Rabbi Menken to Newsmax: Antisemitism Now Directed at Israel

Rabbi Yaakov Menken told Newsmax Friday that people are now expressing their antisemitism through the hatred of Israel rather than specific people of the Jewish race.

"Antisemitism is subtle. When people don't know what to look for, they can confuse real antisemitic bias with an actual legitimate opinion, and vice versa," Menken said during "American Agenda" Friday.

"As we've seen out in the streets, and the examples in the videos, the streets are turning dangerous precisely because of that anti-Israel narrative. And yet the people they are victimizing include the non-Zionist and even the anti-Zionist Orthodox communities where they don't believe in modern political Zionism, but they do believe in Jews living in the Holy Land, and that's what they go after."

Menken called the vilification of Israel "the new façade" to explain the rise in hate crimes against Jews taking place, especially in big cities.

"The term antisemitism comes out of German racism. The idea that Jews are an inferior ethnicity," Menken said. "Well today, racist bias obviously has no purchase. So, we have to have a new thing that we hate. And as Lord Rabbi Sacks put it in England, it used to be about religion. Then it was about science, and his scientific study, antisemitism. Today it's about, We don't hate the Jews because of their ethnicity, we just hate their country."

He said this new "façade" of hating Israel is the same old antisemitism that has been around for decades but is just a new way to exploit it.

"It is about the left's myopia, and that and how it is allowing antisemitism on the left in Congress to fester," he said. "The reason why it's exploding is because on campus, it's become completely tolerable to be 'woke' in a whole set of areas, including this entirely false narrative around a European colonialist name for the Jewish holy land, namely Palestine.

"All of a sudden, Arab marauders turn into Indigenous Palestinians, and everything else devolves from there into a new excuse to hate Jews."

Menken said in his home of Baltimore, Maryland, there was a large police presence during the recent celebration of Rosh Hashana, and "sadly" he expects there to be a similar police presence in the city when Jews celebrate Yom Kippur on Sunday.

Menken said the rise in antisemitism is caused by society becoming more secular in nature and turning against those who observe the Bible.

"If you are someone who wishes to observe the Bible, all of a sudden you're homophobic, and bigoted, and misogynist, and transphobic, and a whole set of names, which, you know sadly because we're Jews, we're very used to this sort of thing, but that doesn't make it more acceptable."

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