We do everything possible to ignore the manifestations of intolerance that accompany migrations from Eastern Europe and the southern Mediterranean; that anti-Semitic eruptions - the profanations, the insults, the intimidations, the attacks - are symptoms of a deep, chronic and serious pathology: signs of a congenital disease of modernity that must be correctly diagnosed and traced to its genesis. Of racism, as children of modernity, we are all in some way heirs and participants, and we cannot call ourselves outside of its history just because we feel repulsion towards it. Nor can we fool ourselves into thinking that it will be easy to get rid of it. Racism responds to an ethical need rooted in modern consciousness: getting rid of it is not just a matter of common sense or good will.
