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Tuesday, December 6, 2005

Here's an excellent piece in Commentary by Emanuele Ottolenghi:

Europe's "Good Jews"

...Unlike the case in pre-Enlightenment Europe, present-day anti-Semitism does not expect Jews to abandon their religion. Today’s Europe is a self-consciously multicultural society. Although it cherishes secularism above all, it respects, if somewhat warily, religious pluralism. What the enlightened sector of today’s Europe would like Jews to do, in exchange for fully approved membership in the circle of approved opinion, is to renounce a core component of their identity: that is, their sense of Jewish peoplehood as expressed through their attachment and commitment to the democratic state of Israel and to the Zionist enterprise.

What remains constant is that, as in both pre- and post-Enlightenment Europe, today’s European elite has its good Jews and its bad Jews. There are the Jews whom it embraces, encourages, and celebrates; and then there are the Jews whom it chastises and condemns. For the former, there will always be a place of honor in the European sun. On the latter, today’s officially pluralist and tolerant Europe has turned its back. Is it any wonder, then, that some "good Jews" have chosen to live in the light, stopping only to burnish their qualifications by noisily joining the chorus that has consigned their fellow Jews to the dark?

Flawed narrative history, shame, self-doubt, and the human need to belong have created some very damaging psychologies in some otherwise intelligent people.

3 Comments

We have seen the enemy.........and he is us.

European antisemitism today, while based in the 'good ole days', is really quite different.

Then it had the deicide, replacement theology, they look and act different basis, today's chimera places in front of all this - we hate you jews because of israel (of course it's the other way around ...we hate Israel because of you jews..as it always was)

That's a great reveal by Ottolenghi. Not acquainted with him beyond a few articles, but he has his own homepage, here.

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