in sight or an arrest made; swastikas proudly displayed; chants of “Globalize the intifada,” which is a war cry to kill Jews wherever they live.
One could find a silver lining in that the purveyors of this hate no longer deny the Holocaust. But they wish aloud that Hitler had finished the job. And now the denial has taken on an even stranger form. Video of the grotesque acts that Hamas terrorists themselves livestreamed is now often claimed to be Israeli propaganda, and the 240 hostages the work of the Jews.
That this is happening in the United States of America—the country where for 250 years Jews have been safer than we were anywhere else throughout history—and may continue to happen and get possibly much worse is a game-changer for us and for our relationship to most everything. Sure, there were restricted country clubs and college quotas and otherwise nonviolent forms of anti-Semitism for decades. But there weren’t Cossacks or Nazis. “Never again” meant that murderous Jew hate lay on the trash heap of history. Or so we thought, believing as an article of faith that we would never have to deal with the horrors our great-grandparents in the old country had.
True, it was hard not to notice rising anti-Semitism in the last few years—Kanye West, Charlottesville, Pittsburgh. But the offenders, we assumed, were marginal, shunned by polite society. There were no observable indications that Jew hate would reach critical mass more quickly than it did in Germany 90 years ago.
The unavoidable conclusion is that this hatred was there all along, waiting for the on button to be pushed. That realization can’t fail to refract our view of this world and, alas, our country.
Two miles from where I live, a 69-year-old man named Paul Kessler died after a confrontation with a Hamas supporter, who some eyewitnesses say whacked the victim in the face with a bull horn, causing him to fall and hit his head on the sidewalk. (The medical examiner ruled the death a homicide, but police say they have been unable to establish probable cause for an arrest because of conflicting accounts.) For more than a decade, Kessler was known to be a prolific letter writer to our community’s free weekly newspaper, always taking the liberal-left position as most secular Jews seem to do. One imagines that he, like millions of us, had been shocked to find that many of the people he had always believed were his philosophical and political compatriots actually hated him for being a Jew.
Whether they had all along is irrelevant. That they do now is why Jews in this country wonder whether we’ll ever feel as comfortable as we always had; and it explains why we are so grateful to Gentiles of goodwill who have reached out, by word and deed, to stand with us. May they continue to outnumber the Jew haters so that we don’t redefine “Never again” to mean only that never again will we allow Germany to kill six million Jews between the years 1933 and 1945.
Mr. Engel is author, most recently, of “Scorched Worth: A True Story of Destruction, Deceit, and Government Corruption.”
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