Today Tell a Jewish Friend You Care

No buttons, no pictures: this one is serious.

“Are you sure you even want me to become a citizen soon? You don’t know who I’ll vote for. Right now the only people supporting me are republicans and Jesus people.”

My beloved friend will be a US citizen soon, he will become an Israeli-American, and I support his right to vote for whomever he wants. But it’s sad that my friend, whose social circles are wide and deep, is finding support only from certain “factions” among his friends.

I don’t know what it’s like to live with the burden of being undeniably Jewish. Some of my family members do. More than a quarter of my DNA was gifted to me by ancestors who did. But those ancestors also worked very hard to scrub themselves and their children of the stigma that had haunted, harmed, tormented, traumatized, and restricted them (to the “Pale of Settlement”). They were restrained from social and economic participation, and forced into the role of the Russian army’s front-line sacrificial “meat.” I am descended, in part, from the survivors of these horrors, the lucky few, who were able to escape to the Americas and reinvent themselves.

Say what you will about abandoning your whole ethnic history, but I cannot judge them. They were the brave in their way, but they were also the still-quivering survivors’ children, who generation after generation had witnessed their loved ones executed on front porches, and in vast pits, who’d been taunted by children and spat upon in the streets, because for so many humans there is a brain-sickness that turns humanity towards its darkest, most evil side, and demands all Jews must be destroyed.

Now I must admit: I was an Israel-skeptic “before it was cool.” In 1996, after seeing video on the news of Israeli soldiers reacting with military weaponry to children throwing stones, I said aloud to a Jewish fellow college student, “who are the Nazis now?” My saying that DID get him to finally stop hitting on me (and for the record he was a relentless tool who could not take a hint), but in hindsight I still regret it. Those soldiers were in the wrong, but they were not like the Nazis, who systematically executed millions of Jews and other “undesirables” with cold, industrial efficiency.

Traumatized people will over-react to being attacked. Trauma travels through generations: the pain and anguish of the parents shape the psyche of their children. But that pain gives no one the right to lash out and harm another.

I live in Iowa. I live on land stolen from other peoples, peoples who were here first. This land was not taken from them bloodlessly; my home mortgage is a legal document attached to a chain of history that involves murder, betrayal, trickery, exploitation, and genocide. Today only the fragmented and decimated remnants of their civilization remain — does this give them the right to butcher me in my bed?

To voice support for the rights of Jewish people to exist is not to support the actions of aggressive and illegal West-bank-settlers today any more than it supports the actions of soldiers responding to stones with bullets in 1996. More importantly, to voice support for the rights of Jewish people to exist is to counteract the dominant rhetoric of almost all of history. And therefore, it needs to be said. Because so rarely has it been said: that there’s nothing bad about being Jewish.

Once I saw an acquaintance proclaim on social media “I love being Jewish!” and the effect of his words has stuck with me much longer than seems reasonable. He was referring to the traditions and connections and community he was feeling at that moment, I think. And yet, his words haunt me: I am the great-grandchild of people who believed the most kind and loving gift they could give me was to take that Jewishness away from me.

We can debate, with hindsight, the wisdom and details of the founding of the state of Israel in the aftermath of the holocaust, but that seems like a petty thing to do from the former British Empire or the United States. All of North and South America is made of “colonizer” states. The survivors of this vast two-continent entire-hemisphere genocide live in impoverished, isolated pockets and are the most discriminated against in our societies — in the US Native Americans are more likely to be killed by police officers than any other group. It’s astonishing that we inheritors of these ill-gotten gains feel entitled to point fingers at anyone.

And to point our hypocritical fingers at Israel? The place where our nations sent the haggard and ravaged remnants of European Jewry that we did not want? The place that Middle-Eastern and African nations exiled their Jewish populations by murderous force after seizing all their possessions? (Before Israel existed, Tripoli in Libya was more than a quarter Jewish. Today it is a city without a single Jew.)

No state is is perfect. Every country commits crimes. Israel’s various governments, over the past half century, have done some bullshit. But compared to the United States? Before we complain about the dust mote in Israel’s eye, maybe we could deal with the goggles stuffed with sawdust we have strapped over our own?

But this isn’t even the point.

The percentage of the world’s population that is Jewish is 0.2% — that is 1/5th of 1%, a tiny minority. I imagine the number would be much larger had not entire towns of human beings been wiped out repeatedly over the centuries, long before the German Nazi government committed the ultimate crime of the holocaust. We punch down. And we have always punched down. When it comes to Jews, though, we tell ourselves we’re punching up.

When I read my favorite authors — Shakespeare, Voltaire, Willa Cather — I try to look past the antisemitism¹ and appreciate the literature for all the good it has to offer, blotting out the Jew-jokes and Jew-slights in my mind. We do this in other realms: people want to celebrate the business acumen or class-positive-actions of Henry Ford, and blot out the fact that he published an anti-Jewish newspaper. But by trying to excuse or ignore this persistent sickness in our culture’s thoughts, do we only permit it to grow?

So that today, over a thousand innocent people can be horrifically attacked, some of them raped, brutalized:

She had nails and different objects in her female organs. Her body was brutalized in a way that we cannot identify her, from her head to her toes.

And there are North American Colonist-endowed Genocide-benefitting individuals who are coughing up the ancient sickness and spreading it: the Jews are the problem, they say, the woman with nails in her female organs, she deserved it, because she was a colonist, they say, the woman who was being raped and the rapist “cuts her breast, throws it on the road, and they are playing with it”² and then they finally kill her, and she deserved it, because of the way Israel has treated the Palestinian people, they say.

If being condemned to an open-air prison (like the Pale), being starved, being shot, being indiscriminately killed and deprived of social, political, and economic rights were justification to kill your oppressors, Jews would be entitled to murder half the world. This is nonsense and madness, symptoms of the brain-sickness.

Jewish people are not many — again, just 1/5th of 1% of us — and they are hurting. They deserve your care. Whatever you think of Israel’s history, whatever you think of Israel’s government, whatever you think of Israel’s military, there are Jews who agree with you. There are Jews in Israel, right now, gathering in public squares to demand a cease-fire, for goodness sakes. Jews are human beings with a variety of perspectives and flawed institutions — just like everyone.

But the unique hurt of being Jewish is that Jews have been brutalized beyond the stuff of nightmares just for being Jewish, again, and a great part of the self-proclaimed moral conscience of our society is blaming them for their own victim-hood, again.

I don’t think people are ill-intentioned, but I do think people are confused. I think we should stop and think and read and learn and reject easy answers and then think some more.

Arnold Garson recently wrote on substack about his family’s experiences being Jewish in the Midwest, and I highly recommend.

I also recommend Dara Horn’s short and highly-impactful book People Love Dead Jews, which will give you a tremendous perspective on the stories we tell ourselves in our culture — if nothing else, get the book so you can learn about the city in China that was built by Jews, which is now a Jew-less tourist attraction with wax models of Jews. (You only get one guess about what happened to the Jews who used to live there.)

One last important thing: when I asked my friend if I could include what he said, as a quote, at the start of this piece, he was hesitant: “I was mostly joking,” he said, “about the voting, but the truth is that they are the only people I feel safe around right now. I don’t need people to go hold banners and protest,” he said, “but maybe just to know that I’m safe with them.”

That is not too much to ask. And it’s not too much to say. Reach out and tell someone Happy Hanukkah. Tell them you love them. Tell them they are safe with you. Say the thing that needs to be said as a counter-spell to thousands of years of vile cursing: Jews Are People With the Right to Exist. Tell them that what happened on October 7th gives you nightmares. Let them know that with you, they can relax: you are not going to accuse them or blame them. You are not going to call for their elimination.

Just be a friend.

1. Why do we persist in using the word “antisemitism” instead of Judeophobia? This verbal construction would align with Islamophobia, Homophobia, etc.; but more importantly, “Semite” refers to speakers of Semitic languages, which includes Arabic as well as Hebrew, and so the term is literally inaccurate in its usage.

2. These quotes are from october 7 survivor testimony provided to the United Nations, link just above the block quote.