The new anti-Semitic cancer all point to the fact that the post-October 7 hatred is a spiritual phenomenon and should be treated as such

PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK /ALEXANDROS MICHAILIDIS

T

he new right-wing anti-Semitism is inescapable, undeniable, and horrible.

Inescapable because for the last few weeks, an interview conducted by Tucker Carlson has convulsed the conservative world. The former Fox News star, who has taken a conspiratorial and anti-Israel turn since being fired from the network, recently hosted Nick Fuentes, a truly odious anti-Semite, for a softball interview.

Undeniable, because the mainstreaming of a man with neo-Nazi views is part of what the Wall Street Journal calls the “New Right’s New Anti-Semitism.” The traction of figures like Fuentes shows that the battle is on for the soul of the American right.

That in turn is horrible, because suddenly, the overwhelmingly pro-Israel and Jewish-friendly slant of the GOP is under genuine threat. Young evangelical support for Israel has dropped off a cliff at the same time as stridently anti-Semitic voices have been allowed in from the cold.

The elevation of an anti-Israel obsessive to mayor of New York from the left and the coddling of a bigot on the right tell the same story. The post-war firewall that kept anti-Jewish sentiment out on the wild margins of American national life has totally collapsed.

Where do we go from here?

Perhaps what I’m about to say will come across as too passive, too galus-minded for some tastes. But I feel impelled to say it anyway.

It would be comforting to reach for solutions in the familiar realms of Israel advocacy, alliance building and interfaith efforts. Organize a well-funded confab or two; arrange a Congressional screening of the October 7 footage; or create a new digital army to fight the online hate.

But while fighting Israel’s corner falls well within the normal parameters of hishtadlus — especially in a world when anti-Zionism is simply a polite version of anti-Semitism — the battle lies elsewhere.

The suddenness, the vitriol, and the sheer reach of the new anti-Semitic cancer all point to the fact that the post-October 7 hatred is a spiritual phenomenon and should be treated as such.

Fourteen years ago, I witnessed an encounter with Rav Aharon Leib Steinman ztz”l in which he made that exact point.

In the aftermath of a major communal effort that he had initiated in Britain to counter anti-Israel hostility, my father Rabbi Jonathan Guttentag consulted Gateshead rosh yeshivah Rav Avrohom Gurwicz as to whether such activism was the correct Torah path. Rav Gurwicz advised that the question be brought before the gedolei Eretz Yisrael, leading to a meeting with Rav Steinman.

By that point, the onset of the second Intifada, the UN’s Durban hate-fest, and the groundswell of bias in the media, anti-Israelism was a fact of life. Unlike today, with the wave of support for a Palestinian state, the center-left was still holding. Democrats were broadly pro-Israel, and to a lesser extent, Britain’s Labour Party was on board, too.

Yet that support was clearly crumbling under the assault of the BDS movement.

The question set before Rav Steinman was whether frum Jews should take a leading role in pushing back under what was labeled the “Big Tent for Israel.”

Sitting on his thin bed in his spartan Bnei Brak apartment, the gadol — then 96-years old — responded forcefully, waving away the Neturei Karta-esque charges of collaboration with Zionists, to focus on the essence.

“Atah yachol — you can,” he said, meaning that there was no problem of supporting Israel. “Aval zeh lo ya’azor — but it won’t help.”

The response was a reprisal of Rav Elchonon Wasserman’s take on anti-Semitism in the 1930s.

The great Baranovitch rosh yeshivah wrote extensively about the tidal wave of Jew hatred that washed over Europe, beginning even before Hitler’s rise to power. In his works he quoted his rebbi, the Chofetz Chaim, who dealt with the roots of anti-Semitism.

Both concluded that the upsurge of hatred was rooted in abandonment of Torah. The Chofetz Chaim (Maamar Chinuch Habanim) pointed to the mass enrollment in secular schools in Eastern Europe as a specific trigger. Rav Wasserman himself connected the upsurge of Arab violence against the Yishuv with the opening of mixed bathing in Tel Aviv — back then, a shocking act of secularist brazenness.

Doubtless, there was plenty of contemporary backlash against that pietistic reading of current events. Economic hardship always brings out anti-Semitism, skeptics might have said. Large-scale Jewish immigration to Israel naturally inflames Arab sentiment, critics would have carped. Both rebbi and talmid understood full well that there were plenty of proximate triggers and rational explanations for Jewish suffering in the 30s.

Yet, the premise of much of Rav Elchonon’s writing was that the Torah demands that we focus on spiritual root, not material outcome.

“A judge who issues a verdict bases his decision on a specific line of the legal code,” he wrote (Torah V’Eretz Yisrael, Ikvesa D’Meshicha). “Hashem’s laws also work that way — they’re based on the law book of the Heavenly Court, which is the Torah. Thus, all current events are the laws of Hashem, and just as it’s our duty to learn the Torah, so too, it is our duty to delve into world events to find their underpinning in the laws of the Torah.”

Back in 2011, Rav Aharon Leib Steinman reached for the same playbook when discussing the wave of anti-Israel hatred. “Atah yachol — aval zeh lo ya’azor,” he repeated emphatically again and again.

What would he have said about a world in which Jews are killed in shul on Yom Kippur in England, and practically banned from sports events there; a world in which reports of pampered New Jerseyites turning to jihad hardly make the news because of the larger scandal around right-wing anti-Semitism; a world where within the space of two years, Jewish standing has collapsed to levels not seen since the dark days of the 1930s?

He might well have responded that those who know how to fight back can go right ahead — but that we should all know the truth.

Anti-Semitism is an age-old cancer of the spirit. When it suddenly metastasizes, ravaging vast new areas of the human body politic, it’s time for the doctor to try something new.

“Rak tefillah ya’azor,” Rav Steinman concluded — only prayer will help, and all efforts to fight back are doomed if we don’t tackle the spiritual root cause.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1086)