The Herzl Moment

Awakening to the Shock of Anti-Jewish Hatred

Each of us must undergo our own “Herzl moment”—as Andrew Pessin recently noted in his excellent interview with scholar Naya Lekht—that moment when we are jolted into the mind-bending realization of what anti-Jewish hatred truly is. It is the moment when our primitive assumptions—of good faith, basic decency, and the charitability of others—are shattered. We come face-to-face with a movement not grounded in reasoned disagreement, but in vicious libel, accusation, and the ritualized shaming and exclusion of Jews.

Herzl had this moment in response to classical antisemitism: for the first time, he truly grasped its nature—not as a semi-reasonable political position of the so-called “anti-Semites,” but as a civilizational poison. So too must we now go through that same experience with the “anti-Zionists,” recognizing how anti-Jewish hatred has once again mutated—and surged forth in all of its monstrosity.