Respect rooted in pity is fragile. Respect rooted in excellence is enduring. The Jewish people do not need sympathy to justify their existence or sovereignty. They have earned admiration through unmatched achievement in science, medicine, finance, law, literature, military strategy, and technological innovation. A civilization that revived an ancient language, built a modern state from desert, and produced Nobel laureates at a rate wildly disproportionate to its population does not stand on borrowed moral capital. The basis for Jewish pride should not be tragedy, but triumph. Excellence commands respect long after sympathy fades — and the Jewish record of excellence speaks for itself.
It's amazing how some of the Jews out there will say why did we have to ruin it all by "inventing" a colonial settler state that the aboriginall population doesn't want and in fact loathes. Now "Jewish" Hollywood ....at least a large chunk of it....agrees with that. As I saw from a Jew on Blacks and Jews PbS series....."Jews invented our Israel here, it's called Hollywood. " And a 99 percent of Academia including so called Jewish studies is preaching the "palestine narrative" By any means necessary , we must lose our alleged racist distinctiveness and join the proletariat.
Excellent commentary. A few points. It was not sympathy the world felt, but more along the lines of guilt and guilt wears thin after a generation. Continually emphasis on the Jewish experience as focused on the Holocaust is self-defeating. It reinforces the mentality of victimhood among the Jewish Diaspora. Our history is deep and it is time for our Jewish leadership, educators and Rabbis to promote not just the disasters that befell us but the times we fought back. Teach about Joshua, the Maccabees, Bar Kochba and in more recent times the partisans during WW2 and the founders of Israel. Mr. Hoffman is spot on when he says "Jewish students must be prepared to engage in self-defense — verbal, social, even physical — rather than shielded from it. "
excellent piece. It feels like, as Jews, we are at a precipice in history--we either seize the moment to pivot or risk losing so much. Time to realize that we are truly in a post-sympathy world. It's a new era and we have to change with it.
I actually had a young Arab in Judea tell me that “the Holocaust was financed by Jews so they could get a State.” I asked him if he knew the name of the Mufti who met with Hitler. His response was, “Who?”
I understand the desire to educate. However, the counter education is based on a fabricated victim narrative of poor Arabs against big bad Jews. No matter how many times you point them towards the facts (the Arab armies that asked folks to leave and promised they could come back), these Arabs (and their “supporters”) have built their identity on this alleged nakbah.
Honestly, at this point it is time to simply say enough. Judea, Samaria, and Gaza are Israeli territory. The Sinai should never have been given back.
No education is going to undue the brainwashed masses. I am not saying don’t educate, I am simply saying, don’t count on it alone.
Here I am again with my observation that my boomer generation of Jews was not much bothered by Holocaust remembrance. The emergence of modern Israel was barely a subject of importance at Hebrew School. And certainly not at Gentile school. The general consensus was that Israel was somehow a problem .... it wrote in "heiroglyphics" as one former Israeli teen girl told the class....and anyway the Arabs had been there before her Austrian dad was forced to go till he could apply to the USA after WWI. Not to suffer life in G d forsaken forever war in the desert of the mid east. A place that has nothing to do with Jews. Or the teen girl in my discussion group at 92nd St Y who loudly protested what is so special about the suffering of the Jews ....in the Holocaust....didn't Americans suffer at Valley Forge? So maybe the grandchildren of these teens have donned keffiyahs in honor of the Jewish identity they learned from their zaydehs and bubbahs. True there were some of us who felt differently. But even in Israel a British Jew after YK War disagreed with my comment "we belong here." I failed to ask her in that case wtf was she doing in Israel? Just sharing my grim memories. it was two British Gentiles my age, I met who encouraged me to volunteer on a kibbutz. Glad I met them before her,
It is true that Zionism was a minority interest among British Jews until 1948 but the keffiyeh-wearing grandchildren have more in common with the guilt-ridden English middle classes who see themselves at white privileged Europeans (=bad) colonising brown Middle Eastern people (=good). Somebody needs to tell them that suicide is not a "Jewish value".
thanks for your comment....enlightening..... I fear that some of these grandchildren have parents and grand parents that were atheists, Bundists or otherwise little disposed to have nothing to anything to do with being Jewish including Israel.
As a childhood friend wrote on a his FB site PALESTINA! Then he must have looked at my FB site and saw my Zionism because he never responded to my kind note about his parents. Maybe some like Mattisyahu were drawn to Judaism their parents largely rejected. But I take your point. I think in NYC there are a lot of "white American gentiles " who feel the same as in Britain and want to unload guilt about the HOLOCAUST. I see them on line for propaganda films at Film Forum.
Holocaust education as it was conceived was never a good idea - Jews, with no history in Western Civilization , suddenly appear as victims of evil Germans. Barely considered, if at all were Question about How the whole world turned complicit? How thin is the veneer of civilization that it could be seemingly turned on its head in a moment?
How does the diary of a teenage girl with all her teenage angst and yearnings who writes that she "still believes that people are good" serve as the sole piece of literature to give insight into the horrors of that time? What impact, for that matter, did the testimony of a single survivor have on the listeners? Temporary tears or troubling titililization ? How was it even good for the Jews, to understand themselves mainly as victims, rather than the proud bearers and heirs of a civilization about which they were largely ignorant?
Maybe we would have ended up at this moment no matter what. But it wasn't because we gave our best shot at teaching and considering the history of the twentieth century and the complex and sometimes evil histories that preceded it.
This is all good and well, but the world never had a shred of sympathy for us and you know it. The Germans just went to the point that the rest of the world had to wait for enough survivors to die and just like that the gloves are back off.
Its enough to make you wonder if they all had a big meeting about it back in '46.
Whether we change the P.R. we want to put out to the world or not, that won't change pro-Israel voices' lack of access to a biased mainstream media. That media is so determined to rely exclusively on anti-Israel sources that one suspects top-down influence from a co-ordinating state or consortium.
"A Judaism organized around death will struggle to compete with cultures organized around life."
The framing may be skewed. Diasporic Judaism was always acutely aware of the precariousness of the Jews' position in the non-Jewish society a veritable stranger in a strange land. That sense of security is being increasingly challenged. by the rising tide of physical as well as verbal expressions of Judeomesia.
Yes, Israel is organized around Jews being masters in their own house, but even before 1967, from even before it assuming statehood, through the long rise of KGB led and Arab executed campaigns agains Israel and Jews, the countless wars and random acts of violence makes them acutely aware that they too life on a knife's edge regardless. how much they feel they are a sovereign people whose existence is secured by the state. The outflow to galut over the decades reveals the transgenerational epigenetic trauma still at work. To put it in simpler terms, "You can take the Jew out of the ghetto, but you can't take the ghetto out oft he Jew."
"The Jewish claim to sovereignty does not begin in 1933 and does not depend exclusively on 1945. It stretches back through millennia of continuous identity, attachment to land, liturgy, language, and collective memory. . . .
To ground Jewish attachment to Israel primarily in 20th-century catastrophe is to truncate a much longer story of peoplehood and purpose."
A truth too many who narrowly define Zionism as the Jewish right to self-determination miss.
"the right of the Jewish People to exercise self-determination in our ancestral homeland. "
Jews have, always wrestled with their relationship to Judaism, Jewishness, and Israel. So, the question is what self is it they are seeking to determine?
Great essay. "We don't want your sympathy. We want and demand your respect. It's our land and we're done explaining " F em all.
This. No more turning the other cheek.
That’s exactly how Israel should feel. But do not expect blind faith allegiance from the USA!
Respect rooted in pity is fragile. Respect rooted in excellence is enduring. The Jewish people do not need sympathy to justify their existence or sovereignty. They have earned admiration through unmatched achievement in science, medicine, finance, law, literature, military strategy, and technological innovation. A civilization that revived an ancient language, built a modern state from desert, and produced Nobel laureates at a rate wildly disproportionate to its population does not stand on borrowed moral capital. The basis for Jewish pride should not be tragedy, but triumph. Excellence commands respect long after sympathy fades — and the Jewish record of excellence speaks for itself.
It's amazing how some of the Jews out there will say why did we have to ruin it all by "inventing" a colonial settler state that the aboriginall population doesn't want and in fact loathes. Now "Jewish" Hollywood ....at least a large chunk of it....agrees with that. As I saw from a Jew on Blacks and Jews PbS series....."Jews invented our Israel here, it's called Hollywood. " And a 99 percent of Academia including so called Jewish studies is preaching the "palestine narrative" By any means necessary , we must lose our alleged racist distinctiveness and join the proletariat.
Excellent commentary. A few points. It was not sympathy the world felt, but more along the lines of guilt and guilt wears thin after a generation. Continually emphasis on the Jewish experience as focused on the Holocaust is self-defeating. It reinforces the mentality of victimhood among the Jewish Diaspora. Our history is deep and it is time for our Jewish leadership, educators and Rabbis to promote not just the disasters that befell us but the times we fought back. Teach about Joshua, the Maccabees, Bar Kochba and in more recent times the partisans during WW2 and the founders of Israel. Mr. Hoffman is spot on when he says "Jewish students must be prepared to engage in self-defense — verbal, social, even physical — rather than shielded from it. "
Excellent analysis. Now to get the idea disseminated - and curricula adjusted.
excellent piece. It feels like, as Jews, we are at a precipice in history--we either seize the moment to pivot or risk losing so much. Time to realize that we are truly in a post-sympathy world. It's a new era and we have to change with it.
I actually had a young Arab in Judea tell me that “the Holocaust was financed by Jews so they could get a State.” I asked him if he knew the name of the Mufti who met with Hitler. His response was, “Who?”
I understand the desire to educate. However, the counter education is based on a fabricated victim narrative of poor Arabs against big bad Jews. No matter how many times you point them towards the facts (the Arab armies that asked folks to leave and promised they could come back), these Arabs (and their “supporters”) have built their identity on this alleged nakbah.
Honestly, at this point it is time to simply say enough. Judea, Samaria, and Gaza are Israeli territory. The Sinai should never have been given back.
No education is going to undue the brainwashed masses. I am not saying don’t educate, I am simply saying, don’t count on it alone.
Excellent perspective of the present situation.
Will you be forwarding this summary to the Ministry of Education in Israel?
The Diaspora organizations also have to change their messaging. Emphasizing successes brought us resentment and conspiracies - “Jews run the world”.
Those who accuse us of running the eorld, I reply that Jews control the whole universe ✨️
I like, "Yes, we run the universe. Now, how would you like your weather tomorrow?"
We're rubbish at controlling the media and the banks, though.
Here I am again with my observation that my boomer generation of Jews was not much bothered by Holocaust remembrance. The emergence of modern Israel was barely a subject of importance at Hebrew School. And certainly not at Gentile school. The general consensus was that Israel was somehow a problem .... it wrote in "heiroglyphics" as one former Israeli teen girl told the class....and anyway the Arabs had been there before her Austrian dad was forced to go till he could apply to the USA after WWI. Not to suffer life in G d forsaken forever war in the desert of the mid east. A place that has nothing to do with Jews. Or the teen girl in my discussion group at 92nd St Y who loudly protested what is so special about the suffering of the Jews ....in the Holocaust....didn't Americans suffer at Valley Forge? So maybe the grandchildren of these teens have donned keffiyahs in honor of the Jewish identity they learned from their zaydehs and bubbahs. True there were some of us who felt differently. But even in Israel a British Jew after YK War disagreed with my comment "we belong here." I failed to ask her in that case wtf was she doing in Israel? Just sharing my grim memories. it was two British Gentiles my age, I met who encouraged me to volunteer on a kibbutz. Glad I met them before her,
It is true that Zionism was a minority interest among British Jews until 1948 but the keffiyeh-wearing grandchildren have more in common with the guilt-ridden English middle classes who see themselves at white privileged Europeans (=bad) colonising brown Middle Eastern people (=good). Somebody needs to tell them that suicide is not a "Jewish value".
thanks for your comment....enlightening..... I fear that some of these grandchildren have parents and grand parents that were atheists, Bundists or otherwise little disposed to have nothing to anything to do with being Jewish including Israel.
As a childhood friend wrote on a his FB site PALESTINA! Then he must have looked at my FB site and saw my Zionism because he never responded to my kind note about his parents. Maybe some like Mattisyahu were drawn to Judaism their parents largely rejected. But I take your point. I think in NYC there are a lot of "white American gentiles " who feel the same as in Britain and want to unload guilt about the HOLOCAUST. I see them on line for propaganda films at Film Forum.
Holocaust education as it was conceived was never a good idea - Jews, with no history in Western Civilization , suddenly appear as victims of evil Germans. Barely considered, if at all were Question about How the whole world turned complicit? How thin is the veneer of civilization that it could be seemingly turned on its head in a moment?
How does the diary of a teenage girl with all her teenage angst and yearnings who writes that she "still believes that people are good" serve as the sole piece of literature to give insight into the horrors of that time? What impact, for that matter, did the testimony of a single survivor have on the listeners? Temporary tears or troubling titililization ? How was it even good for the Jews, to understand themselves mainly as victims, rather than the proud bearers and heirs of a civilization about which they were largely ignorant?
Maybe we would have ended up at this moment no matter what. But it wasn't because we gave our best shot at teaching and considering the history of the twentieth century and the complex and sometimes evil histories that preceded it.
This is all good and well, but the world never had a shred of sympathy for us and you know it. The Germans just went to the point that the rest of the world had to wait for enough survivors to die and just like that the gloves are back off.
Its enough to make you wonder if they all had a big meeting about it back in '46.
It was inevitable from the day that somebody decided we could appease antisemitic drek by "universalising" the Shoah.
Whether we change the P.R. we want to put out to the world or not, that won't change pro-Israel voices' lack of access to a biased mainstream media. That media is so determined to rely exclusively on anti-Israel sources that one suspects top-down influence from a co-ordinating state or consortium.
Millions of Jews were murdered because they weren’t white Europeans.
Yet the antisemites still claim that is what we are (see my comments above)
Who says they ever did
This is quite good. Dara Horn has developed a curriculum she is disseminating very much along these lines. It’s called the Tell Institute.
"A Judaism organized around death will struggle to compete with cultures organized around life."
The framing may be skewed. Diasporic Judaism was always acutely aware of the precariousness of the Jews' position in the non-Jewish society a veritable stranger in a strange land. That sense of security is being increasingly challenged. by the rising tide of physical as well as verbal expressions of Judeomesia.
Yes, Israel is organized around Jews being masters in their own house, but even before 1967, from even before it assuming statehood, through the long rise of KGB led and Arab executed campaigns agains Israel and Jews, the countless wars and random acts of violence makes them acutely aware that they too life on a knife's edge regardless. how much they feel they are a sovereign people whose existence is secured by the state. The outflow to galut over the decades reveals the transgenerational epigenetic trauma still at work. To put it in simpler terms, "You can take the Jew out of the ghetto, but you can't take the ghetto out oft he Jew."
"The Jewish claim to sovereignty does not begin in 1933 and does not depend exclusively on 1945. It stretches back through millennia of continuous identity, attachment to land, liturgy, language, and collective memory. . . .
To ground Jewish attachment to Israel primarily in 20th-century catastrophe is to truncate a much longer story of peoplehood and purpose."
A truth too many who narrowly define Zionism as the Jewish right to self-determination miss.
"the right of the Jewish People to exercise self-determination in our ancestral homeland. "
Jews have, always wrestled with their relationship to Judaism, Jewishness, and Israel. So, the question is what self is it they are seeking to determine?