Volume II: The Aftermath
It’s either banal or painfully insightful to remark that the Nazi Holocaust didn’t happen overnight. In retrospect that trajectory, from 19th century racial antisemitism through the 1930s to the gas chambers, looks crystal clear, to the point where today’s Jews often look back at the Jews in 1930s Germany and just cannot fathom why they didn’t leave, the writing so clearly on the wall.
One wonders if future historians will see our current trajectory of rising and spreading antisemitism as clearly, and wonder the same thing about us.
The essays collected in the two volumes of Israel Breathes, World Condemns document the stages by which it came to pass that when an Islamist jihadi terrorist group massacred the civilians of a democracy, the dominant campus response was to blame the democracy. They document, perhaps for those later historians, how Jew-hatred has moved from the fringe into the solid mainstream, and then into outright dominance on campuses and in the infosphere, finally exploding ingloriously in the campus celebratory response to the October 7 Hamas massacre, to the point where Jewish students on all too many campuses have now had to barricade themselves inside libraries or dorms or Hillel Houses to protect themselves from the mobs outside baying for Jewish blood—mobs consisting of their fellow students, and often their professors. Their primary focus is on the campus, on the many students and professors who, through the lens of their ideologies, have come to see the mass murder of Jews as the moral high ground. But of course what starts on campus, what is incubated on campus, does not and has not stayed on campus. It’s in our cities, on our streets, all over the internet, permeates the media, and it, this intifada against the Jews, is now fully globalized.
As for the details, the “why,” and the “how,” what ideas and ideologies could drive all this and produce these outcomes: well, you’ll have to read the essays. But if there is one point that this collection of essays is trying to get across, it might be this: one must take a good, long, hard and clear look at the wall and see what is written there.