Jonathan S. Tobin
JNS, Oct. 11, 2024
“… many American Jews have been happily swimming in the same cultural sea of hostility towards Zionism, and until recently, never suspected that its venom could drown them.”
On Yom Kippur, there will, as there is every year, be a lot of collective breast-beating in the American Jewish community for all that we’ve done wrong. And, then, as usual, we generally go back to doing many of the same things as soon as the fast is broken and our stomachs full. That this will happen is human nature and no different from innumerable times in the past when we have made collective promises.
But this past year was different. So is the one that is about to unfold. As such, our willingness simply to move on from our failures is insufficient.
In the aftermath of the Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas and Palestinian terrorists in southern Israel, Jews in the United States witnessed an unprecedented surge in antisemitism. Mobs on the streets of major cities, and especially on the campuses of universities, made manifest the new intellectual and cultural orthodoxy in which woke ideology deems Jews and Israelis to be “white” oppressors who must be resisted “by any means necessary,” as goes the popular phrase on the political left.
Students were harassed and shunned if they weren’t willing to renounce their communal affiliations or join those chanting “from the river to the sea” and “globalize the intifada”—in effect, assenting to the idea of the genocide of the Jews of Israel. A generation of students and professors who had come to believe that “microaggressions” in which alleged slights towards minorities should be treated as the moral equivalent of violent crimes took part in activities whose only real purpose was to support those engaged in a campaign of the murder of Jews and the destruction of the one Jewish state on the planet. … [To read the full article, click here]
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