“Jews are the canary in the coal mine of civilization”:

I recommend an excellent column in Sunday’s Boston Globe by Jeff Jacoby: The cancer of anti-Semitism in Europe. After providing a chilling list of recent attacks on Jews in Europe, here is how it ends:

Whether this massacre [in Spain], like those in Istanbul and Bali and at the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, was the work of radical Islamists, the world will know soon enough. What the world should already know but so often forgets is that Jews are the canary in the coal mine of civilization. Anti-Semitism is like cancer; unchecked, it can metastasize and sicken the entire body. When civilized nations fail to rise up against the Jew-haters in their midst, it is often just a matter of time before the Jew-haters in their midst rise up against them.

I experienced some pretty ugly anti-Semitism myself growing up, one of 4 Jews in a high school class of 400, but “normal” anti-Semitism is not to be confused with this. I have seen nothing like what has been happening to Jews in Europe and in Israel in my lifetime. I have always believed that a holocaust could happen again–not that it was inevitable, but that it was clearly not impossible. But I also maintained that, if it did it happen again, it would look different than the last one. Each one looks different. And denial is always the order of the day for Jew and non-Jew alike.