Many of us make resolutions on Rosh Hashanah about the kind of person we want to be in the coming year… call your mom, start meditating, lose five pounds. This Rosh Hashanah there is a resolution that we must make, and stick to, because it’s literally a matter of life and death. Antisemitism is on the rise and we must all do our parts to stop it. Jews and allies need to be courageous, to call it out and to never make excuses for it. Antisemitism isn’t new, but there are new and insidious strains of it. There’s the familiar white supremacy movement that pretty much hates everyone who doesn’t look like them, the run-of-the-mill antisemites, the subtle I-don’t-really-mean-it-when-I-talk-crap-about Jews kind, and a relatively new form of hate directed at Israel which crosses the line to antisemitism far too often. Antisemitism is hate. Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, atheists… literally everyone is worse off for it. Are we going to end it completely? Probably not. But that doesn’t give us permission to throw our hands up and accept it, make excuses, or discount it. It’s exactly the opposite. We must talk about it, write about it, learn about it, and call it out. No matter how difficult or uncomfortable, we can’t ignore, chuckle along, or accept it. We’ve already learned the bitter lesson that true hate is never little, it is never unimportant, and it should never, ever be ignored.
-A JewBelong Original