‘An educated consumer is our best customer’

Many of us got a hit of nostalgia this week when we heard that the discount department store Loehmann’s is reopening, at least as a popup shop, on Long Island.

In the metro NYC area of my childhood, Loehmann’s and its competitor Syms were popular with the Jewish-mother demographic until the chains went out of business in the 2010s.

While Loehmann’s itself didn’t have a marketing slogan, Syms had a slogan that covered the whole industry: “An educated consumer is our best customer.” The implied, uneducated customer could not benefit because it could not tell the difference between a bad deal and the good deal that Syms and Loehmann’s provided.

Since October 8th, 2023, when the world poured out onto the streets to celebrate the Hamas attacks on Israel and to protest the existence of Israel and maybe of world Jewry, the slogan has been percolating in my mind. 

The line is related, for me at least, to the longstanding Arab-Israeli conflict. For Israel and world Jewry, an educated consumer is our best — for lack of a better word —  customer. Our best ally. Our best friend. 

I think Jew haters know that education benefits us, because the primary strategy of the anti-Jewish effort since the 1990s seems to have been to prevent people from accessing direct information about the region, its history, and its conflict, preferring all of the information come from them:

• The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) forces its candidates pledge not to travel to Israel. Students for Justice in Palestine at UCLA tried to coerce students to sign a similar pledge. Mind you, those same DSA candidates and UCLA would be allowed to travel to countries that put Muslims into concentration camps (China), kill women for dress or behaviors that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in the West (many countries), or murder gay people (many countries). No one here is trying in good faith to protect your safety (such as one might try to prevent journalists from being used as human shields in a war zone) because the DSA and SJP have no issue with your traveling to other violent places despite atrocities there. The issue? Once you’ve seen Israel, you may learn the truth that Israel is a pretty regular country with a diverse population and values consistent with Western civilization. People who are thus educated will not gleefully parrot anti-Israel hate propaganda the way that the DSA or SJP wants them to. Therefore, you are not allowed to go to Israel to see the place and the conflict for yourself and use your own powers of discernment.
  
• BBC presented a video last year in which a 13-year-old Gazan child spoke about wanting to commit violent “jihad against the Jews.” The BBC’s translators must have found his statements distasteful, because they intentionally misled viewers by captioning that sentiment, more than once, “fighting against the Israeli military forces.” Their concern? An educated viewer might be horrified that children in Gaza are taught — from birth, both at home and in schools run by the United Nations — to murder Jews as their ultimate life goal. Not resistance, not Zionists, not military, but old-fashioned killing of Jews. Therefore, the BBC won’t give you the chance to be an educated viewer and make up your own mind about how you react to the truth. You will be kept in the dark on purpose.
  
• There has been a push in the largest teacher union in the United States to remove Holocaust education provided by the Anti-Defamation League since the 1980s from public-school curricula. Holocaust education teaches about the propaganda used to incite scapegoating of and hate toward Jews in the leadup toward World War II. So? An educated consumer could recognize patterns in the same type of propaganda and scapegoating happening now, refusing to help it go viral as part of the Outrage Economy. More profoundly, Holocaust education contradicts the popular “ideology” that all people are either oppressors or oppressed and that Jews, specifically, are oppressors. Educated students would learn that the history of the world is too complicated to be represented by this false binary, so we cannot allow them to be educated on this disproof. 
• Academic-looking conferences that claim to discuss Zionism do not allow Zionists to present their own philosophy, instead relying on hateful caricatures to be presented as earnest scholarship in elite academic settings. Why? Because if students heard what Zionism was from actual Zionists, they might understand that it is no different from any other moment of self-determination of any other minority people, not support of “the north star of the rise of fascism all over the world,” and then they couldn’t be weaponized on campuses as protestors against a cause they didn’t understand.
• In many places, anti-Israel protesters are told they may not speak with anyone outside their protest group. Many were not allowed to speak with the media. Some even had signs: “We do not engage with Zionists ever.” Why would protestors’ rights be limited in this way while their organizers hide behind the First Amendment? There are two excellent reasons. First, the policy prevents the media from seeing how uninformed most of these protestors are. Second, and perhaps even more critically, the policy prevents the protestors themselves from understanding how ignorant they are. If you are the sort of person who is willing to attend protests and chant things you don’t understand about places you’ve never been regarding a conflict about which you know almost nothing, holding a mirror up to it might … stop you. So you must not be allowed to be educated. Your ignorance must be weaponized against Jews and Israel without interruption.

An organization that demands that you remain ignorant is not an organization working in your best interest. It is an organization weaponizing your ignorance for its advantage. It is a whole field of red flags about the organization and maybe also about the people who willingly accept that kind of manipulation.

Run from anyone who benefits from your ignorance or insists on it. Run from their interpretations and gospels and propaganda and high priests. 

Run toward the information they don’t want you to have. Run toward organizations that benefit from educated consumers, not “Token Olam” propaganda on social media. You may be surprised how much you were not allowed to learn.