Freedom Was Never a Cowboy: Jewish Memory against American Myth

עֵזֶר כְּנֶגְדּוֹ
ezer k’negdo — “a help that confronts”
— Bereshit 2:18

Stephen Stern’s blog post “Cowboys and Communists” stirred something in me — not because I disagreed with the idea that America builds its myths on freedom and fear, but because of what it ignores. His cowboy-versus-collective framing flattens history and wipes away the communal memory that Jews have carried across centuries.

Let’s be clear: Jews didn’t learn solidarity from Marx.
We learned it from Torah.
From exile. From each other.
Our communities were built not on ideology but obligation — the kind that shows up with soup, with medicine, with burial shrouds.

In 1930s Poland, Jewish mutual aid wasn’t theoretical. It was the ground under our feet.
Warsaw alone had over 600 self-help institutions.
In Łódź, Dr. Hilary Nussbaum organized sanitation programs for factory workers.
In Białystok, Dr. Anna Braude-Heller helped found the Bersohn and Bauman Children’s Hospital, treating thousands regardless of class.
These were not utopias. They were necessities — and they were Jewish to the core.

Stern seems to think that collectivism was always imposed from the outside.
But the truth is: our collectivity was homegrown, home-fed, home-fought.
We built kupat ir (communal funds), bikur cholim networks, micro-loans for widows, Talmud Torah schools funded by tailors.

We never worshipped the lone hero.
Even our prayer requires ten.
Even our God says: “It is not good for man to be alone.”

Not Freedom, but Abandonment

The American cowboy, that mythic figure — always riding, always solitary — is not a model of liberty.
He’s a model of abandonment.
He owes nothing. Feels nothing. Shares nothing.
And when that becomes your national archetype, what happens to the sick?
To the hungry?
To the stranger?

Jews knew.
We lived under empires that gave us nothing, so we gave to one another.
We knew that the opposite of tyranny was not individuality, but interdependence.
We weren’t scared of the collective. We were the collective.

Our heroes weren’t gunslingers.
They were doctors like Dr. Braude-Heller.
Teachers like Janusz Korczak, who refused to abandon the children of the Warsaw Ghetto.
Thinkers like Róża Luxemburg, who believed that freedom without justice is merely privilege.

Ghost Stories and Convenient Forgetting

Stern writes about America’s “ghost story” of freedom and fear.
But the real ghost is solidarity — buried under decades of worship for the market, the gun, the lone survivor.

The frontier ended in fences.
The New Deal ended in deregulation.
Today’s cowboys ride hedge funds and AI firms.
But the myth stays the same: be free by being alone.

Jews cannot afford such myths.
Our memory is built from ruin and rebirth.
We remember how to survive, but also how to stay.
And how to hold each other — even as the world burns.

Freedom Begins Face-to-Face

The Torah doesn’t imagine freedom as escape.
It imagines freedom as עֵזֶר כְּנֶגְדּוֹ — a help that confronts, that stands face to face.
That’s where love happens. Where community begins.
And that’s where real freedom is forged.

If America wants redemption, it won’t find it in cowboy boots.
It will find it in kitchens, clinics, chevrot.
In the quiet Jewish knowledge that to be free is not to be alone — but to be needed.

Don’t quote John Wayne.
Quote the women who ran TOZ clinics.
Quote the orphans of Janusz Korczak.
Quote the soup kitchens of Warsaw, the midwives of Łomża, the barefoot educators of the shtetl.

Not all that is American is worth saving.
But everything they built — with no budget, no blessing, no guns — is.