He said that fighting “antisemitism isn’t only about protecting the Jewish community, [it’s] about guaranteeing the health of the society and of the country itself. The history of antisemitism is that it destroys every society that embraces it. That’s why U.S. President Donald Trump always calls it a ‘vile poison.’”
Carr, who was recently interviewed by journalist Orit Arfa for the Jewish syndication service JNS, said that “hatred of Israel is the hatred of the Jewish people” and that he believes that antisemitism is often “weaponized for political purposes.”
“Movements that seek to suffocate the one Jewish country out of existence through economic boycotts—that is anti-Semitism in its unvarnished manifestation,” he told Arfa.
Carr also noted that he believes that moves to have Jews hide their identity is not a solution to the rise of antisemitism around the world. His counterpart in Germany, for example, recommended that Jews not walk around with their kippahs showing.
“ I don’t think the response to antisemitism should ever be the hiding of the Jewish community or the advice to Jews that they hide who they are,” Carr said. “If that’s what Jews have to do in the face of antisemitism, then we’ve lost the fight. And so, I think Jews have every right to express themselves Jewishly, and that means do it in a public way.
“I say this at every opportunity I can: Jew-hatred is Jew-hatred, and it’s evil, and it doesn’t matter if it comes from the ethnic supremacist right, from the vicious anti-Zionist left or from radical Islam,” he concluded.