‘If We Walk Away from Never Again, It’s Going to Happen Again, It Can’t Happen Again’: In Pre-Rosh Hashanah Call, Biden Discusses Anti-Semitism
President Joe Biden had a stark message on Thursday about anti-Semitism: “If we walk away from ‘Never Again,’ it’s going to happen again. It can’t happen again.”
“Never Again” is a rallying cry in the aftermath of the Holocaust, when approximately 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis. It’s the hope that there should never be another genocide against the Jews.
During a video call with Jewish leaders ahead of the Jewish High Holidays, Biden talked about being active in the civil rights movement in Delaware in which he “used to think that hate can be defeated. It could be wiped out.”
“But I learned a long time ago that it can’t. It only hides. It hides. It hides under the rocks and given any oxygen at all, it comes out. It’s a minority view, but it comes out. And it comes out raging,” he said. “And it’s been given too much oxygen in the last four, five, seven, 10 years. And it has seen itself whether it was, I remember spending time at the … going to the Tree of Life Synagogue … it just is amazing these things are happening, happening in America.”
The Pittsburgh synagogue was the target of a 2018 shooting where 11 people were killed and six others were injured. It was the deadliest attack in American Jewish history.
“It just shows that if we walk away from ‘Never Again’ it’s going to happen again. It can’t happen again,” said Biden.
Biden remarked that anti-Semitic attacks like the one in Pittsburgh “aren’t just a strike against the Jewish community, they’re a strike against the soul of our nation and the values with which we say we stand for no matter its source or state or rationale, we have to and will condemn this prejudice at every turn alongside other forms of hate.”
The Jewish High Holidays begin with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year – which begins at sundown on Sept. 6 and ends at nightfall on Sept. 8 – and ends on Yom Kippur, which begins at sundown on Sept. 15 and ends at nightfall the following day.
Watch above.
