Erin Go Blah

By Meir Y. Soloveichik

Sunday, December 21, 2025

 

In June 2025, the London-based journalist Brendan O’Neill visited Ireland, the land of his ancestors. He found it consumed with one subject above all: “It’s suffocating. Wherever you go, whether city or bog, you’ll see it and hear it—that swirling animus for the Jewish State. The political class speaks of little else. The media are feverishly obsessed. From every political party, every TV set, every soapbox, the cry goes out: Israel is evil!”

 

This obsession with Israel, O’Neill added, is even more striking because, he says, fads in Dublin usually are often ignored in the Irish countryside. Yet in the green hills of Ireland, Israelophobia is ubiquitous: “There were once statues of the Virgin Mother on Ireland’s roadsides, imploring you to resist evil; now, there are dire reminders of the evil Israel commits. It feels like the Jewish State has become a Satan substitute in post-Catholic Ireland. You prove your virtue through renouncing hate.”

 

The most recent anti-Semitic act was the attempt to erase the name of the late Israeli President Chaim Herzog from a park in Dublin. Herzog is best known for his dramatic opposition, with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, to the United Nations “Zionism is racism” resolution. He was also an Irish Jew; his father, Isaac Herzog, was chief rabbi in Ireland before taking the same position in the newborn Jewish state.

 

The attempt to rename the park has been put on pause, but as O’Neill has noted, Ireland’s bizarre hatred of its most distinguished Jewish family has existed for some time: “In 2014 the memorial plaque marking his birthplace in north Belfast was so frequently attacked and daubed with insulting graffiti that it had to be taken down.” Herzog died long before the recent Gaza war, which reflects the fact that, in O’Neill’s words, “the thirst for effacing his legacy has nothing to do with the current war and everything to do with hating Jews who are proudly Zionist.”

 

How are we to explain the fact that hatred of Israel has, in a sense, become part and parcel of Irish culture? Some, such as O’Neill, have noted that in what was once a Catholic rock of Christendom, Ireland has embraced wokeism with a passion. Others have linked the current moment with perhaps the most shameful event in Irish history: when Eamon de Valera, the Irish taoiseach (prime minister) and one of its founding fathers, visited the German Embassy in 1945 to express his condolences for the death of Adolf Hitler, an event so surpassingly strange that I continue to be shocked every time I read of it. The true explanation lies in something deeper: Ireland’s recent anti-Semitic spasm highlights, in a striking way, the essence of anti-Semitism itself.

 

It was the theologian Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) who pointed to the connection between Jewish eternity and ongoing anti-Semitism. The Jews, for Rosenzweig, act as a sort of mirror of mortality: Nations study the mysterious endurance of this much-persecuted people and discover in it a reminder that most of the polities and peoples encountered by the Jews have long since disappeared. This is an uncomfortable fact, and Jews are resented for the reminder, envied for immortality. “The peoples of the world,” Rosenzweig reflected, “foresee a time when their land with its rivers and mountains still lies under heaven as it does today, but other people dwell there; when their language is entombed in books, and their laws and customs have lost their living power. We [Jews] alone cannot imagine such a time.”

 

The refusal of the Jews to disappear has driven many a man mad and inspired anti-Semitism in more than a few societies. But for Ireland, the miracle of Jewish history may be even more maddening, because the seeming similarities between their two stories highlight the actual differences between them. Israel is a country that, like Ireland, achieved independence after being in the British Empire. But consider what Israel did with that independence. Its ancient language, Hebrew, was revived as the central medium of Jewish vernacular expression. The Jewish faith has flourished in Israel, rejuvenated in the land of the Bible. And its demographic future seems safe; Israel is the only Western-style democracy with a birthrate above replacement level.

 

Ireland is nearly the exact opposite. The Irish Times recently reported that only 40 percent of the country’s population speaks Gaelic, and that’s largely in rural areas. To walk the streets of Dublin is not to hear its traditional language spoken as part of daily life, while the same can certainly not be said of Hebrew in Jerusalem. And the bulwark of Catholicism in the Protestant Anglosphere is now secularized—or, in a woke-ist way, paganized. Ireland’s birthrate of 1.5 takes on an even more tragic pallor when contrasted to its recent history: It once boasted a birthrate of 4. The Irish, to paraphrase Rosenzweig, can easily imagine a time when “their language is entombed in books, and their laws and customs have lost their living power.” Israel is everything Ireland might have hoped it would be; Israel achieved with its independence from Britain more than most thought possible. Given these similarities, the contrasts between Israel and Ireland are striking. I think that, deep down, many in Ireland understand this, and this knowledge has driven them mad.

 

In 1891, an Irish-born author by the name of Oscar Wilde composed a novel about a man who sells his soul in order to acquire immortality. All his aging, and reminders of imminent death, would be transferred to a portrait, while his own hedonic embrace of life could continue unabated. The portrait, as many noted, acted as a moral mirror that revealed his own faults. Today, the Dorian Gray that is Ireland has discovered in Israel its mirror image: a Jewish country that is the very image of youth, cultural and religious resurrection, and a maddening reflection that reminds Ireland of its own failures, of the sad state of its own disappearing heritage, and of the fact that the Irish themselves have abandoned it. Countries, have, in the past, acted to halt their own decline; but the renaming of a park will not do the trick, nor will it undo the undeniable fact that am Yisrael chai.