4 | JUNE 13 • 2024 
J
N

essay
Antisemitism — What Do We Do Now?
I

f you want to learn about 
modern antisemitism, 
it would make sense to 
interview a Jewish person 
who grew up 
among non-
Jews, who 
has had many 
careers with 
gentiles of all 
economic and 
social classes, 
who studies 
history and who discusses 
antisemitism with everybody. 
You could ask someone like 
Gilbert Sniderman of Troy, 
Michigan. 
 Sniderman grew up in 
changing — and already 
changed — Detroit 
neighborhoods. His personal 
circle was heterogeneous, 
including friends from 
different races, religions, 
economic, social, sexual, 
cultural backgrounds, both 
U.S. and foreign. He’s still 
friends with many of them 
decades later. 
 He earned degrees in 
history, comparative religion, 
music, mathematics and 
other subjects. He was active 
in politics, campaigning for 
Democratic, independent 
and non-partisan candidates 
and issues for many years. He 
marched and worked for civil 
rights. During the Vietnam 
War, he served with the 
Military Police. 
Since those days, he has 
taught history, music and 
classical literature in public, 
charter, private and parochial 
(Christian, Jewish and other) 
schools across the country. 
He has sought out people who 
share his interest in classical 

music, grand opera, Japanese 
art, and sophisticated 
cooking, history and politics. 
 This incomplete list only 
suggests his wide variety of 
friends and interests.
Sniderman has a long 
history of opposition to 
antisemitism. At Wayne 
State University in 1972, 
when the campus paper, 
The South End, published 
cartoons from Nazi sources 
and called for violence against 
Jews, Sniderman worked 
with other students in an ad 
hoc committee to protest. 
Eventually, the university 
took action to limit editorial 
staff of the paper.
On the topic of current 
antisemitism, Sniderman 
has three points to make, 
two observations and one 
quandary.

HIS THREE POINTS
First observation: We 
American Jews love to debate 
about whether antisemitism 
has become dangerous 
here. America has long 
been the exception, the one 
country without the virulent 
outbreaks of hatred against 

Jews that appear periodically 
in Europe, North Africa 
and the Muslim world. 
Sniderman says that the 
debate has ended: America 
has become dangerous. It 
no longer surprises us when 
a gunman walks into a 
synagogue or a kosher store 
and opens fire. It should not 
surprise us if worse may be to 
come.
Second observation: 
Antisemitism comes from 
all sides. For decades after 
the Holocaust, explicit 
hatred against Jews declined. 
Apparently, the hatred never 
went away; people just 
suppressed it. Though many, 
perhaps most, Americans 
have no feelings against Jews, 
antisemitic roots go deep in 
separate parts of American 
politics. 
Sniderman, fascinated by 
history, identifies distant 
sources of modern hatred: 
ancient Phoenicians and 
Greeks who expressed rivalry 
with Israel, early Christian 
writers and theologians 
who proselytized Hellenist 
gentiles, more modern 
proponents of eugenics who 

thought up racist plans to 
improve human breeding 
stock, conservationists 
who wanted to eradicate 
invasive species like Jews, 
aristocrats who sought to 
exclude undeserving others, 
universalists who wanted 
to end tribalism, socialists 
who opposed commerce, 
bankers and industrialists 
who did business with Nazis, 
and investors who needed to 
appease oil producers. 
But, he says, all that 
does not matter so much, 
compared with who 
hates Jews now. How the 
hatred started is, in this 
circumstance, no longer 
relevant. The reality is that 
there exists hatred of Jews, 
and this is what we must deal 
with. 
Many have tried to 
determine a cause, some 
believing that if a cause is 
found then a “cure” may 
be had. This “cure” may be 
through logic, reasoning, 
demonstrating we are the 
same as they, getting involved 
with their problems and 
forming alliances. 
Much of these attempts to 
thwart, reduce or eliminate 
antisemitism are doomed to 
failure. Many look on us as 
fools to be used and be a help 
when needed, but still looked 
on with disdain and hatred. 
Antisemitism is so rooted 
in society that it has never 
gone away and only waits 
for the climate to be right to 
openly express it; and that is 
now. Though many people do 
not hate Jews, antisemitism 
comes from all sides.
It comes from those 

Louis 
Finkelman

QUINN DOMBROWSKI

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