When the news came about the massacre in the synagogue in Pittsburgh, we were all horrified, but I don’t think anyone was really surprised. The question of “ it happening here” in recent years has been more a matter of “when” than “if.” Rhetorical violence begets real violence. The news cycle for mass shootings have become shorter and shorter. A brief flare of outrage; some people say there are too many guns; idiots like our president complain that there aren’t enough guns. The news media shares and milks the grief of the loved ones of the victims for a few days, impotent anger at the inability to change the political dynamic is expressed; the next big story emerges, and the caravan passes on.

But this feels different. I guess part of it that the attack was on Jews, and Pittsburgh, in my experience, is lot like Rochester, a city where I lived for many years, a northeastern rust belt city with a large Jewish community, with old synagogues, founded by German Jews over a century and a half ago. I imagined myself attending shabbat services or Torah study yesterday morning, discussing Sarah or Sodom, when an intruder walks in with an AK-47 and starts shooting. This incident is not only about gun violence, the pitifully and banally evil man who occupies the highest office in our country. It is about anti-Semitism and hatred of Jews.

Jews talk a lot about anti-Semitism. It comes with the territory. In recent years there has been an ideological divide in such discussions. Those on the right and center focus on left-wing Antisemitism, Middle Eastern terrorism, and lately, BDS efforts. Those on the left are more likely to speak of right wing anti-Semitism, and traditional fascistic or neo-Nazi Jew hatred, and the perpetrator of the atrocity in Pittsburgh seems like a classic example of this, spouting nonsense about Jewish power and secret conspiracies. I do think a lot of the concern about anti-Semitism on the left, especially in connection to BDS is exaggerated or feigned, and legitimate criticisms of Israel are often tarred with the anti-Semitic brush. But there’s no doubt that there are anti-Semites on the left, as there are anti-Semites of the right, and anti-Semites of the center. They differ in many respects, but they all agree that somehow Jews are uniquely insidious. Antisemites hate Jews, and beyond that, see Jews as an explanatory category for everything that is wrong with the world, and often, everything that is wrong with their lives.

When there were murderous attacks on Jews in France a few years ago, Israel’s prime minister and large sections of the Jewish press ran article after article claiming that Jews were unsafe in France and Europe, and needed to make Aliyah. Despite the fact that more Jews were killed in Pittsburgh yesterday than in any anti-Semitic incident in recent years, I don’t think Netanyahu will make the same call for American Jews to pull up stakes and move to Israel, because it would upset his buddy, the president of the United States. But the question remains, is America a safe place for the Jews? And the answer must be, No. America is not really a safe place anymore for anybody, especially for those who don’t fit into the president’s conception of what America should be and who should be here.

I personally don’t think Trump is an anti-Semite, or not much of one. He knew plenty of Jews in NYC, as real estate colleagues/rivals and as tenants in his apartment complexes, and one senses that as a deracinated German growing up in NYC after WWII, he sometimes thought of himself, and carried himself, as an honorary Jew. And attacking Jews, unlike attacking blacks or immigrants is not good for his politics. This doesn’t matter. All I can say is that anti-Semites think he is an anti-Semite, and that’s good enough for me.

The point is, when you begin promoting a politics of hate, a politics based on demonizing outsiders, when you have a nationalist politics that wants to “take the country back,” when you fear monger about “the other” taking over, you are engaging in the politics of anti-Semitism, whether or not you are attacking Jews or not. Even if you denominate other targets, sooner or later you will probably get around to attacking Jews, or condoning attacks on Jews. Antisemitism was present in Trump’s politics from the beginning, sometimes latent, sometimes not. It was probably predictable that Netanyahu, who has built his career on attacking and marginalizing Palestinians, has condoned attacks on George Soros, the anti-Semitic bogeyman of the moment (rich, a “globalist” a supporter of liberal causes) because his politics of hate attracts a lot of haters. And Trump’s politics of hate, telling people to fear and hate blacks and foreigners, always attracts the anti-Semites, because Jews remain both the quintessential homeless diasporic wanderers (the existence of Israel notwithstanding), and the connection of the current so-called “caravan” to Soros, to old-line immigrant aid organizations like HIAS is no accident. And of course, Jews control everything, the tired and the poor telling the high and the mighty what to do, or vice versa. Jews have always been easy to hate.

Acts of anti-Semitism are always an alarm bell, a warning that something has gone terribly wrong in a society. And so it is for America today. Hate, always linked to fear, is perhaps the most primal of political emotions. It gives wayward lives a purpose, a direction, an explanation of what is wrong with the world, and an answer to what is wrong with your life. In America a hatred that has long been submerged, and has long given an impetus to Republican politics has become all too explicit. It’s surprising that something like Pittsburgh didn’t happen sooner. Something like it will likely happen again. Winning elections won’t end the problem by any means, but it’s a place to start. You don’t cure hatred by hating the hater. You must address the hatred. And you address the hatred by giving the haters the means to address their fears without hate. No one said getting the world we want to live in would be easy.

There are few better explainers of the mechanics and psychology of hate than the African American religious thinker Howard Thurman. Let me end by quoting from his classic work, Jesus and the Disinherited (1949):

Hatred finally destroys the life of the hater. While it lasts, burning in white heat, its effect seems positive and dynamic. But at last it turns to ash, for it guarantees a final isolation from one’s fellows. Hatred bears deadly and bitter fruit. It is blind and nondiscriminating…Once hatred is released, it cannot be controlled. It is difficult for hatred to be informed as to objects when it gets underway…the logic of the development of hatred is death to the spirit and disintegration of ethical and moral values.

As Thurman suggests, hatred in America is turning our souls to ashes and cinders. Mourn the dead in Pittsburgh, but don’t forget to organize.