Rabbi’s Corner – The Year in Antisemitism Edition

Dear Friends,
Earlier this week the Simon Weisenthal Center published a list of what it called “Anti-Semitism Goes Mainstream: 2010 Top Ten Anti-Semitic Slurs.”  Not surprisingly, coming in at #1 was Helen Thomas for her comments that “Jews should get the hell out of Palestine. They should go home to Poland, Germany, America and everywhere else” – comments which ultimately led to her “retirement” and tarnishing her reputation as a journalist.

Most of the other selections were either associated with the Holocaust in some way or variations on the classic canards that The Jews control the money and the media.  Breaking this familiar pattern were the comments coming in at number nine made by Christina Patterson in the British paper The Independent.  In an article titled “The Limits of Multi-Culturalism“, Patterson complains “when I first moved to Stamford Hill, I didn’t realise [sic] that goyim were about as welcome in Hasidic Jewish shops as Martin Luther King at a Klu Klux Klan convention.”  Examples of the intolerance she endured included having changed given to her reluctantly “as if [her hand] had been dipped in anthrax” and that he did not say “please” and “thank-you” and that a child who had been taking up two seats on a bus “lept up as if an infection from the ebola virus was imminent” when the female author attempted to sit down next to him.  Patterson then lists comparative offenses by Muslims, ultimately bemoaning freedom of religion:

But we, alas, are living in a country whose government believes that schools should be “free” – free to abandon the national curriculum, free to adopt any damned framework they fancy – and that parents should be free, with no state intervention at all, to teach their children whatever sexist, racist, dangerous, violent and yes, ill-mannered, nonsense that they like.

If anything, Patterson is not anti-Semitic per se, but anti any religion which does not conform to her ideology, specifically those which could be classified as fundamentalist.

Still, Patterson’s experience should serve to the Jewish community at large a reminder to be concerned to some extent with how we interact with our non-Jewish neighbors.  While Judaism does expect halakhic commitment to trump Emily Post, part of living among non-Jewish neighbors in safety and security means playing by certain rules so as not to create a hillul hashem – a desecration of God’s name.   For while we will never rid the world of anti-Semitism, we should not provide the validation or excuse for it.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Josh Yuter