Humanities & Cultures

I’m writing this two months after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed the coronavirus had been engineered to exempt Ashkenazi Jews; a month after audio transcripts filed in a Manhattan court revealed Rudy Giuliani mocking Jews for celebrating Passover and Robert G. Bowers was sentenced for killing 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh; and the day Elon Musk threatened to sue the Anti-Defamation League for costing X ad revenue by calling attention to rising hate speech on the platform.

As public figures breathe new life into ancient stereotypes and hate metastasizes unchecked across social media, it seems clear that we live in a world in great need of a 10-foot-tall Jewish crisis monster — or, at the very least, a reckoning with what the golem can teach us.

His myth is born of an understanding that antisemitism is ineradicable — that as long as there are people who feel embittered about their lives, constrained by forces they cannot control, they will come to blame the Jews and then to enact violence upon us.

The golem is a vanquisher of lies — not just blood libels and Jew-blaming canards, but self-deception of the kind that leads some to shrug off as mere losers the white nationalists outside Disney World chanting “Jews will not replace us,” or to give a pass to Florida Gov.

Instead, it requires Jewish people to enlarge and modernize our watchfulness, to understand that every vehicle of hatred is built on a chassis of antisemitism, and that violence — in word or deed — against any marginalized group will always be a harbinger of tragedy for us.

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