My father was not what you would call a philosemite. At the dinner table, he complained bitterly about the Jewish employee who supervised him when he got a job at a defense company, after his career as an insurance salesman ground to a halt in his late 40s.

My father would repeatedly refer to the Jewish man in obscene and racist terms, as my brother and I would look down at our plates. Our mother would remonstrate with him from across the dinner table, to no avail. To be fair, my father spoke about one of his Irish Catholic colleagues in similarly bigoted language, but the phrase he used to describe his Jewish supervisor was much worse than the man with the Irish last name he also disdained.

But for all the contempt my father expressed for his Jewish supervisor, he was a Zionist. Part of his Zionism was rooted in his admiration of Israel’s success, but it was also rooted in a desire not to repeat the horrors of World War II.

Dad knew full well that German Jew-hatred was a major factor in starting a war that cost 60 million people their lives. His own father, who returned from World War I a profoundly wounded human being, cried like a baby at the kitchen table in Harrisville, New Hampshire, when he learned of the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. He had a premonition that he was going to lose one of his two sons in the ensuing war.

“And he did,” dad said. My father’s older brother, who joined the Marines when he was 17, died on Iwo Jima in early 1945 at the age of 20. “He saw three pitched battles by his 19th birthday,” Dad would say. “Tinian, Saipan, and Iwo Jima.”

Consequently, my father had a visceral and supernatural fear of antisemitism and the chaos it introduced into the world. That’s why he supported Israel. Anything that made it harder to kill Jews was a good thing — not just for Jews, but for non-Jews as well.

He vocalized his support for Israel when the UN General Assembly passed the “Zionism is Racism” resolution in 1975. “What do they think they’re doing?” he asked. “Don’t they remember?” He viewed the Arab world’s open expression of hostility toward the Jews as a people as a harbinger of catastrophe — not just for the Jews, but Arabs as well. The past few decades of the region’s history confirm this assessment.

Three decades after his death, my father would be shocked to see the growing prevalence of antisemitism in American society where, according to the FBI, Jews are by far and away the most likely targets of violence because of their identity. For him, no patriotic American could hate the Jews as a people because to do so would be to side with the forces that turned Europe into a disaster zone in the mid-20th century. “Don’t they remember?” he would ask. (No Dad, they don’t, and I’m sorry.)

My father, a lifelong Republican, would be shocked at Tucker Carlson’s efforts to portray Hitler as something less than the world-ending villain he was in a recent interview. As shocking as it is to hear such an assessment, this interview was preceded by a flood of commentary from the left portraying Israel — not Hamas — as the villain in the aftermath of the October 7 massacre. In sum, the left and the right have contributed to the diminishment of what used to be a strategic asset that kept the crazies from power in the West: Contempt for Jew-haters.

Despite his disdain for his Jewish supervisor, my father understood that those who hate Jews cannot and should not be trusted. Maybe this is something French military officer Georges Picquart understood during the Dreyfus Affair, which rocked France between 1894 and 1906. Picquart was no philosemite, and according to The New York Times, was “casually antisemitic.”

Nevertheless, he spent a year in jail as a result of his role in the ultimately successful effort to absolve Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew, falsely charged with spying for the Germans in the 1890s.

Picquart’s efforts did not just help the falsely accused Dreyfus, or French Jews, but France itself. As long as France falsely blamed Dreyfus for espionage, France would be unable to acknowledge who the real threat was — Ferdinand Esterhazy, who had been spying for the Germans for years. Blaming Dreyfus the Jew obscured the real problem: a general air of incompetence in the French military establishment — an incompetence that played a huge role in France’s disastrous defeat at the hands of Hitler’s armies in the mid-20th century.

The truth is that as long as elites blame Jews for problems in the societies they lead, they will remain unable to confront the source of the threats to their well-being.

But there is hope. When my father died after a long period of confronting his demons — and helping others to do the same — hundreds of people showed up at his wake. A man in his fifties came through the reception line and offered me and my brother condolences over our father’s death.

“I worked with your dad,” he told us. “I learned so much from him. He was a really good man. He was very kind to me.”

“What’s your name?” my brother asked. He told us. We both shook his hand earnestly and thanked him before he moved on to speak to our mother. My brother and I struggled to keep our mouths from opening in shock as we looked at one another. It was the Jewish supervisor our father had routinely vilified at the dinner table years before. Wide-eyed, we nodded at one another before extending our hands to the next mourning well-wisher, awash with astonishment and gratitude.

Dexter Van Zile is managing editor of Focus on Western Islamism, a news site published by the Middle East Forum. His opinions are his own.

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