Boaz Munro
Tablet, Oct. 19, 2023
“And I fell apart. For a few days, I felt like the country was sliding inexorably toward the unthinkable fate of 1940s Germany. After all, I thought, if people will shrug off beatings and swastikas, they’ll shrug off stabbings and shootings. And then they’ll shrug off pogroms—at least if the perpetrators claim to be freeing Palestine.”
Dear fellow Jews of the Left,
In the wake of the most savage butchery meted out upon our people since the Holocaust, you’re glued to social media. You may not be able to sleep or enjoy anything. Our deepest wounds were ripped open last Shabbat, and you’ve been learning how few degrees of separation there are between you and the 1,400 innocent Jews who were bound, burned alive, shot, beheaded, and dismembered by Hamas terrorists on October 7th.
And yet somehow that’s not what feels the worst.
What feels the worst is that rather than reacting with unanimous horror, people and institutions around the world reveled in the slaughter. In Sydney, hundreds of demonstrators yelled “gas the Jews”; in New York City, demonstrators cheered the “glorious victory of the resistance” and a swastika surfaced among a sea of pro-Hamas protesters; Stars of David were spray-painted on Jewish homes in Berlin. And some of your friends either minimized or utterly dismissed your anguish to your face.
It’s terrifying to feel the coldness of one’s friends. You feel the walls closing in, the floor dropping from beneath you. Every psychological handhold you lean on (“America is safe,” “Israel is safe,” “the Nazis are dead”) turns to sand, and you fall down.
I know, because I went through this two years ago. During the last major round of fighting between Israel and Hamas—a minor skirmish compared to what’s unfolding now—I posted about the alarming spike in anti-Jewish hate crimes in the U.S. I’ll never forget the sickening mixture of silence and derision from my left-wing peers. I was accused of trying to distract from Palestinian suffering—of “crying antisemitism,” as they say.
… [To read the full article, click here]
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