October 7 and the Long War on Jewish Civilization

THE SHARDS OF 10/7 REVEAL A PAINFUL TRUTH

It has been one year since our happiness shattered on the very day Jewish tradition asks us to celebrate the joy of completing the annual Torah reading cycle. Many Jews and Israelis are still sitting among the shards. We share the pain of thousands of families – both Jewish Israelis and Arab Israelis – who lost loved ones during the Hamas invasion that day. We carry the hope and despair of many families whose loved ones remain in Hamas captivity. We feel the anger and listlessness of almost 100,000 families from Israel’s north and south who have been displaced from their homes since that day one year ago. We are heartbroken by the suffering of innocent people in Gaza and disoriented by the callous disregard and fanaticism that led Hamas to start such a destructive conflict from a battlefield that they built among and under their own people. We pray that this war will end soon with the return of hostages. We pray for the defeat of Iran and its proxies who have consistently promised a forever war so long as they are allowed to wage it. We pray that one day – however distant, and however improbable it seems in this moment of brokenness – there will be peace and reconciliation so that all people can live securely in the land. 

If the Jewish People in Israel and the Diaspora are going to live to see that day, however, we must realize a simple but difficult truth. The October 7 terrorist invasion, along with everything that has transpired in the intervening year, is just one battle in a long war on Jewish Civilization. There is a physical element to the war. Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and other radicals really do want to destroy Israel and are willing to murder Israelis – and Jews outside Israel – in the process. And there is a spiritual element to the war. The spiritual war takes the form of repurposed Soviet and even Nazi propaganda proliferating on social media and on college campuses. It takes the form of public celebration of terrorism. And it takes the form of one-sided narratives hailed as edgy or enlightening by a liberal establishment so obsessed with signaling their own virtue that they cannot be bothered with the errors, distortions, and lies by omission that riddle such literature. The desired aim is clear: to criminalize, dehumanize, and demoralize Jews and Israelis to the point that we will be unable to stand up for ourselves and our allies will be unwilling to stand alongside us.  While Israel’s soldiers defend the country’s borders against enemies who openly work toward its destruction, Jews in the Diaspora and Israeli civilians must understand the spiritual dimensions of this long war in order to fight and survive it.

LEADING UP TO THE LONG WAR

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries many European nations entered modernity, which brought concepts such a citizenship, individual rights, parliamentary democracy, and a shared rational discourse that could bridge sectarian divides. Modernity also brought the institution of the nation state as well as a realization that there were national minorities that did not neatly fit the nation state model, which demanded a certain degree of conformity that was often anchored in shared language and a shared sense of history. Jews constituted one such group. As adherents of a spiritual tradition, there was no reason Jews could not be brought into national communities that made space for Catholics, numerous Protestant denominations, and others. But Jews were more than another faith group. We preserved a distinct historical memory that honored different ancestors and maintained our connection to a different historical homeland. We spoke our own languages, living reminders of that faraway homeland in the east. And we longed to return to the land from which our ancestors were expelled. Indeed, every layer of Jewish culture originates in that land or else encodes its memory and the shared hope to return to Zion (Jerusalem) in our collective DNA  – from ancient holiday traditions to wedding songs, daily prayers, and how Jews traditionally built and decorated our homes.

European parliaments debated whether to grant Jews citizenship and equal rights throughout the 19th and into the 20th centuries and Jews were eager to prove they could be good citizens and neighbors. While the encounter with modernity produced a diverse spectrum of Jewish responses, a majority of Jews in Western Europe hung high hopes on the prospect of emancipation and their lives usually improved significantly wherever rulers or parliaments did emancipate their Jewish populations. It is also true that the pressures of persistent antisemitism coupled with a conditional promise of equality produced a pressure cooker that led to the rapid and progressive breakdown of traditional Jewish institutions, faith, communal cohesion, and culture. Modernity and emancipation proved to be a double edged sword, with much to gain and much to lose. 

The long war on Jewish Civilization was forged in the same flames as that sword. With the abolition of laws barring Jews from practicing certain trades and attending university, Jews had the economic freedom to enter the professions, the arts, and the sciences. Jews in Germany were emancipated in 1871, and less than one generation later German Jews were serving in the German military, winning nobel prizes, and building successful careers in law, classical music, and medicine. Our success proved to be our downfall. As a conspicuous minority with centuries of culturally ingrained prejudice stacked against us, many Europeans came to resent that Jews were now allowed to participate in society on a more equal footing with non-Jews. 

An analogous reaction occurred in the Ottoman Empire around the same time. The Ottomans, long dominant but now struggling to compete with European states and empires, initiated a series of modernizing reforms in the mid and late 19th century. Among land reforms and other provisions, a new Ottoman constitution granted Jews and other non-Muslim equality with Muslims in the empire. Like many Christian Europeans, some Muslims resented sharing an equal status with non-Muslims in an empire that they thought was supposed to be Islamic. While the status of Muslims did not change in absolute terms, their relative status vis-a-vis religio-ethnic minorities did change. The reforms caused a backlash in the empire’s Arab provinces, which served as a catalyst for the emergence of Arab nationalism and continues to shape the history of the Middle East. 

THE LONG WAR ON JEWISH CIVILIZATION

The modern nation state therefore faced a challenge: how do you create a shared society with a cohesive political community able to withstand division and crisis when your population is not homogenous? Some countries, such as the United States, developed a system of civic nationalism. Rather than basing shared identity on ethnic or religious grounds, the United States grounds its nationhood on citizenship and a common set of values, ideas, and founding documents. Many countries in Europe and elsewhere opted for a hybrid model that recognized and celebrated a specific ethnic identity or religious tradition as core components of the state’s character, but also sought to protect national and religious minorities with a safety net of common values and individual liberties. The 20th century’s two evil empires – Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union – chose a different path. 

Soviet totalitarianism sought to brutally enforce ideological conformity, grinding ethnic and religious identities into dust so that nothing but party loyalty and a common class consciousness remained. The Soviets and their Communist allies in other states murdered millions in the process. Nazi totalitarianism sought to enforce both ideological and ethnic homogeneity within its borders and “Aryan” supremacy beyond its borders. Like the Soviets, the Nazis murdered millions in their drive toward conformity and conquest. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union shared something else in common. As part of their broader dystopian programs, they each waged devastating wars against Jewish Civilization. 

In other words, two of the 20th century’s most powerful and evil states devoted considerable resources to undermine, attack, and destroy the Jewish People. The worst of Nazi Germany’s crimes against the Jews is well known by many. Six million murdered in gas chambers, mass shootings, and countless acts of torture and cruelty. Less known are the Jewish cultural figures and leaders murdered by Soviet authorities or incarcerated in the gulag. Still less known are the myriad ways that both the Nazis and the Soviets attempted to systematically crush the Jewish spirit at home and abroad through a relentless propaganda campaign, psychological warfare, and spiritual terror.

In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler recounts the lessons he learned from studying the success of Vienna’s Social Democrat movement. Focusing on what he describes as militant socialist activists’ use of “spiritual terror,” Hitler writes:

I understood the infamous spiritual terror which this movement exerts, particularly on the bourgeoisie,  which is neither morally nor mentally equal to such attacks. At a given signal it unleashes a veritable barrage of lies and slanders against whatever adversary seems most dangerous, until the nerves of the attacked persons break down.

From his rise to power until the final days of Nazi Germany, Hitler and his Nazi Party would make good use of that lesson, wielding it against his targets and especially against the Jewish People. The Nazis mobilized all organs of the state, civil society, and professional unions under the supreme authority of the party to unleash a torrent of sustained attacks against Jews. Jews were vilified as part of the school curriculum, in university classrooms, in the newspapers, on the radio waves, on posters in public spaces and in speeches at mass demonstrations. The Nazis published children’s books depicting Jews as poisonous mushrooms, blamed Jewish corruption and duplicity for every conceivable societal ill, taught that Judaism and Bolshevik Communism were one and the same, and regularly compared Jews to rats and other pests. The dehumanizing language was not meant as hyperbole. Nazi ideology taught that Jewish People were literally an anti-human race alongside which the Aryan race could not survive. Leading up to and during the Second World War and Holocaust, Nazi Germany spent considerable resources to export Jew hatred abroad, including in the Arab world. They formed alliances with the leaders of the Palestinian and Iraqi national movements. In Europe Nazi racial antisemitism built on centuries of European Jew hatred and Christian anti-Judaism while Nazi propaganda in the Middle East borrowed heavily from Quranic verses. The psychological and spiritual assault that the Nazis directed against the Jews ultimately enabled mass violence and murder in pursuit of a judenrein (Jew free) Aryan empire.

The Soviet Union’s anti-Jewish propaganda and policies were in many cases as bad as pre-Holocaust Nazi Germany. In the early stages of the Soviet war on Jewish Civilization, Jewish religious and spiritual life was severely restricted and outlawed. Expressions of Jewish ethnic or national culture were deemed to be chauvinistic bourgeois nationalism, restricted, and outlawed. The regime bullied and cajoled popular Jewish cultural figures – including artists, authors, and stars from Yiddish theater – to bend their art toward the will of the Soviet State. Among other things, this entailed staging state-sanctioned performances for Jewish audiences in a Jewish language but designed to undermine and ridicule traditional Jewish culture, religion, and communal solidarity. Eventually many of these regime puppets were themselves murdered, exiled, or sent to the gulag when they outlives their usefulness. The Hebrew language was outlawed. Eventually Yiddish language institutions were also shut down and many Yiddish writers and poets were murdered by the state. The Soviets created a world in which it was illegal for Jews to speak, read, or publish in any Jewish language, where Jews could not freely engage in Jewish religious traditions, and in which Jews could not participate in or express solidarity with their own community. 

Like the Nazis, the Soviets engaged in ongoing propaganda campaigns to demonize Jews, which they exported to sympathetic states and socialist groups abroad. What the Soviets nominally claimed was a campaign against Zionism was in fact an information war that peddled distortions and lies that were couched in classic antisemitic motifs and images. Jews who fell out of favor with the regime –  including pro-Soviet individuals – would be accused of “Zionist activities” and executed. The accusations were often false or could include mundane offenses such as reading banned Hebrew books or seeking to emigrate from the Soviet Union. Zionism was regularly vilified in the press. Alleged Zionists and caricatures of Zionist were depicted in Soviet publications with exaggerated “Jewish features” pulled from antisemitic fever dreams. Soviet “intellectuals” depicted Israel’s founders as allies of Nazi Germany (distorting attempts by Palestinian Jews to save their families in Europe) and blamed “Zionists” (Jews) for WW2 and the Holocaust. Just as the Jews were used by the Nazis to symbolize international Communism and pure evil, the Soviets made “Zionists” and Israel the symbol of international capitalism and the symbol of pure evil. The Soviet machine pumped out thousands of books and essays to re-enforce this distorted reality, translating many of these works into dozens of languages to warp the minds of left wing activists, parties, and movements abroad. Much of the language used to demonize Israel and its supporters today, and even some of the organizations who continue to propagate it, originated in the offices of Soviet government agencies and state-controlled universities.  

Taken all together, we must contend with the fact that two of the most important global powers of the 20th century waged brutal wars on Jewish Civilization. They each developed a sophisticated and vast web of propaganda to demonize Jews and all things Jewish in order to support their wars. And they each exported that propaganda abroad. It continues to taint how some activists, organizations, and political parties see Jews and Israel with a prejudicial lens. With the convergence of antisemitic narratives from the far-Left and far-Right, we are now experiencing something of a synthesis of Nazi Germany’s and the Soviet Union’s anti-Jewish legacies. What is the sum of those legacies? Jews cannot exist as a traditional faith community, or as an ethnicity, or as a nation. Jews are vilified for having a state in our ancestral homeland, we are written out of our own history, and ultimately our deaths are justified. At the same time, Jews who live outside of Israel are vilified. Our success, integration, and civic engagement are too often bent into paranoid delusions about Jewish control that lean heavily on tired antisemitic tropes and libels. Nothing is permitted to us. Not our land, or our place as citizens in good standing in countries outside of Israel. Not our religion. Not our history, and especially not any part of our history or culture that connects us to our ancestral land or ancestors. Nothing is permitted to us because the political extremes have joined forces with radical elements in the Arab and Islamic worlds in a total war on Jewish Civilization. In that endeavor – especially in its spiritual dimensions – they carry on the legacy of their Nazi and Soviet forebears.

But there is hope. There are decent people on the political Left and Right. There are Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims who, though heartbroken and angry by what they see in Gaza, reject the radicalism and violence of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. And we, the Jewish People, have the inner strength necessary to withstand the “barrage of lies of slanders” that accompany the physical attacks on our brothers and sisters in Israel. 

FIGHTING BACK BY RETURNING TO OURSELVES

In order to fight back, we must understand that we are under a sustained spiritual assault. We have been fending off that assault since 1933. It is designed to demoralize and isolate us. It is designed to subject us to a “barrage of lies and slanders” until our nerves break down and no one will defend us because we are no longer willing or able to defend ourselves. The good news is that we have the tools to defend ourselves: our story, our tradition, and our community. The barrage of lies leveled at Jews, Zionists, and Israel are powerless so long as we know where we came from, understand our story, invest in our tradition, and commit to maintaining strong bonds with one another and supporting strong Jewish institutions. This is all within our power. We are not helpless. 

The bad news is that Jewish education and communal affiliation is at a low point in the American diaspora. As others have observed, the American Jewish community may be the most Jewishly illiterate of any Jewish community in history. Many Jews do not know their own history and are not engaged in supportive communities, leaving them vulnerable to the spiritual assaults we are subjected to daily. As we approach Yom Kippur it is traditional to consider the tikkunim (correctives) we need to make in our lives. That process of introspection and repentance is called teshuva, which means return. Now is the time to return. Now is the time to rediscover and return to ourselves and our community. Now is the time to commit ourselves to learning more Jewish History. Now is the time to re-engage with Jewish tradition. Now is the time to join and strengthen our communal institutions. The better we know ourselves the harder it is to lose ourselves among the lies and distortions of our enemies. We can win the long war on Jewish Civilization if we stand up and fight together.