10/31/2018 The New Jewish Question and the New Jew Hatred - The American Interest https://www.the-american-interest.com/2018/10/28/the-new-jewish-question-and-the-new-jew-hatred/ 1/3 https://www.the-american-interest.com/2018/10/28/the-new-jewish-question-and-the-new-jew-hatred/ AFTER PITTSBURGH The New Jewish Question and the New Jew Hatred YEHUDAH MIRSKY A new permutation of the oldest hatred manifested itself yesterday in Pittsburgh. Anti-Semitism may be the oldest hatred, but it still comes up with horrifying surprises. One of them is a spike in anti-Semitism, stoked by a President who seems wildly pro- Israel and even has a Jewish daughter. This crazy dynamic climaxed yesterday when 11 Jews were murdered in a synagogue in Pittsburgh. Throughout history people have slaughtered Jews for every reason under the sun. But we still need to attend to their reasons. The shooter, according to media accounts, was obsessed with immigration, and the broad support that more open immigration policy enjoys among Jews, an immigrant group with a long memory. Even Donald Trump was too much of a softy for him, but the shooter’s worldview is the metastasized version of Trump’s cynical weaponization of immigration as the Mother-of-All-Wedge Issues, the diversionary proxy for every bit of white working class social, economic, and cultural resentment he can milk from it for the sake of his deepest love: proætable, personally useful political theater, not to exclude theater redolent in allusions to violence. So POTUS can’t play dumb when his vultures come home to roost. What is it about Jews that drives some people so crazy, and in such opposite and contradictory directions? Jews are evil capitalists and Jews are evil socialists. Jews are religious fanatics and Jews are godless atheists. Jews are overly ambitious and Jews are lazy parasites. Jews want to control the world and want to keep too much to themselves. How can this all be? In no small part, it is because Jews are imaginably all of the above in different ways in different times and in different places. So is all of humanity. Jews live out some of the deepest quandaries of being human, on a small scale and on a large stage certainly in the past few centuries. Above all, they live out the endless drama starring the universal and the particular. A central feature of Jewishness is an attempt to synthesize the particular and the universal. This has its origins in the deepest theologies of the Hebrew Bible. The Biblical God is the universal Creator of the world and giver of the universal moral law. He enters into a covenantal relationship with one speciæc people who He commands to