Sometime in 2021, I naively asked the question: “When are Jews Going to Say: ‘Enough!’”? I was writing an article about Jewish participation in the Spanish Civil War when I heard that Orthodox Jews had been physically attacked for no reason other than they were identifiably Jewish. This was not the first time I’d heard such a story. It kept repeating, and I heard Jews asking themselves, “Is it starting here?” (We could no longer say, “It can’t happen here” because it had already happened in Charlottesville.) Perhaps, I wondered, the attack on the Capitol Building the previous year would be the wake-up call necessary to put us “on notice” –perhaps the amount of antisemitic propaganda found there in the debris would provide us with some insight. Perhaps knowing that German Jews thought Nazi thugs would disappear if they were ignored, would also prove useful.
United States Senator Tammy Duckworth had been making TV appearances that entire week. She was condemning attacks against the Asian community. Kudos to her, but I was left wondering when a Jewish politician or A-List entertainer would come out in support of Jewish victims. This was before October 7th and the disgusting pro-Palestinian university protests that followed.
Jakob Lestchinsky warned the Polish Jews of this time in his book, Erev Khurbn [On the Eve of the Holocaust], presciently written in November 1937, about the antisemitism then blanketing Poland. He wrote: “Perhaps in these depressing times when Jews are lowering their heads, bending their spines, and waiting patiently for this angry storm to pass, we should stop waiting passively and actively oppose it.” Good advice then and good advice now, I thought.
In 2022, I wrote that the stench of antisemitism was permeating the air as we held our collective breath at our own peril. We Jews know what happens when hatred and bigotry go unopposed. Even so, I still believed in the innate goodness of people and supported a homeland for the “Palestinians” living in Gaza and the West Bank.
As a liberal Jew, I supported the Black Lives Matter movement to an extent. It was refusing to accept the casual slaughter of its people. I wanted to support BLM fully as I had supported other civil rights movements in the past. I respected what it was doing and why they were doing it. If I were Black, I would have been marching with them. But, but how could I support a group that didn’t respect me or mine? I was not calling for Jews to step away from BLM; I wanted BLM to step away from the racists within their ranks.
BLM, particularly its Chicago branch, paid and still pays homage to Louis Farrakhan, a blatant antisemite. After reading 100 of his antisemitic comments on the Anti-Defamation League website, I stopped counting; I didn’t want to spend the day reading his vitriolic poison. I wondered if the BLM movement supported him because black people are antisemitic or if it was because they lacked awareness of Farrakhan’s bigotry and hatred. If the latter, whose fault was that? Which led me to wonder whose fault it was if Jews don’t know their own history? Whose fault was it if Jewish kids don’t know enough about who they are to counter the falsehoods disseminated on college campuses and in the media? Or spread by those who were unaware, or worse, by those who were aware, but continued to spread lies?
While BLM members marched through the country demanding their rights, respect, and security, to which they are entitled, the New York Jewish community suffered one assault after the next. An Orthodox Jewish couple was strolling with their baby in New York City. A knife-wielding assailant slashed all three–fortunately, no one died. I scoured the Internet and media for more information. The Jewish news outlets mentioned it, but there was almost nothing in the popular press. I wondered where the media that Jews allegedly controlled was and why this story wasn’t of sufficient importance to garner attention. A baby was intentionally cut—what other information was necessary? At what point were we Jews going to say: “Enough! We will no longer allow ourselves to be defamed! We will no longer tolerate the babbling of ignorant, intolerant fools who are unaware of their own history, let alone the history of the Jews! We will no longer accept these attacks in silence!”
I ended that essay begging Jews to step up when our people are being attacked and defamed. I insisted we could not help others unless we first protected ourselves. I quoted the great sage, Hillel the Elder, who asked, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And being only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”
And then I woke to the nightmare of October 7. I foolishly thought the world would rise in horror. Instead, children so ignorant as to be laughable, who knew and understood nothing, rose to defend murderers, rapists, and baby killers on their college campuses. Spilled Jewish blood meant nothing to them. They either brushed aside or denied that innocent people who believed in the exact cause they were advocating were murdered, raped, burned to death, kidnapped, and subjected to every kind of barbaric horror. Their equally brain-washed professors could not bring themselves to say that calling for the death and destruction of an entire nation was wrong because when those so-called scholars heard these calls for death to Israel, they heard it in a “context” of their own creation. But the nation being maligned and threatened was the only Jewish nation in the world, therefore deserving of the scorn, hatred, and violence heaped upon it.
These useful idiots decried Israel’s response even before Israel knew what that response was going to be. When asked what they would do in Israel’s position, they are silent. But since October 7th, many things have occurred. Israel has been castigated and vilified by know-nothings laying claim to Jewish history. Even Pope Francis has joined the braying for Jewish capitulation to the frenzied mob when he allowed the Baby Jesus to be wrapped in a keffiyeh as He lay in His creche. A keffiyeh—the symbol of a religion that didn’t exist until seven hundred years after the birth of Jesus and which represents a group of people who seek the death of not only Jews but also Christians.
As antisemitic Canadians shoot at a Jewish girls’ elementary school for the third time this year; as a synagogue is set aflame with worshippers inside and protesters waiting for them outside; as Islamists target and blow up a school in Tel Aviv; as a grown man shoots and kills a twelve-year-old boy for no reason, but his religion; as elderly Jews are punched in the face on Brooklyn streets because they are Jews… I have learned the answers to Hillel’s questions: No one is here for the Jews…again. So, we Jews must be for ourselves. But we are not only for ourselves. Despite our people being held hostage by a rabid enemy, Israel sends food, medicine, and warnings to the Gazans, often to Israel’s detriment. No army other than the Israeli Defense Force gives such warnings to their enemies. Israel does this despite the duplicitous cries of “Apartheid” and “Genocide” by those who have, in fact, committed those crimes themselves. And, finally, to the last question asked by Hillel, the Jews, as personified by the State of Israel, have decided that the “when” is “now,” as Israel destroys not only its own enemies but the enemies threatening the rest of the world.