A Confirmed Verticalist

As I’ve read op-ed after op-ed by people, including Jewish people, who seem to understand the events of October 7 totally differently than I myself do, it finally struck me to wonder why precisely that is. Some are just misinformed, which category includes people who are naively getting their information online from openly biased sources all too eager to exploit their readers’ ignorance. And others are being guided forward, I think, by the siren opportunity to express their basic anti-Semitism in a way that makes it feel marginally more acceptable by hiding it behind the diaphanous veil of anti-Israelism. But still others, I think, are guided in their analyses not by prejudice or ignorance, but by a worldview that preferences the horizontal over the vertical.

There are basically two ways to understand any specific event: horizontally and vertically.

When confronted with an event, and challenged to explain and evaluate that event, horizontalists look from side to side to determine how they can fit the event under consideration into the wide world of similar events. So they saw the IDF massed at the border of Gaza and, when the moment was finally right, they saw them crossing that border in pursuit of some of their nation’s most fiendish enemies. That much, we all saw. But then horizontalist, instead of asking themselves how this can have happened, ask themselves instead what this is like. And then, having framed the issue that way, a key to interpreting the event presents itself easily. After all, it’s not like there’s any lack of nations throughout history that have sent their armies across the border into neighboring lands. Some instances of cross-border invasion are known to all: Russia crossing the border to invade Ukraine in 2014 and then again last year, for example. Or Iraq invading Kuwait in 1990. Or the Soviet Union invading Czechoslovakia in 1968. Others instances of one country invading another were once common knowledge but have by now been forgotten by most: the American invasion of Panama in 1989, for example, or of Grenada in 1983. And still other instances of cross-border invasion have become mere curiosities known these days more or less solely to historians of such things. The Brazilian invasion of Bolivia in 1903 in the context of the now-forgotten-by-all so-called “Acre War” would be a good example. And so would the British invasion of Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon, in 1795, just one year after the one in which France invaded Holland as part of the so-called French Revolutionary Wars.

There are lots of other examples, too. Most feature one nation ignoring the sovereignty of some contiguous or not contiguous other nation and then sending troops across the border into that other nation to wrest control from the locals and make the occupied territory part of the invading nation’s plan for its own future. I have omitted to mention the invasion of eleven different countries by Germany following the invasion of Poland in 1939, but those terrible stories are interpretable along similar lines. And, indeed, when a powerful nation invades a less powerful one, the point is almost always to impose the will of the stronger upon the weaker…and almost never to restore power to the people of the invaded nation. (That happens, of course: the invasion by Allied Forces of Nazi-occupied Europe would be the obvious example.) But, somehow, when horizontalists think of one nation invading another, it’s never to examples like that that their minds wander, but always, or almost always, to instances of powerful nations seeking to dominate less powerful ones.

And it is for that reason that opposing Israel’s invasion of Gaza feels so right to so many. Here is the powerful nation of Israel with its mighty armed forces, its powerful arsenal of advanced weaponry, and its formidable military prowess invading a strip of land less than one-third the size of greater Los Angeles that is ruled over by a governing body that has no air force, no navy, no regular army, and no nuclear weapons. How is that different from China invading Tibet in 1910?

And that is the path of horizontalism: you take an event and then, taking a good look around, you compare it to similar events to the east and the west, to the north and the south. You set the situation under consideration into the context of similar situations in other places and draw whatever parallels seem fair. And then, having contextualized the event in a way that feels reasonable, you feel more than entitled to your opinion.

I am, however, not a horizontalist, but a verticalist. I look back, not around. When I see film clips or hear descriptions by eye-witnesses of Jewish people being murdered in their beds, of grown women and teenaged girls being raped, of Jewish children being dragged from their homes and taken hostage by marauding foes intent not on making some sort of dramatic statement about their own vision of the future but, far more simply, on killing as many Jews as possible in as many vicious and brutal ways as time will allow—my mind doesn’t wander to Ceylon or Bolivia, but directly to Kovno, to Lviv, to Vienna, and to my grandparents’ town in Poland, the remaining Jews of which place were all murdered on the same day in 1942 after having been dragged from their homes and marched to their common grave.

Because I have spent my life reading books relating to Jewish history, my verticalism goes a long way down and that is the context in which I evaluate the events of October 7: looking specifically Jewish history to find the correct context in which to evaluate the events under consideration.

In 1963, Salo Wittmayer Baron, probably the greatest Jewish historian of the twentieth century, published an essay called “Newer Emphases in Jewish History” in the journal called Jewish Social Studies in which he came out forcefully against what he contemptuously labelled “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history,” by which expression he meant the way of retelling the history of the Jewish people as an endless series of lurches from one catastrophe to the next, from disaster to expulsion to persecution to ghettoization to genocide. The core concept of this theory, which Baron attributed ultimately to the work of Heinrich Graetz (who is widely recognized as the greatest Jewish historian of the nineteenth century), is the Jew as the eternal object and never the subject, as the eternally acted-upon party and never as the actor, as the eternal victim of persecution who spends the days of a lifetime hoping that no one does anything bad to them. (For an interesting evaluation of Baron’s theory by Professor Adam Teller of Brown University, click here.)

I have read all eighteen volumes of Baron’s masterwork, A Social and Religious History of the Jews. I highly recommend the experience. It will, however, take a while to get through (and you’ll have to assemble a full set book by book from various on-line sites), but the gain will more than justify the time spent reading: this is one of the single greatest works of Jewish scholarship ever written, a work of true genius. Of course, I get the point that Jews have surely been actors and not only the acted-upon parties in the course of Jewish history. But even if that is correct, which it is, the lachrymose thing is still very resonant with me: the history of the Jews outside of Israel really can be characterized as a never-ending series of nightmarish disasters,  of pogroms and auto-da-fés, of deportation and expulsion. Yes, there was more to it than that. But there was also that. And that is the baggage I bring with me as I approach October 7.

And that is why I see it my way and so many others, theirs. For me, it is not possible to think about the wanton murder of Jewish children, including babies, without my mind going directly to Treblinka or to Sobibor or to Belzec. I cannot imagine Jewish families annihilated en masse without my mind going directly to Babyn Yar. I cannot read about parents being shot in their own children’s presence without the full horror of what I know of the Shoah as the backdrop to the scene currently at centerstage.

But that isn’t all that comes to mind. Also in my thoughts constantly these days is the fact that there was no IDF in 1943, let alone in 1648 and 1649 when Cossacks murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews across Ukraine or in 1171 when the locals rounded up the Jews of Blois in France and killed every single one of them. There was no Jewish state for stateless Jews to flee to when they were expelled from Spain in 1492 or from Portugal in 1496, let alone from England in 1290 or from Hungary in 1360. And there was no Israel on the map to speak out in the forum of nations on behalf of the Jews of the Rhineland merciless massacred by Crusaders in the eleventh century or on behalf of the Jews of France during the Second and Third Crusades during the course of the twelfth.

We were, basically, on our own in the lands of our dispersion: on our own to cower in the cellar and hope not to be noticed, on our own to pray for safety, on our own to hope for the best. And it is why I am a confirmed verticalist when it comes to events like the October 7^th pogrom: maybe I’ve just had enough of facing the future on our own and embracing the “hope for the best” thing as a thoughtful plan forward.

 

Thanksgiving 2023

 

As I’ve written many times in this space, Thanksgiving is my favorite American holiday. I have only the happiest childhood memories of the holiday, most of them featuring my mother’s family gathered around my grandmother’s dining room table in her apartment on Eighty-Fourth Street in Bensonhurst. And I have nice memories of the earlier part of those Thanksgivings as well, the several hours that my mother and her sister, my Aunt Ruth, would work with my grandmother in her kitchen preparing the meal while my father and my Uncle Herb were assigned to amusing me (or, as my mother would have said, “doing something with me”) while the womenfolk did their thing in the kitchen. (Holiday roles were distinctly gender-specific in our family back then.) And so we’d go for a walk in the neighborhood, usually wandering down Bay Parkway or along Eighty-Sixth Street to see what was going on in the neighborhood or, in the last years of my grandmother’s life, to check on how much progress had been made on the Verrazzano Bridge, then just being built. Those were happy times and even now, after all these years, I remember them fondly and gratefully.

I have other nice memories as well, for example the one featuring my late mother-in-law organizing a traditional Thanksgiving dinner for her new American son-in-law when we came to visit Toronto in the first year of our marriage. (The only strange part was that Joan’s mother had somehow come to think that part of the fun involved actually dressing up as Pilgrims, to which minhag she dutifully nodded by buying a kind of white cap that seemed to her to suggest seventeenth-century New England and then wearing it at the table.) I was beyond touched by the whole thing and, even to this day, the memory of my first Thanksgiving outside of these United States remains one of the nicest of them all.

I have other nice memories too—our strange ex-pat Thanksgivings in Germany, for example, featuring roast chicken since there simply were no kosher turkeys for purchase anywhere in the Federal Republic, at least not as far as I could see—but that was all then. And this is now. Tradition bids us gather around our dining room tables and speak openly about our sense of thanksgiving, of gratitude, of appreciation for the bounty of the world. It shouldn’t be that complicated: we actually do all benefit from the bounteous earth and from the wealth of natural resources with which our nation has been blessed. And yet what Jewish soul can give him- or herself over to the “normal” sense of uncomplicated thankfulness the holiday exists to engender while so many hundreds—including babies, including a newborn, including little children—are being held captive by a fiendish and barbarous enemy that has shown no sign—or at least no public sign—of being willing to return these innocents to their families and to their homes.

Or is that the wrong way to approach the issue? Joan and I are going to have Thanksgiving at our home, as we always do. (I am writing this before the holiday although you will read it the day following.) One of our children, our son Emil, will be in Boston for the holiday with his husband Adam and their baby. (Adam is from Boston, which is where his mother still lives.) But our other children will be with us, as will also be our son-in-law’s parents and a friend of our older son Max who has no other place to go. So we will have a full house. I can already see the scene in my mind’s eye. The table will be set beautifully. Four of our five grandchildren will be present. As I contemplate what this week will yet bring, I feel overcome with the thought that gratitude is not merely being happy you have some specific thing you have in your life. It’s much more complicated than that, I realize—and has more to do with the fragility that inheres in life than with just being pleased with the things you’ve acquired over the years. My heart aches constantly these days for the hostages held by Hamas, but particularly for the children and for the babies, for those poor souls—some not even old enough fully to understand what has befallen them, some almost definitely unaware of the fate of their families, all but the babies no doubt terrified of what every next hour might bring. But I know enough of Jewish history—more than enough, actually—to understand that their story is not about some tragedy that befell them out of nowhere, but rather about the nature of Jewish life, about the precariousness that inheres in Jewishness itself.

We live our lives on a razor’s blade, all of us. The world is awash in cruelty, in prejudice, in savagery. And things can change on a dime: the anti-Semitism our Jewish students are facing on America’s college campuses, for example, would have been unimaginable for most of us even just a few years ago, let alone when I myself was in college. And yet here we are in a world in which a credible death threat against Jewish students in one our most prestigious Ivy League universities actually led to the arrest the other week of someone who apparently actually was planning to kill Jewish people. All of this, we all know.

So the real question is how to respond to it. With worry, certainly. And with action and not just words, just as certainly—Joan and I went to Washington last week specifically to be present on the Mall when almost 5% of Jewish America gathered to support Israel. But there’s a spiritual part of this as well and that is the part that coincides, at least emotionally for me, with Thanksgiving.

I know that when I look out at my table on Thursday, I will be seized, at least at first, with anxiety, with uncertainty born on my inability to know what the future will bring to all the assembled. (I know myself at least that well.) But my plan is to deal with that ill ease by summoning up a sense of deep, abiding gratitude to God for the gifts that the holiday will have put right before my eyes. My home. Joan. My children. My children-in-law. My grandchildren. All of us gathered under one roof, all of us safe and sound, all of us well-fed and relaxed, all of us together.    

I have responded to October 7 in many different ways. I have lost track of how many emails I’ve sent to our senators, to our (so far still-seated) representative in the House, to the President himself, all of them expressing my hope that the United States will never waver in its support for Israel. Joan and I keep sending checks out as well—to the FIDF and to the American Friends of the Magen David Adom, but also to other, less well-known charities doing things in Israel on a smaller scale for displaced families, for bereaved families, and especially for the families of the hostages. But on Thanksgiving, I plan to respond emotionally and spiritually to the challenge of the day not by becoming angry or anxious, but by allowing myself to be filled to overflowing with gratitude to God for the gifts that will be right there before me. I plan to look out at my family, at my people, and despite everything I know of the world—despite everything I know of Jewish history, despite all I’ve read and learned about the history of anti-Semitism, despite all of it—to allow myself to be filled with the deepest sense of gratitude for the moment and for all that that moment will be capable of suggesting about the future.

Tuesday on the Mall

I rarely write about our nation’s press and news media outlets, but sometimes you just don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. Or both.

The front page of Wednesday’s New York Times website made no reference at all to the gigantic pro-Israel demonstration in Washington. It was mentioned, however, in “The Morning,” a daily news summary that the Times sends out to people like myself who subscribe to it, where the text reads, and I quote, “Tens of thousands joined a rally at the National Mall in Washington in support of Israel.” Tens of thousands? Any reasonable reader might wonder how many tens exactly. You can’t find out by clicking on the link, however: that leads to a story that is buried somewhere in the bowels of the website (and not visible to people who “just” type www.nytimes.com into their browsers to see what’s on today’s front page) which—I have to assume intentionally—merely repeats that “tens of thousands” had converged on the Mall, adding the helpful information that neither the U.S. Parks Department nor the Metropolitan Police Department provided any estimate of the size of the crowd.

Well, I was there. So was Joan. So were, by most estimates, something like 290,000 other people. Some estimated the crowd as over 300,000. Would any reputable newspaper refer to a number like that as “tens of thousands”? That’s something like saying that a new Rolls Royce costs “hundreds of dollars.” Yes, the price of a new Rolls is definitely some multiple of 100. (I just checked: the average price of a new Rolls is $435,000, or about 4350 hundreds of dollars.) But no one would reference the price of a Rolls that way and the Times should be ashamed of itself for going to such bizarre lengths to avoid saying just how many people its crackerjack reporters—a team so endlessly willing uncritically to estimate civilian casualties in Gaza based on information provided by Hamas—how many people its crackerjack reporters estimated were there on the Mall on Tuesday.

Okay, now that I have that off my chest I can write about the rally itself. Oddly described (in the Times and elsewhere, but for no obvious reason) as “a march,” the rally featured no one marching anywhere at all, just people in massive numbers gathering and staying put on the National Mall, the gigantic park space that stretches in our nation’s capital from the Capitol to the east and the Washington Monument to the west. The crowd was so large that we chose voluntarily to stay towards the back where there were gigantic television screens broadcasting the speakers and singers who were speaking and performing at the far eastern end of the Mall—where only invited guests with special blue bracelets could go. So we were fine with that—I’m not a huge fan of crowds and was more than happy just to be present in that place without needing to be all the way up front—and were content to hang back.

The speakers were a strange mix: some A-list politicians (Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, but not President Biden, Vice President Harris, or Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell), some much less well-known types (Republican Senator Joni Earnst of Iowa, for example, or Democratic Senator Jacky Rosen of Nevada), some Israeli singers I personally hadn’t ever heard of (but also Matisyahu, whom I at least had heard of), and a strange sprinkling of Hollywood types like Debra Messing and Tovah Feldshuh, whose presence at the podium seemed to baffle most of the people in my immediate area. There were also a large number of relatives—including parents and siblings—of the hostages being held in Gaza. The parents of Omer Neutra, a lone soldier from Plainview who graduated the Schechter School of Long Island in 2019, were front and center to demand the release of all the hostages being held by Hamas. As they surely well deserved to be and needed to be.

Several speakers stood out in my opinion, though, and, first among them, Democratic Representative from the Bronx Ritchie Torres who spoke, I thought, remarkably forcefully and clearly, calling unequivocally on Israel, and I quote, “to do to Hamas what America did to ISIS in the twenty-first century and what America did to the Nazis in the twentieth century.” That matches my sentiment exactly, so it was very satisfying to hear an ally generally identified as a progressive speaking so forthrightly and clearly on Israel’s behalf.

Next, I would like to mention Deborah Lipstadt, United States Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combatting Anti-Semitism. I’ve heard her speak before and I read with great interest and respect her 2019 book, Anti-Semitism: Here and Now, as well as her biography of Golda Meir and her 2011 analysis of the Eichmann Trial called just that, The Eichmann Trial. In her remarks on the mall, she spoke forcefully and clearly about the link between anti-Israelism and anti-Semitism. Because of her status as a senior official in the Biden Administration, her presence was especially important. And she could not have spoken more eloquently or more forcefully on Israel’s behalf.

Natan Sharansky spoke from Jerusalem via video hook-up, as did Isaac Herzog, the President of Israel. (President Herzog said he was speaking from the Kotel, but it looked as though his spectral presence must have been somehow suspended above it since there were no people visible on the ground and the giant stone blocks of the Kotel were weirdly visible through the president’s diaphanous body.) 

I was particularly interested in hearing the Reverend John C. Hagee speak. That he was invited at all surprised me—here is a super-conservative type who has made dozens of statements opposing women’s reproductive rights, the civil rights of LGBTQ people, and the right of American children to attend public schools in which they are not encouraged, including not even subtly, to embrace the Reverend’s own faith as their own. And yet, despite all the reasons he shouldn’t have been there, there he was. He spoke forcefully and clearly. He prayed aloud that God bless the State of Israel. He declared himself and his followers to stand “shoulder to shoulder with the Jewish people” and noted that, in the current conflict, “there is no middle ground. You are either for the Jewish people or you’re not.” And, sounding fully sincere (at least to me), he noted that “if a line has to be drawn,” then the world should “draw that line around both Christians and Jews, because we are one.” So that was all good. But it begs the question of what to do with allies who speak out forcefully for good with respect to Israel, who raises gigantic sums of money for Israel (about $100 million and only rising), but who support so much of what most of Israel’s most fervent American supporters abhor. I came away unsure how I felt: impressed that he came, pleased that he spoke so forcefully and so unambiguously about his support for Israel and the degree to which he feels that all Christians should be fully supportive of Israel’s efforts to annihilate Hamas in Gaza…and yet not at all ready to say that we should just look past the Reverend’s many abhorrent remarks with respect to so much that we believe to be right and just. I suppose I give the man a pass for the moment: he came, he spoke forcefully and forthrightly, he didn’t mention any topic except Israel, and then he sat down without abusing his invitation to speak.

The crowd was interesting in its own right: lots of regular-looking Jewish people (some with yarmulkes on their heads but most without), some super-Orthodox-looking types (but nowhere near enough, at least not in my opinion, given their actual numbers), some quirky sub-groups (Iranians for Israel was probably my favorite), some pro-Israel Christian groups (mostly behaving respectfully, some not so much), and pro-Zionist LGBTQ people draped in rainbow flags emblazoned with huge Stars of David.

Tuesday’s rally appears to have been the largest ever gathering of American Jews and could conceivably have brought together almost a full five percent of the entire Jewish population of the nation. And so let me wrap up by saying what Tuesday’s rally meant to me both as a Jew and as an American.

We all pay lip service to the freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights. But the power that inheres in those freedoms is rarely something we experience personally. The right to speak out, the right to assemble without interference, the right to protest…and to be protected by the authorities while protesting, the right to insist that public officials listen when people speak out—all those are things we learn about in high school and then mostly don’t think much about. And yet there we all were, all of us together and united and expressing ourselves as one without anyone having needed a permit to show up or a license to speak out. I don’t suppose high-school-me could have imagined about-to-retire me on the Mall last Tuesday embodying all those rights we had to memorize for the American History Regents exam. But there I was. And there Joan also was. Both of us were proud and happy to stand up for Israel and to be two among many, many others united in their disinclination to remain silent when Israel is under attack.

  

A Kishenev Moment

Yesterday was the 85^th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Reich-wide pogrom in 1938 that signaled to the world that the Nazis were not going to settle back into being armchair anti-Semites who expressed their loathing for Jews through hate-inspired rhetoric and discriminatory legislation, but were going to morph forward into becoming brutal, barbarous killers for whom there would eventually be no bottom line at all when it came to attacking Jews or defaming Judaism. The numbers say it all. 267 synagogues were burnt to the ground in the course of that unimaginable night. Over 7000 Jewish businesses, including both family-owned shops and giant department stores, were damaged, looted, or utterly destroyed. Over thirty thousand Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps, the fig leaf of some sort of phony indictment accusing the incarcerated of having committed some sort of crime not even bothered with. Hundreds were murdered or prompted by the pogrom to take their own lives. The die was cast. Millennia of Jewish life in Germany and Austria were at their end. Other than for those able somehow to escape at the very last moment, there would be no future at all, not even a difficult or unpleasant one, for the Jews of the Reich.

We have not forgotten any of this. Nor has the eventual adoption of Yom Hashoah as the annual memorial day for the six million Jewish victims of Nazi anti-Semitism made it feel superfluous to mark the anniversary of Kristallnacht each November. Yom Hashoah, which has its own complicated backstory, ended up as the day on which Jewish people formally mourn for the martyrs who died al kiddush ha-shem during the Second War. But Kristallnacht has its point, its own specific contribution to make. And, indeed, for many of us, Kristallnacht represents not the final debacle, but the early-on turning point, the moment at which the anti-Semitism which underlies so much of Western civilization stepped boldly out of the closet and blatantly shed even the patina of shame that is in theory supposed to attach to race- or ethnicity-based prejudice in the sophisticated lands of our dispersion, in the enlightened West, in lands ruled (as was Germany in the 1930s) by leaders democratically elected by voters fully aware of their platform and program for the nation. There is something tragic about both Yom Hashoah and Kristallnacht, but whereas Yom Hashoah inspires regret, Kristallnacht inspires dread.

For me personally, the events of October 7 in the towns and kibbutzim on the Israeli side of the Israel-Gaza border inspires just that kind of ominous feel that Kristallnacht also awakens, that sense that a line was crossed, that the fantasy that a reasonable solution could one day yet be reached with the Hamas leadership was not only a pipedream, but a malign, dangerous one at that, an example of the kind of illusory pipedream that leads, at least eventually, to Treblinka, to the slaughter of innocents, to hell.

And yet the event in Jewish history that I keep seeing referenced with respect to the Simchat Torah pogrom is not Kristallnacht at all, but Kishenev.

Today, Kishenev (now called Chișinău) is the capital of Moldova, a landlocked Balkan nation wedged in between Romania and Ukraine, and home to almost a full third of its population. But long before Moldova was an independent nation, Kishenev was the capital of the Bessarabian Governate in the Russian Empire and home to a huge Jewish population of about 50,000 (out of a total population of 280,000). The Jews of Kishinev were neither better nor worse off than any other Jewish community in eastern Europe: they had business dealings and social dealings with their neighbors, people with whom they shared a common nationality, a common language, and a common hometown. But shortly before Easter in 1903, things began to go off the rails. There were low level anti-Semitic incidents at first, some violent and others just defamatory. But things escalated quickly and an out-and-out pogrom began on April 19 of that year. The violence was, at the time, almost unprecedented. Countless Jewish homes were broken into, plundered, and destroyed. Synagogues were demolished. Jews were openly attacked by mobs armed with pitchforks and guns; hundreds of women were raped openly in the streets. The violence went on for three days and, at the end, about 1500 homes had been destroyed, forty-nine Jewish people had been murdered, and many hundreds had been seriously wounded. The whole story is told in detail in one of the most shocking books I’ve read in a long time (which is saying a lot): Stanford University historian Steven J. Zipperstein’s Pogrom: Kishenev and the Tilt of History, published in 2018 by Liveright Books. The book, which I can recommend wholeheartedly, is well written and very thoroughly researched. Intelligent and fully forthright in its account of the terror, the book should be read—and read carefully—by every single one of the so-called academics on our nation’s campuses who are willing to be known publicly as supporters of Hamas.

It might be hard for readers familiar with the horrors of the Shoah to take a pogrom in which only forty-nine people were murdered all that seriously. (By way of comparison, the Nazis murdered about 15,000 Jews every single day from August to October in 1942.) And yet the importance of Kishenev lies not so much in its own detail, but in its aftermath because it served in its day as a wake-up call that had repercussions and echoes across the entire Jewish world. And that phenomenon too is chronicled in detail in Professor Zipperstein’s book.

The sense of powerlessness felt by Jews who had no recourse but to cower in their own cellars and hide from the miscreants, rapists, and murderers wandering the streets in search of their next victim was chronicled by many contemporary authors, but by none as successfully as Hayyim Nachman Bialik in his famous poem, Be’ir Ha-hareigah (“In the City of the Killing”), which soon became his most famous work. Others wrote in a similar vein, focusing not on the power of the crowd by on the powerlessness of their victims. And, according to Zipperstein, the combined weight of journalistic accounts, poetic responses, dramatic representations, and literary retelling led to a sea change in Jewish attitudes towards the world and the place of Jewish people in it.

And, indeed, the notion that the Jewish people could only survive in the long term in a Jewish state in the homeland of the Jewish people—the core concept of Zionism—moved quickly from an out-there kind of political theory espoused by some to the kind of basic truism that Jews the world over suddenly found themselves embracing naturally and easily. Kishenev was thus a kind of a catalyst moment, a threshold in time over which the Jewish people itself had somehow stepped…and which could not really be crossed back over again. This was a sea change in public opinion rooted in the realization that the barbarism of the Middle Ages—a time when Crusaders routinely and without fear of reprisal massacred entire Jewish communities and Inquisitors burnt at the stake any Jewish person deemed not wholeheartedly enough to have abandoned Judaism, that that level of barbarism was not a thing of the past but a thing fully of the present. And that triggered a response in the Jewish world that was, so Zipperstein writes, unprecedented.

And that brings me back to October 7, to the Simchat Torah pogrom, to Gaza. I follow the news incessantly. I suppose we all do. The story has yet to reach its conclusion, but I’m already sensing that Gaza was a kind of Kishinev moment for Jewish youth in our nation. The college campuses, once naively imagined by most (including myself) to be bastions of learning, of dispassionate scholarship, of culture, and of civilization, have shown themselves—and we are talking about the biggest and most highly-rated schools in America, these schools have shown themselves to be cesspits of anti-Semitism staffed by at least some faculty members morally depraved enough to feel that the murder, mutilation, and rape of innocents, including children, is a valid mode of political expression. But the Jewish students in those places are waking up and feeling—some, I’m sure, for the first time—the danger, the precariousness that inheres in Jewishness itself, the angst that underlies even the most confident statement of Jewish self-awareness. They too have crossed a line in the course of these last few weeks. And that, just as it was in the wake of Kishenev, will have to suffice as the silver lining in this cloud of unremitting horror stories that we have all heard and read over these last weeks.

Whether this truly will be a transformational moment for America’s Jewish youth remains to be seen. But Kishenev, which surely could have ended up as just one more pogrom on a long list of such events, somehow altered something in the DNA of the Jewish world. Nothing was the same afterwards. And the rise of Nazism just a few decades later only made even more evident the fact that, in the end, hiding from the hooligans and hoping that someone else steps forward to save their potential victims is not a cogent plan forward. Not for Jews, certainly. But also not for anybody.

Professor Zipperstein’s book is a shocking, bracing, very intelligent study of a single moment in Jewish history, but one that somehow nonetheless managed to divide what came before from all that came after. You won’t enjoy the book. No normal person could. But you will learn a lot from it, as I did. For those struggling to understand Gaza in the context of Jewish history, I recommend it wholeheartedly.

What Would Ike Do?

Anti-Semitism and its alter-ego anti-Israelism rarely wear the same dress to consecutive balls. Yes, of course, there are people so blinded by their own hatred that they don’t really care how their behavior appears to people who disagree with them (and even less than that to the actual objects of their loathing). But then there are those—and they are legion—who feel the need to dress up their bigotry and present it, not as something wicked or depraved, but as something rational and reasonable, even as something noble.

It's a big closet. There are lots of outfits to choose from. And the most favored outfit for today’s anti-Semite is pacifism, the struggle for peace in the world. Who could be against peace? And yet the constant, and ever-more-shrill, calls for a ceasefire in Gaza come not from people who support the effort to bring peace to Gaza by eradicating Hamas (and thus granting the actual Gazans a chance finally to live in peace with the neighbors), but precisely from those who wish the IDF to withdraw so as to allow Hamas and its fighters to regroup and plan their next horror-Aktion against Israeli civilians whose only “crime” is the wish to live openly as Jewish citizens of the Jewish state in the homeland of the Jewish people. By redefining pacifism as a path forward to more numerous, more violent, more brutal, and more devastating attacks against innocents undertaken by people so blind with hatred that even Nazi-style barbarism does not feel like a path too perverse to embrace, such people have truly stepped through the looking glass into a topsy-turvy universe where nothing is as it seems, where words can mean what they mean or what they don’t mean depending on the whim of the one speaking them. When Lewis Carroll has Humpty Dumpty say “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less,” he expected readers to laugh at the absurdity of words meaning only what the people speaking them wish for them to mean.

Adding to the irony is the fact that peace—the real kind, the kind that features individuals and nations living calmly and respectfully by each other’s side and resolving their disputes without rancor or violence—is the single most culminatory concept in all of Jewish prayer. The Kaddish ends with a prayer for peace. The Amidah—the series of benedictions that is the core of every Jewish prayer service—also ends with a prayer for peace. As do also the Grace after Meals, recited at the end of any formal meal, and the Priestly Benediction that features kohanim like myself coming forward to channel the very choicest of God’s blessings to the congregation. So if there ever were a people devoted to the idea that the yearning for peaceful coexistence between nations is the beating heart of prayer undertaken for the good of the world (as opposed to the kind undertaken solely for personal advancement or gain), it would be the Jewish people. And yet the calls for a cease-fire are becoming more shrill by the moment, more overtly hate-filled, more blatantly anti-Semitic.

Many years ago, Joan and I lived in Heidelberg, a storybook town dominated by a gigantic, half-ruined castle in what was then West Germany. How I got there and why someone like myself whose entire life could reasonably be described as a response to the Shoah would have agreed to live there at all, let alone for years—that will have to be my subject on some different occasion. But we were there—and the experience was some combination of fascinating, stirring, bizarrely otherworldly, and gratifying. I taught at the Institute for Jewish Studies in Heidelberg’s downtown core, but we lived in a suburb called Rohrbach, once a little town on its own called Rohrbach-bei-Heidelberg but by the time we got there long since redefined as a neighborhood within the city limits of its much larger neighbor. This was forty years after the end of the war, yet the Shoah was my constant companion. I couldn’t walk to the market without passing the red sandstone monument marking the site of the synagogue destroyed on that site on Kristallnacht in 1938. I couldn’t walk to work down the Plöckstrasse without remembering that it was once the Adolf-Hitler-Strasse. Nor could I take little Max (then just a baby) to the park by the river—the one place he still vaguely recalls as an adult—without passing the square in which the surviving Jews of Heidelberg were finally assembled before being shipped east to their deaths.

And yet the town I was living in was a peaceful place, a university town in the old-fashioned sense of the term: a place alive with concerts and lectures, with sporting events and social gatherings. The disconnect for me personally was beyond jarring: these were Germans, these people I was living among, yet they appeared to me neither warlike nor barbarous. If anything, my neighbors seemed like regular people pursuing their regular lives along fully banal lines: shopping for dinner, drinking beer in a pub, waiting for the streetcar, going to the movies, reading a newspaper in a café, attentively watching children playing on a climbing structure in a park to make sure they were safe. No one in our building on the Heinrich-Fuchs-Strasse seemed like the kind of savage who could murder entire communities’ worth of people in a single morning or who could operate gas chambers or who could shoot babies in their mothers’ arms. If anything, they seemed like peaceful sorts trying to earn livings and eager to live meaningful, productive lives. If there were any unreconstructed Nazis hiding out in Rohrbach, I never came across them. Or heard of their existence, even.  I’m usually a fairly good judge of people’s characters. I knew the history of the place in which I was temporarily living. But none of the people in our building or on our street struck me even remotely as the kind of person who could have brought such unimaginable suffering to the world, such misery, such violence, such uncontrolled and uncontrollable hatred.

When I think back on those days these days, I find myself wondering how exactly the most bellicose, savage, brutally violent nation ever to exist (with the possible exception of their Japanese allies), how such a nation became peaceful to the point at which the thought of today’s Germany going to war with Denmark or Holland is not just unlikely but truly unthinkable. And, yes, I say that known full well that there is serious (and growing) support for the ultra-right-wing Alternative für Deutschland party among the German electorate. But war with Holland? With France? That really is unthinkable, which brings me back to wondering what turned people whose entire national ethos was fueled by the most base kinds of hatred and bigotry into the nation Germany is today?

It certainly didn’t come about because General Eisenhower, having embarked on the boots-on-the-ground land invasion that followed the carpet bombing of Germany’s largest cities, decided that what was really needed to bring peace to Europe was a unilateral ceasefire.

What was needed, the Supreme Allied Commander knew, was to eradicate Nazism by neutralizing the Nazi leadership, by bringing the military to its knees, and by granting the German people a way out of this unimaginable catastrophe they had basically brought upon themselves. The defeat of Nazi Germany was total. The nation’s Armed Forces ceased to exist. The government was replaced briefly by ad hoc governing authorities created by the Allies, but soon after that by a democratically elected government of Germans eager to shed the horrors of the past and embrace a future that could steer the nation away from extremism and savagery, and towards playing a useful and helpful role in a reconstituted Europe built on the ashes of a nightmarish past. The role of the vanquishing nations then turned to assisting the vanquished to rebuilt by treating the citizens of Germany generously and fairly, by inviting them to imagine a peaceful future for their nation and then assisting them in making real that dream. The Marshall Plan was part of it. But even more essential than the money provided by the Plan was the willingness of the victors to redefine victory so that it no longer meant the annihilation of the enemy nation but its reconstitution as a useful partner in rebuilding a world that lay in ruins because of them.

People who truly yearn for peace should be thinking along similar lines with respect to Gaza.

The last thing that would ever lead to peace would be for Israel to leave Hamas in place, to go back to “regular” daily life, and to concentrate on working on some hugely lopsided deal to rescue the captives being held by Hamas. What is needed to bring peace to Gaza, on the other hand, is precisely what Israel is doing: working to eradicate Hamas by neutralizing its leadership, by bringing to justice the perpetrators of the October pogrom, by freeing the captives, and then, generously and willingly, to find a way for the citizens of Gaza to create a future for themselves that features peaceful relations with Israel and a governing body for themselves that has their own best interests at heart.  If General Eisenhower was here to put his two cents in, I think he would agree wholeheartedly.