Jews will be in the West; in many places they simply will not be welcome.

My friends and I are having a hard time wrapping our heads around the current Jew hatred seen in North America and Europe. We grew up in an America in which being Jewish meant nothing negative. We went to the same schools, played in the same sports, and, growing up in a not particularly religious home, ate at the same restaurants. We didn’t experience even a whiff of anti-Jewish behavior. Fast forward 40 years and we read articles about Jews and Jewish history being removed from Wikipedia or Jewish professors being denied access to college buildings. We imagine that we are reading stories about 1960s USSR persecution of Jews and not events in today’s world. I guess every generation of Jews has had such feelings. I never had the privilege of knowing my grandfathers, but they both served in the German army in World War I. I assume that they got along with their non-Jewish comrades, and I know from my parents’ reports that they had good relations with their neighbors in the small towns from which they came. But they too had to make an exit from the land of their forefathers when the winds changed directions, and Hitler’s words from "Mein Kampf" jumped from the pages and into the antisemitic “Nuremberg Laws” as a prelude to mass Jewish murder. My paternal grandmother was one of three siblings; two made it to Australia, while the third was murdered at Dachau before the war began.

What one often does not appreciate is that for a destructive political phenomenon to succeed, it by no means requires a majority. Lenin did not have that many supporters, but he called his party the Bolsheviks, which translates into “majority.” His clueless opposition gladly accepted the title Mensheviks, meaning “minority.” Rule #64 in politics: never ever let your opponent define you. The word “orthodox” in Judaism was........

© Townhall