Europe’s Lessons for the Struggle Against Anti-Semitism
On October 28, 2018, I was at home in Paris, a blissful bubble, feeding my one-month-old baby girl, when I got the news of the massacre of Jewish worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. One thought repeated in my head: That’s it. A haven for Jews in the diaspora doesn’t exist anymore. I had feared for years that this moment would eventually arise, when the cancer of anti-Semitism would spread to liberal democracies around the world, including to the one place that had always seemed safe to me: the United States of America.
In France, the disease started nearly 20 years ago. The first anti-Semitic murder occurred in 2003. Sebastian Sellam, a young French DJ, was killed by his childhood friend, who shouted after the murder, “I killed my Jew! I’ll go to heaven! Allah guided me!” Since then, 14 other French Jews have been killed simply because they were Jews. In 2018, there was a 74 percent spike in anti-Semitic
