Hasidic Jews in Stamford Hill, North London, prepare for Passover. The area is home to Europe's largest Hasidic Jewish community. Demotix/Piero Cruciatti. Some rights reserved.
In a video accompanying his recent article in The Nation, American journalist Jeffrey Goldberg discussed the state, and fate, of the Jews of Europe with his fellow Jewish-American intellectual Leon Wieseltier. The article and conversation have caused something of a stir since their conclusion is stark and apocalyptic: it is time for the Jews to leave Europe.
Such a contention, from two such influential thinkers, is necessarily controversial to Europeans, but we would do well to realise that Goldberg and Wieseltier's doomsday forecast is merely a prominent articulation of a notion that is, if not a consensus, then certainly widespread in the two great centres of Jewish population, Israel and America. That the Israeli establishment advocates a mass Jewish European exodus has been made repeatedly clear by Prime Minister Netanyahu, whose own enunciation of the Goldberg thesis - in the wake of Copenhagen and Charlie Hebdo - brought criticism from both Jewish communal leaders and gentile heads of state in Europe.
