Since the day that Israeli Jews were attacked, tortured, murdered, raped and burned to death on October 7, 2023, the entire world, save for a tiny minority, has vilified, excoriated, and blamed — ta-da! — the Jews!  The victims!

Why?  It’s really not that hard to figure out.

We live in a world of eight billion people, the vast majority of whom have never seen or spoken to or met a Jew…a Jew whose numbers constitute a microscopic 16 million, only half of that number in Israel, another approximate seven million in America, and about another million throughout the world.  This represents less than an almost invisible micro-droplet in the Atlantic Ocean.

If you questioned the bought-and-paid for Jew- and Israel-hating “protesters” on college campuses and their simpatico administrators and professors, and if you asked fulminating Jew-haters like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens and the astoundingly long list that includes the pooh-bahs at the N.Y. Times, the American mainstream media, the BBC, et al. if they had ever been physically assaulted or robbed or cuckolded or beaten in sports by a Jew, 99% of them would say no, although they may have suffered true narcissistic injuries when all those smart Jews got better marks in school and beat them on the medical and law boards, and made more money — on drive and merit — than their jealous critics ever dreamed of.

Like oozing gangrene, a deadly systemic infection, or the metastasis of invasive cancers, Jew-hatred comes in many malignant strains.

Strain #1: The Dumb Factor

In short, a dim-witted parent, family member, friend, teacher, or coach — one who was “schooled” by another dimwit — tells an innocent child that much of what is wrong with his life is because of “the Jew” who lives down the street, or employs his parent, or publishes the local newspaper…whatever.

Then the kid gets older, and his actual life experience contradicts what he’s heard as he studies or socializes or works with Jews and sometimes falls in love and marries one.

But dumb antisemitism is just like dumb stereotypes about tap-dancing blacks or whiskey-guzzling Irish people or can’t-screw-in-a-light-bulb Poles or mambo-obsessed Hispanics: still destructive to a decent and respectful social order.

Strain #2: The Emotional Factor

There are legions of highly intelligent people — in terms of I.Q.s, advanced college degrees, professional accomplishments, published books, and fancy titles — who are nonetheless driven almost exclusively by their feelings.  Ironic that they’ve spent lifetimes honing their razor-sharp intellects, refining their debating skills, priding themselves on scrupulous research — but still, emotion prevails.

This is no surprise because, simply, the emotions are stronger than the intellect.  On PET scans of the brain, anger and fear “light up” significantly more often than the higher cognitive processes of reasoning and logic.

Think of a person with childhood-onset diabetes or a seizure disorder.  No amount of hoping the condition away has any effect.  It’s simply there, deep within, and must be treated constantly in order to stem the horrible symptoms that ensue if not attended to.  Emotion-driven antisemitism is in this category — incurable but, unlike diabetes or epilepsy, unfortunately untreatable.

Strain #3: The Self-Hate Factor

Okay, you may say, people of other religions may hate Jews, but how is it possible for Jews themselves to hate Jews?  Surprisingly, the answer is simple: It’s hard to be a Jew, and this species is simply not up to it.  Yes, they can be proud of their brains and talents, but when it comes to their backbones — that’s another story.

For many Jews, being a member of the world’s most historically vilified minority is just “too much” to cope with.  In fact, to withstand the relentless onslaught would require them to have knowledge of Jewish history in order to correct the constant blitz of misinformation that an antisemitic world never tires of perpetuating, a willingness to stand on principle when the entire world is substituting propaganda and violence for righteousness, and a belief that the land of Israel was indeed bequeathed to the Jews by the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and that their return to Zion after Hitler incinerated six million of their brethren during the Holocaust was the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, proven for centuries — up to this month — by irrefutable archeological evidence.

Liberal Jews are not psychologically up to any of these challenges, hence their pathetic over-eagerness to “understand” the people who hate them, to accommodate the enemies of Israel, to capitulate to the ever-escalating and invariably one-sided demands for “compromise,” to slavishly follow Jews like linguist Noam Chomsky, playwright Tony Kushner, and journalist Peter Beinert, who are so suffused with Jew-hatred that their entire lives have been devoted to amputating any vestige of Jewish identity from their beings.

Strain #4: The Mother’s Milk Factor

This variant is infused into tabula rasa embryos by a loathing so systemic that it suggests a DNA aberration.  After delivery, infants literally imbibe a particularly toxic brew of antisemitism flowing from their mothers’ breast milk or worldview.  And when they have been sufficiently intoxicated, they enter into a family and “culture” that makes the hatred of Jews their raison d’être.

This strain has been on vivid display in the Arab world for decades — actually centuries — where toddlers are taught to echo the Jew-hatred drummed daily into their developing brains, instead of being taught — as Israelis and all Jews do — how to play the piano or play ball or play with dolls.  Young children are taught by the time they’re three years old how to strap suicide bombs onto their bodies.

It is in this “culture,” which has not changed significantly since the seventh century, that “leaders” continue to inflame the masses they have purposefully kept poor and ignorant, the better to energize them not by jobs and creativity, but by a loathing fueled by adrenaline.  These palace-dwelling leaders play the media like a Stradivarius to perpetuate the only product that competes with oil, which is hatred of Jews and Israel.

Strain #5: The Green-Eyed Monster Factor

According to author and columnist Dennis Prager, the reason that “for thousands of years there has been so much attention paid to Jews and why, today, to Israel, the one Jewish state,” is that Jews are God’s Chosen People.

But I think of an equally visceral kind of jealousy when I contemplate what it must have been like for a huge population of 450 million Arab Muslims in the Middle East to watch as the straggling remnants of European Jewry — cadaverous, hungry, heartbroken, stupefied by the cruelty they had endured and witnessed — rose up to defeat the savage Arab armies of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria (backed by Saudi Arabia and Yemen) that tried to annihilate the nascent Jewish State in 1948 and then to defeat them again and again and again in the many wars the Arabs continued to initiate.

And then, to see the people they call “pigs” literally make long-barren deserts bloom, to have the Middle East’s only thriving economy, to lead the world in technology and science and medicine, to create magnificent symphonies and athletic teams and life-saving medical remedies, et al., while the most the Arab world has ever accomplished in the last eight decades is to “create” terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezb’allah and of course those itty-bitty suicide bombers?

All fueled by the green-eyed monster!

Strain #6: The Bandwagon Factor

We are seeing this now in real time.  In a little more than a week, French president Emmanuel Macron, British prime minister Keir Starmer, and Canadian prime minister Mark Carney decided to jump on the bandwagon of the most viciously anti-Israel organization in the world, the United Nations, and to join the foreign ministers of Andorra, Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, San Marino, Slovenia, and Spain to demand global recognition of the “State of Palestine” and an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

Make no mistake — this was a huge collective expression of antisemitism!

All these strains of anti-Semitism can never be resolved — have never been resolved — by rationality or fairness or sanity.  But if this scourge of hatred is ever cured or fixed or resolved, I strongly suspect that the Nobel Peace Prize will go to a Jew!

©2025 Joan Swirsky. All rights reserved.

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Please visit Joan’s website www.joanswirsky.com.