Dear Protesters…

Dear Peaceful Protesters:

Please put your posters and banners down for a second and raise your hand if:

1. You have more participation trophies than the New York Yankees have World Series rings.

2. Your parents confronted at least one teacher to insist that you deserved a better grade on your Natural Habitats of the Triceratops diorama.

3. You wouldn’t recognize your college application essay if someone read it to you. Because someone else wrote it for you.

Let’s agree that you are misunderstood, mad as in severely unbalanced, or merely a self-righteous, entitled brat. You are probably a college undergrad, or recent graduate who majored in any subject followed by the word, “History,” or “Studies,” returning to campus to relive those halcyon radical days because no one will hire you. 

Your knowledge of Israel is probably limited to the fact that it isn’t Europe and that there are lots of hummus trees and lox-fish, but what a grand way to get out of final exams! After all, it’s been years since you got to dress up in silly costumes, make new radical friends, indulge in Arts & Crafts projects like sign-making on poster board with Magic Markers, have play-dates that extend to sleep-overs. Instead of playing “Duck, Duck, Goose!” you play, “Free, Free Palestine!” from the encampment you set up on university property with expensive tents and sleeping bags most undergraduates couldn’t afford without a little help from your (Marxist) friends. Your Smart Phones stay charged, so you can have any number of food delivery services provide you with bottled water and protein drinks to wash down your gourmet wrap sandwiches, avocado toast and Japanese Poke bowls, so you stay strong enough to show those disadvantaged, displaced Gazans, most of whom voted for and support Hamas, that you’re fighting the “good” fight…

You’re angry. You’re hysterical. You’re cicadas, coming out every few years, your chants and demands making the high-pitched, non-stop buzzing of the cicada sound better than the Brandenburg Concertos.

But I get it. After the atrocities of October 7^th in Israel, who wouldn’t be? And, who better to blame than the Jews? Again. “The Jews?” you say, “I have nothing against the Jews. I’m not antisemitic. I’m anti-Zionist!” Perhaps you forget that we Jews, a disproportionately targeted minority, know exactly what you mean. After all, we weren’t born yesterday. We were born 5,784 years ago.

At Columbia University, you took over a building, blockaded yourselves in, took a few workers hostage and then were incredulous that no one offered you “humanitarian” aid in the form of bottled spring water and gluten-free lunches and dinners. Your spokeswoman tried appealing to the rest of us because “severe dehydration” can cause brain damage. Too late. 

I’m not sure what I’m most offended by – the hate speech and threats you spew at Jews and all Israelis like a tennis ball machine, or the fact that you get your news from The Young Turks, Tik-Tok and the Daily Planet. You are not the first generation to protest a war. My generation marched and fought against the Vietnam War. That was a war that our country, (note the words our country, as opposed to someone else’s country), should have never been involved in. Add to that, most of us could find Hanoi and Saigon on a map. Why do I believe that most of you could not correctly identify which river and sea you’re screaming about without a game of Charades or Pictionary?

It amazes me how comfortable you feel telling another nation, a nation 6,000 miles away that you’ve probably never been to, how to run their country. What if we Jews insisted you become kosher, fast on Yom Kippur, and define “appetizing” as a noun instead of a verb? I am reasonably sure that if Netanyahu, the IDF and Mossad were just a subway ride away and invited you to explain yourselves, you’d be hiding under your 800 thread-count sheets as you called mommy, begging her to write you an excuse note.

Having taught at what many would call an antisemitic university for almost 20 years, I know your generation a lot better than most of my contemporaries. I know that you love acronyms, which is probably connected to the fact that grammar, spelling and punctuation are as foreign to you as the history of Israel. Your favorites seems to be YOLO, (you only live once), FOMO (fear of missing out), and, of course, BDS. You’re insisting that your university divest of all Israeli, investments, impose severe sanctions on Israel, and to boycott all Israeli products.

It’s probably not too difficult to give up cherry tomatoes, developed by Israeli scientists into the tasty, long-lasting and nutritious food you enjoy today in your probable plant-based diet. You can certainly live without a Soda Stream (although they’re pretty nifty), but you’re going to run into trouble with:

YOUR COMPUTER –– Israel was instrumental in the creation of the Pentium microprocessor and Intel processor. No more Google. Go to the library. No more Facebook – time to advise your fellow agitators the location of the next protest by carrier pigeon.

CELL PHONE – Toss that iPhone or Android. Time to start “texting,” with some sidewalk chalk and slate board.

DRONES – Invented in the 1970s by Israeli Abraham Karem. So the next time you need to assess a disaster area (like every campus you shut down, the statutes you’ve defaced, the bridges you closed down and possibly the people you killed because they couldn’t get to the hospital because you closed down the bridges), perform a search-and-rescue mission (locating the free gourmet food air-dropped to you by various fascist groups and professional agitators), or take aerial photographs of you causing chaos wherever you go, photographs – and now, thanks to digital facial recognition, that will help future employers refuse to employ you, another downside of your inability to see how actions have consequences. 

Clearly you don’t understand that more than 80% of Americans support the Jewish state of Israel, that Joe Biden still confuses the Middle East with Middle-earth, and that we are not your grandparents’ Jews. So continue waving your hate-filled banners, screaming your antisemitic epithets, and convincing yourself that you’re on the right side of history. To quote a fellow Jew, Jerry Seinfeld, booed at the recent Duke University commencement, good luck with all that.