America’s challenge, as violent anti-Semitism swells
The measure of a healthy society is the degree to which it firmly and effectively banishes its extremists to the ostracized margins
As the oldest hatred increasingly rears its head in the United States, it’s hard to resist the sense of helplessness.
Anti-Semitism from the extreme left, anti-Semitism from the extreme right, Jews demonized, synagogues shot up, and now a man with a machete breaking into a rabbi’s home and wreaking carnage on Hanukkah… and all this in what we liked to think was the uniquely tolerant United States of America. The temptation is to slip toward despair — to wonder impotently why the Jews are loathed, and why every golden age and every “Goldene Medina” sooner or later tarnishes and turns black.
But such despair achieves nothing. It’s self-defeating. It’s also unjustified.
