'He's Not Pulling It Out of Thin Air'

A friend tells me he is boycotting a favorite bookstore because, as he writes, “someone posted a fair-sized sign on the store’s ‘Community Board’ reading, ‘From The River to the Sea, Palestine Shall Be Free.’” There’s a naïvely childish part of me that finds the obscenity especially offensive because a bookstore patron or employee --  a reader of books! -- would post it. Readers should know better. They know history and have educated themselves ethically. They have a moral sense, yes? Of course not. My friend writes: 

“That by now familiar rallying cry constitutes a call for the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state and, by implication, for the judenrein-ization of the country.  I’m mindful of the possibility that the store didn’t post the sign and even disapproves of it (though the clerk didn’t disavow it when I registered a protest). The store may instead be afraid to remove the sign, fearing a hostile reaction from the city’s boisterous pro-Palestinian groups. Whatever the case, the sign still hangs there, a conspicuous affront to the store’s Jewish customers.”

 

And to the rest of us who claim to possess a rudimentary moral and historical sense. You needn’t be Jewish to find the recent metastasizing of anti-Semitism abhorrent. We can try to be understanding and blame Jew-hatred on historical ignorance and the ongoing corruption of public education. I almost called it a “revival” of anti-Semitism but the hatred has always been there, like a bacillus resistant to antibiotics.

 

I suggest Jews and non-Jews alike read Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt: The War Years, 1939-1945 (trans. David Stromberg, White Goat Press, 2023). The great short story writer left Poland in 1935 and settled in New York City, where he wrote for the Yiddish-language Jewish Daily Forward. Stromberg selects from the columns Singer produced during World War II. One of them, published on September 7, 1941, is titled “Jews Would Oppose Nazis Even If Fascists and Hitlerites Were Not Antisemites”:

 

“There was a time when Hitler’s antisemitism wasn’t taken very seriously, just as his political program, threats against ethnic groups, and power over the German people were not taken seriously. Hitler was not the first antisemite and will not be the last. As long as Hitler did not put words into action, there was no reason for anyone to take what he said seriously. . . . When Hitler says that the existence of the Jews is a personal insult to him, he’s not pulling it out of thin air.”

 

Read that again, substituting Hamas and its cheerleaders, in the U.S. and elsewhere, for each mention of Hitler.