Jewjitsu Might Protect Jews when they’re Hatefully Disliked

“Whenever I like Wagner I don’t like
myself,” said Otto Klemperer. He’d do
what Wagner would do also to the Jew,
regarding Otto Klemperer a “kike.”

Some Jews by anti-Semites are possessed,
thus losing freedom to possess themselves,
the hate that dares to say its name no jest,
inducing Jews to put themselves on shelves.

Joseph Epstein recommended Jews to use
“Jewjistsu” for protecting those who’re abusing
them not only for their Zionistic views
of ‘genocide,’ a crime of which they’re Jews wrongfully accusing,

and for their identity as people who are Jews.
Jewjitsu might also enable Jews to follow
Erasmus’s motto, “concede nothing,” whose
adoption would help them oppose all charges that are hollow.

In “To Fight Antisemitism, Try ‘Jewjitsu’: Amid rampant antisemitism, we must turn absurd claims back on those who advance them,” WSJ, 9/14/26, Joseph Epstein writes:

Jujitsu—the word came to me recently on a sleepless night. Jujitsu is the Japanese martial art that uses an attacker’s force against him and through the clever use of leverage allows a smaller person to defeat a larger opponent. If there is Jujitsu, it occurred to me, why not “Jewjitsu,” the Jewish art of fending off antisemitism, as Jews have done since the beginning of Judaism?

Doubtless the most effective way Jews have practiced Jewjitsu is through their contributions to society. In the U.S., this would include their dominance in musical comedy and their presence in classical music, the central role played by Jewish scientists from Einstein and Oppenheimer on down, their part in the country’s financial institutions and in its intellectual life.

I bring up the contributions of Jews in the U.S., where Jews in some quarters are under the whip of what is said to be rampant antisemitism. The whip is wielded by the far right and far left, with the more intense lashes at present coming from the left, some members of which go so far as to equate Zionism with genocide.

How best to combat this? I wonder if the methods employed by jujitsu wouldn’t prove useful? In defending themselves, the Jews might do well, à la jujitsu, to use the force of the antisemites’ accusations and arguments against them. These accusations and arguments, after all, are nutty at best.