The following is making its rounds on Facebook:
Many of my FB friends are appalled.
If Jews in France were not feeling welcome recently, they got another dose of reality when a graphics design company posted a “help wanted” ad on a specialty website that specified candidates should not be Jewish (if possible.)
I’m not buying the company’s explanation either. This kind of casual, unthinking, nauseating anti-Semitism is making a big comeback all over Europe. It has become respectable to hate Jews again, and blame them for the world’s ills. It’s already led to violence against Jews and not just by Muslims. Swastikas painted on synagogues are becoming more common and jostling Jews in the streets has become so bad that some parents refuse to let their kids walk to school.
The left isn’t quite as crude in their anti-Semitism. They disguise their hatred in the form of anti-Israel rants. Attacking the Jewish state by elites has become a substitute for the less sophisticated violent attacks against Jews on the streets, but it is there nonetheless.
And Europe is failing utterly to deal with it.
I see nothing wrong with such an ad. I think people should have free association. If they don’t want to hire Jews, have Jews as customers, hang around Jews, they should have that right. I am an Orthodox Jew. I choose to spend most of my spare time with other Orthodox Jews. I live in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood that became heavily in Jewish, in part, through discrimination, through Jewish homeowners refusing to sell to anyone who was not Jewish. I am sure there are plenty of employers who for certain jobs only want to hire Jews.
The more united a workplace, or a community or a shul or a country, the more homogeneous it is, the stronger. If a workplace of 12 entirely consists of French Catholics or French Muslims or French Jews or French atheists, it will not be strengthened, generally speaking, by the addition of somebody different.
Each group has distinctive gifts. Each group has certain traits. Jews are more emotional, for instance, than WASPs. Jews are a difficult people. It makes sense to me that there might be restaurants or hotels that don’t want to do deal with them. I understand that there may be Gentiles who don’t want to mix with Jews. There are certainly plenty of Jews who don’t want to mix with goyim any more than is necessary.
Every strongly identifying in-group has hostility to outsiders. There’s nothing wrong with that.
If a Jew insists on keeping kosher, he can’t eat at the home or in the restaurant of someone who does not keep kosher. This is discrimination and there’s nothing wrong with it. If Gentiles want to have Jew-free dining clubs, a kind of reverse kosher, there’s nothing wrong with that either.
