By: Brandon Rattiner
Senior Director, Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC)
I woke up too early last Sunday, jostled awake by my young children excited to get their Hannukah presents. Then, I looked at my phone and saw a mass shooting at an Australian Hannukah celebration killed 15 people. Another Jewish holiday forever linked to violence.
This comes two months after a stabbing at a London synagogue on Rosh Hashana that killed three, five months after a Molotov cocktail in Boulder on Shavuot killed one, seven months after Gov. Josh Shapiro’s residence was set on fire on Passover, and 26 months after Hamas killed more than 1,200 Israelis on Simchat Torah.
As I sit with this moment, I find that the Hannukah story helps me contextualize the hate our community is facing right now.
Scholar Dara Horn teases out two kinds of antisemitism from Jewish holidays that tell stories of survival. In the Purim story, Queen Esther thwarts a plot to kill the kingdom’s Jews, defeating an eliminationist strain of antisemitism whose goal is quite literally our death. In the Hannukah story, by contrast, the Maccabees defeat a conversionist strain of antisemitism that aimed to destroy Judaism as an institution. The Greeks didn’t want to murder Jews; they wanted Jews to abandon Jewish law, distinctiveness, and practices and fully assimilate into dominant culture.
Sarah Hurwitz describes ‘Hannukah antisemitism’ nicely: “Jews can have the same rights and opportunities as the majority if they agree to be Jewish the way the majority demands. Then the Jews get to live—for now at least—just not fully as Jews.” And at this moment in time, the problem isn’t Jews’ religion, race, occupations, etc. It’s Zionism. The modern-day Greeks ask Jews to renounce the dream of self-determination in our ancestral homeland.
It might be Hannukah, but what happened in Sydney is ‘Purim Antisemitism.’ The shooter did not differentiate Jews based on their convictions about Israeli politics.
And that so many can’t see this is a painful reminder about how entrenched ‘Hannukah Antisemitism’ has become in our society. I’ve read countless articles over the past few days that try to create distance between the Sydney attack and phrases like “Globalize the Intifada.” Their implicit argument being either (1) real violence against Jews has nothing to do with the massive rise in anti-Israel rhetoric or (2) Jews have it coming because Israel’s actions justify violence against Jews. Both points are obviously nonsense.
I’m angry. But as our holidays teach us, neither form of antisemitism will win.
What gives me comfort, or something like it, is knowing that today’s threats, however destabilizing and novel they feel, are not new. They fit a pattern Jews have confronted for centuries. Overcoming it has never been easy, but we will do it. Together.
Please email Brandon Rattiner at brattiner@jewishcolorado.org with questions or comments.