The Jewish Courage to Be Disliked

It is time we Jews cut through the crap. To hell with being “accepted” and “acceptable.”

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AIPAC, the vaunted pro-Israel lobbying group, recently spent $8 million to successfully unseat U.S. Congresswoman Cori Bush, a member of “The Squad,” the group of Far-Left U.S. legislators with a long history of hating Israel and employing blatant antisemitic tropes.

Bush has blamed U.S. funding to Israel for homelessness and crime in her jurisdiction of St. Louis, invoking traditional antisemitic scapegoating and making good on a twisted tactic which “The Squad” routinely uses: to make every issue about, you know, “Palestine.”

“There is a bizarre, apparently knee-jerk reaction among people like members of ‘The Squad’ to deflect attention from the issue at hand — these literally life-and-death matters facing Americans and those desperate refugees who want to become Americans — and refocus it on Palestine,” wrote one of our guest columnists, Pat Johnson. “Yeah, yeah. Until all of us are free, none of us are free and blah blah blah. But seriously? Everything comes back to the Jews.”¹

A little over a month before Bush’s electoral debacle, AIPAC put some $15 million behind another anti-Israel candidate’s challenger, George Latimer, in New York’s 16th District, helping him crush in that election the incumbent Jamaal Bowman — who has baselessly accused the Jewish state of “genocide” during the current Israel-Hamas-Hezbollah war.

The message in both of these elections and perhaps more to come, at least from interpretation, was simple: Don’t f*ck with the Jews.

Unfortunately, the very last sentence makes many Jews in the Diaspora feel uncomfortable. They prefer to be “nice” and “welcoming” and “diplomatic.” God forbid Jews rub other people the wrong way, even when it means rightfully standing up for ourselves, our people, and our homeland.

As another one of our guest columnists wrote, “I remember deciding to continue supporting the Black Lives Matter movement even after reading the vile antipathy to Israel included on its online platform.”²

That attitude is exactly what got 6 million Jews merked in and around the Holocaust. If Israeli Jews thought and behaved in such a way, Israel would be but a figment of the imagination in the dustbin of history.

Clearly, Israeli Jews have done some things right (even if controversial) in surviving the treacherous, profusely antisemitic quicksands of the Middle East. Jews in the Diaspora would be wise to learn from Israeli Jews in this capacity. Seems to me that it is preferable to be controversial and alive than dead and pitied.

Part of the reasons for Jews in the Diaspora defaulting to being “nice” and “welcoming” and “diplomatic” can be attributed to Adlerian psychology, based on the theories of Alfred Adler, one of the three giants of 19th-century psychology alongside Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.

More specifically, Adler argued that people have a need for recognition and validation from others, Jews in the Diaspora being no different. But when this relentless need for recognition and validation coincides with record-high levels of antisemitism since the Holocaust, we must ask ourselves if this approach is serving the Jewish People.

Perhaps a shift from seeking the approval of others to accepting ourselves as we are will better position Jews in the Diaspora to develop more healthier horizontal relationships based on mutual respect and understanding.

The goal of relationships is to gain a sense of belonging, and we can only achieve this by contributing actively to our own community. Yet Jews in the Diaspora tend to be social justice warriors for every other cause imaginable, and many of them look for inspiration and motivation in every place except Judaism.

We need to think with the perspective of “Whose task is this?” and separate our own tasks from other people’s tasks. The task owner is the one will ultimately receive the result brought about by the task, yet so many Jews in the Diaspora take on other people’s “tasks” without receiving any beneficial results. Discarding other people’s tasks is the first step toward lightening the Jewish load and making life simpler for us.

For example, it is not our job to take care of the Palestinians. It is the Palestinians’ job to take care of the Palestinians, and trust me, they have plenty of aid and resources at their disposal, dating back decades. As for us Jews, it is our job to take care of our fellow Jews and of our homeland, while understanding that Jewish diversity (Jews who are different than others) is a feature that ought to be celebrated, not scorned.

As it pertains to Israel, we can debate whether the Jewish state is too nationalistic, too conservative, too militaristic, or too hardened by its hostile and erratic neighbors. We can debate whether the State of Israel should do a better job of taking into account Jews in the Diaspora when making policy decisions. We can even debate whether Jewish self-sovereignty contradicts Palestinian self-sovereignty.

Trust me when I say that Israelis debate these topics all the time, both in times of peace and in times of war. As the saying goes: Two Jews, three opinions. Sometimes even four.

But what is not up for debate? The Jewish world, as a matter of fact, changed for the better — a heck of a lot better — in 1948, when we formally reestablished Jewish self-sovereignty in our indigenous homeland.

Self-sovereignty is certainly not a walk in the park (just ask Palestinian leadership today and prior), but it is an unequivocally vital task for Jews who want to confidently practice any form of Judaism and tap into any sort of Jewishness, wherever they live in the world. And it is a task that needs every Jew to be engaged, to stay engaged, in order to help effectuate the type of Jewish world each of us wants to see.

At the same time, there will always be Jew-haters on both the Left and the Right, and we must be careful to not overemphasize one side of the spectrum because our sociopolitical views align more with the other. I cannot tell you how many Jews in the Diaspora are overly focused on Right-wing antisemitism even as Left-wing antisemitism appears to be far more intrusive and catastrophic across Western societies.

Part of this stems from Jews not really knowing our entire history spanning millennia, not just decades or centuries. Part of this stems from Jews living with PTSD following Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, which blinds them from modern-day antisemitism and its “anti-Israel” cover-up. I am sure there are many other reasons and explanations as well.

For Jews in the Diaspora to continue to flourish, we must rewrite our playbook. This means holding politicians responsible for side-stepping and in some cases stoking the flames of antisemitism. Blind faith to one political party or another is exactly that: blind (i.e. visually impaired, oblivious).

Jews cannot afford to offer their support to political parties that do not, unequivocally, come out against antisemitism, no less those which continuously group it with the overinflated “Islamophobia.”

Jews cannot afford to give their genuine support to other causes that neither return the favor nor share our values of loving-kindness, social justice, and dignity and respect for all people, not just some.

Jews cannot afford to bad-mouth each other while making superficial excuses for everyone else.

Jews cannot afford to continue coddling our children and grandchildren with a let’s-all-feel-good mentality that has infected modern Judaism and spoiled at least one generation of Jews. When we raise kids to think that Judaism can be whatever they want it to be, and when we raise kids unaccustomed to facing adversity (i.e. antisemitism), the Jewish People are threatened.

I understand that many Jews (myself included) have multifaceted identities which determine the decisions they make, activities they do, causes they support, and ways they vote. But when a Jew lives in a non-Jewish society, these multifaceted identities are plainly irrelevant. To that society, no matter how well they have historically treated their Jews, a Jew is a Jew is a Jew. Some 2,000 years of history confirms this to be true. How’s that for a sample size?

Indeed, antisemitism did not go away after the Holocaust. It just morphed into something more socially defensible, like “anti-Zionism” and “anti-Israel.” Think about that for a second — the Jewish state is literally the world’s only country with the term “anti” prefixed to it. If this does not explain at least half of Israel or Zionism’s supposed problems, may God bless your soul.

It is time we Jews cut through the crap. To hell with being “accepted” and “acceptable.”

Right now, many Jews are understandably confused about October 7th and its aftermath, so allow me to provide some context: October 7th largely occurred because of the failed Oslo Accords peace process between Israel and the Palestinians in the 1990s. The price Israelis have had to pay for the illusion of peace has been exponentially tragic, not to mention the side-effects that Jews across the world have subsequently experienced especially during the last 11 months.

It is not just the October 7th horrors, nor just the hundreds kidnapped or the fallen soldiers. Since these unspeakable Palestinian terror attacks, millions of Israelis and their families have had their lives upended. The societal cost is beyond calculation and comprehension.

In no short order, Israelis have had enough of more dead Jews as part of some naive attempt to be liked or accepted by the international community. If anyone wants peace with Israel then let them have it — but the Jewish courage to be disliked means not indulging in those who don’t.

Enough of the weeping mothers paying a price for the empty dreams of ignorant fools. No more allowing Palestinian day-workers to enter Israel under some mirage that we can “purchase” their peace. Enough of Israelis needing to justify every little military action against antisemites whose ambitions are on par with, if not worse than, the Nazis.

The Jews suffered the worst atrocity since the Holocaust on October 7th. Did it make any difference? Look around you at the hate and vitriol. Even in an hour of enormous grief, streets in the West are abound with people perverting the rights of free speech and “peaceful” protest.

They have chosen, loud and clear, to support genocidal terrorists not because of what the terrorists did, but because of who their enemies are: the Jews. This is not about Gaza or the Palestinians anymore. It is about cursing Jews and intimidating Jewish communities.

Media outlets, for their part, have feebly attempted to draw moral equivalents and question Israel’s intentions while using the terrorist-run “Gaza Health Ministry” as a remotely reliable source for the supposed number of Palestinian casualties.

At the same time, celebrities and influencers (who said nothing as millions died elsewhere) suddenly obsess over Israel and regurgitate the words of Palestinian terror groups’ spokesmen.

Make no mistake: The grossly disproportionate global attention levied at Israel is the very nature of antisemitism, yet even our most “prestigious” universities are effectively complicit in this Jew hate.

During the last few months, I have heard that some Jews are concerned about Jewish donors pressuring university administrations, thus giving Jews a “bad name.” When we donate, we are called out for using it to control. When we don’t, we are called cheap and stingy.

Enough already with caring what others do or don’t think about us. We will never win the never-ending game of trying to attract other people’s love.

But we can still live proudly as Jews. We can own our identity and stand up straight, while stomaching the fact that a majority of societies simply cannot understand our minority experience. There is a term for this; it’s called “hermeneutical injustice.”

Israel knows about “hermeneutical injustice” all too well. The Jewish state is not quite good enough for “the West” and definitely does not fit into “the East.” Even then, the Israelis have tried over and over again to make peace with the Palestinians. The start of the Oslo Accords in 1993 was another iteration at this attempt, but it was a trap.

How so? In return, all Israel received was terrorism mainly targeted at civilians. Some 700 of them were killed in the Second Intifada, which took place immediately after the 2000 Camp David Summit, another Israeli attempt at peace.

Most Israelis have painfully realized that there is no partner for peace, since the Palestinians have no leader that can deliver on any promises, let alone make them. It is time the rest of the world’s Jews, and our non-Jewish family and friends, to accept this uncomfortable truth as well.

Continuing to live in a fairy tale of a possible two-state solution only means, at least for now, sacrificing more Jewish life on the altar of illusions and distortions. If one day the Palestinians want a true and lasting peace, let them come to us.

You think the world will hate us if we draw these lines in the sand? Look around you, they hate us anyway. All we can do now is develop the Jewish courage to be disliked.

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1. “Burning Bush.” Pat’s Substack.

2. “As a lifelong Jewish Democrat, it pains me to say this.” Future of Jewish.