The Antisemitic Wall of Shame
Twenty-seven names, one Star of David, standing in its center, and like the people it represents, bold and undeterred. This design maps over three thousand years of trials and tribulations. The following is a rundown, organized loosely by era, chronicling those who tried to wipe us out. None of them succeeded.
The Ancient World. Start at the beginning: Pharaoh enslaved the Israelites in Egypt, and Amalek attacked them in the desert right after the Exodus, unprovoked, which is why Amalek became the Torah's shorthand for an enemy who hates Jews simply for existing. Centuries later, the Assyrians conquered the northern Kingdom of Israel and exiled ten of its twelve tribes, to be lost to history. Next came the Babylonians, who destroyed the First Temple in Jerusalem and exiled the rest of the nation to Babylon.
The Greek Empire came next and outlawed Jewish practice entirely, desecrating the Temple and sparking the Maccabean revolt that Hanukkah still commemorates. Elsewhere during that same era, the Persian official Haman plotted to exterminate every Jew in the empire, a spiritual predecessor to enemies like Hitler. He was foiled only by Esther. Then the mighty Romans arrived, and no people gave them a harder fight than the Jews. But, alas, the Romans secured victory, destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE, eventually exiling the Jewish people from their land for the next two thousand years.
Christian Europe. Once exiled and living in the shadow of the growing Christian faith, the plight of the Jewish people only deepened. Papal Bulls repeatedly restricted Jewish life across Catholic Europe, from forced identification badges to legally mandated ghettos. The Crusades, launched to reclaim the Holy Land, slaughtered entire Jewish communities along the Rhine while en route. Blood Libel, the medieval lie that Jews murdered Christian children for ritual purposes, originated in 12th-century England and fueled massacres across Europe for centuries. Similarly, another defamation in the form of the Black Death Libel, when Jews were accused of deliberately poisoning wells to spread the plague. Horrifically, this led to entire Jewish communities being tortured and burned alive.
Few realize that the term ghetto originally referred specifically to the forced segregation of Jews. Forced Ghettos confined Jewish communities first in places like Venice and Rome, then again under the Nazis. Waves of Expulsions threw Jews out of England, France, and eventually Spain and Portugal entirely, often with their wealth confiscated and debts owed to them canceled in the process. With the Spanish Inquisition in particular, Spain's rulers decreed that Jews had to either convert to Christianity or leave the country entirely. Many converted, but the Inquisition went on to torture and execute many of those converts under suspicion they were secretly still practicing Judaism.
Martin Luther, father of the Protestant Reformation and virulent antisemite, wrote a pamphlet calling for the burning of synagogues and Jewish homes, a text the Nazis later cited approvingly. The Cossack Uprising of the 1600s saw massacres that killed tens of thousands of Jews across Ukraine and Poland. Over a century later, Russia's Pale of Settlement legally confined Jews to a fraction of the empire, setting the stage for the Pogroms, waves of state-tolerated mob violence.
The Islamic World. Under Islamic rule, Jews and Christians were generally granted Dhimmi status, legal "protection" in exchange for a special tax called the jizya. It wasn't so different from the American mob's protection racket of the 20th century, you paid up, and in return, you were protected largely from the very authority collecting the payment. Beyond the tax, dhimmis faced a long list of restrictions: they were often barred from building synagogues, oftentimes required to wear distinguishing clothing or badges, barred from riding horses, and generally excluded from holding any position of authority over Muslims. Sounds an awful lot like apartheid to me.
That dynamic changed with the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of Pan-Arabism. Alongside the creation of the State of Israel, many newly formed Arab nations expelled their Jewish populations, collectively numbering roughly 850,000. Communities that had lived in these lands for over two thousand years, in Iraq and Yemen especially, had their citizenship stripped and assets frozen or seized, forcing people to flee with little more than what they could carry. Groups born from the ongoing conflict since, Islamic Jihad, the Intifadas, and Hamas, have targeted Jews and Israelis with terrorism up through today.
The Modern Era, and Today. Everything else on this wall, as brutal as it was, was regional or sporadic. The Nazis were different: a systematic, industrialized attempt to eradicate every Jew in Europe, massacring six million and putting a murderous end to two thousand years of European Jewry. The world saw, in black and white, the evils of antisemitism. And yet, with survivors of the Holocaust still living today, antisemitism en masse has reared its ugly head again.
Kanye's antisemitic tirades helped kick off and mainstream the practice, and when certain online personalities saw a receptive public reaction to his hateful rhetoric, they looked to capitalize and grift off the reemerging evil, spreading their own conspiracy theories through podcasters and other platforms.
But this hatred hasn't confined itself to one side of the aisle. On college campuses, anti-Israel encampments and faculty-led boycotts have normalized open hostility toward Jewish students, while politicians like The Squad have pushed anti-Israel rhetoric from within the halls of Congress itself. It's proof of the horseshoe, the idea that the far left and far right curve around and meet in the same place, Jew hatred. With no small amount of incredulity, it seems humanity's oldest hatred never fully clocked out, it just found new costumes. At the end of the day, some things never change, we're still the scapegoat.
Still Standing. Which brings us to the focus of the shirt. "Am Yisrael Chai" is a modern rallying cry, popularized by a song Shlomo Carlebach wrote in 1965 to energize the movement to free Soviet Jewry. It's been sung at rallies and featured on banners in the decades since, including after October 7th. Three words, one very simple point: they're all crossed out, and we're still here.
Go Deeper This is a subject worth truly understanding, not just skimming. Whether it's the resources below or others you find on your own, we strongly urge you to take the time to learn the full extent of this history.
- A brief and worthwhile overview of Jewish life under Islam, from myjewishlearning.com
- Ever hear of "The Farhud"? Me neither, but such an interesting story. The Farhud is the name of a horrific pogrom in Baghdad, 1941. It marked the end of a 2500 year old Iraqi Jewish community. Read about it here in honestreporting.com
A European history of antisemitism.
An academic and sociological examination of Jew hatred. The video breaks down the research of Professor Thomas Sowell, one of the most brilliant and under appreciated minds of the last century.
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