viewpoint: ben cohen

Europe’s Jews tied to a declining political class

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As regular readers of my column will know, I am not an admirer of the analogy between the situation that Jews faced in Europe in the 1930s, and the trials and challenges we face now.

I don’t like it because, quite simply, the differences far outweigh the similarities. First and foremost, since 1948, there has been a Jewish state ready to absorb any Jew fleeing from anti-Semitism—a lifeline that was glaringly absent during the period of Nazi perse-cution.

The position of Jewish communities vis-a-vis their governments has also changed. In the 1930s, European leaders didn’t say that their countries would be irredeemably damaged by the exodus of their Jewish populations; even after the Holocaust, it took several years for there to be anything like a moral reckoning with the fate of the Jews in the countries that were occupied by the Nazis. But in the days following the recent Paris terror attacks, both the French prime minister and the British home secretary delivered emotional speeches declaring that France would not be France, and Britain would not be Britain, without their long-settled Jewish populations.

Nonetheless, I do understand the appeal of the 1930s analogy. During that decade and the one that followed, the lethal potential of anti-Semitism was driven home with a darkness previously unknown. Therefore, it’s hardly surprising, now that we are living in the most dangerous period for Jews since the Second World War, that the Nazi period has become the yardstick against which we measure and judge our current woes.

I expect the use of the 1930s analogy to grow in the coming months, as Europe further succumbs to the temptations of populism and nationalism, as the United States is led by an administration that has made its disinterest in—even contempt for—the old continent painfully clear. Under President Obama, Europeans have been rudely awakened to the fact that they no longer have a privileged relationship with an America that variously ap-pears to them inward-looking, or trapped in the Middle East, or desperate to tilt its for-eign policy towards Asia.

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