The title of this column plays off my first book, A Good Look at Evil. There I revisited some of the main philosophical ways of understanding evil before I offered my own view, exhibiting its power to illuminate a wide spectrum of situations. 

Of course, Jew-hatred — with its political embodiment, the unequal focus on the Jewish state — is merely one instance of evil. But in my personal experience, it’s a pretty telling instance.

My first intimation of the animus that would become global came when a certain philosophical colleague, and friend of my father, began making anti-Jewish speeches all over the New York academic landscape. When — with the idea of a meeting of the minds — I suggested we get together at a neighborhood cafe, he precipitated an extraordinarily unprovoked and discourteous fit of temper.

It was something he would never have done had my parents been alive. Our two families had been on the most cordial of terms. They’d visited us in Maine. My father had been instrumental in securing his appointment to my father’s philosophy department. In his turn, he’d been one of the speakers at my father’s memorial service. So his cafe scene with me — together with his new syndrome of making speeches attacking Jews — seemed to me completely out of character.

A different “small cloud no bigger than a man’s hand” appeared in the sky when a gifted colleague at Brooklyn College’s History Department told me that worrisome signs of Anti-Semitism were now incubating at the college.

Alarmed, I asked two women colleagues who were friends of his, and like me also retired, to meet in midtown. They’d been staunch allies in our successful fight to save the college’s core curriculum. My intention was to discuss what might be done to combat this new and unexpected threat besetting the college we loved, whose educational integrity we had all fought to preserve.

Much to my surprise, my hope was met with ridicule. I’d taken for granted that defending the core — as well as the dignity and safety of Jewish students and colleagues — were linked activities. To mind, both came under the head of Defending Civilization. Afterward, once I was back in Pennsylvania, both colleagues emailed me their assurance of continued professional regard. But they never withdrew their rebuff with regard to the issue of Anti-Semitism at the college, which was what I’d traveled to Manhattan to talk with them about.

Despite these early signs of an unseen fire behind the visible smoke, the events of October 7th and 8th, 2023, were for me a vast and shattering surprise. The relish with which the jihadis of October 7 cut babies from their mothers’ wombs to throw them into ovens, roped whole families together to set them afire, first mutilated, then raped and murdered women — and the hellish jubilation with which these atrocities were filmed and boasted about — such was the first aspect of my shattering surprise.

But while these atrocities were still being perpetrated — the relish with which students and faculty all over the world celebrated these crimes — was the second aspect of my shattering surprise. 

In Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1867), he affirmed that our civilization rests on two fundaments, Athens and Jerusalem: the effort to know the truth and the effort to act rightly. For me, October 7th and 8th exhibited the crumbling of our two foundations.

With the aim of keeping my personal fundaments from crumbling, I tried to enclose these doubly menacing events inside mental brackets. And I might have brought it off, had not the destabilizing factor come from what I believed to be a thoroughly harmless part of my world.

Though I’m far from the rider I used to be, there was a stable where I still rode, just for the joy of being with horses. And for the add-on that the young woman who was my minder in the saddle was also a horse whisperer. I knew about them from my riding days in Maine. The real ones can tell you what the horse would say — if the horse could talk. And horses do not deceive. They see through the nonsense.

I can’t recall what led the horse whisperer to talk about October 7th — perhaps something I said — but her words were to the effect that the atrocities perpetrated had the significance of children quarreling over toys in the sandbox!

I haven’t ridden there since. I wrote her to explain why. In her reply, she wrote that she’d only been trying to convey the distress that a mare will feel if anything threatens the herd or her colts. However, as time has gone by, that explanation strikes me as less and less credible. I don’t believe that horses are unable to tell the difference between deliberate, boastful cruelty and the victims of it.

It seems to me that, without Jews’ intending to play that role, attitudes toward Jews tend to be a metric of the sanity of a society. Therefore, to trivialize, perpetrate or celebrate the suffering of Jews —

sends shock waves

through the seismograph

of moral sanity.

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