She is also a contributing editor to the Jewish Daily, Forward.
This week she wrote a timely and enlightening article entitled, When 'Anti-Semitism' Is Abused: It is subtitled, "Disagreeing With Israel Doesn't Make One a Bigot" She begins:
We were raised to be vigilant. We were taught to fight oppression, admonished to be New Jews — strong, muscular, defiant.
We were told to look for the signs, the slogans and the double-speak. We learned at the knee of those with tattooed forearms; knelt at the feet of those who lost brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, parents, grandparents, lovers, spouses, children.
We have cried, we have wailed, we have lit thousands upon thousands of memorial candles. And we have sworn, again and again, that we would never forget.
That is why when anti-Semitism is falsely applied, we must also stand up and decry it as defamation, as character assault, as unjust. That is why when we debase the term by using it as a rhetorical conceit against those with whom we disagree on policy matters, we have sullied our own promises to our grandparents. For if we dilute the term, if we render the label meaningless, defanged, we have failed ourselves, our legacy, our ancestors, our children.
Wildman concludes:
And when Haredi men and women put their children in striped pajamas and place a yellow star emblazoned with the word “Jude” on their chests and parade in the streets of Jerusalem to protest the secular world, we can call that spitting on the graves of our ancestors. And we can weep that we have lost all perspective. Enough.Whether we are Jews, Muslims, Christians or of another faith, lets commit to join in common cause against all forms of racism and anti-Semitism, and learn to distinguish the real threat from the imaginary, as Wildman urges.
Read more here
See also Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism have no place in PSC (or anywhere else)
I concur wholeheartedly with John Stott who once said,
“Away then with anti-Semitism! It has been an appalling scandal in the history of Europe, and even the Christian church has been implicated. Christians should be ‘pro-Semitic’, in the sense that we recognize how the people of Israel have been highly favoured by God. We Gentiles are their debtors, Paul wrote (Romans 15:27). We owe them a huge spiritual debt, especially in their bequest to the world of both the Scriptures and the Christ.”
