Dennis Prager - Why the Jews?: The Reason for Antisemitism

T HE FIRST EDITION OF THIS BOOK was published in 1983. We wrote the book then because we believed that antisemitism was profoundly misunderstood, but not because of any particular danger to the Jews. A generation later, Jew-hatred remains misunderstood, but we have rewritten this book because Jews are indeed in danger.

This is the world in which this edition of this book is being written:

The rocks have been lifted all over Europe, and the snakes of Jew-hatred are slithering free.

• In Belgium, thugs beat up the chief rabbi, kicking him in the face and calling him a dirty Jew. Two synagogues in Brussels were fire-bombed; a third, in Charleroi, was sprayed with automatic weapons fire.
• In Britain, the cover of the New Statesman, a left-wing magazine, depicted a large Star of David stabbing the Union Jack.Oxford professor Tom Paulin, a noted poet, told an Egyptian interviewer that American Jews who move to the West Bank and Gaza should be shot dead. A Jewish yeshiva student reading the Psalms was stabbed twenty-seven times on a London bus.
• Anti-Semitism, wrote a columnist in The Spectator, has become respectable at London dinner tables. She quoted one member of the House of Lords: The Jews have been asking for it and now, thank God, we can say what we think at last.
• In Italy, the daily newspaper La Stampa published a page-one cartoon: A tank emblazoned with a Jewish star points its gun at the baby Jesus, who pleads, Surely they dont want to kill me again?
• In Germany thousands of neo-Nazis held a rally, marching near a synagogue on the Jewish Sabbath. Graffiti appeared on a synagogue in the western town of Herford: Six million were not enough.
• In Ukraine, skinheads attacked Jewish worshippers and smashed the windows of Kievs main synagogue. Ukrainian police denied that the attack was anti-Jewish.
• In Holland, an anti-Israel demonstration featured swastikas, photos of Hitler, and chants of Sieg Heil and Jews into the sea. In Slovakia, the Jewish cemetery of Kosice was invaded and 135 tombstones destroyed.

But nowhere have the flames of antisemitism burned more furiously than in France.

In Lyon, a car was rammed into a synagogue and set on fire. In Montpellier, the Jewish religious center was firebombed; so were synagogues in Strasbourg and Marseilles; so was a Jewish school in Crteil. A Jewish sports club in Toulouse was attacked with Molotov cocktails, and on the statue of Alfred Dreyfus in Paris, the words Dirty Jew were painted. In Bondy, fifteen men beat up members of a Jewish football team with sticks and metal bars. The bus that takes Jewish children to school in Aubervilliers has been attacked three times in the last fourteen months. According to the police, metropolitan Paris has seen ten to twelve anti-Jewish incidents per day since Easter. Walls in Jewish neighborhoods have been defaced with slogans proclaiming Jews to the gas chambers and Death to the Jews. The weekly journal Le Nouvel Observateur published an appalling libel: It said Israeli soldiers rape Palestinian women, so that their relatives will kill them to preserve family honor. The French ambassador to Great Britain was not sackedand did not apologizewhen it was learned that he had told guests at a London dinner that the worlds troubles were the fault of that shitty little country, Israel.