Antisemitism isn’t going anywhere. It didn’t die out after the holocaust and it certainly won’t die after the antisemitic massacre in Pittsburg. We cannot change the haters. Only grace can do that.
Antisemitism is a shape shifter. It can look like David Duke or Louis Farrakhan. It can look like Jeremy Corbyn or Linda Sarsour. It can look like the leaders of SJP on college campus or those that distributed Nazi flyers from The Daily Stormer. It has a rightwing and a leftwing. Antisemitism speaks English, German, French, and Arabic. Actually it knows so many languages it could easily get a job at the UN. It is ever evolving as it is ever staying unchanged.
The purveyors of antisemitism like to put us in Schrodinger’s box where we can be opposite things at the same time. We can be money hungry and run the world’s banks. When the holocaust both happened but too bad Hitler didn’t kill all the Jews and at the same time denied. We are simultaneously inferior in mind and body and yet we run the world’s governments. We are caught in an endless catch 22.
Whats a Jew to do? The only thing we can. Flip the lid of the box open and get out. Be “that Jew”. You define what “that” means. I’m that pro choice, LGBTQ equality, free speech, civil rights loving feminist Jew who will not stand with Linda Sarsour or Tamika Mallory. I’m that zionist Jew that doesn’t believe that we can be colonizers in our historic homeland. I’m that zionist Jew that also recognizes that Palestinians have history on this land. I am that zionist Jew that wants to separate from the Palestinians. I’m also that zionist Jew who believes Jerusalem is the capital of Israel and the Jew who wants all ways to be a Jew recognized in Israel. Maybe you are a different kind of Jew, so be that.
But be the Jew that stands with Israel. Do it for the people whose lives are on the line for being that Jew who wants to fulfill his Jewish dream of liberation. Don’t divide us. Israel will welcome you if you need us, although we might ask“What took you so long?” Stand with us like you stood with Pittsburg.
The reason Jews have survived thousands of years of antisemitism is because we never stopped being “that Jew”. Being is how they never win.