Antisemitism Today Lecture delivered at LSE on November 7, 2024

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JCA 2024

(DOI: 10.26613/jca/8.1.180)

Antisemitism Today Lecture delivered at LSE on November 7, 2024 Anthony Julius

PRELIMINARY There is much to say, and much of it will have to be left unsaid if I am not to run over the hour, and cut into the time allotted for questions. Yet, I wonder what more needs to be said than that these are bad, dark times for Jews? How bad? A young Jewish woman, a master’s student, relates: “I was wearing a JSoc [Jewish Society] jumper on campus and someone spat on me as they walked past.” Shylock’s protest to Antonio comes to mind: “[You] spat on my Jewish gaberdine” (1.3.122). For Venice’s Rialto read university campus; for Jewish gaberdine, read JSoc jumper. Other Jewish university students have related similar experiences: “After leaving a bagel lunch from the Jewish chaplaincy on campus I was spat at.” “I wear a Magen David. I have been spat at and shouted at as well as not allowed to enter certain areas in the university. I have been told I should have ‘died in the gas chambers.’”1 What does it mean, to spit at a Jew at her place of study? You are not wanted here. You do not merit the ordinary civilities. You are an object of disgust; expressions of disgust are therefore your portion. Spitting at a Jew is a moral act: something to be done precisely in public, in demonstration of virtue, as an act of witness, a refusal of complicity with the Jew. Now—let us agree that a student spitting at another student is an objectionable, reprehensible act, and that, when the student is spat at because she is Jewish, it is an objectionable, reprehensible, anti-Jewish or antisemitic act. And

let us further agree that for it to be necessary for me to say these things—and it is necessary—is a sign of quite how bad these bad times are. It is my disagreeable task this evening to speak about such objectionable, reprehensible antisemitic acts and language; to communicate some sense of their weight and consequence; and to protest against them. How could one not protest against them? It is a puzzle and a scandal that they are regarded with such complacency by so many people.

INTRODUCTION So—my subject is “Antisemitism Today.” By “today” I mean the period that began on October 7, 2023—a period of two moments, the moment of the terror attack, and the moment of the military campaign, the response to the one, and the response to the other. • Terror attack. October 7 itself, that is, when Hamas terrorists invaded Israel to murder, rape,2 and abduct Israeli citizens and other defenseless civilians. Over 1000 people were killed; elderly women and children were among the over 240 people seized, including the four-year-old Abigail Eden, whose parents were murdered on that day. Bodies were mutilated; the kidnapped were paraded in the streets of Gaza City; some hostages were sexually assaulted,3 others have been murdered in captivity.4 This terror attack was on Israel itself, the national entity, with the intent of initiating a maximally violent


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