Anti-Semitism is Christianity’s original sin
Attacks on Jewish people, like attacks on African Americans, place a mirror in front of our culture and religion.
Last week saw two attacks on communities of faith. The first, at an African American church, was thwarted by security measures the congregation had put in place after Charleston. Undeterred, the gunman went to a nearby town and gunned down two African Americans in a parking lot. The second was at Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh where 11 worshipers, aged 54 to 97, were brutally murdered. Both assassins were white men filled with hatred.
It may be that as a culture, we are so hardened by the recurrence of acts of racist terrorism that we hardly noticed the Kentucky incident. Or perhaps it was because only two people were killed. In either case, the lives lost there and the escalating violence against African Americans, enabled by a culture of white supremacy and refusal to acknowledge our complicity in systemic racism, has not so much reopened old wounds as it has exposed how deeply racism pervades the American psyche and American culture.
The killings at Tree of Life synagogue have struck a nerve in me and throughout America. World War II and the Final Solution showed us the scale of the horror that human beings could inflict on each other and revealed the end goal of anti-Semitism. At the same time, American Jews assimilated into the mainstream. As many Jews became less observant and intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews became common, Jews seemed to be different from other Americans only in their personal or family histories, or in that they observed Hanukkah as well as Christmas.
