Welcome to Breakpoint in a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Coulson Center, I'm John Stone Street. According to a new report from the J7 Large Communities Task Force Against Anti-Semitism, and I quote here: in both the number of lethal attacks and the number of casualties, 2025 was the deadliest year for anti-Semitic attacks in more than 30 years. As a CBS article describing the report pointed out, this includes 15 people shot dead at Bondi Beach in Australia, two killed at a Manchester, UK synagogue, two who were gunned down at a Jewish museum in D.C., and an 82-year-old Boulder, Colorado woman who died a month after being hit with a Molotov cocktail. While the attackers responsible often claim vengeance against Israeli actions in the Middle East, the attacks are not against Israeli military or government sites.
Instead, as has been the case for much anti-Semitic violence throughout history, the targets are random people around the world who happen to be Jewish. In fact, Jews have been the target of irrational hate and violence since at least the 5th century BC, when Haman was bested by Mordecai. According to the historian Josephus, about 50,000 Jews were killed in the AD 60s when an ethnic riot broke out in Alexandria, Egypt. The harassment and murder of Jews in the Russian Empire was so common it's portrayed as an ordinary fact of life in the musical Fiddler on the Roof. Most evil of course was the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis in the 1930s and 40s, a mass murder so horrific that there are still to this day fewer Jews alive in the world than there were before it.
Now one reason this demon has returned again is that history has moved on. The memory of the Holocaust is fading. The world's less familiar with names like Auschwitz. Nearly everyone that was involved in the Holocaust, victim, villain, or liberator, is now dead. Without the power of eyewitness testimony, the lessons of never again can quickly be lost.
Another factor is a quirk of this cultural moment in which scepticism is considered a virtue, not to mention profitable. Like the dwarves in the C.S. Lewis's The Last Battle, many are convinced that they're just too informed to be taken in by commonly held ideas. The cynicism is not the result of discovering newly surfaced facts, but a posture of just disbelieving all accepted narratives. The posture is the pop intellectual version of what philosopher Philip Reif called a death work.
Rather than pursue truth, it's far more popular to join the knee-jerk disbelief crowd. Who claim that the so-called post-war consensus is just what they want you to believe? In other words, the new anti-Semitism is just as irrational as it is evil. And to be clear, there's absolutely nothing Christian about it. In 1943, even before the world learned of the Holocaust, apologist Francis Schaefer responded to Jew hatred by saying this: quote, Considering anti-Semitism, the first thing that fixes itself in my thinking is the fact that Christ was a Jew.
When we open the New Testament to Matthew 1.1, we find the very first claim made concerning Christ is that he sprang from Abraham and was a descendant of David. The Bible does not say that Jesus just happened to be a Jew, but the word emphasizes over and over again that he was a Jew. ⁇ And so, hatred of Jews has absolutely no place whatsoever for the Christian. And this is about more than even the biblical call to love our neighbors, though that should be enough to squash it. Jesus' Jewishness is at the center of his identity because at the center of God's plan to bless all the nations of the earth was his making a chosen people of the descendants of Abraham.
And that's why to hate the Jews is to scorn the most important Jew of all. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored with Dr. Timothy Padgett. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download your podcast.
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