But this moment of defamation is one that is experienced not only by Jews, but by people who understand—who care about Jews in their lives, care about Jews as a matter of principle, and also understand that, in some complicated way that it’s difficult even to untangle, that the fate of democratic institutions, the fate of liberal institutions, is bound up with the fate of the Jews in democratic and liberal societies. And one of the ways that the sadism expresses itself—and this is, I think, the theme I wanna take from this remarkable novel, this prophetic novel—is the delight in turning against the victim, the accusation of the very thing that the perpetrator is doing to the victim. In the fourth volume of his famous kind of cranky and crackpot history, but it’s a famous book in its day, Toynbee wrote, “On the Day of Judgment the gravest crime standing [to] the German National Socialists’ account might be, not that they had exterminated a majority of the Western Jews, but that they had caused the surviving remnant of Jewry to stumble.” That is, it wasn’t murdering the Jews; it was this failure to correct the Jews.
Author: David Frum
Published at: 2025-11-05 22:00:14
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