Let’s start with music. A friend recommended to me the Trumpet Concerto by Mieczyslaw Weinberg. Do you even know who Weinberg is? He was one of those Soviet composers who was virtually unknown in the West, and who is now being discovered (not rediscovered, but discovered). He was a good friend of Dmitri Shostakovich, and very well known in the Soviet Union. He lived until 1996. His concerto might remind you a little of Stravinsky, a little of Shostakovich and, for me at least, a little for Russian contemporary art of the early 20th century. I recommend you listen to it.

Let’s go to a podcast. I listened this week to a presentation by Douglas Murray, a conservative British journalist and associate editor of The Spectator. He spoke about antisemitism, the war in Gaza, and to a lesser extent about American campus protests to an audience in Rotterdam, Netherlands. I recommend you listen to/watch it.

Murray is a conservative, to be sure, but I think that what he says makes a lot of sense. He talks about the historical foundation of antisemitism, and how it relates to the way that so many in the world react to Israel even if they aren’t conscious of it. Why they react to what the Jews are doing in Gaza, more than what Gaza wants to do in Israel, and more than what non-Jews are doing in, say, Ukraine, South Sudan or Yemen, to name just a few places. In his presentation, he does mention the church as an important institution in the development of antisemitism, but in response to a question from the audience, he lists “envy” as perhaps the most important contemporary cause of continuing antisemitism.

This is in contrast to Rabbi Yossy Goldman of the Sydenham-Highlands North Hebrew Congregation in Johannesburg, whom I also listened to and watched recently, and who thought the prime cause today of antisemitism is that Jews are “disturbers” whenever they are in the minority. Their ideas as to social justice, globalism, and so forth are often at odds with the majority community.

Perhaps it is a combination of the two, and these two presentations do give you ways to think about the problem that might be helpful and useful.

Going back to Douglas Murray, I should add that he talks not only about the causes of antisemitism, but the results. Wherever there is pervasive antisemitism, he says, there is a society in trouble, trouble beyond the antisemitism. The Jews, he says, are the canaries in the coal mine. But rather than treat them as such as search for what is wrong, it is often easier, apparently, simply to shoot the canaries, as if this will help. It doesn’t.

That’s it for my writing today, because I would like you to at least start these attachments, in the hope that you will want to see them through.