If nothing else, Rosh Hashanah asks us to take an honest accounting of ourselves.
This year, I’m also doing a parallel accounting of antisemitism. The incidents themselves are troubling enough; what infuriates me are the increasingly elaborate explanations for why what we’re seeing isn’t really antisemitism at all.
I have become very good at noticing it, but have I become very good at proving the case? Absolutely not. If I’m being honest, I tend to go from Zero to Very Angry without spending much time strategizing in the space between.
Don’t worry, though. By this point, I know exactly how I’ll be told what I’m seeing is NOT antisemitism. I hear the explanations all the time; so do you.
It would be super nice to have just one day without opening my phone and discovering that a celebrity, politician, activist, professor, student group, journalist, influencer, or random guy with 12 followers and a Palestinian flag in his bio has decided to explain antisemitism and the Jewish experience to Jews.
Just one day.
The explanations themselves are predictable. Something horrible happens, and right on cue, the remarkably efficient Antisemitism Industrial Complex enters the chat. Before the smoke has cleared, before the police report is filed, and before Jews have finished reacting, experts arrive to explain why what just happened is not what it appears to be.
Someone says something about Jews, and we’re told they’re really talking about Israel. Someone says something about Israel, and we’re told they’re really criticizing the government. Someone dusts off a trope that’s been circulating since The Dark Ages, and apparently, they’ve just never heard it before. Someone posts something ugly online, and we’re assured they’re angry, uninformed, young, radicalized, or trolling.
Curiously, the one explanation we’re never offered is the simplest one: they meant it.
To be fair, sometimes those explanations are correct. Not every criticism of Israel is antisemitic, and not every offensive statement is motivated by hatred of Jews. And yet we have become so committed to explaining every tree that we’ve stopped noticing the forest.
A joke here. A slur there. A protest sign. A conspiracy theory. A synagogue adding another layer of security. A Jewish student deciding not to wear a Star of David necklace today. A Jew, anywhere, being asked to answer for something that happened half a world away. A person who has never met a Jew suddenly developing very strong opinions about Jewish identity. A kosher restaurant burned to the ground. A gunman firing 20 shots at a Jewish camp. Cornell students doing Cornell student things on the first day of class.
And my personal favorite: celebrities cashing in their one curated anti-Zionist Jewish friend as a permission slip to say something absolutely horrifying. That is the gift that just keeps on giving.
None of these things, standing alone, are the whole story. That’s the point. Forests are made of trees.
Each incident arrives, and we are inundated with reminders about context, freedom of speech, and how this is not actually about Jews. And even when something is most definitely about Jews, we often find ourselves defending our own discomfort instead of examining its cause. Jews are the only minority expected to submit supporting documentation before prejudice against them can be acknowledged.
Listen…you can explain a tree; you cannot explain a forest. At some point, the sheer volume of explanations becomes its own explanation, and being told not to believe your own eyes gets a little exhausting.
Rosh Hashanah asks us to be honest about who we are.
It might not be the worst thing to be honest about what we’re seeing, too.
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