After Paris and Copenhagen

The particular topic at this particular moment in history after Paris and Copenhagen, responding to the rising tide of anti- Semitism, is sadly all too timely. It is reminiscent of an even darker age that we thought was behind us. Seventy years ago, as American GIs advanced into Nazi Germany in the last days of the most devastating war in history, the world had a glimpse of the horror of unbridled anti-Semitism. The images of the concentration camps that were liberated throughout Europe in the spring of 1945 still cause a universal shudder to this day. For the first few decades after World War II, we mistakenly, all of us, believed that anti-Semitism, the age-old hatred of Jews, had finally disappeared from Europe and everywhere else. That is because in the 1950s and 1960s, no one in their right minds wanted to be associated with Nazis. It is because we all saw where this kind of hatred leads. And, perhaps, people who still harbored these beliefs were too embarrassed to express them openly. I now tell you with the greatest sadness that 70 years later, the age-old virus of anti-Semitism has returned in all its evil and ugliness. Anti-Semitism has returned to streets of Paris and Toulouse, to the streets Brussels and Copenhagen. It has even returned to Berlin.