Sometimes an idea can upend decades of thinking. That’s what Dara Horn’s recent essay (“October 7 Created a Permission Structure for Antisemitism”) in The Atlantic did for me.
Horn, the author of People Love Dead Jews, offers up a definition of antisemitism for the post-Oct. 7 world. The source of Jew hatred, Horn writes, is not that the Jews killed Jesus or refused to accept Muhammed’s teaching. Rather, it stems from the very core of the Jewish experience in the Diaspora – and for many years a key tenet of my own beliefs.
Judaism, I felt growing up, should focus on the universal, not the particular. We should stand up for the oppressed and downtrodden whomever they are. Fixating internally on the problems of one’s own people ignores the world’s most pressing issues.
Moreover, the concept of tikkun olam – of making the world a better place – well, isn’t that what Judaism ought to be about, rather than arguing over the minutiae of ancient laws on how to slaughter a goat?
Yet, by embracing universalism over particularism, many Jews have assimilated our unique values into the narratives of our enemies.
Horn lays out how this happened.
She starts by pointing out how Holocaust education in North America, which increasingly posits that all genocides are equivalent, has become a “massive appropriation of the Jewish experience that obscured, behind a screen of happy universalism, an intellectual tradition that has been used to justify the demonization of Jews for millennia.”
This appropriation, Horn explains, is “entirely consistent with what non-Jewish societies have routinely done with the Jewish experience: Claim that that experience [applies] to ‘everyone,’ and then use it to demonstrate how wrong Jews are for rejecting the ‘universalism’ of their own experience — for refusing to be just like everyone else.”
Here are several salient examples from history.
- Christianity appropriated the Old Testament, stated that Christians were the “new Israel,” then excoriated Jews for failing to accept the Church’s universal salvation while promoting “supersessionism,” the claim that Christianity had replaced the Jews as the legitimate heirs to the identity of Israel.
- Islam did this too, insisting the Quran “was the true universal message and the Torah, which shares many of the Quran’s stories and precedes it by many centuries, was somehow ‘corrupted,’” Horn writes.
- Rational-minded Germans at the turn of the last century didn’t feel comfortable playing the supersessionist card. So, instead, they decided they were the ones experiencing subjugation. By whom? The Jews, of course.
- When the former USSR announced the official memorial for the 100,000 people massacred at Babyn Yar, the text read that the Nazis had murdered “citizens of Kyiv.” That is, “the Soviets declared themselves – not the Jews who went unmentioned – to be Nazism’s chief victims,” Horn explains.
The modern Jewish impetus to focus on universal values, while minimizing the particulars of being Jewish, has backfired spectacularly. That was the case even before Hamas’s invasion of Israel and mega-atrocity on October 7. Afterward, the masks came off (or went on, depending on who’s protesting) and the disastrous repercussions of our obsession became manifest.
We are being canceled everywhere, from the political – where Jewish college students are not allowed to pass on their way to class – to the literary – where having a Jewish-sounding name is enough to brand one a “Zionist” and therefore not acceptable to participate in an authors’ roundtable.
And yet when Jews complain, Horn writes, we are told that it is we who “are perniciously shutting down ‘free speech.’”
Is it time to reignite the particular and jettison those touchy-feely universal concerns? Bret Stephens, writing in The New York Times, hints that this will be his approach.
“To have been born a Jew is the single most fortunate thing that ever happened to me,” he opines. “It is therefore worth the time it takes to explore and worth the cost — including, tragically, the cost in bigotry and violence — it so often extracts.”
Shimon Rafaeli, writing in Tablet, sums up the conundrum.
“We’re citizens of the global village, wearing sports shirts like the rest of the world, participating fully in Western culture,” he notes. “[That has] led many of us to abandon our historical identification with the collective Jewish story.”
If ever we needed reinforcement of that historical connection, the post-Oct. 7 protests around the world have made it clear.
“The great post-Holocaust achievement of North American Jews was the gradual end of their ‘conditional acceptance,’” writes Yossi Klein Halevi. But now, “the sense of their acceptance in society – from universities to the political system to the streets – is eroding.”
Perhaps it was always an illusion.
This doesn’t mean we should drop all concerns for universal issues like combating climate change and racism to instead set up tefillin stands on every street corner.
But, as per Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we have to think of ourselves first. As Jews and Israelis, our personal and national security trumps seeking the world’s goodwill by becoming assimilated universalists. As journalist Douglas Murray quips, “History shows that only one people will protect the Jewish people: the Jewish people.”
Rabbi Amiel Hirsch, of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York, addressed young Jewish universalists in his Yom Kippur sermon this year. “We tried to instill in you a sense of justice, righteousness and honor for all people. We did not intend for some in your generation to turn their backs on our people. We wanted you to be Zionists. We did not intend that our emphasis on tikkun olam would lead some Jews to join anti-Israel demonstrations.”
If the tides continue to turn against us, we must internalize that no universalist from outside the community is coming to help us. What that looks like will differ according to each person. For my family, moving to Israel was the best way to actualize this realization.
How will you change when your particular overtakes the universal?
I first wrote about universalism vs. particularism for The Jerusalem Post.
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