“All the World Wants the Jews Dead: An Overwrought View from the Peak at the Bottom”

“All the World Wants the Jews Dead: An Overwrought View from the Peak at the Bottom”—a 7,200-word essay by Cynthia Ozick published in Esquire magazine in November 1974—is still as powerful and urgent as on the day it appeared. Now that Dara Horn and Bari Weiss, two of America’s most dynamic young writers, have given us their own updated versions of this theme—Weiss in How to Fight Anti-Semitism and her recent Substack entry, “Everybody Hates the Jews,” and Horn in her compelling book People Love Dead Jews—it is worth returning to see whether anything has changed since Ozick’s blast.

The October 1973 war, initiated in a surprise attack on Yom Kippur, was the fourth and most traumatic of the wars Israel had fought in the quarter-century since its creation. The heavy early losses made it the most devastating to Jewish morale. In its aftermath, Ozick traveled to Israel, “not in the hours when the mourning over the fallen was fresh, but soon enough,” as amputees were being fitted for limbs and the Syrians were still refusing to name the Israeli prisoners they held. Visiting Israel then was like entering a house of shiva. Ozick, however, was not there to mourn, but rather to indict both the aggressors and the “world” that was colluding with them.

Even at this remove of a half-century it is hard to fathom the sheer hatefulness of that combined Arab attack in celebration of Ramadan—for it was during the Muslim sacred season that the leaders of Egypt and Syria attacked the Jews on the holiest day of the Jewish year. Set against regional coexistence, unsatisfied with their preposterous advantages of land and resources that were compounded by all they had seized from the centuries-old Jewish communities they had recently expelled, averse to internal reforms that would make their countries competitive with the West, and smarting from their rout in the June 1967 war that they had launched a mere six years earlier, the Arab leaders, inspired by Hitler’s example, thought to recover Arab pride by erasing the Jewish state from the map. A more cowardly and villainous war had never been conceived by invaders who may have felt they had nothing to lose: their hundreds of thousands of restive young men were dispensable cannon fodder, and their vast economic and political superiority would keep the international community quiet, if not on their side.