Responding to Anti-Semitism? Ask a Holocaust Survivor. |
The commenter was completely assured that there is no left-wing in Israel or the Jewish diaspora, and that any nuance to views on Israel is a lie. Tell that to The New Israel Fund. He compared Israel to South Africa. It was my first hate-filled comment on Substack.
“I’ve been expecting you,” I wanted to reply.
My first instinct was to lead with gallows humor: “Hey guys, look! My first hater!”
A former colleague had reached out and I told them I’d blocked them on social media because their anti-Israel posts were too painful. We started a dialogue, and they read my first blog post, published on Times of Israel and Substack.
They pointed out my ridiculing of leftist justice warriors and said they were careful not to deride their ideological opponents.
Does my gender-queer colleague know that they would be thrown off a building in Gaza for proclaiming their non-binary gender identity?
The colleague said I was trying to control them by saying that anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism.
For Yaron Lischinsky, z”l and Sarah Lynn Milgram, z”l of Washington, DC and Karen Diamond, z”l of Boulder, CO, there is no distinction. Their murderers screamed “Free Palestine!” as they committed their crimes. “Globalize the Intifada” doesn’t prescribe checking Jewish victims for ideology. Karen Diamond’s murderer said he had nothing against Jews, just wanted to “kill all Zionist people.” So, wanting to kill at least 80% of the world’s Jews is not anti-Semitism? You could have fooled me.
But you haven’t fooled me, although you have been chillingly successful with 33% of the Jews of New York City, home to more Jews than any place outside of Israel. Their votes helped install a mayor who still will not reject the cry to “Globalize the Intifada”: Mayor Mamdani says he doesn’t use the term but defends the rights of those who do.
So, how do I jump out of the Jew-Hate Swamp? Where do I find fresh water?
Michelle Obama says, “When they go low, we go high.”
What does “go[ing] high” look like, these days?
On campuses, Jewish students did not mirror encampment protesters who spat at them and advocated for our extinction. Jewish students did not forbid our adversaries from speaking with us, as was done by encampment protesters who refused to allow any Zionist (i.e., Jew or Israeli) to enter their spaces and dialogue with them. This would have been “normalization” of Zionism.
Better to normalize dehumanization.
I sought and found factual responses to my hater’s libelous accusations of “apartheid” and “genocide.” (See hyperlinks.) Do I imagine he would read them or that doing so would affect his binary thinking? This is someone who thinks “leftist Zionist” is a contradiction in terms.
I do know what Zionism is and is not and I know that tens of thousands of Israelis protesting the Netanyahu government every Saturday night for years are fighting for a just and free Israel as Zionists. It’s a nice word.
However, by now, the public perception of the term “Zionism” has hardened into such perversion that a new Jewish Federations of North America study suggests using different terms like “Jewish self-determination.” This is not a post-October-7 phenomenon; it has been brewing for decades. Young leftists equate Zionism with white supremacy. And many university-aged Jews “have only known Israel under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a series of increasingly right-wing governments” (Andrew Silow-Carroll, referencing Derek Penslar’s book Zionism: An Emotional State).
I immediately recognized Hater 1.0’s surname as Armenian. Had he been schooled in Jew-hatred as an Orthodox Christian? Or as a descendant of the Turkish Genocide who’d fled to Syria, Lebanon or Iran? If he hadn’t been taught to hate us, perhaps he knows us as rich, crafty manipulators. Or maybe he’d gone to an Ivy League school, where Qatar-funded professors taught him who the real villain of the world is. So old-school, no?
Not at all: Anti-Semitism is the new black.
I tell myself that using words as swords might keep me one step from internalizing the rage. Like punching a pillow, except the punches are words aimed at people who will never hear them.
We are being gaslit. There’s a meme going around: “I wish I had the self-confidence of an anti-Zionist schooling Jewish acquaintances in what is and is not anti-Semitism.”
When I don’t use terms like “drinkers of woke Kool-Aid,” I’m forced to feel my feelings and strip down my expression to essentials. I keep feeling sad, shocked and scared. Angry too.
This blog is the result of two-plus years of bracing for impact, to quote Leigh Hartzman’s Becoming Israeli blog on Substack.
It started in mid-October 2023. I read in The Gothamist, WNYC-FM’s (NPR station) online magazine, about how at Columbia University, “right-wing protesters” were objecting to “pro-Palestinian” rallies crying “From the river to the sea…” Right-wing. Opposing pro-Palestinians. Obvious who the bad guys were to your average lefty like me.
I remember feeling blindsided and powerless at the distortion.
I sent some reply that was as potent as a toytn bankes. (Yiddish for giving a cupping treatment to a corpse. The toytn [corpse] is fact-based public discourse about Israel/Palestine.)
This Jerusalem Post podcast featuring Taryn Thomas, former anti-Israel movement protester at Stanford University, is worth an entire course. She courageously exposes the disinformation and news blackouts imposed by Students for Justice in Palestine at the Stanford encampments. Needless to say, she is shunned by her former comrades.
An Israeli friend says the thing is not to waste energy replying to the haters. Psychologists and spiritual teachers say that bearing anger is like holding a hot coal – it will burn the holder.
Extremists reject nuances and the Israel-Palestine situation is nothing if not rife – blessed, cursed, overflowing – with those. It’s the nuances that have hope of opening hearts that are not yet sealed shut.
Rabbi Shai Held, in Judaism is About Love, references the Maharal’s (Rabbi Judah Loew’s) concept of goodness flowing from Hashem (God) as a river. “We are intended to keep the river flowing rather than stopping it up, because waters that are dammed or diverted ultimately spoil… To serve God is, in large part, to keep God’s gifts in circulation… God gives not alone to us but also through us.”
If one gift is the truth of the byzantine and beautiful complex of histories which is our ancestral region’s legacy, those who choose two-dimensional views are dams in the river. If we cannot dismantle the dams, we are obligated to dig fresh, broad access routes for that river of divine love whose nature it is to flow.
What to do? I found this tile at a summer camp art shack, abandoned by its young maker:
Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav says to just flood the world with good deeds and they will crowd out evil. Nu, worth trying!
Today, I spoke with Livia Horovitz, 88, a Hungarian-born survivor of the Strasshof concentration camp. She was gifted in the sciences and math, but in post-Holocaust Russian-Communist Hungary, she could not enter university because, you know, Jewish.
Once here, she sold children’s clothing at the flagship Bloomingdale’s at 59th and Lex for twenty years.
One day, Donald J. Trump, in his pre-politics, stiff-the-working-man phase of wealth-building, arranged a shopping trip for Ivanka and some of her friends. It was after-hours and they were accompanied by bodyguards.
At one point, displaying his famed diplomacy, he said to Livia: “You little Jewish woman – you can’t tell me what to do!”
Livia replied, “I survived Hitler and I’ll survive you.”
Somehow, she survived that comment too and continued at Bloomingdale’s.
Zelda Polofsky, a 93-year-old Holocaust survivor, says it best in this video: https://youtu.be/j4mIlVaCc24
“We do our thing.” Hashem, grant us the heart and strength to keep on doing it. _______ * “Z”l” is a Hebrew abbreviation for “May his/her memory be for a blessing.”