“כי לא רק אויב אחד קם עלינו להשמידנו ,אבל בכל דור ודור הם קמים להרוס אותנו .אבל הקדוש ברוך הוא מציל אותנו מידיהם.”
—The Haggadah—
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We are untermenschen again.
There’s a certain advantage to this.
Rarely do we ask for suffering in order to learn a virtue, or to refine virtues already learned but not practiced. And yet—when suffering does come—against our will and often unjustly, it gives us the opportunity to become better versions of ourselves. Our resilience is built. Our wisdom is increased.
In this case, the suffering I speak of is a collective suffering - the suffering of the Jewish people since October 7th.
For most, this suffering is of a psychic nature. Though Israel is, and will always be, the Jewish State, the fact still remains in 2024 that more Jews live outside of Israel than in it. And for these Jews, the massacre of October 7th and subsequent vitriol displayed by governments, universities, “journalists”, and activist groups toward the victims has been devastating to behold from afar. If I could boil down the complexity and range of negative emotions felt by diaspora Jews post-October—whilst still doing that complexity and range justice—they would be condensed into three: rage, disbelief, fear. This psychic suffering from afar is quite a different form of suffering from those in Israel directly impacted by the atrocity and the outside world’s hatred; the hostages taken by Hamas, and the grieving families and friends of the hostages and slain. For while they too feel rage, disbelief, and fear, it is to a far more heightened degree because the stakes for them are higher and their proximity to moral monsters closer.
But regardless of the type and level of suffering being endured by Jews in different places, the Jewish people as a whole in the past seven months have—as a result of our suffering—been forced to exercise a particular virtue with an intensity not seen since the generation of the Shoah: defiance.
We don’t often hear of defiance as a virtue, despite the fact that it is central to every heroic tale in history and myth. If nobody stands up to evil, if nobody challenges lies, then there is no justice, no order, no peace. A cosmic imbalance is set in motion. A moral vacuum is suspended like a guillotine over the heads of the innocent. Defiance, then, is the only way darkness doesn’t win.
The world does not like defiant Jews. It does not like Jews who talk back. Jews who call attention to false narratives and tell tyrants and bureaucrats to fuck off. The world likes its Jews docile, groveling, or dead. The world likes its Jews docile, groveling, or dead, because docile, groveling, and dead Jews don’t challenge whatever narrative agenda-driven actors concoct about them. Whereas living, vocal, opinionated Jews insist on being the ones to tell their own story. Stories that a world who hates Jews don’t want to hear.
An example:
In the eyes of the world, Anne Frank is a “good Jew”. She’s a “good Jew” because most details of who she was outside her diary are unknown, she was 16 when she died (so not old enough to have—what’s the modern boogeyman?—a “complicated legacy”), and she died before she could finish telling her own story. This allows the tragedy of Anne Frank to not be about the evils of early-20th century German society, or Nazis who escaped, or “icky Zionism”. Anne Frank—being a young, pretty, and dead Jew—gets to be rebranded as a martyr in service to a vague, catch-all, feel-good, United Nations-approved, Coldplay-soundtrack humanitarianism. The murder of Anne Frank has been used over the decades as a prop for every pet issue ranging from “violence against girls” to “freedom of expression” to even “the importance of open borders”. But you’ll notice that the repackaging of Anne Frank to serve these causes de-emphasizes the thing that actually killed her: antisemitism.
By contrast, Noa Argamani—who has been held hostage in Gaza for 225 days—is not (currently), to the world, “a good Jew”. She could still be alive, you see. She could be released and returned to Israel. She could start talking. She could start talking about the torture and rape committed by Hamas, by other smaller terrorist groups in Gaza, and by Palestinian civilians (wouldn’t that be an inconvenient—sorry, “complicated”—narrative). She could travel the world and bear witness to the atrocities pro-Palestine activists are busy denying. In sum, a living Noa Argamani could spit in the world’s eye. The only story about her would be the one she tells. She would not be docile, she would not be groveling, and worst of all, she would not be dead. You can’t co-opt the tragedy of a brave living Jew. So the world prefers weak or dead ones.
“Very well,” you think, “Defiance is the antidote to lies and evil, and therefore key to Jewish survival. But what the hell does any of this have to do with us ‘being untermenschen again’?”
Well, right now the world is concocting a certain narrative about us.
To the antisemitic left, we are greedy capitalistic settler-colonialists who love the smell of dead Palestinian babies in the morning. To the antisemitic right, we are parasitic communist perverts who perform demonic rituals and secretly revel in our orchestration of the murder of Christ.
In regard to the antisemitic left, it was the French Catholic poet (and great friend of French Jewry) Charles Péguy who wrote in 1905 that “It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been committed for fear of not looking sufficiently progressive.” Yes, well, while he was surely right that not every act of cowardice for progressivism’s sake could be counted—as they are truly innumerable—the spineless toleration by administrators at America and Europe’s top universities, nearly 120 years later, of organized pogroms against Jewish students by their pro-Palestine peers certainly makes the list; the travesty occurring less than six months after the presidents of Harvard, M.I.T., and Penn told a congressional committee that “calling for the genocide of the Jewish people was not always wrong but depended on the context”.
In regard to the antisemitic right, perhaps the most visible representatives of this bunch would be Gab pundit Nick Fuentes and former DailyWire host Candace Owens. Fuentes, who leads the revived “America First” movement, has gained infamy among level-headed conservatives for encouraging the MAGA crowd to deny the Holocaust and endorse the death penalty for Jews. Though banned from every major platform, Fuentes’ influence among the far right is indisputable, with an estimated 500,000 followers. Owens, who has several million followers, for her part, prefers the just-asking-questions route: “Could there be a gang of Jews that secretly run our media and government?”, “Could the foremost critic of Israel [who is openly pro-Hezbollah] be onto something when he accuses the state of apartheid?”, “Could the Germans in WWII have been victims of genocide just as much as the Jews?” (As I peruse Barnes & Noble a few months into the future, I will not be surprised to find she’s written the foreword to a sleek new printing of Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion.)
With their own cherished fictions about the Jews in place, both leftwing and rightwing antisemites seem to share a point of agreement. They both agree that we Jews run Hollywood, politics, finance, and the jewelry trade, and therefore bear responsibility for the decline of civilization.
This is the story being told about us.
How, then, do we use our defiance to ensure our ability to tell our own story in these dangerous times? We interrupt.
For example, a way of dealing with some of the common stereotypes is not by denying them but by flipping them on their head. “We don’t run Hollywood, but it’s true that a large percentage of our ethnic group have been artists through the ages. We don’t run banking and finance, but it’s true that throughout history our people have known how to prosper. Come learn about us! Emulate the things our people have done in the arenas where they’ve traditionally thrived!” That’s one method of antisemitism-interruption: combat through invitation. It won’t work on the Nick Fuentes’s and Candace Owens’s of the world, who are too far down the rabbit hole of hate, but it can rescue someone who’s at the “milder” antisemitism stage.
A related method of antisemitism-interruption is, of course, hasbara. That is, a collective recognition by Jews outside of Israel that we in the diaspora are “ambassadors” tasked with extolling the wonders, history, natural beauty, culture, and rightful existence of our reclaimed ancestral homeland. Praising Israel, celebrating Israel, reminiscing about Israel, praying for Israel - and doing this monthly, weekly, daily if necessary. Defense of the homeland does not only depend on weapons and soldiers, but depends—perhaps even more in our information age—on a charm offensive coming from non-Israeli citizen Jews whom their neighbors have come to know and trust.
These two methods of interruption—invitation and hasbara—are the honey. Now we come to the vinegar.
When tackling severe advanced stage antisemitism, there is no “killing with kindness”. Any friend or acquaintance who expresses disdain toward Israel and/or Jews must be swiftly removed from our lives like a putrid boil. We should have no problem being vicious in this regard. If any friend or acquaintance expresses disdain toward Israel and/or Jews, they are persona non grata. The Jewish people have a right to live in peace and not in fear, and the Jewish people have a right to a state in the land they are indigenous to - which is Israel; and anybody we associate with has about five seconds to affirm both of those things if they come up in conversation. Why do this? Why be so insistent? Because deliberate and severe antisemitism has to have some kind of cost for the person espousing it. If nothing happens when a person accuses “the Jews” of collaborating with Freemasons to take over the world or orchestrating 9/11 or of drinking the blood of Christian babies, then the message gets sent that persecution of Jews will be shrugged off as a thing no one cares about. If, however, making ridiculous accusations about the Jewish people results in loss of friends, family, or a job, that’s a deterrent.
Of course, for Jews to go on at length about the subject of defiance (as I have done) opens us up to the charge that we have a weird and annoying fixation with our own suffering. A fixation that reveals our “dual loyalty” - in our religions, in our political parties, in our diaspora countries. Well, like all insidious lies, the charge contains some truth. The truth in the lie is relatively simple: which is that all we Jews have is each other. Yes, we (or a lot of us) venture beyond ourselves into other communities that welcome us most of the time (religious, political, or national), but as soon as those same communities begin to turn on us, our only home that can be an anchor in rough seas is one another. At the end of the day, the only person guaranteed to not kill a Jew for being a Jew is another Jew. Everyone else is a question of odds.
The lie of “dual loyalty”, however, is that “dual loyalty” means conflicted loyalty. That between two equivalent things, devotion to one thing must detract from devotion to the other. Hm. Can a child be loyal to their father without subtracting from the allegiance given to their mother? I say yes. Can business owners be loyal to their customers without subtracting from the allegiance given to their shareholders? I say yes. Even in the context of marriage, if a husband is widowed, can he be loyal to his new bride whilst still feeling some pang of sentimental loyalty to the original marriage he “came from”? Yes. But if yes to all of these, then it’s simple to see how a diaspora Jew can love their country and love Israel. It’s simple to see how a diaspora Jew can be a loyal follower of Buddha, a loyal follower of Jesus, or a loyal follower of no deity at all, and still cherish the wisdom of the sages and celebrate Jewish holidays. It’s simple to see how a diaspora Jew can be a loyal conservative, a loyal liberal, or a loyal libertarian, and still be the kind of Zionist to tell all of those groups to kick rocks whenever they launder the reputations of antisemites or denigrate Israel as a world ally.
How can this be? Because no matter where in life one goes, you cannot erase your starting point.
No community can be one’s root community except the community one is part of by blood. The root is the root. Trees can bend however they wish once they grow, but their roots stay in place. As Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur is fond of saying, “You can look for a way out of the Jewish House, but nobody has ever found it.” Which brings us, as the conclusion draws near, to the lesson a “worldly” or cosmopolitan Jew needs to learn: The world hates us living Jews. And the world hating us living Jews necessitates persistence (defiance) in that identity.
But though this charge of “dual loyalty” has been the primary cause for suspicion of Jews in America, I offer a word of warning for American Jews. Especially American Jews who are vocal in their support of Israel and the war Israel is currently engaged in: it isn’t only antisemitic conspiracy that causes Jew hatred in the “land of the free”. Rather, a great deal of antipathy toward Jewish-Americans stems from our people’s insistence that there are clear standards of right and wrong, of dignity and indignity, that require public acknowledgment and strict adherence. In this regard, the Jews share the burden of the disdain of the general public with conservative Christians. Because a majority of Americans think consequences and standards are things that can be negotiated. Parents negotiate consequences and standards with their children, teachers negotiate consequences and standards with students, and prosecutors negotiate consequences with defendants. And in fact, to insist on the inflexibility of consequences and standards is to victimize people; especially if they are a minority, a woman, or a minority woman, in which case, said individuals are never responsible for their bad actions, their agency is “compromised by discriminatory systems”. The idea that there could ever exist a hard line that can’t be crossed, and—if crossed—results in a punishment from which there is no turning back, is anathema to the American mind. This feeds into another annoying American tendency, which is to always look for the exception to every rule. Rules can never be things set in stone, “rules are made to be broken.” A nation founded on revolution can only justify and sustain its Being on the premise of continued revolution, or at the very least, a ceaseless “revolutionary spirit”.
It only follows, then, that the country whose primary virtue is rebellion-born-from-victimhood will grow to temperamentally despise the country whose primary virtue is justice-born-from-resilience. Jewish-Americans need to prepare to face increasing animosity, and we need to warn our Israeli brothers and sisters that their ally may not be so for very much longer. As the war against Hamas in Gaza has been waged for nearly eight months now, Americans have made it clear that they do not have the stomach or moral willpower—as they once did in WWII—to fight a war until their enemies either surrender or are obliterated, and find any nation who does still have this strength and moral willpower to be “inhumane”. Hence, just as a vain aging mother is confronted by the lost beauty and vitality visible in her blossoming daughter, so Israel reminds America of what it once was and will never be again: strong, sacrificial, and mindful of its forefathers, with clear moral convictions and a vision for its people unencumbered by self-doubt.
I close this essay with how I began it: we Jews are untermenschen again. There’s a certain advantage to this. That advantage is that we now have an opportunity to practice defiance. To prove to ourselves and the world that we, as a people, will not live on our knees but will die on our feet. Will the world listen? Who knows. Will our neighbors? That is up to us to find out.
