nt-size: 11pt”>Yifat Bitton, president of Achva Academic College in Southern Israel, a law professor, and an advocate for women’s rights, has spoken of the “deafening silence” she encountered from activists abroad who work on issues of sexual assault: “Unwillingness to listen to Israeli women victims because they are on the occupying side is simplistic and shocking. . . . This is a progressive argument that is completely regressive.” Such left-wing antisemitism has forced many American Jews, the great majority of whom identify as liberal, to confront hatred in a much more direct way, often among ostensibly close friends and colleagues….
Looking for historical analogies in times of crisis is inevitable, yet if many of them fall short, it may be a sign that we are truly now in uncharted territory. Basic assumptions about the modern Jewish experience have been called into question, both the Zionist belief in the security offered by political sovereignty in Israel and the diasporic belief in bedrock American tolerance.
A year after the Hamas massacre and the ensuing war, we may be standing at an inflection point whose significance we cannot yet grasp.
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