Lesley Rubenstein-Pessok

JEW-HATRED IS REAL A shared experience. My husband Thomas Finn takes the floor.👇🏽 Last week we were sitting at a lunch restaurant down by the harbour in Skagen. High season, thirty degrees, full tables, children and draft beer and fried plaice - Denmark at its most Danish. A young couple sat down at the table next to us. Mid-twenties, from a mid-sized Danish town, he a tradesman, she friendly and well-spoken. We fell into conversation, the way you do while waiting for the food - where are you from, what do you do - and the conversation drifted, as conversations do these days, onto the culture war, which he in particular was preoccupied with. Islam, Christianity, the EU, political life. A completely ordinary conversation between completely ordinary Danes over lunch. And then he says it. Calmly, out of the blue, as if he were remarking on the weather: "If you ask me, we obviously need to keep an eye on Islam - but the real threat is the Jews." Krisztina was about to get up. I managed to put a hand on her leg under the table and send her the look that, between partners who have been together for decades, means - wait. Not because the sentence didn't deserve an answer - but because I wanted to know how deep the well was before I said anything. So I asked, as neutrally as I could - "Ok. Well, some people do think that. Are there many around you who feel that way?" "Yes, pretty much all my friends." Krisztina tried again, by way of history - "But surely you know the history. They have always been persecuted - and during the war Hitler killed six million of them..." She never got to finish the sentence. "Well, they deserved it. They brought it on themselves." The sun was shining. The plaice arrived. I looked at Krisztina, and we understood each other without words - not here, not now. We had driven to Skagen for the day's sake and for each other's, and there were families with children at every other table. You have to know when a conversation is a conversation - and when it is merely an occasion. So we ate our food in peace, wished them a good day and walked out into the sun. But the sentence came with us. And it is still lying on the table between us. A nice, normal, friendly young couple - and the sentence Europe has spent eighty years promising itself never to hear again, served over lunch, as if he were noting that the food needed salt. What I want to tell you today is that this sentence was not a bolt from a clear sky. I had expected to hear it out in the open this year. Because it is not one stray young man in Skagen. It is the surface of something that has grown larger than most people quite notice, beneath us, while we were looking away - and I can document it - as can many others here on this platform - because I, or we, have been standing in it all year. Over the course of this year I have written a series of exhaustive texts and hundreds of long comments about Jews. About their three-thousand-year history, from Abraham through the exiles to the rebirth of the State of Israel. About their traditions, their scriptures, their way of carrying memory through the centuries. About everything the Western world stands on without knowing it - that Man bears the image of God, that the law stands above the king, that conscience cannot be owned, that every child should be able to read - foundation stones that are all Hebrew, and which were carried out to us through a Jewish saviour and his Jewish apostles. I have written about the causes of the persecution, its patterns and its costumes through a thousand years. About the grammar of Jew-hatred - the kind that cannot imagine a human being who freely holds an opinion, or a people that wants something of its own. And about why it is crucial that the world stands up for and in front of this people - not because they are worth more than others, but because the attack on them has always been the first act in the attack on Man as such. MORE👇🏽