We have spent much of our history being told that Jews were paranoid shortly before discovering that we were not paranoid enough. I suspect that is precisely the point we are at now.
Love this. I agree with everything you say, except that I believe you aren't neurotic enough. It's the neurotic Jews who survive. My grandfather left Hungary in 1939 because he'd had enough of the crushing poverty and antisemitism that he'd been enduring for years. He spent the following two years raising money to bring the rest of the family over, and in 1941, my then 4-year-old father left Hungary.
My grandfather had no clue that a catastrophe as huge as the Holocaust was coming, and my grandmother didn't want to leave, arguing that they should wait until after the war. He wasn't a prophet; he just felt an overwhelming need to get out.
The Holocaust reached Hungary in the last year of the war, and in that one year, the Nazis succeeded in wiping out three quarters of Hungarian Jewry. Had they "waited," I very likely might not be sitting here typing these words.
The pattern of Jewish history is clear. When the signs we are seeing today become clear, things get horribly worse before they get better, usually ending with Jews either being exterminated or cleansed from that place. Because of the global nature of the threat today, that thought is extremely terrifying.
I don't think we can do anything to successfully fight it off, either. Why would we succeed where so many Jews in history have failed before? The only thing we can do is survive it, and we instinctively know how to do that. After October 7, we began to cling harder to each other and to our traditions. It's what we've always done in times of trouble, and it's the only way to weather it through.
You hit the nail on the head and I am glad your family escaped. Fifty years ago, a man named Ernest van den Haag, wrote a book called The Jewish Mystique. He wrote that yes we faced pogroms. Some might be harmed, but the majority would survive. Who could have imagined the Holocaust? Now that it has happened, we have to be aware. Historical memory helps.
Yes. This is all true. And you point a finger to how hatred of Jews and hatred of Israel has become normalized to the point where our very right to be safe has become a debate.
It seems there’s always validation offered for violence and hate against Jews in Israel and I think this is what’s different from most other forms of hate
People accept Jew hatred as a valid default position
Worse things than looking foolish? You got that right! At least for me. I couldn't care less if people think I am an idiot or a fool. As long as I am the one still standing at the end. I think we all know the old joke. "Just because you are paranoid, does not mean that someone isn't really out to get you." Get out to the range and practice.
There is an old saying. "It's not paranoia if they're really after you." As a non Jew who supports Israel because it is the one country in the Middle East in which there is respect and support for freedom and individual rights (FAIR), I say to anyone who is Jewish, do not make the mistake of thinking that the new alliance between the left and followers of Islam is anything but virulently anti Semitic and desperately trying to enslave not just Jews but everyone in order to establish a police state in America and world wide. Jews happen to be an early target because of the alliance's virulent hatred of Israel. But that hatred includes not only Israel but also FAIR and life itself with its requirements. If you disagree or are uncertain, just keep watching, listening to, the alliance and its leaders. Like all 'wanna be' tyrants, they cannot resist telling you what they're going to do.
The psychosis of Jew hatred, individual-group- community- country, has continued for several millennia. The reasons are endless and reflect the haters interests which do not require a grain of truth.
Not paranoia but vigilance. Is the United States 1930's Europe? No, the Antisemitism is not state sponsored. Could it drift that way? I hope not. I am not so sure about our Northern neighbor Canada, from what I read. Until three years ago, I knew there were cranks out there, but it is getting more shrill for sure. No matter what I am watching.
Nachum Kaplan has written the diagnosis and it is correct in every particular. The cycle is starting again: violence rising, governments issuing statements instead of protection, politicians performing concern for cameras. The only question left is what we do about it. Not as individuals. As a people.
I am talking about America, because for most of Europe it is already too late. The continent that murdered our grandparents has spent eighty years apologizing while nurturing the next generation of people who want to finish the job, and its governments now indulge them for votes. Jews there live among the descendants of their families' killers and the successors to their families' killers at the same time. No Jew should support or live in that concentration camp. Leave. Take the businesses, the capital, the talent, and let Europe find out what it looks like without us. It is a decaying broken society and I welcome its future status as a 3rd world failure.
Canada is worse, because it is faster. When the Palestinian flag flies over government buildings and synagogues are shot at and firebombed almost weekly, nobody paying attention needs more evidence. Take your companies, lay off your workers, move your money, and let that government explain the hole in its economy to the voters it chose over you.
Now America. There is no Jewish leadership here capable of fighting this fight. Not in the Democratic Party (half the country) where Jewish senators voted to withhold even bulldozers from Israel in wartime and the Senate Majority Leader, the highest-ranking Jew in American history, told Columbia's president to "keep heads down" on campus antisemitism because only Republicans were complaining. Jews were being assaulted on that campus. Jamie Raskin shielded Harvard while Jewish students were harassed in the open. These men are not our leaders. They are our problem. Republicans, whatever their resolve, cannot save us. Safety that depends on one party is not safety.
Not in the twelve thousand Jewish charities either. Two years into the worst antisemitism in American history, the richest diaspora institutions ever built have produced zero coordinated plans. They compete for donors, protect budgets, and mistake press releases for action. Every liberal partner they spent fifty years cultivating walked out after October 7 and joined the intifada, and most still cannot say so out loud. They are not generals. They are custodians of endowments.
So ask the question. Who is going to lead this? Which organization will build one security apparatus instead of a hundred, one legal operation that sues every university and city that lets this happen, one political machine with real money that ends the career of any politician in either party who looks away?
Today there is no answer. Not a name. Not an organization. Not a room of donors with a plan on the table. Seven million Jews, more wealth and influence than any diaspora in history, and not one entity whose job it is to win. Think about that. We can fund a hospital wing in an afternoon and we cannot name the person responsible for keeping our children safe. That is not an oversight. It is the failure. Everything else in this essay is a symptom of it.
We have always been hated. We have never before had this much capacity to defend ourselves and used none of it. Israelis assume no one is coming and act accordingly. That posture is the only thing that has kept Jews alive, and American Jews have refused it because it felt paranoid, or divisive, or bad for fundraising.
That ends now. There is nothing to reform, so build it from nothing. Pull the communal money out of institutions that will not fight and put it into the one that will. Replace the leaders who stay silent. Defund the charities that will not coordinate. And then, for once in diaspora history, fall in line behind the effort instead of splintering it into two hundred chairs at two hundred tables.
None of this is radical. It is what a people does when it decides to survive. We did it in Israel. Do it here, before the next stage arrives and we are once again shocked, once again scared, once again unready.
The ability to hold opposite ideas and conclusions in one’s head marks a special aspect of the Jewish Cultural experience. In fact, Liberal societies can be AntiSemitic. The history of the Jewish People in Europe is not good. Certainly too, America is adjusting to Economic change through Demographics which has seen the same antisemitic Dynamic now in ascendancy. The very first point to make is, non of these trends is our fault. Understanding this fact eliminates self-doubt. On-going Hatred of Jews and the steps we take to avoid the worst consequences of this are actually a permanent feature of Liberal Democracies. And they always were. For our job for wider society is to prevent Genocidal Nazism, and the causes of Nazism, and more recently Islamist terrorism. Thus we preserve freedom in Society, from the twin horrors of mass intimidation from psychopaths, and from penury which feeds their support. And in doing this work uniquely well we are mightily appreciated. This is our real job.
“Just because you're not paranoid doesn't mean no one is after you.”
In the interest of accuracy, I found that the more correct passage is: “Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you.” Although the precise attribution is difficult to verify conclusively, it is often attributed to the author Joseph Heller (Catch-22).
Love this. I agree with everything you say, except that I believe you aren't neurotic enough. It's the neurotic Jews who survive. My grandfather left Hungary in 1939 because he'd had enough of the crushing poverty and antisemitism that he'd been enduring for years. He spent the following two years raising money to bring the rest of the family over, and in 1941, my then 4-year-old father left Hungary.
My grandfather had no clue that a catastrophe as huge as the Holocaust was coming, and my grandmother didn't want to leave, arguing that they should wait until after the war. He wasn't a prophet; he just felt an overwhelming need to get out.
The Holocaust reached Hungary in the last year of the war, and in that one year, the Nazis succeeded in wiping out three quarters of Hungarian Jewry. Had they "waited," I very likely might not be sitting here typing these words.
The pattern of Jewish history is clear. When the signs we are seeing today become clear, things get horribly worse before they get better, usually ending with Jews either being exterminated or cleansed from that place. Because of the global nature of the threat today, that thought is extremely terrifying.
I don't think we can do anything to successfully fight it off, either. Why would we succeed where so many Jews in history have failed before? The only thing we can do is survive it, and we instinctively know how to do that. After October 7, we began to cling harder to each other and to our traditions. It's what we've always done in times of trouble, and it's the only way to weather it through.
You hit the nail on the head and I am glad your family escaped. Fifty years ago, a man named Ernest van den Haag, wrote a book called The Jewish Mystique. He wrote that yes we faced pogroms. Some might be harmed, but the majority would survive. Who could have imagined the Holocaust? Now that it has happened, we have to be aware. Historical memory helps.
I will summarize this lengthy article which seems to repeat endlessly the same theme:
“ If you know someone is going to kill you, rise up early and kill them first”
the Talmudic principle from Sanhedrin 72a, "if someone comes to kill you, rise early and kill him first."
Yes. This is all true. And you point a finger to how hatred of Jews and hatred of Israel has become normalized to the point where our very right to be safe has become a debate.
It seems there’s always validation offered for violence and hate against Jews in Israel and I think this is what’s different from most other forms of hate
People accept Jew hatred as a valid default position
Worse things than looking foolish? You got that right! At least for me. I couldn't care less if people think I am an idiot or a fool. As long as I am the one still standing at the end. I think we all know the old joke. "Just because you are paranoid, does not mean that someone isn't really out to get you." Get out to the range and practice.
There is an old saying. "It's not paranoia if they're really after you." As a non Jew who supports Israel because it is the one country in the Middle East in which there is respect and support for freedom and individual rights (FAIR), I say to anyone who is Jewish, do not make the mistake of thinking that the new alliance between the left and followers of Islam is anything but virulently anti Semitic and desperately trying to enslave not just Jews but everyone in order to establish a police state in America and world wide. Jews happen to be an early target because of the alliance's virulent hatred of Israel. But that hatred includes not only Israel but also FAIR and life itself with its requirements. If you disagree or are uncertain, just keep watching, listening to, the alliance and its leaders. Like all 'wanna be' tyrants, they cannot resist telling you what they're going to do.
The psychosis of Jew hatred, individual-group- community- country, has continued for several millennia. The reasons are endless and reflect the haters interests which do not require a grain of truth.
Not paranoia but vigilance. Is the United States 1930's Europe? No, the Antisemitism is not state sponsored. Could it drift that way? I hope not. I am not so sure about our Northern neighbor Canada, from what I read. Until three years ago, I knew there were cranks out there, but it is getting more shrill for sure. No matter what I am watching.
Nachum Kaplan has written the diagnosis and it is correct in every particular. The cycle is starting again: violence rising, governments issuing statements instead of protection, politicians performing concern for cameras. The only question left is what we do about it. Not as individuals. As a people.
I am talking about America, because for most of Europe it is already too late. The continent that murdered our grandparents has spent eighty years apologizing while nurturing the next generation of people who want to finish the job, and its governments now indulge them for votes. Jews there live among the descendants of their families' killers and the successors to their families' killers at the same time. No Jew should support or live in that concentration camp. Leave. Take the businesses, the capital, the talent, and let Europe find out what it looks like without us. It is a decaying broken society and I welcome its future status as a 3rd world failure.
Canada is worse, because it is faster. When the Palestinian flag flies over government buildings and synagogues are shot at and firebombed almost weekly, nobody paying attention needs more evidence. Take your companies, lay off your workers, move your money, and let that government explain the hole in its economy to the voters it chose over you.
Now America. There is no Jewish leadership here capable of fighting this fight. Not in the Democratic Party (half the country) where Jewish senators voted to withhold even bulldozers from Israel in wartime and the Senate Majority Leader, the highest-ranking Jew in American history, told Columbia's president to "keep heads down" on campus antisemitism because only Republicans were complaining. Jews were being assaulted on that campus. Jamie Raskin shielded Harvard while Jewish students were harassed in the open. These men are not our leaders. They are our problem. Republicans, whatever their resolve, cannot save us. Safety that depends on one party is not safety.
Not in the twelve thousand Jewish charities either. Two years into the worst antisemitism in American history, the richest diaspora institutions ever built have produced zero coordinated plans. They compete for donors, protect budgets, and mistake press releases for action. Every liberal partner they spent fifty years cultivating walked out after October 7 and joined the intifada, and most still cannot say so out loud. They are not generals. They are custodians of endowments.
So ask the question. Who is going to lead this? Which organization will build one security apparatus instead of a hundred, one legal operation that sues every university and city that lets this happen, one political machine with real money that ends the career of any politician in either party who looks away?
Today there is no answer. Not a name. Not an organization. Not a room of donors with a plan on the table. Seven million Jews, more wealth and influence than any diaspora in history, and not one entity whose job it is to win. Think about that. We can fund a hospital wing in an afternoon and we cannot name the person responsible for keeping our children safe. That is not an oversight. It is the failure. Everything else in this essay is a symptom of it.
We have always been hated. We have never before had this much capacity to defend ourselves and used none of it. Israelis assume no one is coming and act accordingly. That posture is the only thing that has kept Jews alive, and American Jews have refused it because it felt paranoid, or divisive, or bad for fundraising.
That ends now. There is nothing to reform, so build it from nothing. Pull the communal money out of institutions that will not fight and put it into the one that will. Replace the leaders who stay silent. Defund the charities that will not coordinate. And then, for once in diaspora history, fall in line behind the effort instead of splintering it into two hundred chairs at two hundred tables.
None of this is radical. It is what a people does when it decides to survive. We did it in Israel. Do it here, before the next stage arrives and we are once again shocked, once again scared, once again unready.
The ability to hold opposite ideas and conclusions in one’s head marks a special aspect of the Jewish Cultural experience. In fact, Liberal societies can be AntiSemitic. The history of the Jewish People in Europe is not good. Certainly too, America is adjusting to Economic change through Demographics which has seen the same antisemitic Dynamic now in ascendancy. The very first point to make is, non of these trends is our fault. Understanding this fact eliminates self-doubt. On-going Hatred of Jews and the steps we take to avoid the worst consequences of this are actually a permanent feature of Liberal Democracies. And they always were. For our job for wider society is to prevent Genocidal Nazism, and the causes of Nazism, and more recently Islamist terrorism. Thus we preserve freedom in Society, from the twin horrors of mass intimidation from psychopaths, and from penury which feeds their support. And in doing this work uniquely well we are mightily appreciated. This is our real job.
I learnt this when I was a teenager:
“Just because you're not paranoid doesn't mean no one is after you.”
In the interest of accuracy, I found that the more correct passage is: “Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you.” Although the precise attribution is difficult to verify conclusively, it is often attributed to the author Joseph Heller (Catch-22).
"Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there AREN'T people out to get you" is the version I heard :)
My typo! (And I was able to edit it)
“Just because you're not paranoid doesn't mean no one is after you.”