Alison Rose’s Reviews > The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living > Status Update

The story of antisemitism is consistent for thousands of years, and inseparable from the content of Jewish civilization, because it all traces back to the Jewish people’s radical proposition that people don’t need to conform or agree, that people don’t need to bow to tyrants.

The tenure process generally rewards conformity, and students, paying far too much to take risks, also perform to conform. When everyone around you is invested—via billions of dollars of investment from autocratic regimes—in the same old story where the villains are Jews and the heroes are federally designated terrorist organizations, there is zero incentive for anyone to say anything to the contrary.

I thought about the bizarre fact that even though Jews were praying in the equivalent of a parking lot, entire massacres of Jews—not only on October 7, but also the ‘Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades’ that murdered Israeli civilians …—had been named after this site, to rile people up by evoking the terrifying and imaginary possibility that Jews might dare to want to pray in their own holiest place.

Herzl briefly considered a British offer of land in East Africa for a potential Jewish settlement; other ideas were raised involving territory in S America &elsewhere. These ideas, however, were angrily rejected by Herzl's fellow Zionists &Herzl tabled them by 1904. Zionists did not want to be, to use a 21st-century term, settler colonialists. They wanted to be in the only place on Earth where Jews have always lived.

'There's a joke often told about Gentleman's Agreement about a stagehand working on the movie when screenwriter Moss Hart came to visit the set,' Gordan said. 'The stagehand told Hart he really loved the movie & thought it had a wonderful moral. Hart was pleased &asked, 'What do you think the moral was?' The stagehand said, 'I learned that you should never be mean to a Jew b/c he may turn out to be a Gentile.'

...von Leers' great insight was that 'the Jews had convinced the world of a great lie: that all humans are equal'.
That line stopped me short b/c in fact it was true. Not just that all humans are equal, but that even if few ppl have lived up to it, Jewish civilization had indeed brought this into the world: every human being is made in the divine image.
One could see how this concept would be threatening to tyrants.

In the educational resources I explored about the Holocaust, I did not encounter any discussions of sadism--the joy derived from humiliating people, the dopamine hit from landing a laugh at someone else's expense, the self-righteous high from blaming one's problems on others--even though this, rather than the fragility of democracy or the passivity of bystanders, is a major origin point of all antisemitism.

The Yiddish word for the Holocaust, khurbn, is a biblical word referring to the destruction of Jerusalem. The Jews who endured this destruction did not understand it as a new experience, but as an old one.

The timing alone laid the game bare. This mass exhilaration emerged not in response to Israel’s war to take down Hamas and rescue its captured citizens, but exactly in response to, and explicitly in celebration of, the most lethal and sadistic barbarity against Jews since the Holocaust.

For many American Jews, [October 7] was a profound moment of horror, not merely because of the brutality our friends and family members in Israel had just endured and would continue to endure, but because of the sudden and dramatic revelation of the true thoughts and feelings of far too many of the people in the United States who we thought were our friends.