If that seems peculiar, consider the likes of Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban, who vilifies George Sorosin classic anti-Semitic fashion even as he makes trips to the Western Wall and embraces Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Or Jeremy Corbyn and others on the left, who denounce Zionism as racism even as they foreswear anti-Semitism and valorize the Jews who support them.
Not that there's anything new under this sun.
In the 1930s, the demagogic Catholic priest Charles Coughlin liked to direct his radio addresses to "Catholics, Protestants, and religious Jews." The bad Jews were, in his mind, the irreligious—the cosmopolitan. But there were also those, beginning in the Enlightenment, for whom the good Jews were the ones who had emancipated themselves from religious shackles. Similarly, for every person who condemned the Capitalist Jew and celebrated the Communist, there was someone else who did the opposite.
So while it is easy enough to identify simple hostility to a group based on race, religion, ethnicity, or nationality, there's something distinctive about the way non-Jews—gentiles—divide us into the good and the bad. Why do they do that?
Read Full Article »