The Durban conference was a watershed moment for Jews around the world, a stark reminder that the deliverance from the forces of history was not yet in the offing. The world’s oldest hatred was alive and well, not just in the remnants of an unreconstructed Eastern Europe or the aggrieved masses of the Third World, but among the cosmopolitan classes of the West. Yet few people addressed a basic question about this revival of anti-Semitism: What was the underlying ideology driving the Jew-hatred at Durban? And, 20 years later, with a resurgence of left-wing anti-Semitism in the United States and Europe, many still haven’t figured out how a variant of that same virus generates anti-Semitism today.</i></ref> | The Durban conference was a watershed moment for Jews around the world, a stark reminder that the deliverance from the forces of history was not yet in the offing. The world’s oldest hatred was alive and well, not just in the remnants of an unreconstructed Eastern Europe or the aggrieved masses of the Third World, but among the cosmopolitan classes of the West. Yet few people addressed a basic question about this revival of anti-Semitism: What was the underlying ideology driving the Jew-hatred at Durban? And, 20 years later, with a resurgence of left-wing anti-Semitism in the United States and Europe, many still haven’t figured out how a variant of that same virus generates anti-Semitism today.</i></ref> |