I am not Jewish. I was brought up in Texas in the 50s and 60s, in a white middle-class family that attended a Protestant church but was not very religious. Between then and now I have lived in the Washington DC area and in several other countries including Pakistan. I never in a million years thought I would see anything like this resurgence of antisemitism. The events of October 7 broke my heart, and I thought everyone in the Western world would feel the same pain, outrage, and sympathy that I feel. I feel like I am living in the world of the 1993 film The Body Snatchers. Half the population have lost their minds. I pray for a return to sanity.
Jane, we love you, thank you, and welcome you with open arms. The significance of non Jews calling out this centuries old hatred cannot be overstated. You are among the righteous.🙏
Jane, I feel the same way. I don’t know anyone who expresses support for Hamas or antisemitism. And if I do, they don’t do it around me. It makes me feel as though I am in an alternate universe. How can so many embrace such a detestable construct? I am from a very similar background and have lived in other countries, too. I’ve never seen the world filled with such inexplicable hatred.
I am also from a casually Protestant Southern middle class family. I didn’t grow up in a racist household. And my parents welcomed all my friends into our home, no matter their race, religion or ethnicity.
Perhaps I‘be been lucky, but honestly, I believe people such as you and I far outnumber the haters. More of us stand with the Jewish people than against. We’re just not as loud and in-your-face as they are. Maybe we should be.
Maybe we should—although I don't think that would change many of their minds. In my opinion, the biggest reason for the current wave of antisemitism (and for what Elon Musk calls the Woke Mind Virus) is ignorance. Ignorance of religion, ignorance of the world outside the United States, ignorance of history. I haven't attended church since I graduated from high school, but I learned and I remember both the stories told by the Bible and the morality taught therein. I now believe that a fully realized adult needs to have learned the fundamentals of a religion. I regret not forcing myself to attend church with my child and send her to Sunday school and Bible camp.
Now 48, she's voting Democrat. I want to know how she feels about Israel, but I can't ask her anything political. I had a friend, a retired editor (as I am), tell me years ago that she knew I was better informed than she is and that she couldn't defend her "progressive" opinions but she wasn't giving them up. (Her husband is a non-observant Jew. We haven't talked since October 7, but I doubt the events of that day made her think.) These otherwise intelligent adult women are willfully ignorant. I don't think we can educate the deluded mobs no matter how loud and in-your-face we become.
Jane I think you nailed it! We've been experiencing an invasion of the body snatchers! Nothing else adequately explains the total lack of common sense and moral clarity the West has been experiencing.
Artists have always been over valued as intellectuals. They’re some of the most ignorant, self absorbed and self promoting people I have ever met. Being an artist makes a person more likely to be horrible, not less. Leni Riefenstahl was an artist and a Nazi and members of the Free Palestine cult are the new Nazi sympathizers, admirers of genocidal Islamist terrorists.
Great article. Yours is not the only industry in which anti-semitism is crawling out from under rocks where it used to hide with the slugs -- and with a new boldness. I have three kids. One works at home, so he's safe. One works in the hospitality industry -- but high up and in an extremely cosmopolitan location. Last month she experienced three anti-semitic remarks from the same person: one was overheard, one was made directly to her, one was a comment at a meeting she was attending with ALL the high-ups. She pressed it and got the person to admit publicly that "those people" were "Jews." Everyone remained silent. My other child is a teacher in a school in a small city up north. While passing another teacher in the hallway, she looked at him and said, "Free Palestine."
They both took the issue to HR / the principal and in both cases were met with shock and compassion. With the first incident, the guilty party apologized profusely and everyone went on professionally as a team. With the second incident, it has only just happened so I don't know the final outcome. I worked in corporate America for 39 years and only ONCE overheard an anti-semitic remark. These two workplace incidents with my children have occurred within the past 4 weeks!
Perhaps if the general atmosphere were not so anti-semitic, one could overlook these things as the stupidity and bad manners of a few ignorant people. But in today's environment it is imperative that these things be reported. We have to make a fuss and make it understood that it is not okay to "create a hostile workplace" for Jews (it's always handy to use phrases with legal overtones; that makes employers nervous). They can think what they like, but they must behave professionally. That's all.
Art is dead. Art is a form that had meaning when it was a part of aristocratic patronage and the very rare talent that could break through: very few and only the best could create amazing art because most did not have the time to create or could even attempt to live off art/music/theater. We are at a huge inflection point in which due to modernization and technology many have the time and resources to create, therefore diluting the meaning and beauty of the special and unique. Thus, there is a cannibalization of artists clawing after the shrinking crumbs as the art world collapses into pastiche and simulacrum. And it does not help that DEI has wrung the last bits of authenticity and truthfulness from art and theater. And the art world doubles down into an amoral, debaucherous joke devoid of universal beauty as what we saw at the Olympics. So it isn’t surprising that many in the art world have jumped on anti-semitism and far left radicalism because they are untalented and unimportant. And, instead of glorifying western civilization like Shakespeare, Mozart and Michaelangelo, they turn to glorifying backwards and barbaric ideologies.
“For instance, if you are an anarchist or a universal anti-nationalist, and therefore believe no nations have a right to exist, which further entails an apathy for all country borders and nation-states including (but not only) the State of Israel, then you are a non-antisemitic “anti-Zionist.”
Many on the left seem to spring from the Islamo—leftists manifesto. Using Marxism to battle ram capitalism, at the sacrifice of women’s rights. It seems strange to me how such beliefs ironically call for a “unify or die”, the communist manifesto, the destruction of all ethnicity and religious belief, a colonial dystopian, the flip side to this ideaology is that you’re supplanting your own utopian fantasy at the cost of diversity, which is truly what makes our world so unique. Pluralist society’s who value tolerance is what the world needs. Not more communism that ends in genocides and bloodshed.
Christopher Hitchens once said all anti semites are anti Zionist. But not all anti Zionists are anti semites, I think he would approve of your reasoning here. Sadly most are anti semites.
Thank you so much for your wonderful article.......I am also an artist ( pianist ) Jewish, zionist, and also lost some friends after October 7th .......It's utterly shameful and unbelievable that so many hav sided with the murderers and kidnappers of our people !!! ...I will keep on playing sublime music every day .....Best wishes and keep on creating art......
I know EXACTLY what I'm talking about, as I grew up in a very anti-semitic environment, once in High School confronting a teacher and former Nazi child soldier, who attempted to deny the Holocaust altogether. But, when pressed, he claimed it to be a Soviet conspiracy, which incredibly enraged me, as I've Soviet ancestry! And since Paraguay and Brazil were the only 2 Latinamerican nations to declare war against Nazi Germany, I demanded to know How many Paraguayan soldiers he had killed? When he said that he didn't know, I demanded his immediate resignation, as someone that doesn't know anything, had NO business being a teacher! Now his face got all red in rage too, and he said the unthinkable: "If the Germans did it, then the Jews deserved it!" Now I was shivering in rage, and it took 4 teachers and a dozen students to keep us from killing each other! I then demanded that the teacher be escorted out of his class and be fired! He was escorted out and I never saw, nor heart from him again!
I was in the stable for a few years at a Jewish-owned NYC gallery, but it went belly-up in February, so now I'm gallery shopping, and part of gallery shopping involves entering competitions. Although I have been a finalist in three international ARC competitions and at the international ModPortrait competition at MEAM in Spain in the past, this year I have been rejected by all the galleries to which I've submitted. There was a concerted effort online to cancel the great David Kassan's work from this year's MEAM exhibition, although that effort did fail. I had made some Jewish-themed paintings, and that work I submitted to specifically Jewish competitions, most of which accepted my work, but there was no follow-through, no exhibition, no publication, no website mention, nothing. It was bizarre and the fact that this has happened a few times is even more bizarre. The Jewish-owned galleries where I submitted my work either rejected it or ghosted me. The ARC accepted all my submissions this year *except* for one that was explicitly Jewish. This is not a question of quality. I'm doing better work now than I did when my work was being accepted everywhere. I did recently win the Gold Medal at the Guild of Boston Artists New England Regional competition, and that surprise did my soul a lot of good because I thought I was being cancelled everywhere. I was especially grateful in the context of all the antisemitism that has welled up in Cambridge and greater Boston. The fact remains, it is one thing to make the art. It is another thing altogether to get it seen. The only thing to do is to keep doing your best work and to keep trying to get it out there.
I am not Jewish and have been outspoken in my support of Israel and the Jewish people since October 7. In my neighborhood I confront antisemitism daily in graffiti spoken words and white women wearing fancy keffiyehs. I do not feel safe as I am well known here but I can’t afford to move. I will not be silent. The “friends” I lost were never friends at all. Anyone who will stand by for a new Holocaust is no friend of mine
You didn't lose friends; they were never your friends in the first place. There's not a dimes worth of difference between these marxist pigs in the art world and neo-nazis.
The "art world" has always been a collection of mostly no-talent idiots who cling to left wing politics because that world supports them financially. But if you think those of us who reject those policies cannot appreciate good art, you're dead wrong. Jewish artists: if you have talent it will shine brightly through your work and "sell" because it is coming from your soul. Form your own groups, get Jewish and pro-Israel backers. Don't worry about it.
I am not Jewish. I was brought up in Texas in the 50s and 60s, in a white middle-class family that attended a Protestant church but was not very religious. Between then and now I have lived in the Washington DC area and in several other countries including Pakistan. I never in a million years thought I would see anything like this resurgence of antisemitism. The events of October 7 broke my heart, and I thought everyone in the Western world would feel the same pain, outrage, and sympathy that I feel. I feel like I am living in the world of the 1993 film The Body Snatchers. Half the population have lost their minds. I pray for a return to sanity.
Thank goodness for people like you. I truly appreciate you.
Thank you, Robin. I just wish we had the power to do something.
This 🙏🏼
In retrospect, is the West being revisited by "history repeats itself" with Bonhoeffer's "Theory of Stupidity"?!! 😢
I had to look up Bonhoeffer. The answer is Yes, emphatically.
Jane, we love you, thank you, and welcome you with open arms. The significance of non Jews calling out this centuries old hatred cannot be overstated. You are among the righteous.🙏
Jane, I feel the same way. I don’t know anyone who expresses support for Hamas or antisemitism. And if I do, they don’t do it around me. It makes me feel as though I am in an alternate universe. How can so many embrace such a detestable construct? I am from a very similar background and have lived in other countries, too. I’ve never seen the world filled with such inexplicable hatred.
I am also from a casually Protestant Southern middle class family. I didn’t grow up in a racist household. And my parents welcomed all my friends into our home, no matter their race, religion or ethnicity.
Perhaps I‘be been lucky, but honestly, I believe people such as you and I far outnumber the haters. More of us stand with the Jewish people than against. We’re just not as loud and in-your-face as they are. Maybe we should be.
Maybe we should—although I don't think that would change many of their minds. In my opinion, the biggest reason for the current wave of antisemitism (and for what Elon Musk calls the Woke Mind Virus) is ignorance. Ignorance of religion, ignorance of the world outside the United States, ignorance of history. I haven't attended church since I graduated from high school, but I learned and I remember both the stories told by the Bible and the morality taught therein. I now believe that a fully realized adult needs to have learned the fundamentals of a religion. I regret not forcing myself to attend church with my child and send her to Sunday school and Bible camp.
Now 48, she's voting Democrat. I want to know how she feels about Israel, but I can't ask her anything political. I had a friend, a retired editor (as I am), tell me years ago that she knew I was better informed than she is and that she couldn't defend her "progressive" opinions but she wasn't giving them up. (Her husband is a non-observant Jew. We haven't talked since October 7, but I doubt the events of that day made her think.) These otherwise intelligent adult women are willfully ignorant. I don't think we can educate the deluded mobs no matter how loud and in-your-face we become.
Jane I think you nailed it! We've been experiencing an invasion of the body snatchers! Nothing else adequately explains the total lack of common sense and moral clarity the West has been experiencing.
Artists have always been over valued as intellectuals. They’re some of the most ignorant, self absorbed and self promoting people I have ever met. Being an artist makes a person more likely to be horrible, not less. Leni Riefenstahl was an artist and a Nazi and members of the Free Palestine cult are the new Nazi sympathizers, admirers of genocidal Islamist terrorists.
Great article. Yours is not the only industry in which anti-semitism is crawling out from under rocks where it used to hide with the slugs -- and with a new boldness. I have three kids. One works at home, so he's safe. One works in the hospitality industry -- but high up and in an extremely cosmopolitan location. Last month she experienced three anti-semitic remarks from the same person: one was overheard, one was made directly to her, one was a comment at a meeting she was attending with ALL the high-ups. She pressed it and got the person to admit publicly that "those people" were "Jews." Everyone remained silent. My other child is a teacher in a school in a small city up north. While passing another teacher in the hallway, she looked at him and said, "Free Palestine."
They both took the issue to HR / the principal and in both cases were met with shock and compassion. With the first incident, the guilty party apologized profusely and everyone went on professionally as a team. With the second incident, it has only just happened so I don't know the final outcome. I worked in corporate America for 39 years and only ONCE overheard an anti-semitic remark. These two workplace incidents with my children have occurred within the past 4 weeks!
Perhaps if the general atmosphere were not so anti-semitic, one could overlook these things as the stupidity and bad manners of a few ignorant people. But in today's environment it is imperative that these things be reported. We have to make a fuss and make it understood that it is not okay to "create a hostile workplace" for Jews (it's always handy to use phrases with legal overtones; that makes employers nervous). They can think what they like, but they must behave professionally. That's all.
Art is dead. Art is a form that had meaning when it was a part of aristocratic patronage and the very rare talent that could break through: very few and only the best could create amazing art because most did not have the time to create or could even attempt to live off art/music/theater. We are at a huge inflection point in which due to modernization and technology many have the time and resources to create, therefore diluting the meaning and beauty of the special and unique. Thus, there is a cannibalization of artists clawing after the shrinking crumbs as the art world collapses into pastiche and simulacrum. And it does not help that DEI has wrung the last bits of authenticity and truthfulness from art and theater. And the art world doubles down into an amoral, debaucherous joke devoid of universal beauty as what we saw at the Olympics. So it isn’t surprising that many in the art world have jumped on anti-semitism and far left radicalism because they are untalented and unimportant. And, instead of glorifying western civilization like Shakespeare, Mozart and Michaelangelo, they turn to glorifying backwards and barbaric ideologies.
“For instance, if you are an anarchist or a universal anti-nationalist, and therefore believe no nations have a right to exist, which further entails an apathy for all country borders and nation-states including (but not only) the State of Israel, then you are a non-antisemitic “anti-Zionist.”
Many on the left seem to spring from the Islamo—leftists manifesto. Using Marxism to battle ram capitalism, at the sacrifice of women’s rights. It seems strange to me how such beliefs ironically call for a “unify or die”, the communist manifesto, the destruction of all ethnicity and religious belief, a colonial dystopian, the flip side to this ideaology is that you’re supplanting your own utopian fantasy at the cost of diversity, which is truly what makes our world so unique. Pluralist society’s who value tolerance is what the world needs. Not more communism that ends in genocides and bloodshed.
Christopher Hitchens once said all anti semites are anti Zionist. But not all anti Zionists are anti semites, I think he would approve of your reasoning here. Sadly most are anti semites.
Thank you so much for your wonderful article.......I am also an artist ( pianist ) Jewish, zionist, and also lost some friends after October 7th .......It's utterly shameful and unbelievable that so many hav sided with the murderers and kidnappers of our people !!! ...I will keep on playing sublime music every day .....Best wishes and keep on creating art......
Thank you for your story. They are adding up, our stories. Am Yisrael Chai…
Stupidity, Ignorance, Distortions and Lies are an art form for the Intellectually incompetent and lazy, moronic Jew haters!
I know EXACTLY what I'm talking about, as I grew up in a very anti-semitic environment, once in High School confronting a teacher and former Nazi child soldier, who attempted to deny the Holocaust altogether. But, when pressed, he claimed it to be a Soviet conspiracy, which incredibly enraged me, as I've Soviet ancestry! And since Paraguay and Brazil were the only 2 Latinamerican nations to declare war against Nazi Germany, I demanded to know How many Paraguayan soldiers he had killed? When he said that he didn't know, I demanded his immediate resignation, as someone that doesn't know anything, had NO business being a teacher! Now his face got all red in rage too, and he said the unthinkable: "If the Germans did it, then the Jews deserved it!" Now I was shivering in rage, and it took 4 teachers and a dozen students to keep us from killing each other! I then demanded that the teacher be escorted out of his class and be fired! He was escorted out and I never saw, nor heart from him again!
Even though I haven't (yet) experienced this personally, I know that you're right. The more we speak up the better.
I was in the stable for a few years at a Jewish-owned NYC gallery, but it went belly-up in February, so now I'm gallery shopping, and part of gallery shopping involves entering competitions. Although I have been a finalist in three international ARC competitions and at the international ModPortrait competition at MEAM in Spain in the past, this year I have been rejected by all the galleries to which I've submitted. There was a concerted effort online to cancel the great David Kassan's work from this year's MEAM exhibition, although that effort did fail. I had made some Jewish-themed paintings, and that work I submitted to specifically Jewish competitions, most of which accepted my work, but there was no follow-through, no exhibition, no publication, no website mention, nothing. It was bizarre and the fact that this has happened a few times is even more bizarre. The Jewish-owned galleries where I submitted my work either rejected it or ghosted me. The ARC accepted all my submissions this year *except* for one that was explicitly Jewish. This is not a question of quality. I'm doing better work now than I did when my work was being accepted everywhere. I did recently win the Gold Medal at the Guild of Boston Artists New England Regional competition, and that surprise did my soul a lot of good because I thought I was being cancelled everywhere. I was especially grateful in the context of all the antisemitism that has welled up in Cambridge and greater Boston. The fact remains, it is one thing to make the art. It is another thing altogether to get it seen. The only thing to do is to keep doing your best work and to keep trying to get it out there.
I am not Jewish and have been outspoken in my support of Israel and the Jewish people since October 7. In my neighborhood I confront antisemitism daily in graffiti spoken words and white women wearing fancy keffiyehs. I do not feel safe as I am well known here but I can’t afford to move. I will not be silent. The “friends” I lost were never friends at all. Anyone who will stand by for a new Holocaust is no friend of mine
The white women in fancy keffiyehs are very prominent in my neighborhood too and I roll my eyes every time I see one.
You didn't lose friends; they were never your friends in the first place. There's not a dimes worth of difference between these marxist pigs in the art world and neo-nazis.
The "art world" has always been a collection of mostly no-talent idiots who cling to left wing politics because that world supports them financially. But if you think those of us who reject those policies cannot appreciate good art, you're dead wrong. Jewish artists: if you have talent it will shine brightly through your work and "sell" because it is coming from your soul. Form your own groups, get Jewish and pro-Israel backers. Don't worry about it.
Well said my friend! Keep up the good work and shine your light in a dark world! Good will always prevail!
Josh leifer is not anti-Zionist - you should read what he writes before labeling
Yikes