Don’t love us only when we are weakened
Two years ago, Dara Horn published an important book and gave it a provocative title that summarizes its main thesis: “People Love Dead Jews.” People enjoy learning about the holocaust, she writes, they visit Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam, but they don’t like stories about vibrant, successful and powerful Jews.
A month after the publication of the book, a terrorist killed 11 Jews attending shabbat services at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. The love and support the Jewish community received, not only in Pittsburgh but all over the United States, was unparalleled.
On shabbat, Oct. 7, 2023, more than 1,400 Jews were murdered in one day. With so many dead Jews, one would expect a mighty wave of universal love directed at Israel and a worldwide condemnation of Hamas. And indeed, many people, of all faiths and political persuasions, have recognized the enormity of Hamas’ crimes. Neighbors sent me and our synagogue consoling messages and even delivered flowers. Many world leaders unambiguously condemned the terrorist attacks, and private citizens expressed their pain on social media.
But there has also been a large group of people and organizations, most notably some of the most prestigious universities and some Progressive organizations, that stayed uncharacteristically silent and even went as far as to justify the massacre.
Why 1,400 victims in Israel didn’t elicit the same support that the victims of the Tree of Life terrorist attack did? I would like to suggest that the murder of the Jewish worshipers in Pittsburgh fits the old model of attacks on Jews that was prevalent over millennia. Jews experienced it during the Crusades, the Pogroms in Russia, and the Holocaust. The perpetrators were powerful, the Jews were helpless and all they could do was lick their wounds, bury their dead and pray for a better tomorrow. Following the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, the Psalmist wrote, “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.” The Babylonians killed and exiled us and all we could do was to sit and cry – this is the Jew that people love.
But 75 years ago, the model changed. Having our own Jewish state taught us to multitask. Our enemies never stopped killing us. We still cry but now, even before our tears dry up, we strike back and we do it with more force than the enemy could imagine. We don’t sit and cry, we cry and fight and we win. And these are the Jews people don’t like.
Of course, the academics and students at the elite universities will vehemently deny it. Their condemnation of Israel and embrace of Hamas is elegantly dressed in theories of racism, white privilege and decolonization. Conveniently they ignore the reality that the majority of Israelis are not white-people and forgetting the historical fact that some 700,000 Mizrahi Jews were displaced from their Middle Eastern country of origin in the late 1940’s and 1950’s where they had lived for hundreds of years.
My grandparents were Holocaust survivors. Their son, my father, was an officer in the IDF. I grew up on stories of both models - the helpless Jew and the powerful one. They are both part of our identity but one belongs in the past and the other shapes our present and future. It saddens me that there are too many people who love only dead Jews whose brothers and sisters cannot fight back. I hope that they will soon come to terms with the reality that this model is not coming back.