I wanted to say a few words about today, which has been one of the harder days in the past three weeks. I really dread the weekends because of all the displays of support for a terror regime. It is indescribably “triggering” (I hate that word), but I’ll do my best to sum some of it up, for anyone who cares to listen, particularly for anyone who goes to the marches and considers them good or peaceful.
I can't bear knowing that you march in "resistance" in these crowds, knowing that you are among people who agree that the savage way in which Jews like myself, my family, my ancestors, my friends, my people were killed, body parts dismembered, pelvises broken, corpses burned, children beheaded – was justified. You march alongside people who wave Al Qaeda flags and scream Arabic chants shared with Hamas that translate to death calls to Jews. To say that witnessing this carnival of antisemitic hate is frightening is an understatement. It is beyond dehumanizing. It is something you can never understand. Perhaps that is the problem.
Part of the Jewish experience is being told your whole life that people don't agree. And what they mean when they say that is – they don’t really see your humanity. Yes, the disagreement is dressed up as opinions about politics and/or society, but it's not about politics and/or society. It’s about us and how we don’t quite fit. Even though we don’t ask to fit. We really don’t ask to fit. But we’re being told that we have to fit, and that we can’t fit unless we’re prepared to be told how. And told how by people who purport to be humanitarians while participating in a totally fascist way of being.
And instead of being a human to these supposed radical thinkers, you become a thing that is debated. You become a question that needs to be solved. If I need to spell it out to you: this is the path of thought that all of the groups of people who ever sought to rid the world of its Jews walked down. It’s not only that they blamed the Jews. They picked us as the ultimate enemy. Have you ever seen such rampant, enormous crowded scenes in London or New York or in Berlin as today’s and last Saturday’s, and the Saturday’s before?
Antisemitism is one hell of a unifying drug.
Here I am. Here I have been. For so many years. I try so hard to see reason, to listen, to tolerate, to educate, to explain, to humanize the issue, to take off layers of myself so that others can see something raw and honest. I try to be as naked in the world as I can be. I have nothing left to lose, honestly. And what pains me is that it’s never enough. I can strip down to the barest bones of myself and look people dead in the eye and they will still have a reason to disagree, a reason to doubt, a reason to question, a reason to abstain, a reason to refuse, a reason to turn away.
It doesn’t matter how much I give, people choose their ideas over me, over us. That is what breaks my heart. But it has never broken the Jewish spirit.
I really wish people well, and all the best of luck in this new age we’re living in. But please if I can ask one thing of you, do not kid yourself that these choices are for anything other than your own comfort. There is no other explanation as to why you won’t trust the voice of a people who have incurred this hate for generations, and who are destined to incur it for generations more, precisely because you cannot take accountability for the part that you play in it.
Some film scenes stick in your mind for a reason, and I've always remembered that scene in The Sound Of Music when Rolf heils Hitler in front of Liesl, and it shatters her innocence. There are so many Rolfs out here.
We Jews are the great unifiers--we are the only people on the planet who could get the LGBTQ+, Islamists, Neo-Nazis, and college faculty to agree on something: They all hate us.
Just subscribed annually. You saved me today. Thank you for your courage...and your stance. And for your readers as well.