The latest brazen attacks on Jews simply because they are Jewish make us shudder. Are we back in the Middle Ages? These provocations bring back age-old questions: Why do they hate us so? And what can we do about it? Over the centuries, thinkers and scholars, politicians and journalists, have grappled with the question of the “Jewish problem” — a foreign people living among the world’s nations — offering various “solutions,” from the mild to the most horrific, from assimilation, relocation to annihilation. But last week one European leader offered another solution. With the recent rise of anti-Semitism in Europe, not to mention, in the Middle East, it was quite refreshing to hear Czech President Milos Zeman declare that “now we all must say ‘I am a Jew. Ani Yehudi.'” Instead of eliminating the Jew, President Zeman suggested embracing the Jew. Was he aware of the profundity, the gravity, of his approach?
Please join Rabbi Simon Jacobson in this out-of-the-box post Purim workshop and learn how the true root of anti-Semitism is deeply embedded in fear of the divine change a Jew can bring to the world, and how the solution is thus to dispel this fear by integrating, not rejecting, what the Jew – the Yehudi – stands for. Discover what being Jewish means in a new way. You will never again look at yourself and others in the same way.