John Podhoretz
Commentary Magazine, November 2024
“The fact that under any proper understanding of moral responsibility, Hamas is to blame for every bullet fired, every meal missed, and every death recorded since October 7 is just too simplistic for the wonderful complexity of your preferred worldview.”
Do you consider yourself cosmopolitan, sophisticated, properly skeptical of simplistic doctrines? Do you believe yourself to be philosophically curious and therefore uncomfortable with absolutes because you believe there are many different ways of coming to understand truth—including that there might be no such thing as truth but rather there might be your truth and my truth and his truth and their truth? Well, then, you might be a politically and socially liberal Jew in the United States in 2024.
This has been a horribly difficult year for you intellectually because your utter assurance that your worldview combines warmth, wisdom, capaciousness, and a humanistic grasp of life’s complexities has run headlong into a reality it cannot easily argue away. The slaughter of October 7 was not only brutal in a manner you really haven’t encountered in your lifetime, but it involved your own people—maybe some people related to people you went to summer camp with, or cousins of friends of yours who live in Israel.
And while you have an explanation at the ready for why the troubles in the Middle East are the troubles in the Middle East, you were utterly unprepared for what happened here at home in the wake of the attacks. The instantaneous rise in anti-Semitic activity just days and weeks after October 7 could not really be dismissed as a by-product of Bibi Netanyahu’s judicial-reform proposals, for how does tearing down a poster featuring a photograph of a baby being held hostage speak to that? Why couldn’t the president of the Ivy you attended call out anti-Semitic activity on your beloved alma mater’s campus? And why are you feeling nervous in a way you’ve never felt nervous before? Maybe your sense of the world is askew. Maybe it has always been. … [To read the full article, click here]
