The Jewish Question (Again)
“The Jewish Question” dates back to 1750’s Britain and pertained to the legal, political, civil, and national status—aka legitimacy—of Jews as a people within European societies. That chilling debate is very much alive today. As in the past, the very existence of the planet’s most persecuted people is again being debated.
As reported in a Nov. 9, 2023 article in the New York Times on free speech at U.S. campuses, Jason Rubenstein of the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale—a Jew—penned an open letter in which he asserted that he is “no defender of many of Israel’s policies.”
Referring to the Hamas attack, though, he next wrote something that made me bristle at first until, still thinking about it hours later, I begrudgingly came to the conclusion that he was mostly right.
“Antisemitism isn’t primarily about hurting or killing Jews, and it’s not based on some theory of racial inferiority (or superiority),” he wrote. “Instead, antisemitism is a fear, and hatred, of Jewish power — expressed primarily as a readiness to believe that Jews, when organized and acting together on large scales, are dangerous, the very essence of evil.”
