Roman Vishniac (1897-1990) was a famous documentary photographer who captured images of what turned out to be the end of a thriving Eastern European Jewish community. His photographs and story are captured in film and several books, which serve as witness to Jewish life as it existed before being extinguished in the Holocaust.
Vishniac did not try to capture only old Jews or poor shtetl Jews, although his images do bring stories like Fiddler On The Roof to the real world. He captured all kinds of Jews who lived full lives in cities and towns, without the foreboding knowledge that death was coming as individuals and as a collective.
Marc Chagall (1887-1985) captured Russian villages and Jews in his paintings in the decades before Vishniac. Jews had been relegated to live in the Pale of Settlement on the western ends of the Russian Empire for hundreds of years, and Chagall’s early paintings were somewhat peaceful despite the various pogroms which decimated much of the Jewish community in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
On October 7, 2023, roughly 3,500 people came to southern Israel near the Gaza Strip to celebrate life and music. The Tribe of Nova music festival was an annual all night electronic music experience which drew mostly secular people from around the world. They celebrated with friends and family near Jewish communities whose residents strove for coexistence with their neighbors in Jew-free Gaza nearby. No one knew that Palestinian terrorists were going to descend on the party and the kibbutzes to slaughter and torture as many people as the Arabs could find.
In eastern Europe and Russia, Jews lived in confined areas at the edges of where host countries decided Jews may live. The Jews lived the best they could under the restrictions, until political powers decided that they didn’t want Jews anymore. The militaries either slaughtered the Jews or expelled them.
While Jews originated and always lived in the land of Israel, modern Zionism sought to give Jews autonomy in their homeland again. While the reestablished Jewish State was formed in 1948, the country fought many wars against neighbors which found a Jewish State an insult to Islam.
Believing that the Israeli army kept them secure, Israelis danced the night away on October 7, just three kilometers from where the Palestinian group Hamas governed the terrorist enclave of Gaza, with a well-publicized plan seeking the death of Jews and destruction of Israel. Thousands of Gazan terrorists invaded Israel and butchered and slaughtered more Jews on a single day than any day since the Holocaust.
Jews danced and lived on the edges, on narrow slices of the world where they were informed they were entitled to live. In the end, whether from their own antisemitic governments or neighboring genocidal armies, they were targeted for annihilation.
The United States Now
What are the lessons for the largest diaspora community the world has ever known, with nearly 6 million Jews accounting for two-thirds of the global diaspora? Or other western democracies like Canada, the United Kingdom and France?
Jews have achieved financial success and attained leading positions at many global companies. They have built schools and hospitals, industries and factories. They have no restrictions on professions or where they can live, how they can pray or what they eat.
Yet the feeling for Jews post-October 7 feels tense. Unsafe.
The presidents of America’s leading universities came to Washington, D.C. and said that they would not combat Jew-hatred on their campuses. The best they could offer were chaperones to escort Jews to their classes or dorms as they confront open and approved intimidation and harassment.
Many American politicians in liberal cities are openly saying that they will not protect Jews. Jews living in the suburbs of New York and St. Louis fought aggressively to oust antisemitic politicians (Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush), with the defeated members of Congress then threatening to come after them.
Are these the new edges in the West in 2024, the straight line on campuses from dorms to classrooms, as well as suburban towns outside of liberal cities? Are universities and cities generally becoming off limits to Jews? Are Jews being told to simply accept that they can live happy lives on the edges?
Jews know history. They carry it in their DNA. They know that any restrictions form the contours of confinement. There is no safety in ghettos, only marked addresses for future annihilation.
President George Washington penned a letter to the Jewish congregation of Newport, RI on August 18, 1790 which said “The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”
Yet Jews are feeling a deep erosion of that sentiment, that they are part-and-parcel of the fabric of the great country, as leaders of both academia and government assist persecution and inflame bigotry against the most persecuted people in the world.
Excluding Jews in any form, place or time is against the foundational principles of the United States. It cannot be accepted for America to be America.
American Jews will not fight for a slice of land on the edges of society in which to live. They have seen the destruction of fellow Jews when they stay politely in the alloted corners. Whether traditional or secular. Whether in Israel or the diaspora.
American Jews will fight for all of America and to continue to be integral part of the great nation, unafraid.
American Jews hold fast to Washington’s Newport letter, as he signed “May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid. May the father of all mercies scatter light and not darkness in our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in his own due time and way everlastingly happy.”
Alas, what make antisemites everlastingly happy is harassing Jews until they experience the pogroms and expulsions of Fiddler On The Roof today.
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