Sarah Schutte:Rothman: We’re Seeing ‘Some of the Most Grotesque, Overt, Unselfconscious Displays of Antisemitism That I Have Witnessed in My Entire Lifetime’
National Review senior writer Noah Rothman, on Tuesday’s episode of The Editors podcast, said antisemitism in the West is reaching levels he’s never before seen. The discussion followed the killing of a Jewish counter-protester in Los Angeles over the weekend.
“Attacks on Jews, for being Jews, are up by 388 percent in the last month,” he said. “That’s an estimate, so we don’t know. But it would comport with what we’re seeing.”
Rothman added, “We’ve seen acts of property destruction, specifically Hitlerian threats against lawmakers, ritualistic vandalism. This is all an act of intimidation and a sort of a rite, a ritual that summons in the people who engage in this, the will to engage in murderous violence.”
These acts, he said, amount to “some of the most grotesque, overt, unselfconscious displays of antisemitism that I have witnessed in my entire lifetime.” He noted that even New York City, with its large Jewish population, is hosting rallies “where people are chanting, ‘Globalize the Intifada,’ and, ‘There’s only one solution to the Jewish problem.’”
Much of this, Rothman said, is a product of press bias and historical illiteracy. “We don’t teach the Holocaust anymore,” he said. “Studies suggest that 10 percent of people in the Gen Z age haven’t even heard the word ‘Holocaust.’ Most of them don’t know what it was about. They don’t know the numbers. They don’t know why they were killed. And they don’t know the predicate for it.”
“We have been creating the conditions for antisemitic violence for years,” he said. “It has come home to roost, and it’s only going to get worse. And we have no one else to blame but ourselves.”
The Editors podcast is recorded on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.
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