What needs to happen before the people of europe take action against anti-semitism? | thearticle

I was in Bordeaux recently. It is a beautiful and underrated city. That weekend the riot police were out in force expecting a violent demonstration by the _gilets jaunes_. They fenced off

the cathedral in Case of attack. Walking around the city a friend and I encountered a member of the _gilets jaunes_. He looked at me and called me “un juif et con.” We walked on in case

there were others around. This was my first direct experience of antisemitism. Not online or through social media, but directly in person. I had just been reading Stefan Zweig’s _Journeys_

(Pushkin Press), a selection of travel essays written between the 1900s and 1940. What is striking about these essays is the total absence of Jews until the last essays, written in the late

1930s. Zweig, a Viennese Jew, was more interested in cathedrals and the twenty or thirty church towers in Catholic Salzburg than the Jewish world of Galicia or Bukovina. There are no

references to Jews here at all until the last few pages.     Suddenly, Zweig’s mood darkens. He starts to notice Jewish refugees, stateless and destitute, “the homeless and exiled”. These

last essays are deeply moving accounts of what’s happened to the European civilization Zweig grew up in. By then Zweig had himself become a refugee. On 30 June 1940 he left his beloved

Europe for good, never to return. It is easy to criticise Zweig. How could he have missed what was happening under his very nose? Easy but unfair. After all, what would to take for us, now,

to start to pack our cases and look for a safe place to move to? _The New York Times_, of all papers, prints an openly antisemitic cartoon, by an artist who has previous form. Do you

remember a previous work in which he took a famous image of Polish Jews being rounded up in the Ghetto by Nazi soldiers and turned it into an image of Palestinians being rounded up by

Israelis? In San Diego, only a few months after the Pittsburgh shooting, one Jew is killed and several wounded in a shooting in a synagogue. In Britain, the Labour Party is led by someone

who turns a blind eye to Jew-hatred among his own followers. Every day I see antisemitic images or tweets. This week, Len McCluskey wrote of the need for solidarity with Palestinians. “What

about Muslims in China,” I wrote to him, “the poor in Venezuela, Christians in north Africa, gays in Iran?” No answer, of course. France recently commemorated the third anniversary of the

Islamist attacks against _Charlie Hebdo_ and a supermarket in Paris. One of the largest Jewish communities in the world has seen growing antisemitism over the last twenty years, particularly

since 2015.  There is now an 18-24 month waiting list for British people applying for German passports. In Daniel Quinn’s _The Story of B_, he describes the story of the boiling frog: “If

you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will of course frantically try to clamber out. But if you place it gently in a pot of tepid water and turn the heat on low, it will float there

quite placidly. As the water gradually heats up, the frog will sink into a tranquil stupor, exactly like one of us in a hot bath, and before long, with a smile on its face, it will

unresistingly allow itself to be boiled to death.” Should Zweig have heard the alarm bells sooner and started writing about the plight of the Jews in Europe? Should the frog have jumped out

of the pan sooner? What needs to happen before Jews take action? How many synagogue shootings in America? How many violent attacks in France? How many vile images and messages on social

media in Britain? How many antisemitic cartoons in _The New York Times_ or vile cartoons in _The Guardian_? In Alan Isler’s superb novel, _The Prince of West End Avenue_, Isler creates an

old Jewish man who looks back on his past in Europe. He was so confident that nothing could happen to the Jews. His family respected his wisdom. He was so intelligent, such a man of the

world. Surely they should follow his advice and stay. Read Isler and Zweig and wonder what else needs to happen.