OPINION:
Anti-Semitism has been ascribed to many factors over the millennia, but the one with most purchase in our sophisticated age is simply that many people require an “other” to explain their failures and disappointments, for it stills the restive mind to project one’s deficiencies on others (“The chosen people, chosen again,” Web, Oct. 31). And Jews, from their earliest coherence as a distinct people, were decidedly an “other.” In the historical perspective, it is apparent that they delighted in their distinctiveness, never intuiting that the degree of difference would lead directly to a genocidal coefficient of hatred, one with which we deal to this day.
The compulsion to slaughter innocent Jews — including elderly, infirm and cognitively challenged people, as in the latest mass murder in Pittsburgh — reveals how little we can sanction such bloodshed in a free society. When even the best and brightest of our bigots, those on university campuses, spew hatred unencumbered by the anti-discrimination standards endorsed by faculty and administrators, and uninformed by the Holocaust, then we are left with the impotence of the unarmed. All the education in the universe has not stilled the rage to kill Jews when anti-Semites feel the urge. As uncomfortable and inconvenient as it may be, synagogue security may require armed measures.
PAUL BLOUSTEIN
Cincinnati
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