The Terminal Complacency of American Jews

We are in crisis. Having survived the horrors of the Holocaust, the Jewish people declared Never Again. We swore an oath to the future generation of Jews that they would not just live in safety but would be granted the tools and the will to ensure it. Jewish soldiers fought to create and preserve the reborn Jewish State. In America, Jews worked to achieve rights not just for themselves but for others as well. Joining others in their fight for rights was a form of not just paying it forward but a form of solidarity. An acknowledgement that we finally made it in our emancipation as a people and could finally rest having achieved victory. This is the lie that will destroy the Jewish people.

The reality is that there has been a slowly growing tumor of Jew Hatred invading the minds and institutions of the American people. For decades it has spread as all cancers do from one organ to the other. It started in the fringes of the political spectrum before spreading to the universities. From there it malignantly entered lower education where left to fester; it multiplied and metastasized across the country. Entire generations of young students have been subconsciously taught to hate Jews. Each generation is more obvious and radical than the one before. In other words, we are the frog in the pot, each generation raises the temperature and tends to the pot. Even worse, they have convinced the frog the water is still cold; all while explaining how it deserves to be boiled for its multitude of sins. If left unchecked the cancer of Jew Hatred will overtake the country, and we will be destroyed.

Most troubling of all is that Jewish Institutions we trust for our protection have themselves become blind or incompetent. Where were they when the teaching of Jewish history started to decline and was removed from our schools? What have they done as Jewish history has been rewritten from the ghettos onward? Where were they when it was taught that the Jewish national spirit was an unnatural consolation prize for surviving the Holocaust. That the creation of Israel was artificial and the conflict between peoples is one of the organic vs the inorganic. Based on this, any “good” student of history will conclude that the only natural recourse is that Jews should return to the ghettos and rats from which they emerged.

How has it gotten to a point that the very existence of Jewish history is controversial? No other group would tolerate the upholding of the view that their history did not happen. Where was the ADL when children were taught to deny Jewish History? What has the ADL done to promote the message of Jewish unity? Or even more so when was the last time the ADL did something to earn the trust of the Jewish people and achieve community mobilization? How is it that the ADL’s tool of choice is inaction? It is to my great regret that they have fallen ill to the same complacency that has become so symptomatic among our kind. They believe that Jew Hatred was merely a weed that could be picked out of an otherwise pure garden. Yet the infestation is below the ground and will take real action to uproot. It may be disruptive, it may be controversial, but I refuse to let the existence of Jewish people be so easily challenged. If the ADL and others like it want to create change, they would target the sources that let such hatred spread. Statements and reports do not create change, they are merely the agonal gasps wrought on by terminal complacency. Those who do seek to create change are labeled as extremist based in the fallacy that they threaten our so called safety and acceptance. Instead, they preferred to remain “Good Jews” and not rock the boat. To be a “Good Jew” you must betray your identity and deny the core tenants of who and what we are. A “Good Jew” must have no interest in the preservation of our culture, our history and our faith. They must be quiet; they must not cause a ruckus. They are to be seen and not heard, to be forgotten and of the bygone.

Under the pre-10/7 belief system Jews allied with groups ideologically aligned with the left to fight the Jew Hatred coming from the right. They placed their back against that of the left trusting them to defend the Jewish people from the shared threats of injustice and bigotry. However, they soon realized that trust was misplaced, and a dagger had stabbed them in the back. Many Jews have since realized their poor choice in allies.

If we wish to fight back against Jew hatred we must start with the basics. For one, we must end the myth that our persecution and our plight is inspired by individual moments of madness or evil but rather accept that it is a constant of the world. We become complacent that our fathers and grandfathers fought for a world where we need not ourselves fight. That the great sacrifice of 2,000 years of Jews have brought a so-called “end of history” to Jew Hatred. Yet, in actuality, if even one generation fails to stand against those who hate us, they will destroy us. Each generation has been tested and all have withstood. We must refuse to be the generation that failed our parents but more importantly our children. Therefore, today I call to you to make a stand, be it on the streets, be it in the schools, be it in the government. As I write and you read, brave Jewish men and women face pure evil in the battlefields of Gaza, Syria, and Lebanon. It is by their continuous sacrifice, be it by blood and tears that the Jews of Israel survive. Yet that same spirit is ever so lacking in the American Jew. How is it possible that amongst the Jews, can be found both the bravest and weakest of people?

Now the burden to stand up is on us the Jews of America. I ask did we not righteously march in the face of injustice when men like George Floyd were openly murdered on the street? Did we not march in the name of stopping hate and declaring the lives of our friends mattered? Did we not call for the rights of women? Yet today I am here to tell you that when it is the Jews facing down evil, there are no righteous amongst the other nations. I ask you who has marched for the Jews? To those who marched for racial justice, who has spoken out against the anti-Jewish pogroms both in Europe and in America? To those who marched against hate, who has marched with us against more than 10,000 hate crimes? To those who marched for women rights, who has marched with us against the rape and murder of Jewish women? Where are our friends and allies marching in the name of the Jewish people declaring that we too matter? It would seem we have not only been abandoned but we have been betrayed! Those who you called your compatriots now cheer and legitimize your destruction. To be clear, we have not been abandoned nor betrayed, look back and you will find they never stood with the Jewish people. They never claimed to support or defend the rights of the Jews. It was us who naively and foolishly believed our causes to be the same.

So I ask: If we do not stand for ourselves who will? The answer is no one. If we cannot speak for ourselves, if we cannot advocate for ourselves, if we cannot fight for ourselves… who will? We keep saying that “Never Again is Now” but that is only half the truth. Never Again is not just now, Never Again is Always. There will always be threats to the Jewish people be they Babylonian, Greek, Roman, Russian, Nazi, Terrorist or Socialist. Never Again is not just one moment, it is not just individual moments but rather it is always. If we do not make a constant stand against the hatred and destruction of the Jewish people; then we will be destroyed.

I often end my articles with a lesson from Jewish history and I will do so here as well. In 1903, a pogrom, a horrible massacre, occurred in the Russian City of Kishinev. Jewish men, women and children were beaten, raped and murdered. Over a thousand homes destroyed and a community left in ruin. Just as with October 7th, it was viewed at a scale thought impossible. Among those to report on the events was the Jewish Poet, Hayim Nahman Bialik. In his poem In the City of Slaughter he provides not just a description of the violence but of the conduct of inaction of the Jews during it. I leave you with this excerpt and ask we all learn from its message.

Crushed in their shame, they saw it all; They did not stir nor move; They did not pluck their eyes out; they Beat not their brains against the wall! Perhaps, perhaps, each watcher had it in his heart to pray: A miracle, O Lord, —and spare my skin this day!” -Hayim Nahman Bialik