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Is the exile coming home to roost?

NB: This column was written prior to the attack on Charlie Hebdo and the hostage-taking at a kosher supermarket in Paris on January 9.

ONLY A two-year hiatus from reading the news could leave one ignorant of the truth about being Jewish in France today.

Stories on attacks on Jews in France are so numerous that they blur. A synagogue is shot at. A synagogue is surrounded by a mob. A person with a yarmulke is attacked. A Paris suburb puts up a plaque honoring a convicted Palestinian terrorist. Shots are fired at a Jewish print shop. A kosher restaurant is attacked. A Jewish home is targeted because it’s Jewish; one resident is raped, another robbed.

In 2013, there were 423 anti-Semitic incidents in France. Hardly a small number. In the first six months of 2014, there were 527 attacks.

And this doesn’t count the terrorist attack on a Toulouse school that murdered children a couple of years ago, or the earlier attack on a Jewish youth that stretched out over three weeks, before he was murdered.

It also doesn’t count the vicious attacks on Israel in France.

Nor does it count the anti-Semitic attacks, and murders, in Belgium.

Or the claim by right-wing Swedish politicians that Jews are welcome in Sweden — if they stop being Jews.

Or the rise of far-right, openly anti-Semitic parties in Hungary (“Jobbik”) and Greece (“Golden Dawn”).

Or that a Jewish politician in London, a member of parliament, recently received five death threats because he is Jewish — another speck in a growing blur of stories of anti-Semitic incidents in Britain.

AMERICAN JEWS live in a fools’ paradise. May it continue!

American Jews, including most of the Orthodox, have all but forgotten that we live in exile. That our political status as totally free is abnormal.

I know of no American Jews or Jewish groups who would shrink from speaking up on any issue, and speaking loudly if the issue really means a lot to them.

I think it’s safe to use the plural and say that we American Jews feel we are just as free as any other citizens to say our piece in any medium we choose without fear of anything worse than disagreement.

It’s different in France and in many parts of Europe. They know they live in exile. They know that they don’t raise their heads all the way, that Jewish life is not fully normal; that the exile from the Holy Land almost 2,000 years ago — that is, the exile from an independent Jewish government sanctioned by G-d — ended fully Jewish normalcy.

In Europe the Jews keep a low, or at least a lower, profile than American Jews. In this country, Jews feel no restraints on either being American or being Jewish.

It is indeed great to be free — but is it naive?

It is indeed terrible to be in exile — but is it curable?

On both sides, the questions are not asked by Jews today because of deeply ingrained historical conditions, which might be simplified and summarized in two words: for European Jews, the Holocaust; for American Jews, the Constitution.

THE THING is, it is horse blinder-like to deny that things are changing. How badly? How extensively? I don’t know. But it becomes increasingly difficult to witness the worsening anti-Semitism, the sharper and more salient, unabashed expressions of Jew hatred in France, Britain, Belgium and elsewhere, and simply say, “it’ll pass.”

One need not be an alarmist — “it’s 1930s Germany all over again” — to see that today things are said and done that even a decade ago would have been unthinkable.

It would be the height of hypocrisy for a writer such as myself to advocate the lay-low approach; the very act of writing and publishing says the opposite.

But I do feel that without necessarily reaching any programmatic or even analytic conclusion, it is not hypocritical to raise the issue: Is the old form of exile descending more pervasively upon the Jewish people?

Is it illusionary to see continued, unrestrained freedom for Jews in democratic countries around the world?

Rabbi Hillel Goldberg may be reached at [email protected].

Copyright © 2015 by the Intermountain Jewish News



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