What She Said

photo by Stephen Jaffee

 I don't always agree with Bari Weiss. In fact, more often than not, I take issue with some of her statements. That said, she still makes a good argument for her positions and I think she's worth reading. That's my opinion. On November 12th, she addressed the General Assembly at the annual conference of Jewish Federations. Her speech, The Old World Is Not Coming Back, is a powerful call to pull our heads out of our asses. She begins with a simple question, When did you know?

Looking back, now that we are on the far side, I wonder: When did you realize that things had changed?

When did you know that the things we had taken for granted were suddenly out of our reach? That the norms that felt as certain as gravity had disappeared? That the institutions that had launched our grandparents had turned hostile to our children?

When did you notice that what had once been steady was now shaky ground? Did you look down to see if your own knees were trembling?

When did you realize that we were not immune from history, but living inside of it?

When did you see that our world was actually the world of yesterday—and a new one, one with far fewer certainties, one where everything seems up for grabs, was coming into being?

Maybe it was September 11, 2001, when Islamist terrorists murdered 3,000 Americans. Maybe you noticed, as my friend Jonathan Rosen did, that “an explosion of Jew hatred seemed to have ridden in on the contrails of the airplanes that jihadists had turned into weapons of mass destruction and aimed at the heart of American civilization.”

Maybe it was the second intifada, in which everyday places—Mike’s Place and Sbarro and Café Moment and the Dolphinarium—became synonyms for slaughterhouses, even as few of our would-be allies said their names.

Or maybe it was on February 1, 2002, when al-Qaeda beheaded the journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan as he spoke his final words: “My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish.”

Or maybe it wasn’t until the Shabbat morning of October 27, 2018, when a neo-Nazi gunned down 11 Jews at Tree of Life while shouting, “All Jews must die!”

Or maybe it was the shooting, six months later, at the Chabad of Poway. For Hannah Kaye, who witnessed the murder of her mother, Lori Gilbert Kaye, it surely was. Or maybe it was in January of 2022, when a gunman held the congregants of Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, hostage.

Or maybe it was beforehand—the bombing of the AMIA Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina; the terror attack at the Chabad of Mumbai, India; the school shooting in Toulouse, France; the murder of Sarah Halimi, who was thrown out of her apartment window in Paris. (French prosecutors decided to drop murder charges against her killer, who had shouted “Allahu Akbar” and who had told them: “When I saw the Torah and a chandelier in her home, I felt oppressed,” because, those prosecutors said, he had smoked weed.

Maybe it was the rise of Jeremy Corbyn in England. Or the white supremacists marching through Charlottesville, Virginia, with their tiki torches. Maybe it was the antisemites at the helm of the Women’s March. Or maybe it was the social consequences you suffered when you dared to notice them.

Maybe, as it was for so, so many, it was the morning of October 7, when Hamas terrorists came across the border into southern Israel on foot and on motorbike and by truck and by car and by paraglider to murder and maim anyone they could find. They came armed with maps that indicated which houses had children. Which family owned a dog.

But maybe even that wasn’t enough. It was still over there. Not here.

Maybe it took until October 8 when, in Times Square, people were cheering, exhilarated at news of Jewish death.

Or perhaps it was the moral inversion in the days that followed: the Chicago chapter of BLM using the symbol of a hang glider—the symbol of mass murder—as a sign of liberation. Or when the heads of Harvard and Penn and MIT, who run schools that cater to the most minute of microaggressions, could not answer in the affirmative to whether calling for the genocide of Jews qualified as bullying and harrassment. Or the professors and Broadway producers that tore down posters of women and children and babies taken by Hamas.

Maybe it was when you organized the march. And none of the people who post about being allies showed up.

Or maybe it was physical attacks on Jewish students at Tulane, at the University of Pittsburgh, at DePaul. Maybe it was the school shootings in Toronto and Montreal. Or maybe it was the now near-daily assaults on the streets of Brooklyn against the most visible members of our community.

Or maybe it was more subtle—the quiet purging of proud Jews, like the novelist Elisa Albert, who refuses to be quiet about Israel, from the arts, from museum boards, from human-rights groups. Maybe it was watching what your children were learning in their “ethnic studies” class about Israel and the Jewish people.

Maybe it was the mobs that gathered outside of Michael Rapaport’s comedy show, calling him a “racist Zionist,” or the venue in Chicago that canceled a Matisyahu concert because they claimed they couldn’t guarantee his safety.

Or maybe you knew when an Orthodox Jewish man was shot while walking to his synagogue on Shabbat in Rogers Park, Chicago—only to be offered “thoughts and prayers” by the city’s mayor.

Or maybe it took the event of two weeks ago, when Jews were hunted in the streets of Amsterdam. A pogrom in twenty-first century Europe. They called it a “Jew hunt.” In one of the recordings from the attack, a man jumps into one of Amsterdam’s canals to escape his assailants. He is forced to say “Free Palestine” as he treads in the water. His assailants laugh and jeer that he is a “cancer Jew.”

Soon, I am sure, Columbia students will hold a protest on the pogromist’s behalf. Don’t believe me? A group of them just spent Veterans Day on the quad, holding a memorial event for Sinwar. 

When did you know?

This is not a flippant or rhetorical question. The admission that "things" are changing for us in this country does not come easily to anyone. This is America! The Goldene Medina! The place we came to escape pogroms and hate! The place we could live openly and freely as Jews. We hoped, we came, we built new lives outside the ghetto walls...either real or implied. We fought for social justice. We fought for equal rights. We stood up to be counted for Civil Rights. We shared in the dream that was America.

I'm not so sure we're sharing in it these days. 

People and groups we once thought of as allies are not. They have proven themselves to be in favor of a Judenrein world as they call for the globalization of intifada. I am certain they have no idea what they're encouraging, nor do they understand that once the Jews are gone, some other group will take our place. But that really doesn't matter when mob rule takes over. Jews are the other; we're on the outside once again. 

I totally get how the German Jews believed Hitler's lunacy would all blow over and things would go back to "normal." Our neighbor down the block once explained how her uncle convinced her aunt to take the kids and get out of Warsaw because he believed the Germans were coming. My neighbor's own father, his brother, was not convinced anything would happen. The uncle got his family out, my neighbor's family was in Auschwitz. She and her mother were the only ones to survive. "It never blows over," she told me. "And they always come back." I also knew that she kept packed suitcases in the basement ...one for each of them....just in case.

The first exile from Jerusalem happened around 587 BCE (about 2600 years ago, that's about 600 years before Jesus was born, about 2150 years before Mohammed was born in 570CE) and Jews were forcibly take to Babylonia. Since then, we have survived exiles and returns, expulsions, forced conversions, inquisitions, pogroms, and intentional exclusions...redlining, quota systems....you know what I'm talking about. And now, we're facing it full frontal all over again in America. 

In all that time, we have always had a presence in the land now called Israel. We were there through it all. Our liturgy is directed at Jerusalem. Our hopes, our prayers, and our communal aspirations have always been directed toward Jerusalem. It has always been our homeland, our home. Jerusalem will always be our heart. 

We can stick our heads in the sand in hopes it will all blow over, but from a historical perspective, we already know that it will not. The intifada movement will continue to grow, to be a proxy for Iran's hatred toward the west. We know who's funding the movements here and in Europe. Since the world has chosen to support them, to tell us we are not entitled to defend ourselves, we must take that responsibility for ourselves.  Or not. Or just finally die off.

That is so not happening. 

We are a stiff-necked people. Even G-d said so: Exodus 32:9

.ט  וַיֹּאמֶר יְהוָה, אֶל-מֹשֶׁה: רָאִיתִי אֶת-הָעָם הַזֶּה, וְהִנֵּה עַם-קְשֵׁה-עֹרֶף הוּא.

And the LORD said unto Moses: 'I have seen this people, and, behold, it is a stiff-necked people.'                                    

Loosely translated, take that to mean Don't fuck with us. 

We are Jews. We choose life. And if it means leaving overfed, overtaxed Ameritekva, that's what we'll do. 

The Wifely Person's Tip o'the Week

I am a Jew.

The survival of the children comes first. 

Our children are our future.