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.