“Perhaps the most enduring wound for Jews from the Holocaust is the memory of aloneness. For 12 long years, the international community scarcely intervened as Nazi persecution gradually turned to extermination. Even as we established a sovereign state and created thriving communities in a free diaspora, there remained a lingering anxiety that the post-Holocaust era of Jewish acceptance, at least in the West, was an aberration, and that some day we would once again be alone.

The ancient fear of the Jews is immutable otherness. ‘They are a people that shall dwell alone and not be considered among the nations,’ declared the pagan prophet Balaam in the Bible. The miracle of the post-Holocaust Jewish recovery was that, just as history seemed to confirm Balaam’s curse, we managed to become a ‘normal’ people, securing our place in the world.

But now we are at one of those defining moments in Jewish history when we find ourselves at a moral disconnect with much of the international community. As we struggle to absorb the enormity of the Oct. 7 massacre and to confront the worst wave of antisemitism since the Holocaust, the trauma of aloneness has returned.”

Read the full article on The Globe and Mail.