The increasing culture wars in schools have placed a target on Jewish students. Throughout the past four years, Jewish students have increasingly reported being victimized by anti-Semitism coming from both their peers and educators. Teachers and administrators are failing our kids, either minimizing or completely ignoring anti-Jewish bigotry or outright embracing it.

“There is no rationality in the Nazi hatred: it is hate that is not in us, it is outside of man… We cannot understand it, but we must understand from where it springs, and we must be on our guard. If understanding is impossible, knowing is imperative, because what happened could happen again.”
– Primo Levi, If This is a Man 1947

“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”
– John Adams, letter to John Taylor, 1814

I’ve witnessed empires rise and vanish; Cursed are those who curse us; Egypt, Rome, Greek, and Spanish; A Divine mirror to all who haunt us

Houses of worship are intended to be open places where people feel welcome to enter. Some also might minister to people with mental health conditions, making it hard to know which people are in need and which are a danger to the congregation. Turning the place into a fortress defeats the purpose of having such a place. However, that doesn’t mean we can ignore security concerns.

It is imperative that we pay attention to the resurgence of Neo-Nazi ideology not just due to its increasing normalization in certain conservative spaces in the U.S., but because it can once again infect all of Western civilization.

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.

Free speech can be messy. It can be infuriating. However, we wouldn’t need a First Amendment if it only protected the speech we feel is agreeable or useful.

If a marketplace of ideas truly exists with rational actors serving as discerning consumers, then, as we have been assured by free speech absolutists, good ideas will cancel out bad ones. If that’s true of how this marketplace works in practice, then how can the resurgence of Nazism be explained? These ideas should have been flushed away with the Fuhrer. And yet pernicious attitudes about racial superiority and Jewish sub-humanity are still being peddled in far too many circles.

No German, or Western European for that matter, did more to grant anti-Semitism its permanence in the cultures of Western Europe than the German Reformation leader, Martin Luther.