Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews

by David L. Bernstein

While good for Jewish security, the decline in antisemitism posed a challenge to Jewish continuity. Could Jewish identity survive and thrive in such an open society? French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre argued in his 1946 essay “The Antisemite and the Jew” that the Jew would not exist but for the antisemite. “If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him,” he wrote.16 While most Jews would deny Sartre’s assertion, and insist that Jews possess

a vibrant moral and spiritual tradition that didn’t require antisemitism for its continued existence, many of us also privately asked ourselves if we could be so sure Sartre wasn’t correct. If antisemitism precipitously declined, might Jews stop caring about being Jewish and simply marry themselves out of existence?