Anti-Semitism is surging in a manner eerily reminiscent of the mid-20th century, when World War II broke out and the Holocaust claimed 6 million Jewish lives. There are extreme right-wingers coalescing around new media platforms (radio then, the internet now) to spread their hate-based philosophy. Conspiracy theories continue to be shared about Jewish banking families controlling the weather and Jewish space lasers igniting wildfires. Year after year there has been a rise in anti-Semitic hate crimes, which may even be underreported.
On top of the inherent injustice of religious and ethnic persecution, anti-Semitism has also darkened the lives of many of history's most important intellectuals, from Franz Kafka to Albert Einstein. One of these famous intellectuals to also be victimized by anti-Semitism is the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. He was less than two months away from his 82nd birthday during the Anschluss, or the annexation of Austria by Adolf Hitler's expanding and genocidally anti-Semitic German empire. A lifelong Austrian who loved his home city of Vienna, Freud was destined to flee his native land while in the thrall of a mortal disease and spend his dying days in a distant city. While enduring these hardships, he also penned a work called "Moses and Monotheism" that dealt specifically with Jewish issues — and in a way that many of Freud's critics felt was profoundly disrespectful to Judaism.
