In February of 1896, long before the Nazis, just a couple of months before Adolf Hitler’s 7th birthday, Theoror Herzl’s Der Judenstaat, The Jewish State, was published in Leipzig and Vienna by M. Breitenstein’s Verlags-Buchhandlung. Mr Herzl saw the persecution Jews were facing in Europe, where they had lived ever since their expulsion from the Holy Land by the Romans beginning in 70 AD. Jews, he believed, needed to live apart from the mostly Christian populations of Europe.
But even living apart, while in Europe, didn’t prove particularly safe. While the Jüdischer Wohnbezirk in Warschau, the Warsaw ghetto, was not formally established until November of 1940 by the Nazi occupation authorities, it contained those heavily Jewish neighborhoods which existed before the outbreak of World War II in Europe.
Now there’s this, from The Wall Street Journal:
Maybe It’s Time for Jewish Self-Segregation
The self-protective impulse is a healthy response to a wave of antisemitism.
By Joseph Epstein | Thursday, September 19, 2024 | 5:33 PM EDT
The recent and rampant rise in antisemitism is, to put it gently, disheartening. One finds it everywhere, much of it passing under the flag of anti-Zionism, criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and presumably sympathy for the Palestinians. Saddest of all is that antisemitism has cropped up so exuberantly among students in our elite universities. Apart from decrying it, calling it out for what it is, what are Jews to do to protect themselves from this recurring nightmare? Perhaps a jaunt down memory lane will help.
For those who don’t have my too-expensive subscription to the Journal, the OpEd can be accessed for free here.
I was 5 when I was first aware not only that I was Jewish but that being Jewish had consequences. My father asked me what I had learned in school one day, and I told him the poem “Eenie, Meenie, Miney, Moe,” which I began to recite. When I came to the n-word—before “tiger” had been substituted as a more appropriate alternative—my father angrily stopped me and told me I was never to use the word again, especially since our people, like the Negroes (as they were called then), had been long persecuted and called all sorts of terrible names.
A few years later, returning with my father from a Bing Crosby movie, “Going My Way,” I asked if we might have a Christmas tree. “No,” he said. Why not? “Because you are Jewish.” Case closed. Not long after that, my mother pointed out various Chicago neighborhoods and suburbs—Sauganash, Kenilworth—that were “restricted,” which meant no Jews allowed. Not only did being Jewish carry responsibilities; it also apparently meant being despised, at least in certain quarters.
After several more paragraphs, in which Joseph Epstein, the author, describes his life growing up, and in college, in mostly Jewish enclaves, we get to the meat of the column:
No one saw the current wave of antisemitism coming. Who thought Hamas would find supporters at Harvard, Columbia, the University of California, Los Angeles, and elsewhere? The country had known of this virus before, but it came not from crowds of thousands but from prominent people. Henry Ford was openly antisemitic. No Jew in those days drove his cars. Father Charles Coughlin, on his radio show in the 1930s, attacked what he termed “international bankers.” But those were largely isolated, the present strain more widespread.
Is self-chosen segregation among Jews a good thing? In one sense, it feels like taking a step backward toward a less open society. Yet when the politics of a country swing too far in either direction, antisemitism is almost certain to come in its train. The swing today is unmistakably and strongly leftist, and self-segregation strikes me as the first step in combating the attacks on Jews that attend it.
I am not Jewish, and I live in an area with very few, if any Jews, so perhaps I just don’t understand, but this seems to me to be an advocacy of surrender, and not even an effective one. If American Jews self-segregate, into small, mostly Jewish communities, are they not simply gathering in a smaller and more confined target area for any violently antiSemitic ‘mostly peaceful protests’? We have already seen ‘protests’ at synagogues and Hillel Centers on campuses. Self-segregation, self-isolation doesn’t work when those who hate you still know where you congregate and live.
Israel is, of course, Mr Herzl’s dream, even if he never saw it; he died in 1904, at a very young 44 years of age, though he is now buried in Mt Herzl, on the west side of Jerusalem. But look at the situation today. Israel is the self-segregation of millions of Jews in the modern world, yet we see not just the Arabs — who can always be counted on for hate — but millions of people reared in Western civilization nations who don’t want the Jews to have even that small nation.
Self-segregation counts on the tolerance of others to allow your segregated communities, and we aren’t seeing much of that tolerance by the supporters of Hamas and the ‘Palestinians.’
In the end, hiding from your enemies just doesn’t work.
This member of (((The Tribe))) lives in a distinctly non-Jewish neighborhood, but we’ve never had any trouble. People here keep to themselves, and we know only a handful of our neighbors, so I can’t say whether self-segregation is the right answer.
I will say this though: the Orthodox “shtetls” in places like Borough Park and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Rockland County NY, and elsewhere seem to have a whole lot more fecundity than their more dispersed secular brethren elsewhere. If there’s a Jewish future left in America, they are it.
Many Orthodox Jews are already “self segregated”.
They tend to live in communities within walking distance of the Schule. This is because on the Sabbath, they are forbidden from driving, so they walk…hence having homes within walking distance.
There is also a technicality within their laws that they can perform some tasks classified as “work” (such as carrying things) on the Sabbath as long as they are within a fenced property…so Jewish communities put a big fence up around the entire community so they can do those things within their community on the Sabbath. They have a lot of community and multi-family meals on the Sabbath and that would be hard to do if they couldn’t carry pans and pots of food between their homes.
So, basically, the Jews for which this is even a valid proposal tend to be the ones that are Jewish only by race and heritage, not by religion. Practicing Orthodox Jews are largely already “self-segregated”.
I am also not a Jew, but my best friend (since the second grade) is a practicing Orthodox Jew who has two sons currently studying to be Rabbis.
By the way, Orthodox Jews are a minority of the Jewish population, but they are largely very conservative…at least the ones outside of New York and New Jersey. My friend has a concealed carry permit and carries everywhere he goes. He also often wears level II body armor under his shirt too. I’ve been to his Schule on the Sabbath more than once (and even as a non-Jew have always been welcomed and accepted warmly) and I can say with confidence that on any given Saturday, over half the men in the congregation (and some of the women) are armed. I wouldn’t want to be the anti-semite that tried something in their community.