It is outrageous that respondents to Michael Kossove’s My View, asking “Why is antisemitism so rampant today in America?” have used his article as an excuse to spew anti-Israel slander in the River Reporter. 

The article  reflected on a problem for Jews, whether they be Zionists or Peace Now activists, or even Jews for Jesus. There has been an uptick in hatred towards us and it is worrying.

As for the Jewish state and the present war being “the reason” for Jew hatred (as two responders have indicated), there was no Jewish state when the Holocaust occurred. If you go back in time to European pogroms, or as far back as the crusades, the Inquisition and persecutions throughout history, Jew haters never needed a Jewish state to inspire them.

However one justifies antisemitism, let me note at the outset that Jews have had an outsized influence on the world. They are and have always been innovators and influencers despite their small numbers. The smartphone, the microprocessor, Facebook, Google, WhatsApp, blue jeans, psychoanalysis, the lipstick tube, the traffic light, the remote control, video games, sound in films, Superman, Hollywood, instant coffee, Batman, Spider Man, Captain America, color TV, the Heimlich Maneuver, the USB flash drive, Waze, Valium, Prozac, the alphabet, modern physics, monotheism, the Sabbath, the birth control pill. This list is just to recall a few Jewish gifts to our world. 

To hate us while you are popping your daily Jewish-invented antidepressant and undergoing Jewish-developed chemotherapies, which we health-obsessed Jews created… this is absurd. Even if Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes have millions of followers, all those podcast fans using Bluetooth and WiFi—which Jews invented—are simply looking a gift horse in the mouth.

Is there more Jew hatred because of the Jewish state? Maybe. But there’s more Jew hatred because of the sinking of the Titanic, which was sunk, if not by a Goldberg than an “Iceberg,” as a Jewish joke goes. You don’t need a valid excuse to hate the Jews. And this has been true since Abraham smashed his father’s idols and set out for the land his people now occupy.   

Jews have done good things for the world, including in the Middle East, where Jews are fighting terrorism in several countries, and successfully. 

Palestinians are suffering, not because of Israel, but because their leaders have refused to broker a peace deal since 1948 and gambled for all or nothing at their people’s expense. 

The terrorist group that led the Gaza population into a war where they would be purposefully used as human shields, and never allowed to seek shelter in the five hundred miles of tunnels Hamas built under Gaza—with the money given to the people of Gaza to better their lives, from American tax dollars and money sent from all over the world, trying to better a people that after 75 years still claim to be refugees. That money was not used to better lives but to wage a war that would destroy them. 

The terrorists, Hamas, are not once named in these dreadful anti-Israel letters. Why is that? And why is the word “genocide” used again and again, even though, given that Hamas inflated the number of casualties they cited, used underaged soldiers who are technically children, counted combatants as civilian dead, counted those who died of natural causes as casualties of the war etc., etc. 

The ICJ has still not ruled this war against Hamas as a genocide, which it isn’t. “Genocide” is a word invented to describe what the Germans did to the Jews—which was to try and wipe out an entire people. If there was a genocide in Gaza, why is the population there today larger than before October 7?

One writer cites incorrect information about a “brutal depopulation campaign” that was carried out in 1948. There was a war started by five Arab nations waged against the brand new state, and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem issued a decree ordering all Arabs to flee or else they would be murdered, either by the Mufti’s army or in the war. Many Arabs stayed (and are now citizens of Israel—one fifth of the population today), but the ones who fled were replaced by the 850,000 Jewish refugees who were expelled from the Arab countries surrounding the new state at that time. This is what happened. The Jews did not set out to depopulate the land. In fact, in many cases, they begged the fleeing Arabs to remain. 

Telling lies, creating untrue narratives, “bearing false witness against a neighbor,” is not just violating one of the Ten Commandments (another gift of the Jews) but it is a form of libel used by antisemites today. The writer of this letter sounds to me like a jihadist riding on the back of Kossove’s reflections on a troubling phenomenon plaguing his people. Mike Kossove is himself a living embodiment of a Jewish gift to the Catskills. Not only is he an incredible comedian in person and a wonderful teacher, but he himself suffered from polio and lived with its effects for the rest of his life, because his falling ill predated the Jewish-invented vaccine that saved so many other children all over the world. 

I always enjoy Mike’s My Views. 

Judith Maidenbaum lives in Kauneonga Lake, NY.