Where’s the Vaccine for that Pandemic Antisemitism?

I was born on Yom Kippur 1938 in the City of Brotherly Love, but no worries, I will not be part of that pack of wolverines seeking the presidency as there’ll be enough incumbents, maybe by then even inmates in or around their eighties strutting and fretting their hour upon a stage hopping or limping toward that high and mighty office in 2024.  

In that same year was born in France, a Catholic philosopher, Jacques Maritain.  No, that’s hardly a contradiction of terms as you can be Catholic and still awesomely philosophize.  Maritain decried a diversion he said was as divisive then as it is today—antisemitism.

His words rang out from the shadow of the Holocaust and the rise of Nazi Germany as a voice of reason and compassion springing from the heart of his vibrant, ever flourishing faith. 

Just weeks prior there had erupted a horror known as Kristallnacht, a fateful night in Nazi Germany during which thousands of Jewish businesses were destroyed, hundreds of synagogues burned, and thousands of Jewish men deported to concentration camps.

While the savagery of the antisemitic excesses in the fall of 1938 had reached unprecedented levels, only time would tell the full extent of the horrors looming over monster-ridden Nazi Germany.

Denouncing antisemitism

Shamefully, not everyone of Maritain’s faith would respond with his undaunting perception and courage. One of the best-known Catholic priests in America at the time would even foolishly defend Kristallnacht, could you believe it?  Actually, defend the Nazi’s antisemitism calling Kristallnacht simply a retaliation for Jewish oppression of Christians.   

Today that depraved, empty-headed thinking haunts young priests like Father Patrick Briscoe, a host of a podcast call Godsplaining.  Fr. Briscoe laments how Kristallnacht was defended by some numbskull Catholics as retribution just as today some blinded, brain-clogged activists defend Hamas terrorism on Oct.7, another dreadful day that will live in infamy. 

“After years of oppression, how else could Palestinians have responded?” is how today’s insane argument goes, says Briscoe.   Decrying the conditions in Gaza, too many pro-Hamas advocates blame Israel.  They stupidly justify savage terrorism as an acceptable response to discord and discomfort of overcrowding and mismanagement in Gaza.

But this crooked line of unreason cloaked as an argument for justice against oppression is patently cruel, illogical, and absurd as no such thing has happened.  While I’m against Islamophobia too, I still ask how dumb demonstrators at the University of Wisconsin can be who chanted "Glory to the martyrs!" in praise of Hamas terrorists.  Then the university describes the demonstration as “respectful dialogue?”   What?

One young demonstrator holds a sign during a Washington, D.C., demonstration depicting Israeli flags put into a trash can with the sign reading, “Keep the world clean.”    What?

This mentality is not merely about Zionism or the state of Israel, says Fr. Briscoe.  “We are seeing radical, inflammatory and evil expressions of contempt for the entire Jewish race.”  As a side note, perhaps a boatful of wisdom, one of my deeply thoughtful Jewish friends, Dr. Michael, resents calling Jews a “race.”   

“We are a people- looking like me,” he says, “or like Moroccans, or Yemenis, or Ugandans, or Ethiopians, or Bengalis, or Japanese-whatever superficial characteristics.  The commonality is a community in a contract with God to folllow God’s commandments.” 

Speaking of devout followers of God, after offering his sympathy for the October 7 attack on Israeli civilians by Hamas, Pope Francis told this to a delegation of rabbis:

“The spread of anti-Semitic demonstrations, which I strongly condemn, is also of great concern.   It is hateful. It is antisemitic. And it must be denounced. 

Spiritually we’re all semites

Maritain rightly underscored that Jews and Christians must stand together. “It is no little matter, however, for a Christian to hate or to despise or to wish to treat degradingly the race from which sprang his God and the Immaculate Mother of his God,” says Maritain. 

“That is why the bitter zeal of anti-Semitism always turns in the end into a bitter zeal against Christianity.” 

He implored Christians to view the suffering of Jews with a brotherly eye, invoking the parable of the Good Samaritan, who helped a wounded stranger on the road.  Maritain denounced racism as a “brutish” materialistic mockery of humanity. 

“From a social and cultural viewpoint, racism degrades and humiliates to an unimaginable degree reason, thought, science, and art,” argued Maritain. He rightly described racism as the most inhuman and desperate form of barbarism, chaining humanity to biological categories and fatalism.

Though one may express opposition to and even condemnation of specific Israeli policies or actions concerning Palestinians or Israel's Arab citizens, it remains an indisputable fact that Israel has not taken any action with the intent of exterminating the Palestinian people, either wholly or partially.

“Will we learn the lessons of history?” ask Fr. Briscoe.  As the death toll on both sides from the Israel-Hamas war continues to mount, “we Christians must be brave enough to pursue the truth.

“Then as now, antisemitism is a deadly diversion, pulling our attention away from the true causes of our woes: the unbalanced materialistic structures and spirit of the modern world. 

“These beget unequal economic and social systems that need transformation. We must address these root causes of perpetual unrest rather than ever again permitting an existential prejudice to feel like an actual solution."