An Open Letter to My Non-Jewish Friends on Antisemitism

Nov 14, 2023

Last week I was visiting my parents. When I went to leave for the airport, for the first time in my life, my Mom tucked my Jewish necklace into my shirt before I left the house. “Be safe,” she said, the pain in her eyes cracking a hole in my heart. And I knew why she said it - we have both been watching the news the last three weeks. We’re not the only ones thinking twice about wearing outwardly Jewish symbols, with Israel warning its citizens abroad to consider downplaying Jewish symbols amid rising antisemitism. I want to hang the mezuzah on the front door of our new home. I might wait awhile, after the break-in a couple faced in California.

My mom’s fear, her grief - our entire family’s - are even more raw than when a neighbor spray painted a giant swastika on our house when I was 14. That moment hurt - it was painful and real and you never quite get over it, like how I still remember in middle school the first time that someone called me a Jew as an insult, in a way that oozed disgust. But in my head, these were isolated incidents - actions of the few extremists with hateful views.

Never mind that the extremists have been seemingly growing in number. They marched with tiki torches in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us.” A synagogue was the site of a mass shooting a few years ago and there was a sharp rise last year in violent attacks on Hasidic Jews in New York. These were the extremists, the few ruining it for the many, I would tell myself out of a hope it wouldn’t boil over. But then in 2022 Kanye West - who has more Twitter followers than there are Jewish people in the world- tweeted “I’m going death con 3 on Jewish People,” and it felt like the extremism was becoming more mainstream and that we were being thrust toward a boiling point.

These are just the big things that we see reported about. I went to a comedy show a week after the October 7th attack to try to unplug from the world. One of the comedians started his set by making known his anti-Israel stance and ended his set by making jokes about Anne Frank burning in an oven. Those are the smaller instances, the countless paper cuts, that go unseen.

Sometimes I feel like I have just been waiting for the shoe to drop. Like my whole community has. We know that the highest number of religious hate crimes (60%) in the US are against Jews. And factoring in population size, Jews in the US are 2.6x more likely to be victims of hate crimes compared to Blacks and 2.2x more likely compared to Muslims, based on 2019 FBI data. We’ve watched for years as the UN perpetuates a double standard against the only Jewish state in the world, issuing more resolutions in 2022 in the General Assembly criticizing Israel (the only liberal democracy in the Middle East) than all resolutions to condemn any other country combined. We’ve seen the antisemitic rhetoric take a larger foothold in our society each time there is conflict in Israel.

What’s so incredibly disappointing is society’s inability to identify the difference between being antisemitic and criticizing Israel, nor spot when the latter is turning into the former.

Antisemitism has increased nearly 400% since Hamas’s attack on October 7th. Just this week, “Death to All Jews” was trending in the UK on X (Twitter). That’s not about Israel. Gas the Jews chanted a crowd protesting in Australia last month. That’s not about Israel. The Free Press, founded by Bari Weiss, (author of How to Fight Antisemitism) had their offices in NYC branded with f*ck the Jews. That’s not about Israel. Russians across the country hunted down Jews. A Jewish man was attacked at a pro-Palestinian rally in California and died. Synagogues and Jewish Communities in Canada and other countries have been attacked. Cafes and homes and restaurants in Europe have been branded with Jewish stars, reminiscent of the Holocaust. A Pakistani senator tweeted a picture of Hitler saying “At least now the world know [sic], why he did, what he did.” Jewish students at US colleges are feeling targeted at colleges and locking themselves in libraries for safety and being told by the NYPD not to go out in their neighborhoods at Shabbat. None of that is truly about Israel. Israel just continues to be the excuse to unleash antisemitism that lies dormant in the shadows until an opportunity arises

In some ways, the antisemitism I’m seeing now seems even more dangerous than the overt antisemitic extremism. For example, I don’t think that the majority of people who are parroting, antisemitic chants at rallies even recognize that they are doing it. Many of us studied Arendt’s banality of evil in college. How many of people who learned about the Holocaust told themselves that they would easily spot the anti-Jewish propaganda that older generations failed to spot?

What’s worse, though, is that the people and groups, most focused on combating oppression, aren’t doing the work to learn to understand, spot, and condemn antisemitism. Israel makes the best excuse to be antisemitic because it provides a political cover to justify hatred—a pattern we have seen before with other forms of prejudice, such as Islamaphobia. Yet, the movements and institutions and friends that I’ve counted on to champion marginalized groups are overlooking antisemitism. My liberal friends have spoken out before when witnessing hatred and violence towards other groups, and it's something I admire them for. Yet, when it comes to antisemitism: crickets.

It feels like in order for antisemitism to be worth addressing by other groups, I need to preface the conversation with, “I don’t agree with Israel about xyz so therefore...” Why? I shouldn’t need to feel pressured to condemn a foreign government in order for people to pay attention to antisemitism and say that it’s wrong and undeserved.

I’m hurting in a way that someone could never fully appreciate unless they have grown up in a community existing in the living memory of the Holocaust. It’s not some far off piece of history for us - our grandparents carry numbers etched into their arms bearing witness to the horrors they escaped. Our genetics carry trauma etched with generations of enduring pogroms, massacres, oppression, and hate. The global Jewish population still hasn’t recovered to pre-Holocaust numbers from before 1939.

My ancestors fled the pogroms in Russia so they wouldn’t be murdered for being Jewish. My grandfather fought in World War II, against the Axis powers who made exterminating the Jews part of their main mission. And now this month, my grandmother witnessed mobs in Russia, the country her family fled from generations prior, storming airports to intercept planes they thought were carrying Israelis and attempted to hunt down Jews in hotels. Her heart is breaking.

So is mine. There has been an unceasing ache in my chest, every moment of every day since October 7th, a pain makes me draw even further inward, even further into an already isolated Jewish community.

The media coverage is often exacerbating the issue of antisemitism, not countering it.

The perfect example of this was that nearly every single major news agency jumped at the opportunity to immediately print a headline blaming Israel for bombing a hospital in Gaza, relying primarily on claims from the Hamas controlled Health Ministry of Gaza that Israel committed the attack. Not long after, both Israel and the US were able to point to proof that Israel did not bomb the hospital, and the hospital bombing was actually from a terrorist rocket in Gaza that misfired. But the lack of journalistic integrity catalyzed global antisemitism. It launched attacks on synagogues and embassies and fomented hatred, violence, and misinformation that no number of “corrections” can undo.

I continue to wonder: why isn’t there more mainstream reporting on the spike in antisemitism? Why did the New York Times just recently rehire a Hitler sympathizer that it previously fired? Why is it only my Jewish friends posting against antisemitism on social media? Where are the voices of the liberal groups who have made it their mission to speak out against oppression? Why aren’t they educating people on the difference between being antisemitic and criticizing Israel?

The ache has ignited to simmering anger, always there. My Jewish psyche - the collective Jewish psyche- feels like it's fragmenting. The way I live and move through the world as a Jewish person feels like it will now be broken into before October 7th and after. I feel like we’ve awakened a sleeping giant. And even if the antisemitism quells as this conflict dies down, your Jewish friends now know. We now know how little it takes for the world to reveal its true colors, how few actually care about combating antisemitism. And we know how many people will just sit quietly while it unfolds.

When I was in high school, I created a print of a Palestinian girl looking out her window, longing for a sea that she couldn’t get to because of the Israeli checkpoints. I kept it in my bedroom and looked at it every day. It was a reminder that Palestinians are suffering, too. It was a reminder to myself not to let hate creep into my heart after each time there was a suicide bombing in Israel. It was a reminder that Palestinians are struggling, that their lives are difficult and that individuals are not their governments. That at the end of the day, it’s two groups of humans on both sides of this conflict, people with wants and wishes and feelings and their own right to self-determination. The tragedy is that that young girl in the picture in my window- if she was real- wouldn’t be taught about the validity of self-determination on both sides. She would have been taught, in UN-funded classrooms, to want to eradicate Israel. To want to kill all Jews.

“Father, father, I killed 10 Jews,” a Hamas terrorist is recorded saying over the phone on October 7th, gleefully calling up his dad to brag about it. Not Israelis. I killed Jews. That’s part of the reason why Jews across the whole world are hurting because of the October 7th attack. “We must attack every Jew on the face of the Earth,” Fathi Hamad, a senior leader in Hamas, is recorded as saying in 2019. We know that even though we aren’t in Israel, that Hamas also wants us dead.

Just this month, a Hamas leader was interviewed on TV exclaiming that “we would do it again,” talking about the October 7th attack on innocent Israelis.

You know what antisemitism is? The thousands of people around the world saying some version of “Israel deserved the October 7th attack, they are exclusively to blame.” There is no justification for massacring innocent civilians. Yet instead of chanting to Free Palestine from Hamas, countless groups are justifying Hamas’s horrific behavior.

(Trigger warning in this paragraph: violence). “With or without baking powder?” was the tweet made by a professor, whose work the New York Times has published before. He was responding to accounts from an Israeli first responder finding a baby baked to death in an oven by Hamas.

And even though Hamas live streamed their atrocities, somehow Israel is still having to do private screenings to reporters to counter the denial of what Hamas did. The fact that there are people who deny the Hamas Oct. 7th massacre is insane - the very son of one of Hamas’s founders has dedicated his life to working to condemn Hamas and expose their true colors.

I try everyday not to think about the horrors befalling the 240 innocent hostages that Hamas has taken captive. And yet, people keep ripping down posters of those hostages. I keep seeing countless videos. Why? Many of them are family members of US citizens, or US citizens. Do these people not value innocent, Jewish life?

My soul is shattering, my faith in humanity is shattering. I feel powerless. I feel guilty. I feel hopeless. I feel rage. I feel as if the world has turned a corner into an antisemitic frenzy that we can not go back from. I feel like something in me, a way I view the world and the communities around me, has been broken irrevocably.

I try to remind myself that much of it is bred from ignorance, from people trying to do the right thing by the Palestinians, who deserve support and advocacy. I too want Palestinians to live a life free of suffering, a life of self-determination, and of living in peace with Israel. I have to keep reminding myself that the drive of so many out there saying horrible, ignorant things, is coming from a place of idealism, of good. But what does it matter if people are mostly good, if they are also mostly ignorant and that ignorance can be weaponized? Ignorance can have the same consequences as hate, even if unintended.

I believe that many people are perpetrating antisemitism and don’t even recognize it.

People have turned the symbol of a paraglider into a sign of resistance. The paragliders were Hamas terrorists who flew into the Israeli music festival on October 7th to murder, rape, and kidnap innocents and then called home afterwards to celebrate murdering innocent Jews.

Chants at pro-Palestinian rallies that announce “from the river to the sea, Palestine must be free,” or “globalize the intifada” are antisemitic - the White House agrees. Accomplishing “from the river to the sea,” would mean the destruction of Israel and therefore likely the death of millions of Jews and the exile of any who survived. Similar arguments that Israel “doesn’t have the right to exist” or that it should “go away” would mean wiping Israel off the map. What other country in the world faces this kind of rhetoric? What other country in the world do people say doesn’t have a right to exist? Especially a country that has had a conflict of this magnitude thrust upon them by European powers, through policies such as the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration.

“But when criticism of against Israel is allowed to cross over into something different - into a denial of a Jewish state in any form, into open calls for the very destruction of Israel, while at the same time the self-determination of other peoples is exalted - that is an example of the discriminatory double standard Jewish people have always found hurtful. And we worry about what could come next.”

- Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer

It’s actually during times when Israel is under attack when many Jews across the world most viscerally feel the need for a Jewish state to exist as a means of protection, with a reported rise in the number of Jews applying to make aliyah (e.g. move to Israel). I’ll let that sink in. The rising antisemitism is so terrifying right now, that there are many Jews across the world who feel that they would be safer in Israel.

There’s a reason that about half of the world’s Jews live in Israel, 40% in the US and only 10% elsewhere. It’s not that we haven’t tried living elsewhere. It’s that history has shown that not many other places will let us live peacefully. Amos Oz says it perfectly in A Tale of Love and Darkness.

“When my father was a young man in Vilna [Lithuania], every wall in Europe said, Jews go home to Palestine. Fifty years later, when he went back to Europe on a visit, the walls all screamed Jews, get out of Palestine.” - Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness.

I’ll end with an anecdote about the spirit of the Jewish people. I visited Theresienstadt several years ago, a concentration camp in the Czech Republic. As we stood in the camp’s crematorium, holding vigil with small round candles in our hand, the Rabbi told us a story about how he and his students were kicked out of Auschwitz the year before. “To be honest, though,” he laughed, his long ponytail shaking, “if there is anywhere in the world you do want to get kicked out of, it’s probably Auschwitz.”

“Why did you get kicked out of Auschwitz?” we all asked.

“We were singing, and we were kicked out because we were told it was a somber place and singing was not allowed. But if Jews looked at suffering like that…if we weren’t the type of people to go back to these places and sing, we would never have survived.”

And so, we stood in that place of death and darkness and did what Jews do. We let our voices cry out and joined one another in song, the lights of our candles dancing in unison with our breath, as we sang “Hatikvah” (The Hope).

So I’ll leave you with this. If you are not Jewish, do the work to understand antisemitism. Now more than ever, do the work. If you are not Jewish, don’t make us sing, don’t make us hope, alone.

Resources:

Idalia's Substack

An Open Letter to My Non-Jewish Friends on Antisemitism