If you’ve been living in a cave for the past four years, or are one of those incurable cockeyed optimists of South Pacific fame who hasn’t noticed the steep rise in antisemitic rhetoric and violence in recent times, this book delivers a wake-up call in the form of a literary smack in the face.
Antisemites are innately violent. “Everything about them goes back again and again to violence, as a hummingbird to nectar; it is what they crave, it fills them with a fleeting sense of virility and meaning,” Lavin writes. It is the “ideological linchpin” of white supremacy, for white nationalists see Jews as the brains behind the campaign to enslave white people.
There also is a definite link between misogyny and radical antisemitism, the author notes. Antisemites tend to hate independent women and feminism, but the reverse also is true. “Just as white supremacy leads to misogyny, the causal relationship could be reversed. No hate is an island.”
Then there’s the blood libel, the preposterous idea that Jews, forbidden by Jewish law from consuming animal blood, use Christian children’s blood to bake matzah. This absurd notion, whose creator apparently knew nothing about Jews or their customs and laws, is still hanging around almost 1,000 years since its inception.
Most ironic of all are the pagan antisemites. “Jesus was a kike and deserves to be burned,” Lavin quotes one white supremacist as saying online. “Every Bible should be burned.”
Another offers: “If he [Jesus] were in Auschwitz, I’d give him a tattoo.”
Think about that for a minute. For 2,000 years, Christians have been discriminating against, persecuting – and even murdering – Jews because of Christian ideology: their belief that Jews killed Jesus and their frustration over their largely unfulfilled demand that Jews abandon their religion and become Christians. Now we have a pagan movement which rejects that faith and all it stands for – but enthusiastically adopts Christianity’s antisemitism.
As the author notes, Christian racists have a tradition of antisemitism, but “heathen racists must create their own justifications for loathing Jews.”
In addition to laying out the bases of modern antisemitism, Lavin chronicles her efforts to infiltrate the dark world of hate on the Internet and “out” the haters.
She lays out the tremendous efforts she and others have made to discover the real people behind the phony online personas these individuals create to protect themselves from the authorities and deceive their employers, who might fire them if their distressing activities became known, and their neighbors, who might shun them.
After the insurrection at the US Capitol in January, we see that these extremists are a threat to more than just Jews. The man who wore the sweatshirt with “Auschwitz camp staff” emblazoned on the front made clear what his aspirations are toward Jews. But his presence in the mob shows his ambitions go beyond that.