(Sept. 28) In any honest discussion of faith in the modern world, there is no getting around this reality: One people of one faith, Jews, make up just 0.2% of the world’s population, yet year after year the entire globe seems obsessed with the influence of Jews, the actions of Jews, the treatment of Jews and the fate of Jews.
Too many people treat this obsession as a matter of politics, but it shouldn’t be so.
Alas, along with this obsession comes wave after wave of the serious soul-sickness known as anti-semitism. Europe and the United States, the supposed apexes of enlightened civilization, are in the midst of just such a wave. On Sept. 19, the rigorously fair-minded publication known as the Conversation published results of surveys of thousands of college students and administrators, showing that 34% of non-Jewish undergraduates expressed views reasonably characterized as anti-semitic.
On the same day, more than 100 European rabbis wrote to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen complaining of a continent-wide trend of “visceral anti-semitic hate.”
This is not just about the actions of the government of Israel. By all reasonable ethics and logic, a Jew in Belgium or a Jew in New Orleans is no more responsible for the policies, good or bad, of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu than a Catholic in Mandeville is responsible for how the pope governs Vatican City. Nonetheless, individual Jews keep getting targeted specifically for being Jewish.
In recent months we’ve seen the home of the Jewish governor of Pennsylvania set on fire, two Israeli Embassy staffers murdered outside a Jewish museum, and a terrorist flamethrower attack against a Jewish gathering in Boulder, Colo. Official FBI statistics showed that 2024 featured the highest number of anti-Jewish hate crimes since it began compiling such statistics in 1991, and early indications show 2025 trending even worse.
And college campuses for three years have been roiled by anti-semitic protests, with Tulane being one of the few universities that refused to kowtow to trespassing, obstruction, and rhetoric that was not just hateful but violent. (Yes, there’s a big difference.)
All decent people should recognize this sort of hatred as an objective evil; yet even as a mild inclination, it makes no sense. Statistics and common experience both show Jews collectively to be among the most philanthropic of cultures, and statistics show American Jews have become even more philanthropic, not less so – and to secular causes, too, not just religious ones – in response to rising anti-semitism.
And rather than being insular and aloof, Jews regularly show higher levels of civic engagement than most people. In sum, the average Jew is likely to be a better citizen, a more responsive and responsible citizen, than the average non-Jew.
To be clear, it is wrong to assume that group generalizations such as these apply to any particular Jewish individuals. It is to say, though, that even if someone does insist on collectivizing Jewish individuals, the attribution of group characteristics to Jews should work not against them but in their favor.
For those reasons, among many others, the main character in my novel The Accidental Prophet writes that “all, of all faiths, should honor the Jews. You belong to a faith tradition that is an inspiration to all people of good will.” He also encourages Christians to refamiliarize themselves with, and embrace the lessons of, Jewish traditions such as Yom Kippur, the day of atonement and eventually renewal – which, by the way, begins this coming Wednesday, Oct. 1.
The Jews’ survival alone, and joyful, continuing existence as a people and a faith is remarkable. In each of the six novels of the late Covington-based author Walker Percy, his characters see particular “significance” in the Jewish people, and he wonders how they have survived so many millennia while other, seemingly more powerful groups have gone by the wayside. “Where are the Hittites?” asks one main character. “Why does no one find it remarkable that in most world cities today there are Jews but not one single Hittite?”
The Hittites, and the Assyrians and Babylonians and all the rest, lacked something essential and admirable that Jews possess.
The unspoken answer to Percy’s rhetorical question, an answer from which those of all faiths and even no current faith can learn, is that something good and wonderful has sustained Jews as a people, a culture, and a faith. While hatred eventually consumes itself in its own misguided fury, only a deep-rooted love, unsullied by worldly tempests, can so endure.
[Above is a slightly different version from the published one. For the published version, follow this link.]
