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This week culminates in the saddest day of the Jewish calendar.
On Tisha B'Av — the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av — many of the worst calamities in Jewish history occurred.
It was on that date in 586 BCE that Babylonian forces destroyed the First Temple in Jerusalem, which for four centuries had been the center of Jewish life. A second Temple was eventually rebuilt, only to be burned to the ground by Roman legions under Titus on the same date in 70 CE. That destruction triggered the worst mass murder and enslavement of Jews until the Nazi Holocaust in the 20th century.
Other disasters have coincided with the 9th of Av. That was when the First Crusade commenced in 1096, unleashing a slaughter of thousands of Jews and the obliteration of Jewish communities in the German Rhineland. On Tisha B'av in 1290, King Edward I expelled the Jews of England. It was the first such expulsion by a European country, setting a grim precedent for centuries to come — above all the catastrophic expulsion from Spain on Tisha B'Av in 1492 of every Jew who refused to be baptized. World War I began on Tisha B'Av in 1914, setting in motion the train of events that would lead to Adolf Hitler's rise. And in 1942, the Nazis began transporting Jews to the Treblinka extermination camp from Warsaw — the largest Jewish community in Europe — on July 23, which that year coincided with Tisha B'Av.
No date in the long annals of the Jews is so drenched in grief. For more than 2,000 years, observant Jews have marked the day by abstaining from food and drink for 25 hours. In synagogues worldwide, families will begin the fast at nightfall Saturday by sitting on the floor and reading the biblical Book of Lamentations, a series of heartbreaking dirges mourning the destruction of Jerusalem.
In a sense, Tisha B'Av encapsulates in a calendar date all the pain and loss that have been inflicted on the Jewish people through the generations by those who hate them. That hatred has ebbed and flowed, but it has never vanished. There have been blessed golden ages in Jewish history, but they have always ended badly.
Tisha B'Av arrives this year as American Jews confront an inescapable and chilling reality: Antisemitism in the United States has surged to levels unseen since before World War II.
The threat has been intensifying for a decade or more, but since Oct. 7, 2023, the frequency of antisemitic harassment, vandalism, rhetoric, and violence has exploded. "On a per capita basis," The New York Times recently observed, "Jews face far greater risks of being victims of hate crimes than members of any other demographic groups." An American Jew is now 2.5 times as likely to be targeted in a hate crime as an LGBT person, 3.5 times as likely to be targeted as a Muslim American, and 4.5 times as likely as a Black American.
Here in Massachusetts, anti-Jewish hate crimes jumped by more than 20 percent in 2024, according to the Commonwealth — even as other hate crimes declined. Reports of antisemitic episodes skyrocketed. They ranged from Jewish students being menaced on college campuses, to the gunman yelling threats outside the Jewish Community Center in Longmeadow while brandishing a weapon, to the defacing of multiple houses in Newton with antisemitic slogans. There were bomb threats directed at synagogues in Attleboro and Sharon. Thousands of demonstrators, massing on Storrow Drive, chanted "Intifada, intifada, globalize the intifada" — a call for deadly violence against Jews everywhere.
A "Status Report" from the Anti-Defamation League, the venerable civil rights organization, was released last month following the killings in Washington, D.C., of a Jewish woman and her Israeli boyfriend and the firebombing of a group of Jews in Boulder, Colo., which left more than 25 people hurt and one woman dead. A few weeks earlier, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro's home was set ablaze on the first night of Passover.
In response to these attacks, the ADL commissioned a national survey. Its report stressed that a majority of Americans regard antisemitic hatred as a serious issue and oppose violence against Jews. But between the lines, the survey's findings were horrifying.
Asked about the violent attacks in Washington and Colorado, as well as the torching of Shapiro's home, 13 percent of respondents said that such acts were "justified," 15 percent believed they were "necessary," 22 percent did not consider them antisemitic, and an astonishing 24 percent — nearly 1 in 4 respondents — pronounced the attacks "understandable."
These are no longer fringe views. Raw, antisemitic bigotry is going mainstream in real time. Even more scary, the growing embrace of anti-Jewish poison is highest among the young. A Harvard-Harris poll in December 2023 found that two-thirds of Americans between 18 and 24 years old agreed "that Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors." It is a bitter and frightening irony that Generation Z — the cohort likeliest to regard social justice as the highest good and bigotry as an inexcusable evil — is the one least likely to oppose antisemitism, the oldest and most toxic bigotry in history.
Young people acquire their opinions from multiple sources, of course. But at least some of this animus against Jews has been deliberately inculcated by teachers unions that make no effort to disguise their antipathy toward the Jewish state. The recent vote by thousands of National Education Association delegates to sever all connections with the ADL was only the latest reminder of how deep the anti-Jewish, anti-Israel hostility of unionized teachers now runs. The NEA's executive committee didn't ratify the delegates' call for a boycott this time. But how long can it hold out against the rank-and-file?
As Tisha B'Av approaches, more than three-fourths of American Jews now say they feel less safe than they used to. More than half (56 percent) report changing their behavior over the past year to disguise their Jewishness out of concern for their security. And 1 in 4 Jewish adults report that a business in their community has been targeted with antisemitism in the past year.
For anyone born after 1945, this normalizing of Jew-hatred in the United States represents a chilling reversal. The Cold War era's moral taboo against antisemitism — bolstered by the revelation of Nazi Germany's genocide, and by the success of the Civil Rights and Soviet Jewry movements — used to render overt Jew‑hatred unthinkable in mainstream America. Now that taboo is shredding. Ours has become a society in which antisemitic venom — on the right and on the left — increasingly permeates social media and academia, professional organizations and labor unions, podcasts and workplaces.
As a Jew, and as the son of an Auschwitz survivor, I find all this darkly ominous. So do many Jewish Americans I know. Yet with few exceptions, most of my non-Jewish friends and acquaintances don't seem to understand how frightening it is for Jews to sense history beginning to repeat itself — or how exposed, isolated, and endangered many Jews now feel.
It has been pointed out often that the hate that begins with the Jewish people never ends with them. Islamist terrorists were attacking and killing Jews long before they attacked and killed Americans on 9/11. The Nazis first set out to incinerate the Jews; in the end, all of Europe was ablaze. That is why the message of Tisha B'Av — especially a Tisha B'Av like this year's, when Jews are ever more at risk — is one non-Jews, too, ignore at their peril.
That isn't merely a historical observation. It reflects a pattern first articulated in the earliest pages of the Bible.
As an Orthodox Jew, I believe in the continuing validity of the promise God made to Abraham in Genesis 12:3: "I will bless those who bless you, and those who curse you I will curse." But you don't have to be religious or Jewish to be persuaded that Genesis 12:3 means what it says.
Benjamin Disraeli, who twice served as Britain's prime minister, distilled the biblical pledge into an axiom of statecraft: "The Lord deals with the nations as the nations deal with the Jews." Winston Churchill agreed and on multiple occasions quoted his predecessor's maxim. "We must admit," he remarked in a 1920 essay, "that nothing that has since happened in the history of the world has falsified the truth of Disraeli's confident assertion."
More than 80 years later, the renowned journalist and historian Paul Johnson developed the point in a fascinating article for Commentary, in which he described anti-Jewish hatred as a "highly infectious … disease of the mind." Antisemitism is not just self-inflicted, Johnson wrote, it "is also self-destructive, and of societies and governments as much as of individuals." He called it a "historical law" — when nations become riddled with antisemitism, they grow weaker, poorer, and less influential.
It happened to Spain after it expelled the Jews in the 1490s, to France in the wake of the Dreyfus affair, and to Czarist Russia following the wave of antisemitic pogroms in the late 19th century. Germany's descent into genocidal madness led to cataclysmic military defeat in 1945 and brought on 40 years of communist dictatorship in the eastern third of the country. And the antisemitic obsessions of the Arab world over the past century have kept it mired in economic and cultural backwardness, when it could have become "by far the richest portion of the earth's surface."
Conversely, nations that extended protection and freedom to their Jewish citizens have invariably flourished.  Cyrus the Great of Persia liberated the Jews from captivity, and went on to rule the largest empire the world had seen to that time. The Ottoman sultans who welcomed Jewish exiles from Spain presided over a multicultural dominion that thrived for centuries."England's readmission of Jews under Oliver Cromwell in 1656 preceded the emergence of a commercial and naval power that by the 19th Century ruled a quarter of the globe.
Above all, the United States — where Jews enjoyed freedom, opportunity, and safety they had never before known in their long Diaspora — grew into the wealthiest, strongest, and most important nation on the globe. Jewish Americans, making the most of the liberty and equality afforded them, became scientists and doctors, entrepreneurs and entertainers, retail innovators and writers, judges and educators. America's ascent to global preeminence was inseparable from its treatment of Jews as full citizens.
"I will bless those who bless you, and those who curse you I will curse," G od said at the dawn of Jewish history, and history has repeatedly confirmed it. But the ancient promise — or, if you like, Paul Johnson's "historical law" — is also a reminder and a warning to the American nation. Unchecked antisemitism is not merely a Jewish problem. It is an infection in America's soul and a threat to its future.
George Washington, in his famous 1790 letter to the Jews of Newport, prayed that "the children of the stock of Abraham" would dwell in this new republic under the protection of a government that gives "to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance." He envisioned an America where all would "sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid."
That vision animated America's founding promise and it helped shape the nation's greatness. But today, nearly 235 years after Washington wrote those words, the children of the stock of Abraham are afraid. If that fear is allowed to deepen and spread, the cost will not fall on Jews alone.
Tisha B'Av is a day of mourning for the Jewish people — but it ought to be a moment of reckoning for all Americans. To drive out the virus of antisemitism, to ensure that Jews can live in safety and dignity, is not only to defend a beleaguered minority. It is to recommit to the very ideals that made the United States a light among nations. America has been blessed because it blessed its Jews. May it never learn what happens when it stops doing so.
Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission.
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