Republican former President Donald Trump handedly defeated Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, and liberals have begun second guessing their strategies and choices that led to her defeat. Many consider whether Harris could have won had she (or the Democratic establishment that surrounded her) selected Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro as a running mate. The popular governor might have been able to help Harris win the Keystone State (which she lost) and had more Jews support her in other races, perhaps delivering Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.
The reality is that Harris and the Democrats fought a very good race – considering the TOP of the ticket. Bringing in Harris late in the election cycle, limiting her interviews to prevent gaffes, and making the election about her not being Donald Trump was smart. However, it could not overcome the Biden-Harris term being deeply unpopular and Harris could not separate herself from the administration in which she served.
The correct question for Democrats this Wednesday morning was not what they did wrong over the past few months but what they did FOUR YEARS AGO. Specifically, choosing Harris as the Vice President because she was a Black woman, and allowing the nation’s border to be overrun.
Harris never won a single delegate in her 2020 run for the president. She had a voting record as a member of the alt-left coming from a radically woke state. Had Biden chosen a moderate and qualified candidate from one of the seven swing states, the 2024 election would have been much easier for the Democrats to secure. Opting to pick a person a heartbeat from the presidency purely because of her intersectionality characteristics was more than a blunder.
In addition, the Biden-Harris failure at the borders put Americans at risk. Americans listed it as one of the key considerations in selecting a president along with the economy (in which people also preferred Trump), well above abortion rights. But the Democratic machinery was tethered to the reality of the past four years, even as they attempted to make the race about democracy and women’s rights.
Democrats began to get tough on the border late in the term but the impact was already present, much like the soaring inflation of Biden-Harris’s first years in office leveled off, but the cumulative effect was already baked into everyone’s daily living. Wars in Ukraine and Israel made the world feel unsafe and rudderless.
Picking Josh Shapiro as the VP might have helped Harris win the 2024 election but it would have just covered up bad choices of the last four years. The takeaway should be more strategic to develop better tactics for the future, not just thinking about the choice of VP in the immediate race.
Americans voted for the economy and safety. Just like Israel. As long as Democrats appear as the party of redistributing wealth, defunding the police and porous borders, with left-wing politicians from left-wing states as their spokespeople, they will continue to lose races they could have won.
Like many Jewish Americans, I am a registered Democrat. Unlike many, I have no party loyalty and vote for the person I think is best suited for the job.
My friends were shocked when I voted for the libertarian candidate for president in 2016. They rattled off the many offenses of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and that I was wasting my vote. I did not disagree. But I could not vote for Trump or Clinton. Not only had Clinton proven herself to be awful but Trump was a vulgarian wildcard. I believed Trump was such a “deal guy” that he had no sense of the compromises that are needed to run a country of 330 million. He would be bad for America, Israel and the whole world.
I ended up being quite wrong about Trump on Israel. Surrounded by a strong team of advisers, he understood what was required for an ENDURING PEACE in the Middle East, not just the paper to get to a peace agreement. He delivered an amazing array of achievements for America and the Middle East over his term, including the fewest deaths of Arabs and Jews over any four year stretch in modern history.
Yet I remained worried. America was deeply divided and I could not imagine Trump being the solution to bring the country together. Four years on I looked for an alternative.
I cast my lot initially with Mike Bloomberg as a centrist, who had pushed aggressively for Hillary over Trump in 2016 under the premise that she was basically like a prostitute who is deeply unloved but gets the job done. Bloomberg was my version of #NeverTrump meets #NeverBernie Sanders. But he was eliminated early on.
I settled on Biden as the “centrist” to help address the “Mason-Dixon Plaid” that pitted neighbor against neighbor. I wanted to stop the brewing civil war, and too many people hated Trump for him to be the solution. I similarly voted for centrists in Congress, rejecting mainstream media’s endorsement of far left-wing radicals like Jamaal Bowman. I picked a winner at the top of the ticket but saw extremist radicals taking over Congress.
Those radical members of Congress had no need to compromise the way a president must. They incited their base, and brought antisemitism to deplorable levels after the October 7, 2023 massacre of 1,200 people in Israel. Fading Biden had no idea or desire to stem the vicious tide.
Jewish members of Congress like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) turned on Israel and refused to combat the wave of antisemitism. Young Democrats and liberal universities revealed themselves to be deeply hostile to Israel and Jews.
The divide in America now felt more personal. It was no longer about Republicans versus Democrats, but more immediately, radical antisemitic extremists which had metastasized inside the Democratic party and liberal institutions against American Jewry. The general tension in the country is no longer my priority, but the specific targeting of minority-minority Jews which made even leading Jewish politicians hide in fear.
Pundits like Bret Stephens may argue that Trump continues to be a danger, and I was a NeverTrumper just like him. Many friends who are devout liberal Jews continue to believe that the antisemitism is really just a minor issue which will subside when the Iranian proxy war against Israel ends.
Sen. Bernie Sanders explaining that Kamala Harris will side with the alt-left when she is not bound by Biden’s preferences as it relates to Israel
Israel is laying the groundwork for an enduring peace in the Middle East by ridding the region of jihadi extremists who intend on annihilating local Jewry. It is tragic and ugly but essential. Americans – DEMOCRATS – need to similarly take actions which may seem displeasing, including voting for Trump, to end the toxic antisemitism drowning Jews today.
Since 1993, the United States has provided more than $7.6 billion in assistance to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza—primarily through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The Trump administration suspended the program in January 2019 due to the Palestinians continued support of terrorism but it was restarted under the Biden administration in April 2021. According to the U.S. Governmental Accounting Office report in December 2023, American taxpayer dollars are currently not going to terrorism via that program.
The same cannot be said of the money the U.S. sends to Palestinians via the United Nations.
Since 1950, the U.S. has donated $7.3 billion to UNRWA, the temporary agency to deal uniquely with Palestinians who left Israel in 1948, together with their millions of descendants. The Biden administration suspended payments to UNRWA in January 2024 when it was revealed that several staffers participated in the brutal mass slaughter of people in Israel on October 7.
All that money hasn’t bought America any love.
The supposedly “moderate” Holocaust-denier President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority addressed the Turkish government on August 15, 2024. He promised “sharia law: victory or martyrdom” in the war against the Jewish State, and cursed the United States, “America is the plague and the plague is America.”
Pro-Palestinian protesters in the United States hate America too.
The negative sentiments about the U.S.A. is more prevalent among Democrats than Republicans. According to a June 2023 Pew poll, Republicans were more likely to view America as tolerant (54% to 35%) and democratic (51% to 36%) compared to Democrats. Meanwhile Democrats were more likely to find the U.S. to be dangerous (43% to 21%) and religious (35% to 26%) than Republicans. Note that these statistics were taken before the Palestinians launched the October 7, 2023 war against Israel.
Meanwhile, Israelis have a very positive view of the United States, with 77% having a positive view according to a June 2024 Pew poll. By way of comparison, Canada, the United Kingdom and France have 54%, 54% and 46% positive scores for the United States, respectively.
According to Palestinian sources, there are over 40,000 Gazans killed in the current war against Israel. Israel claims that 17,000 of the dead were terrorists. That means that the Palestinian Authority expects millions of additional dollars to support their “Martyrs Fund” / pay-to-slay program, on top of appeals to rebuild Gaza in the war they deliberately initiated.
When the leader of the Palestinian Authority declares “America is the plague” and his supporters threaten to burn America to the ground, it begs the question why America gives a single penny to people who despise the country, and whose leaders promise to give their last penny to people who slaughter Jews.
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.
Vitebsk (1917)Russian Village (1929)
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.
Nova festival party goers
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.
Vishniac in Berlin after WWIIChagall’s White Crucifixion (1938)
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.
Fleeing NovaDestruction at Nova
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.
Wayne State UniversityBirmingham, UK
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.
Marker for location of massacre of the Jews of Lisbon on April 19, 1506
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.
Marker of location where 200+ Jews in Vienna who had refused to convert to Christianity were burned at the stake in 1421.
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.
The pro-Palestinian movement in the United States has gone full jihadi, targeting JEWISH institutions, including synagogues. The instigators are not only anti-Israel but anti-Jews.
Squirrel Hill Synagogue, PA location of worst mass murder of Jews in the US, defaced with pro-Palestinian graffiti, July 2024Mercer Island, WA synagogue defaced, November 2023
Jewish houses of worship are not Israeli. They have nothing to do with the war between Israel and Hamas terrorists, but were targeted by pro-Palestinian antisemites.
Synagogue in Los Angeles, CA spray painted with “Free Palestine” and “F*ck Israel” in May 2020Calgary, Canada synagogue defaced July 2024
The Palestineism movement specifically calls for finding and confronting Zionist organizations, which it has determined is every Jewish organization unless it specifically repudiates Zionism. They have created a “Mapping Project” to enable people to locate and harrass Jewish Americans, Jewish organizations, Jewish schools and synagogues.
The United States Holocaust Museum has written extensively about the Nazis use of intimidation as a tool to weaponize fear and “rationalize war, persecution, and genocide.” The “Free Palestine” graffiti on houses of worship – especially in the shadow of the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust on October 7, 2023 by Palestinian Arabs – is a deliberate targeting of Jews, a marker for exclusion and persecution.
The Department of Justice needs to act against these hate crimes. The department knows that “Hate crimes have a devastating effect beyond the harm inflicted on any one victim. They reverberate through families, communities, and the entire nation, as others fear that they too could be threatened, attacked, or forced from their homes, because of what they look like, who they are, where they worship, whom they love, or whether they have a disability.”
Section 241 of the civil rights code makes it a felony to intimidate people to hinder the free exercise to a basic privilege like worship.
Yet in Pennsylvania, home to the largest mass murder of Jews in the United States and scene of recent graffiti on a synagogue, Sen. Bob Casey and Gov. Josh Shapiro did not flag that the perpetrators of the antisemitic intimidation should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. They only spoke of the symbolism of the vandalism and graffiti.
The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE) made it an offense to use intimidation to prevent a person from going to a synagogue. A Tennessee woman was just sentenced to three years and five months for intimidating people from using an abortion clinic. Such action should be enforced quickly and broadly for vandalizing a synagogue, with long sentences when the language calls to eradicate the Jewish State.
Words of condemnation are appreciated but American Jewry needs and demands that politicians and law enforcement enforce laws to protect Jews from the onslaught of toxic antisemitic Palestineism that is sweeping the nation.
Gamestop is a publicly-traded company with very poor prospects. Technology has changed the way people buy and play games, and retail stores are hurting all over the United States. The company has swapped management, closed stores and let people go but the business continues to flounder.
But not its stock price. As covered in the movie Dumb Money, masses of people decided to wage a war against professional capitalists and kept pushing the stock higher. Ignoring all fundamental principles, the trading horde opted for another capitalist principle, that things are worth what people are willing to pay for them. Enough of them bound together to run the stock and push professional stock traders to capitulation.
Gamestop stock trading last five years showing dramatic spikes
People are protesting on college campuses and the streets to protect Hamas from the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Masses have willfully opted to ignore basic morality in the face of heinous barbarism committed by the group which has promised to repeat its barbarity.
Like “Hello Kitty” who directs the masses to buy a meme stock, the Iranian tools of CAIR, Democratic Socialists of America, Students for Justice in Palestine and others, rally mobs to shut their blind moral eyes, and side with an antisemitic death cult.
They have turned the game on itself using its own rules. Capitalism both believes in fundamental values as well as market pricing, just as western society values liberalism as well as free speech and assembly. In the frenetic broadcast social media world, clicks and retweets are empowering the latter to overwhelm normalcy.
Passions are no longer tethered to truth and decency. And this is BEFORE artificial intelligence (AI) gets mainstreamed which will usher a future in which people will be unable to differentiate the real from the manufactured.
We are entering a very dangerous state for mankind, in which bots, AI and the masses actually have the power to tear down society without conventional weapons. Depravity coupled with technology will breed anarchy, particularly in societies where trust has been trashed, as many have been in the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The current axis of evil – China-Russia-Iran – are using anarchists on these shores to launch an insidious revolution, and our society just scrolls through X in bewilderment, rather than take actions to protect our values and our country.
In a world where facts are extraneous, we are only left with a clash of emotions.
Will we pass judgment solely on which party seems the most sympathetic because they feel the most injured? Does that foretell a future of balms for the pain, rather than solutions for the problems?
We are carrying our emotions across the threshold to deflower our intelligence. That is a marriage that will end poorly for civilization.
Anne Frank was a young teenager living in Amsterdam when the Nazis invaded Holland. She went into hiding in an attic with her family, fearful of genocidal maniacs who roamed the streets. For a few years, she kept a personal diary of her thoughts and how she and her family were living in hiding, before ultimately being discovered and sent to their deaths. Her diary has become an important document read by people around the world about a disgraceful period in human history which began with hatred, lawlessness and fear, and ultimately genocide.
People today – especially young people – live their lives online. With postings on Instagram, X/Twitter, TikTok and Facebook, people share their thoughts and activities with friends and strangers.
So when hate and lawlessness come for Jewish youth in the United States today, anyone around the world can see and read the testimony. The brave came to congress to testify about their classmates calling for the genocide of Jews. The unbowed sued their universities for not providing a safe environment. The fighters came onto the public stage and recounted the scourge of antisemitism they experience going to classes.
But they are few. Most young Jews are trying to just experience high school and college. They let teachers’ snide comments about “Jewish baby killers” go by, lest they lose a grade. They don’t report their mezuzahs being torn down at their dorm, pretending they fell on their own. They hide in rooms and skip events and parties with peers who have revealed themselves to be Jew haters.
Some young and older Jews have quietly lobbied for change at schools and local governments. Others have opted for a less forward approach such as writing blogs.
This blog, First One Through, started ten years ago in May 2014 as the Obama Administration was failing to secure a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinian Authority as well as failing to end the Iranian nuclear program. It focused on the terrible media coverage, particularly of The New York Times, in excusing and ignoring any horrible action by the Democratic administration and Islamists, while sparing no vicious ink on the Jewish State.
Over time, the posts captured the media’s antisemitic bias, which included deliberately obfuscating the direct connection between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. It described America’s priorities in fighting racism while ignoring growing Jew hatred. It detailed the moral rot of the United Nations and America’s leading universities.
Over 1,500 articles by a single author over the decade.
While the Shoah Foundation has collected important testimonies of thousands of Holocaust survivors about their recollections of World War II, they are colored by history and age. Anne Frank’s diary gives us something unique: a vision of a world gone mad in real-time, without the perfect hindsight of how the story played out.
We are witnessing Anne Frank in students’ public testimonies and blogs penned by those who prefer the written word. It is imperative to heed their warnings and to take actions to help them and mass of Jewish students in hiding.
Gamestop is a publicly-traded company with very poor prospects. Technology has changed the way people buy and play games, and retail stores are hurting all over the United States. The company has swapped management, closed stores and let people go but the business continues to flounder.
But not its stock price. As covered in the movie Dumb Money, masses of people decided to wage a war against professional capitalists and kept pushing the stock higher. Ignoring all fundamental principles, the trading horde opted for another capitalist principle, that things are worth what people are willing to pay for them. Enough of them bound together to run the stock and push professional stock traders to capitulation.
Gamestop stock trading last five years showing dramatic spikes
People are protesting on college campuses and the streets to protect Hamas from the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Masses have willfully opted to ignore basic morality in the face of heinous barbarism committed by the group which has promised to repeat its barbarity.
Like “Hello Kitty” who directs the masses to buy a meme stock, the Iranian tools of CAIR, Democratic Socialists of America, Students for Justice in Palestine and others, rally mobs to shut their blind moral eyes, and side with an antisemitic death cult.
They have turned the game on itself using its own rules. Capitalism both believes in fundamental values as well as market pricing, just as western society values liberalism as well as free speech and assembly. In the frenetic broadcast social media world, clicks and retweets are empowering the latter to overwhelm normalcy.
Passions are no longer tethered to truth and decency. And this is BEFORE artificial intelligence (AI) gets mainstreamed which will usher a future in which people will be unable to differentiate the real from the manufactured.
We are entering a very dangerous state for mankind, in which bots, AI and the masses actually have the power to tear down society without conventional weapons. Depravity coupled with technology will breed anarchy, particularly in societies where trust has been trashed, as many have been in the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The current axis of evil – China-Russia-Iran – are using anarchists on these shores to launch an insidious revolution, and our society just scrolls through X in bewilderment, rather than take actions to protect our values and our country.
In a world where facts are extraneous, we are only left with a clash of emotions.
Will we pass judgment solely on which party seems the most sympathetic because they feel the most injured? Does that foretell a future of balms for the pain, rather than solutions for the problems?
We are carrying our emotions across the threshold to deflower our intelligence. That is a marriage that will end poorly for civilization.
Four university presidents of America’s leading academic institutions came to the United States capital to address a congressional hearing on antisemitism on college campuses. Most failed to satisfactorily answer a very simple question: “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate the school’s code of conduct?” As private institutions, the question had nothing to do with free speech, and in framing the question about “the genocide of Jews”, there was no debate about what “intifada” or “Free Palestine” meant.
The answers should have been clear and unambiguous, just as if the question were about students shouting to drown gay people or lynch Blacks.
Not long after America’s theoretically best-and-brightest failed Morality 101, campuses around the country actually began calling for the genocide of Jews and the destruction of America. Right in New York City, the capital of Diaspora Jewry, people called for a repeat of the October 7 massacres, to kill Zionists and Israeli businesses and to run Jewish organizations out of the public square.
Pamphlet from New York University anti-Israel encampment
Somehow, this has caught New Yorkers and Americans off guard, as if October 8th happened from thin air. As if there had not been antisemitism and anti-Zionism in the United States. As though the situation for American Jews was at perfection on October 6.
This dynamic recalls the story of the Jews in Persia 2,500 years ago, as told in the Book of Esther. Hints about the current tragedy are laid out in how the story is chanted in synagogues.
That story, retold on the holiday of Purim, began to unfold around the year 483BCE. The Jewish exile had come to a close with most Jews having returned to the land of Israel after the First Temple was destroyed one hundred years earlier. Still, many Jews decided to remain in the Persian kingdom in the Jewish diaspora, as their lives had become quite good.
As laid out in chapter three, there was an opportunist named Haman who saw that the laws of the land were capricious. In that backdrop, he saw a wealthy, non-conformist community that was easy prey and offered the king 10,000 talents of silver in exchange for the fate of the Jews. Every single Jew – from infants to the elderly – were to be exterminated, leaving no heir for Haman to consider as he stole the lives and property from every unsuspecting Jew, yielding himself multiples of the 10,000 talents of silver.
The edict against the Jews was not made in secret. It was put in public in every province and every language. At the end of the chapter, the text states that the king and Haman sat down together “but the city of Shushan (the capital) was bewildered.”
The Book of Esther is sung in a unique set of happy cantillations, but there are a few parts that are read in an unhappy melody used for the Book of Lamentations. One would imagine that the entirety of chapter three describing the condemnation of the country’s Jews for annihilation would be read in the sad tune, but it is not. Only those last few words “the city of Shushan was bewildered” are sung in the sad melody.
Why? Why would the rabbis leave the call to annihilate Jews in a happy tune but the dumbfoundedness of Jews and non-Jews of Shushan emphasized in tragic song?
There are a few explanations.
Some suggest that the Persian Jews should have moved back to the land of Israel. That foreign laws turning on Jews should not be shocking. The Persian Jews had deluded themselves that they were living in the heart of civilization in a protected lifestyle. It was that delusion and failure to return to the holy land that was the tragedy; the new antisemitic edicts were to be expected.
Another approach builds on that theme. Jews had become trained to only think of antisemitism in a certain way: the blocking of particular rituals like kosher, observing the Sabbath and circumcision. If those were practices were not infringed upon, the general breakdown of a legal framework in the country was ignored.
These ideas are familiar to Jews in America today.
American Jews were trained to think of society as not inherently antisemitic because their synagogues got built and they attained corporate success. While they saw the reports that Jews suffered the greatest number of hate crimes, it was generally dismissed as being a problem for the outwardly devout, while those focused on just living and working with their heads down would do just fine.
Jews ignored politicians saying that wealth is in the hands of the “wrong people.” They didn’t complain when edicts for DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) specifically excluded Jews and promoted other minorities. Jews observed themselves being systematically removed from positions of power and joined the celebration; diversity replaced meritocracy, seemingly in line with “social justice” and “tikkun olam“, even if not universally fair.
Somehow, it never dawned on American Jews that they were facing a threat as they watched a legal and financial system which was based on fairness and hard work in which they participated and excelled, being trashed as inherently racist. Jews nodded approval that a proper response to the War on Terror on a couple of Muslim-majority countries was to facilitate billions of dollars and tens of thousands of students and professors from other Muslim-majority countries into leading American universities. They did not consider that the curricula was being gutted to vilify America, capitalism, Jews and the Jewish State.
America and American Jews – like Persia and Persian Jews 2,500 years ago – were duped into believing that antisemitism was only about Jewish customs and ignored the reality that the seeds of antisemitism are planted when a legal framework that protects EVERYONE is dismantled in favor of a select few. More specifically, laws that excluded Jews in favor of people of preference.
To be bewildered is to be caught off guard, a horribly sad situation for a people who have thousands of years of history from which to learn.
As reported in the press, “Columbia University has announced that classes at its main campus will be held remotely for the final weeks of the semester — as critics blasted the “weak” administration for allowing anti-Israel student protesters to shut down the college “in essence” and called on parents to seek tuition refunds.”
This comes as Jewish students at the New York City school have faced unrelenting harassment and intimidation from students and professors. An Orthodox rabbi at Columbia/Barnard told his community that Columbia clearly “cannot guarantee Jewish students’ safety in the face of extreme antisemitism and anarchy,” and Columbia provost Angela Olinto seemed to agree, as demonstrated with the announced shift to an off-campus schedule.
Jews have long been the most persecuted group in terms of the number of hate crimes in the United States, exceeding the rates for Blacks, LGBT, Muslims and any other minorities, well before the current spike in Jew hatred.
Leading institutions and the U.S. government seem to think that the best solution is for Jews to stay home and hide.
Consider that on May 21, 2021, the Biden Administrations’ Jewish engagement director, Aaron Keyak, tweeted “It pains me to say this, but if you fear for your life or physical safety take off your kippah and hide your magen david (Star of David).“
We are seeing the ramifications of electing antisemitic politicians who refuse to protect Jews, as open warfare against Jews permeates college campuses. During this election season, it is critical to oust the elected officials in Democratic primaries who have fostered this environment that Jews are fair game for assault.
ACTION ITEM
In NY-16, extremist Rep. Jamaal Bowman is being challenged by Westchester County Executive George Latimer. Donate to Latimer here.
In MO-1, extremist Rep. Cori Bush is being challenged by public defender Wesley Bell. Donate to Bell here.
In MN-05, extremist Rep. Ilhan Omar is being challenged by Minneapolis City Council member Don Samuels. Donate to Samuels here.
Write to the White House and your local politicians to provide protection for Jewish institutions and students.
First One Through 