To Be a Jew in America after 10/7

By Jeffrey Blehar

Monday, December 04, 2023

 

On Sunday night, hundreds of protesters took to the streets of Philadelphia to march in favor of Hamas, chanting slogans of intifada and calls to remove Jews from Israel “from the river to the sea.” In other words: It was, alas, a pretty typical night for a pro-Palestinian rally in the post-10/7 world. That is until the protesters, on the march, decided to stop by the falafel restaurant Goldie, mass together outside its entrance, and shriek “GOLDIE, GOLDIE, YOU CAN’T HIDE, WE CHARGE YOU WITH GENOCIDE.” The restaurant’s crime? Its owner, Michael Solomonov, is an Israeli-born chef based in Philadelphia, and is donating the store’s proceeds to a medical charity for victims of the Hamas attacks.

 

Try to set aside some time to read what Jim Geraghty has to say about this in today’s Morning Jolt; it is a passionate expression of disgust whose arguments I endorse in almost all particulars. But his conclusion is a political one, namely that Biden and far too many Democratic grandees are reluctant to denounce acts like these too loudly lest they find themselves even more crosswise with an extremely disaffected left-wing youth electorate just in time for the 2024 elections.

 

That is correct, and yet it doesn’t address what troubles me even more deeply about these incidents: Biden and national Democrats are reacting accurately to perceived market feedback here. Their caution is morally reprehensible (and wholly predictable), but it is rational; they are not jumping at shadows. Which points to the much larger problem: Antisemitism (as specifically expressed in seeking to undo the Jewish state of Israel because of “settler-colonialism”) now has a huge youth constituency. Most politically inclined members of the younger generations were reared in the racialist and anti-colonialist discourse of modern American education. Inculcated with its values, they are currently making full use of a preexisting “victim hierarchy” that permits them to code Jews as “white” and thus Israelis as de facto “oppressors.” Voilà: An easy, guilt-free target is born. (Even easier when you haven’t learned any actual world history, another thing the American educational system has done a good job of ensuring.)

 

For it is important to note the persistence and organizational strength of this pro-Palestinian movement. Keep in mind: Goldie’s had already been protested by Philadelphia’s activists last month for its unforgivable Israeliness; the crowd (or its leaders) had to have known exactly where they were going when they headed there. And consider the example of Columbia University, which recently suspended its college chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine for various and sundry attacks upon human decency and student safety in the past two months. A fine (if tardy) gesture from the administration, but to little avail: The group has simply “gone underground,” reorganized into multiple front groups instead, and there will be another massive protest rally/teach-in this Wednesday. Note that the organizers term the October 7 massacre a “counteroffensive.”

 

The point is, there is a real appetite for this stuff throughout the most ideologically engaged sector of the Left. It gets people out into the streets, and particularly on campus, where students live in a disinhibiting, consequence-free bubble that encourages true verbal savagery without guilt. Sure, some of the kids are mere trend-chasers who just want a social scene — they get a text or hear via word of mouth and show up to experience the frisson of vicarious hatred. But many others are clearly true believers, and in any event mobs are often directed to ill ends. And those ends can be more insidiously subtle than just the obvious horror of having people bellow bloodthirsty, eliminationist propaganda at you. The people who plan these things have a longer-term strategy in mind than merely shouting and stamping their feet. Their goal is to extract a public toll from Jews for their Jewishness — to make them pay a social cost that slowly ratchets upward to the level of unbearable — until they in turn exert pressure on Israel to do their activist bidding.

 

Which brings us to the inevitable outcome of all this. A final story from this weekend, one that should chill you, took place in Williamsburg, Va., home to the College of William & Mary and a great place to see someone dressed in full colonial garb filling up the tank at the local Shell. The local Second Sundays Art Festival (staged by a private company, not the city) canceled its traditional menorah-lighting to celebrate Hanukkah. The reason given by the organizers? To commemorate a Jewish holiday would be to send the message that the festival “support[s] the killing/bombing of thousands of men, women, and children.” Local Jews were offered a gracious compromise: The ceremony could go on if and only if it was done under a banner calling for “CEASEFIRE NOW.”

 

LoveLight Placemaking, the company that puts on the festival, is a private actor and can more or less do what it wants in terms of event staging, however revoltingly bigoted. But the menorah-lighting has been part of the event for years, and the most important point of all is that Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights, is a Jewish holiday, not an “Israeli” national holiday. (Do the LoveLight people actually object to the Maccabean Wars?) To single it out for unique exclusion is, quite brazenly, to stigmatize all Jews everywhere, regardless of their views on Israel or Hamas. They are convicted, instead, by their blood and their faith.

 

Maybe the people who did this are moral monsters, actively seeking to hold Jewish religious participation in a town festival as surety against the behavior of the Netanyahu government. Or maybe they’re just moral cowards, reacting in fear to anticipated activist complaints. But either way, their decision is acutely responsive to what was once, but now is no longer, a niche activist concern. To use a cliché from the post-9/11 days that was overused to the point of parody (but this time correctly), canceling a Jewish public holiday celebration out of fear of political backlash in a war begun by Hamas is literally letting the terrorists win. The further demand for a “CEASEFIRE NOW” banner suggests something far more sinister about their preferences.

 

Make no mistake about this: There is no other explanation for the fact that the organizers dangled the possibility of participation in front of the Jewish community if they would adopt their political position on the present war. My innate anger at seeing religious festivals chased from the public square takes on a far graver sense of blood-boiling outrage, even despair, when I see it tied up with such specific political demands on the Jewish community. It’s a “mask drop” moment that reveals the racist assumptions underlying the entire position — akin to shining a blacklight on the bedsheets in a hotel room.

 

We are not likely ever again to be presented with such a thumping real-world refutation of the “it’s anti-Zionism, not antisemitism” trope. No, when an American town’s Hanukkah celebration is suddenly up for grabs based on the policy of the Israeli government, it is demonstrably, irrefutably — by the terms it sets out for itself — antisemitism. What’s more, it all seems directed toward raising the temperature of fear for American Jews, making it a tick more socially unacceptable, or risky, or isolating, to be a Jew or supporter of Israel in public. That’s why such shocking rhetorical cruelty runs throughout the pro-Palestinian movement. It is not incidental to the cause. The cruelty is the point.