When Is It Time To Flee Antisemitic Violence?

We are not a threat. We are THE threat. White supremacy is not enough to keep Jews “in our place” like it is for every other minority.

Image via MSNBC

by Justin Rosario

Last week, The Banter’s Ben Cohen wrote about Whoopi Goldberg’s latest flirtation with antisemitic ignorance. It wasn’t Kayne West-level ignorance and it for sure wasn’t the weaponized hate of Donald Trump and Nick Fuentes, but as Ben explains, it’s part of the rapidly surging tide of antisemitism in America (among other familiar places). 

While the press is just starting to notice how serious this surge is getting, American Jews have been much more aware of what has been unleashed by Donald Trump and the Republican Party. So much so that a number of us have started to seriously contemplate leaving the country.

If that sounds extreme, you are not a Jew and you do not understand what it means to be one.

When is it time to go? 

That’s a good question and one that a lot of American Jews have been asking recently. This is not idle speculation because the Washington Post had an entire article about it and by the time a mainstream outlet like the Post notices how serious things are getting, it’s already far worse than most people are aware of:

The year 2022 began and is ending with some of the highest-recorded modern levels of antisemitic actions and Jewish worry. An atmosphere that experts say began as a shock with the 2016 election of Donald Trump and his comments against religious and racial minorities has matured, taken root and for some led to serious consideration or action toward emigrating. Warm pride in Jewish parts of the national zeitgeist such as “Seinfeld” has given way to cold calculations about what if.

It’s hard to put into words what it means to be a Jew. I understood, from an early age, that to be a Jew meant that there were people, millions of people, who would kill me if they had the opportunity. 

These people knew nothing about me. They had never met me. They had never heard my name or seen my face. They did not know that I liked comics and board games. That I liked to cook and read science fiction books. I was a complete and total stranger to them and yet, they would murder me and my entire family in a heartbeat if they could just because of who and what I was. Every Jew knows this on some level, even Republican Jews who delude themselves into believing that they’ll be OK because they’re “one of the good ones.”

To an antisemite, there are no good Jews, only dead ones. Thus has it always been.

This is why, as I have mentioned numerous times, after Donald Trump was elected, I stopped talking to my in-laws and anyone in my life who had voted for him. I knew, not suspected, knew that sooner or later the hatred that fueled the then-nascent MAGA movement would turn towards the Jewish community. As I explained to my wife, who did not understand why I was so angry at her mother, “It doesn’t matter who they’re angry about today, they always come for the Jews.”

A year later, the Nazi march at Charlottesville happened, ending in the murder of Heather Heyer. A year after that, 11 Jews were murdered at the Tree of Life synagogue by a white nationalist. That’s when Debbie stopped being confused about why I was angry and started paying closer attention to what I was saying about the state of the country. That’s why she stayed home on January 6th, 2021. And that’s why when I started talking to Debbie in late 2019 about the possibility of having to leave the country, she didn’t immediately reject the idea. 

The violent hate for Jews on the right has become so overt that even she, a non-Jew, recognizes it as a clear and present danger to her family.

The Jewish Supervillian

Antisemitism is, as far as I know, the oldest ongoing racism. I have no doubt that before Jews existed, this tribe of cavemen hated that tribe of cavemen because their skin was a different color or their knuckles didn’t drag on the ground quite as much. But for sustained, historical racism, Jews have quite the pedigree. 

If you take the Bible as a historical document, we were enslaved in Egypt 3000-4000 years ago. There’s a great deal of debate of the accuracy of this account but at the very least, we know for a fact that the Romans were quite fond of persecuting Jews on and off again 2000 years ago and Christians have been murdering and enslaving us for almost 1500 years. Muslims got in on the action later and the Middle East’s history is rife with massacres, slavery, and other assorted atrocities. Then there was that whole Holocaust thing. You may be familiar with it? A millennia of genocide just because we exist. 

These days, antisemitism is still pervasive. It never went away. It just became less polite to say it out loud. But it was always there. The Jews control the media. The Jews control Hollywood. Jewish lawyers. Jewish bankers. Jewish doctors. Jews Jews Jews. Why are there so many rich Jews?! And I heard that in New York City, the most diverse and tolerant city in the United States with the largest population of Jews in the world outside of Israel. I can only imagine what it was like in, say, Incestville, Whitesylvania where the Jewish population was somewhere between 0 and “My grandparents changed their name from Weinberger to Johnson so the KKK would pass us over like the Angel of Death on Pesach.”

Bigotry is deeply baked into America’s DNA, of course, and it spares no one who isn’t a white Christian heterosexual male. But there’s a qualitative difference when it comes to antisemitism. The specific thing that makes antisemitism so dangerous when it gets loose is that we are constantly portrayed as “supervillains” by the people who hate and fear us. This is the special sauce, as it were, that has enabled at least 2000 years of murder. 

When a racist looks at a Latino or Asian or someone from the Black or Arabic community, they see someone “inferior” and they feel contempt. That allows them to justify lynch mobs, setting entire communities on fire, or systemic racism to maintain white supremacy. It is vile, ugly, and extremely deadly here in the United States. So much so that, like Jews, a number of Black people are packing up and getting out.

Believe it or not, though, it’s different for Jews. When a racist looks a Jew, they don’t just feel contempt, they also see the root of all the evil in the world. Oh, we’re also “inferior.” We’re vermin and an infestation, just like any other hated minority, but we, and we alone, are also the reason for everything bad that has ever happened.

Inflation. War. Covid. Unemployment. Urban decay. Stock market collapse. Birth control. Abortion. CRT. Civil Rights. You name it, we Jews are behind it throughout all of human history. We rig elections. We control world leaders and remove the ones that get out of line. We topple entire governments and spread famine and drought to move populations around the world like chess pieces. 

Oh? Do you think I am exaggerating? Who do you think the right believes is engineering “The Great Replacement?” Hint: There’s a reason they toss the name “George Soros” around like confetti and it’s not because it’s easy to remember.

Allow me to drive this point home as clearly as I possibly can: When the Tiki-Torch Nazis marched in Charlottesville and chanted “Jews will not replace us!”, they were not saying Jews would replace them with more Jews. This is something the mainstream media misunderstood at the time. We make up maybe 2% of the population of the United States and about 0.2% of the world population. Outside of the West Bank, Jews ain’t replacing nobody nowhere. There just are not enough of us.

What they meant was that Jews were trying to replace them with other, “lesser” races like Latino migrants or Black people. This is the story of The Turner Diaries, widely understood by people familiar with the white nationalist movement as their Bible.

Do you understand? The violent Nazis in Charlottesville, who attacked a Black church and plowed a car into marching protesters, blamed Jews for the increase of non-white people in America. We are always the root cause of whatever they fear and hate, even when it comes to other minority groups.

The Final Solution never ended

When the right screeches about “globalists,” they’re talking about the global Jewish conspiracy to do…whatever thing it is they believe we’re doing at that particular time. It constantly changes. 

Medieval Christians used to believe we sacrificed their children in dark Jewish rituals and drank their blood. The Christians of Europe and America in the early 1900s revived the Blood Libel and looked away as we were murdered by the tens of thousands throughout Eastern Europe before being systematically slaughtered by the millions in WWII. 

Today, it’s “adrenochrome” and global pedophile rings and the Great Replacement. The right dreams of “deporting” Latinos and sending Blacks “back to Africa.” When they speak about Jews? The speak about killing us. All of us. This is the danger of antisemitism. We are not a threat. We are the threat. White supremacy is not enough to keep Jews “in our place” like it is for every other minority. The glorious white race can only be safe when there are no more Jews. Anywhere.

If antisemitism was just confined to the right, it would be bad but not as dangerous. But as Ben has explained, the left is dripping with it as well. Not the overt kind that will see liberals out in the street with Tiki torches but the kind that will allow them to look the other way as the pogroms start again. After all, are Jews even a race? Aren’t they white? Don’t they already have a ton of privilege? Do they really need more protection? Aren’t Blacks the real Hebrews? This isn’t my problem, I’m busy. And that’s how it gets normalized. It’s really that easy and we’re really that far down that slippery slope already.

As long as we are the gravity that holds the worldview of white nationalism together, Jews will never be safe. Right now, America’s entire political right is being consumed by white nationalism which means antisemitism in this country (and everywhere white nationalism is on the rise) will only get worse. Significantly so. 

If they win, they will sooner or later use their power to target their most hated enemy. They will have to. Their ideology will demand it. 

If they lose, they will blame it on the shadowy forces of the “Globalists” and the violence against Jews will rage out of control for years.

A real lose/lose situation for us with only the second scenario having a light at the end of the tunnel that doesn’t lead to a gas chamber. Yay.

The idea of moving to another country is terrifying. I’m very American and provincial that way and I’m among the not terribly large percent of Americans who have been outside of North America twice. Even so, moving just 300 miles from New York to Virginia was a big honkin’ deal for us. But you do what you have to for your kids. 

One of the cruelest things I learned about the Holocaust was how the Nazis murdered almost three hundred thousand of the mentally and physically disabled. Republicans already despise the disabled. What they would do to my autistic son in 10 or 20 years if they had the chance to enact their most sadistic policies is the kind of thing that keeps me up at night. An autistic Jew to boot? No thank you.

If Republicans continue to fail to seize control and dwindle away to a party of domestic terrorists, we can ride out the coming violence. The luxury of a non-Jewish surname and no social or geographical ties to a broader Jewish community puts us pretty far off the radar for revenge-minded white nationalists. We won’t be any more of a target than any other family living in a deep blue community. It’s not ideal but not enough to force us to leave the country.

But if we cannot stop the slow-motion Republican coup that is still inexplicably ongoing (Brazil certainly seems capable of arresting people in a timely fashion so why can’t we?) and the right takes control of this country? The worst will come and we will be getting the hell out of Dodge before the Proud Boy Purification Squads start roaming the streets.

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