The Southern Border

The current presidential campaign has already been characterized by an amazing amount of obfuscatory rhetoric, confusing policy zigzags, and inconsistent argumentation—and we are still almost five months away from the actual election and, other than Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., there still aren’t any actual candidates out there, by which I mean candidates formally nominated by their parties to run for the office of President. Nonetheless, and barring the kind of catastrophe that in our gun-crazed society can never really be ruled out, we all know that the next president of the United States is going to be one of two individuals. And neither is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

For me and for many, the ultimate decision about how to cast my ballot will have to do with the candidates record on supporting Israel, and particularly during the war in Gaza that has lasted now for well over 200 days. I suppose that won’t surprise anyone at all among my readers, since I have basically been writing ever since October 7 solely about issues relating to Israel, and particularly to the events of that horrific day and their aftermath in Israel and around the world (and particularly on American college campuses). But there are other issues to consider. And today I’d like to write about one of them.

Americans like to reference their country—our country—as a nation of immigrants, a phrase made famous by then-Senator John F. Kennedy as the title of his 1958 book on the topic. And, for all it has gone out of fashion (to put it mildly) to celebrate our country as one founded and populated by colonialist settlers from other lands who—other than to massacre them or herd them onto reservations—mostly ignored the presence of native people in this place who surely thought of the land our nation occupies as their own, the reality remains in place that our nation’s Founders were either immigrants or the descendants of immigrants, which could also be said of the vast majority of American citizens today. (To refer to the enslaved ancestors of today’s Black Americans as “immigrants” seems both offensive and ridiculous, even grotesque. But, horrific though their story may be, they too came here from somewhere else.) And that truth—that, for better or worse, we actually are a nation of immigrants, just as JFK put it in his book—is at the core of our current issues with immigration.

In other words, President Biden’s decision to issue an executive order earlier this month closing the southern border when our officials are literally overwhelmed by a surge of would-be immigrants seeking to cross the border illegally needs to be evaluated in its historical sense as well as its political one.

The order itself feels almost banal. Targeting only people attempting to cross the border illegally, the order decrees that the border be closed once the average of such people trying to cross into the United States in a seven-day period exceeds 2,500 a day, and only re-opened after that figure drops to 1,500 for seven consecutive days and stays at that number or less for a two-week period. But nothing about our immigration policy is ever that simple. But between the two obvious response-positions—the one wondering why any illegal immigration should be tolerated at all  and the other wondering how a “nation of immigrants” can deny safe haven in this place to any newcomers at all when almost all Americans are personally descended from people who sought safe haven in this place themselves—between those two extremist positions there should be a middle-ground approach that features both charity for the desperate and respect for the law. Complicating all of this, of course, is the nightmarish images that still haunt the American psyche of children being ripped from their parents’ arms just a few years ago, an unbelievable 1,200 of whom have still not been reunited with their families. (For the government’s own avowal of that figure, click here.) For Jewish Americans, of course, it is impossible to contemplate the image of children—any children at all—being dragged away from their families and then forced somehow to survive on their own, or at least without their parents, without evoking the most horrific Shoah memories. And I suppose that is also the case for a large number of non-Jewish Americans as well.

Another part of this, and surely not just for Jewish Americans, is the challenge of setting the whole concept of barring the desperate or the eager from entering our country in its historical context. And that is  a long, complicated story.

We can start with the Page Act of 1875, which had as its specific point, to quote its sponsor in the House, one Horace Page (R-California), “to end the danger of cheap Chinese labor and immoral Chinese women” by making it illegal for Chinese women to immigrate to the United States. And then, seven years later, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 made it illegal for any Chinese laborers, male or female, to enter the United States.

The Immigration Act of 1917 went a step further still, barring all immigration from Pacific Island nations and from the Far East, but also imposing literacy tests on would-be immigrants as well as creating for the first time categories of people to whom immigration was to be denied without respect to national origin. The sanitized expressions “mentally defective individuals” and  “persons with constitutional psychopathic inferiority” were used to deny openly gay people the possibility of entry, along with undesirable “illiterates, imbeciles, insane persons, and paupers.” But it was the Immigration Act of 1924, framed in its day as a mere extension of the earlier act, that for the first time established immigration quotas. Formally, the idea was to restrict immigration to a number equivalent to 2% of the number of Americans who claimed that nation as their ancestral home in the 1890 census. Why it was deemed desirable at all, let alone crucial, for the ethnic balance of the populace to be maintained by law is a good question. But it’s not that relevant a one, because the real purpose of the Act was to keep out Italians, Greeks, Poles, and (I can’t help thinking especially) Eastern European Jews, all of which groups were coming here in numbers that far exceeded the percentage of the population that was already occupied by people of that heritage or national origin. I hardly have to pause to note what happened to those Jews who would have come here to start new lives, but who were instead condemned to be present when the Nazis occupied their homelands. Nor do I have to say out loud that this specifically is the baggage Jewish Americans bring to this debate, that sense that millions died because of an act of Congress inspired by the xenophobic and anti-Semitic desire to preserve the nation’s religious and ethnic mosaic in the future precisely as it had been in the past.

And then there is the counter-narrative, the one that finds it reasonable for the great statue of Lady Liberty in New York Harbor to have on its base engraved the words of Emma Lazarus’s “The Great Colossus,” which poem was actually written in the first place to raise the funds necessary to construct the pedestal atop which the statue would eventually be set. This is my personal way into the debate because I have truly loved that poem ever since I was obliged to learn it by heart as a student in Mrs. Gilbert’s sixth-grade class at P.S. 196. And it was the poet’s description of the statue as “a mighty woman with a torch, whose flame is the imprisoned lightning and her name the Mother of Exiles” that was the most resonant with me because my people came here fleeing persecution from towns in Poland and Belarus in which, as far as I know, no Jews at all survived the Nazi occupation. And the rest of the poem spoke equally directly to the young me. When I read that “from her beacon-hand glows world-wide welcome,” I imagined the three of my foreign-born grandparents passing through Ellis Island and wondering what fate awaited them here. And when the poet imagined Lady Liberty herself addressing the decaying lands of the Old World and imploring them to send to us “your tired, your poor,” your homeless and tempest-tost, and that they would be welcomed by Lady Liberty herself, on duty 24/7 holding aloft her “lamp beside the golden door,” I felt that the values embedded in those words were precisely what made America great.

So was President Biden protecting our nation with his executive order or betraying our core values of inclusivity, tolerance, hospitality, and empathy? I suppose we shall find out soon enough. If this really is just a way to keep the authorities from being overwhelmed with desperate people eager to find a safe, prosperous place in which to raise their children, then it’s hard to find a good reason to be opposed: surely, no good can come from the system in place breaking down and ceasing to function well or at all. But, in the end, if this is really a way to close the border precisely to the people Emma Lazarus had in mind when she composed her poem, then it’s hard to feel sanguine about the nation’s future. Consider the poet’s words, “From her beacon-hand / glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command / the air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.” In Emma Lazarus’s day, the twin cities were New York and Brooklyn. But although Brooklyn has been part of New York City since 1898, the poet’s sentiments are no less relevant today than they were when she wrote the poem fifteen years before the expansion of New York City from just Manhattan to the city it is today and defined, at least for me, what the most basic of all American values was to her and should be for us all.  

Dancing in the Moonlight

There are so many things in my heart following this crazy rollercoaster of a week that began with the death of my dear father-in-law last Wednesday and continued through his funeral on Thursday, my return to New York without Joan on Friday, our beautiful musical Shabbat on Friday evening, the remarkable Shabbat morning service featuring remarks by Rabbi Carl Perkins (my friend of many, many years), the Gold Plate Dinner itself on Sunday, Joan’s return to Long Island on Monday, and the next few days of shiva observance in our home. You could say it’s been a busy week!

Any one of the above could turn into a blog post in its own right. But I thought I’d write this week not about any of it but about all of all, about the experience of knitting so many discordant themes and diverse obligations and opportunities into a coherent whole. Because, in the end, isn’t that what life itself is like, only just not usually quite that concentrated? We dance through the years of our lives, after all, and, as the music changes to suit the occasion, we dance differently: slower or faster, in our partner’s arms or merely facing each other, in step with the other couples on the dance floor or fully on our own and without reference to anyone else. But, at least for as long as we can, we keep dancing. When the pace actually gets a bit dizzying, as happened to me this last week, we finally force ourselves to take note of what we’re doing. But most of the time, we’re too pre-occupied for that kind of focused introspection and we just keep on keepin’ on, twirlin’ and swirlin’ to the music, happy still to be standing, still to be moving, still to be dancing in the moonlight.  (Just for the record, “Dancing in the Moonlight” by King Harvest was my favorite record of 1972, the year I left for my junior year of university in France. I knew you’d all want to know that.) And the music is always there, always audible, always present—just usually in the background. And then something happens—sometimes a single event, but other times a strange concatenation of unrelated events—and suddenly, almost out of the blue, there we are in the moonlight as the world falls away and we are suddenly on the dance floor all by ourselves.

That’s what this last week was like.

Since I mentioned one of my favorite songs from my college years, I’ll also mention one of my favorite books, The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts. Watts, now forgotten by most, was a remarkable and well-known figure in his day and a great author. The child of devout Anglican parents, he eventually forsook Christianity to become a Buddhist monk, then went on to write any number of books I treasured as a young person. Of them all, however, The Wisdom of Insecurity is the one that had the greatest effect on me. He begins by observing that, just like people, animals also age as they pass through the years. They get older, then sicker, then weaker. And eventually they die, just as do we all. But the difference between animals and people is that, whereas we are consumed with anxiety about all of it (by which I mean: the aging process, the possibility of illness, the fear of incapacity, the opacity of death itself and our inability to see past it other than in our mostly made-up fantasies, the whole concept of growing more frail and less hale as we age, etc.), animals don’t seem to worry at all about following the natural trajectory of their lives. In fact, they seem far better at facing it all than any of us is. And so, as they become less strong and less able, they just move through those stages of their lives the way they’ve already moved through the earlier ones, possibly even not noticing the diminution of ability as it devolves upon them, and simply growing into new version of themselves without seeming to find that concept upsetting or off-putting. Growth, they appear wordlessly to be saying, may not be always positive, but it is invariably normal.

And so is the anxiety growth naturally engenders. In his book, Watts teaches that the insecurity that the aging process engenders in all of us is not a bad thing and certainly not something to try to deny or avoid. There is, he wrote, great wisdom in insecurity, in accepting the fact that we have no idea what the next day will bring (which idea would presumably be totally foreign to animals), that we cannot control the universe as we decline any more than we could when we were young people growing more strong and more capable with each passing year of childhood and adolescence. And it is from that insecurity that wisdom comes. (Or can come.) And not just wisdom, Watts wrote, but wisdom born of acceptance, of acquiescence, of submission to the nature of things, to our place in the universe, to the Creator who created Creation according to a divine plan that seems to include inevitable decline as we age and grow less sturdy and increasingly rickety. Even after all these years, I can still recommend that book to you all. You’ll like it, I think. But it is troubling too—and precisely because we are so good at avoiding these truths for most of the time, even perhaps for most of our lives.

And then you have a week like I just had. Brought together in a handful of days were the following: anxiety in the face of impending death, death itself (weirdly captured on video, since my father-in-law was actually facetiming with Joan when he breathed his last), eulogy, burial, bereavement, terrible sadness…and then, as if I wasn’t feeling mortal enough, my return to New York and the ensuing worship services and speakers and dinners and dancing celebrating my impending retirement, which is to say the beginning of the next stage, the stage that contains—not plausibly or possibly, but inevitably—all the things that Alan Watts writes about in his book. So you can excuse me for feeling a bit fragile as I contemplate all of this. Fragile and brittle. And yet, also as per Watts, hopeful and eager to see what the next years bring.

Is that eagerness itself a kind of denial? You could make that point very cogently! Or was Watts right that the great reward for facing things as they are is the wisdom that insecurity engenders as we find the courage to acknowledge the flimsiness of it all, to face the impermanence of this world we inhabit and, specifically, of our place in it? I thought he was when I was in college and, now, a half-century later, I find that I still do.

Like everybody, I’d like to live forever. But I’m not indulging that fantasy these days and, instead, I’m embracing the insecurity and seeking comfort in the ephemeral. Nothing lasts forever. As the great philosopher said, panta rhei, it’s all in flux, all changing constantly, all morphing forward into its own next version, all a work in endless and permanent progress. You can like it or not, but that’s how things are in this world God made and set us all into. So I’m not going to retreat into morose acceptance of my fate or resignation to the inevitability of decline. Instead—and this is the last and best lesson Joan’s dad taught me—I’m going to dance in the moonlight for as long as I can. Like my father-in-law, I have a happy marriage to sustain me and three wonderful children. And another three wonderful children-in-law. I have grandchildren too, unberufen, and watching them grow is and always will be a source of huge pleasure for me. So what am I complaining about? That life is process? I’ve known that since I was in college! 

Contextualization Is the Opposite of Surrender

As we make our way through the weeks between Pesach and Shavuot, we are bidden by Scripture to count each day separately. This mitzvah, called informally “counting the omer,” is not complicated or difficult: you simply say the blessing, then say out loud the day of the omer upon us, then wrap up with a brief prayer. In different years, of course, this custom has a different feel to it. But this year, as things have gone from bad to worse, as the situation on many college campuses has deteriorated to the point almost of no return, as the poisoned tree that is the international effort to delegitimize Israel has born more and more fruit on more and more different branches, as traditional allies have wavered or retreated entirely, and as many members of Congress (a minority, but a sizable one) hesitate to support the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act for a variety of reasons, some bizarrely exaggerated and others darkly ominous—in a year such as this, the practice of counting each day, of marking each day as it passes and turns into the next one, that practice feels ominous and darkly suggestive of worse things to come in a way that I cannot recall ever having felt in years gone by.

And then I came across a video by an Israeli sketch comedy time called Ha-y’hudim Ba’im, literally “The Jews are Coming.” Normally, it’s a very funny broadcast on Israeli television, something along the lines of Saturday Night Live in its heyday.  But this last video clip, released just a week or so ago, is not at all funny. But it is profound and it is, in its own dark way, encouraging.

The video presents a series of Jewish people from ancient to modern times. A woman speaks about her experiences in first-century C.E. Judea as the Romans razed Jerusalem and defeated the rebels who dared seek an independent Jewish state in Israel. A young man follows who speaks to us from eleventh century Cologne and describes his family’s experiences as the Crusaders invaded the city with the specific intent of murdering its Jewish population before setting off to “liberate” the Holy Land. We then shift forward a millennium and find ourselves in Kishenev in 1903 as a resident describes what he saw and what his family experienced during the pogrom I wrote about last fall (click here), an anti-Jewish riot that, in a world that had yet to experience the Shoah, was understood as an almost unimaginable act of violence directed against innocents, including children. And then we skip forward two decades and meet a young person speaking from Hebron in 1929, the year of the anti-Jewish riots there that took the lives of sixty-nine Jews, also including children.

From Hebron, we move back to Germany and meet an older man who lived through Kristallnacht in Berlin. He describes the riots, the destroyed Jewish shops and businesses, the arrests of innocent Jewish men, the intentional destruction of the local synagogues. And then we travel to the east and meet a younger man who speaks from Baghdad and describes the Farhud, the violent anti-Jewish riot that seized the city on the first two days of June in 1941, riots that included gang-rape, the destruction of synagogues and Jewish shops, the murder of more than 180 innocents, and the destruction of upwards of 900 Jewish homes.

And then we move forward to Gaza in 2023. A young woman from Kfar Aza who lived through October 7 faces the camera. Based on what we’ve already seen, we expect her to tell about her experiences, about what she saw, about whom she lost. But she skips that part. We know those stories, she seems to suppose. And instead she speaks about the future. About her intention to remain in place, to live in her home, to rebuild what the vandals destroyed. She speaks calmly, but with integrity and purpose. And then, almost as if to reward her for her courage, she is joined by the others, all of whom step out of history to join her on camera and to say, as one, that together they represent the worst of Jewish history, the low points, the disasters, the pogroms, the nightmares, the true horrors…but that they also represent the spirit of the Jewish people to face down its oppressors and enemies, and to refuse to do anything other than to resist the haters and the bigots and the barbarians, and to thrive.

There’s an interesting riddle embedded in the clip as well. The actors are all Israelis. The clip itself is in Hebrew with English subtitles. Except for the final woman who speaks from Kfar Aza, they are obviously depicting people who lived before the State of Israel existed, some of them long before. Even the woman who speaks first, the one who describes the Roman onslaught against Jerusalem in the first century, and the fellow who speaks from Hebron, even they didn’t live in an independent Jewish state! And the others obviously lived in different places, in Germany and Iraq and Moldova. So that’s fine: actors depict personalities from different centuries and different countries all the time. But then, at the end, when they all come together, they somehow turn into Israelis as they speak in fully unaccented Israeli Hebrew and pledge to rebuild, to thrive, to defend their country, and to prosper in their own land, in their homeland, in their native habitat.

And in that merging of past and present, of Jewish history and Israeli reality, of stories from distant centuries and contemporary reality, there is something truly uplifting and satisfying, even encouraging.

I’ve written almost weekly since last October about the situation in Israel. It has consumed us all, of course, and me no less than anyone else. As the situation in Gaza, on the diplomatic front, at the UN, in the halls of Congress, and on our nation’s college campuses has deteriorated, it’s been easy to lose hope and to feel dejected about the future. Yes, it could always be worse. But that’s the punchline to a famous joke, not a rational path into the future! And then I saw this clip and things fell back into place for me. Yes, we’ve dealt with terrible things in our past. Yes, October 7 was beyond horrific. Yes, it will take a long time for Israel to return to its pre-October 7 state, if it ever does. But contextualizing is neither denial nor retreat. And seeing these people on the clip I’ve been writing back stepping out of history to join that young woman from Kfar Aza to remind her that she is not alone, that the ghosts of the past are not only present but fully and really so as Israel—and Jewish people in all the lands of our dispersion—move forward into whatever comes next.

I intentionally didn’t give the link earlier on because I wanted to introduce it to you with my own words, but here’s it is: https://youtu.be/KjwrV0wG9E0?si=Zp2vl0HkWWQzNPCA. Take a look, let these people speak to you as they did to me, and together let us all find comfort in the thought that, since history is run-up and destiny is catch-up, it’s the present we need to negotiate together into the future. We have faced worse than Hamas and survived. And we will survive this as well. 

Who is Opposing the AAA and Why

A few weeks ago, the House passed the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act by a vote of 320 to 91. Obviously, I’m pleased that 320 members of Congress take anti-Jewish prejudice seriously enough to want to specify in law what constitutes an anti-Semitic act so as to facilitate taking legal action against the perpetrators of such acts. But I’m much more involved emotionally with the fact that 91 members of the House voted against the measure. The naysayers were a bipartisan group too, albeit a lopsided one: 70 of those who voted against the bill are Democrats and the other 21 are Republicans. To condemn them all as haters opposed to opposing anti-Semitism would be wrong. Nor is it so that they came to their opposition from similar vantage points.

The basic concept of the AAA is that the bill requires the U.S. Department of Education to use the definition of anti-Semitism developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, a group based in Sweden that works “to foster education, remembrance, and research about what happened in the past, to build a world without genocide in the future.” (That’s a direct quote from their website; to see more, click here.) To do their work, it became necessary at some point to define anti-Semitism precisely. And so they developed a precise definition, one as brief as it is almost banal: “Anti-Semitism,” they determined, “is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” It’s hard to know what anyone could possibly take issue with in that. But, of course, the devil is always in the details.

The definition comes with quite a big set of elucidatory details, each describing a specific manifestation of anti-Jewish prejudice. They are:

1.       Calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion.

2. Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.
3. Accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group, or even for acts committed by non-Jews.
4. Denying the fact, scope, mechanisms (e.g., the gas chambers) or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany and its supporters and accomplices during World War II.
5. Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.
6. Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.
7. Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
8. Applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
9. Using the symbols and images associated with classic anti-Semitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libels) to characterize Israel or Israelis.
10. Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis, and
11. Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the State of Israel.

So you can already see where this is going. The Democratic opponents of the bill, including several Jewish member of Congress, were afraid that adopting the IHRA definition would criminalize criticism of the State of Israel under points 7 and 8 above. To me, that seems almost bizarrely exaggerated: the points listed above do not seem even remotely to me to mean that criticizing this or that decision or policy of the State of Israel ipso facto makes someone an anti-Semite in the way that questioning the right of Israel to exist would. Our own Jerry Nadler (D-NY) voted against the bill. So did Bernie Sanders (D-Vermont). That hardly surprised me, but what did me was a comment by yet another Jewish member of Congress, Sara Jacobs (D-California), who observed that although she personally feels that Israel has a right to exist, she knows many people who don’t feel that way at all despite the fact, and I quote, that they are “deeply connected to their Judaism.” I’m sure there are people out there whose understanding of Judaism is so unconnected to classical Jewish thought that they really imagine it possible to be “deeply connected” to Judaism without feeling any emotional connection to the State of Israel. We see such people, thankfully in tiny numbers, when they show up annually at the Israel Day Parade. But was it those people that Representative Jacobs had in mind? I doubt it. Whom she really had in mind, I obviously have no way to know. But to speak of such a position as though it were a valid, reasonable approach for a Jewish person to take—is it even possible for someone educated enough to be elected to Congress to know so little about her own faith? Apparently, the answer is yes. But weirder and creepier still are the reason at least some of the 21 Republicans who voted against the measure chose to do so, of which the one that made the headlines was the one put forward by Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) who opposed the bill not for any reason that had to do with Israel, but because she perceived the bill to threaten her right to hold Jewish people responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus in the 1^st century C.E. Oy.

It would be easy—and more than easy—to write off a comment like that. This is, after all, the same woman who speculated, apparently seriously, that the 2018 wildfires in California may well have been ignited by secret lasers orbiting in space that were put in place by the Rothschilds as part of a larger plan to control the world by controlling the weather. But Greene was not without her own supporters. Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, took things one step further by observing that, in his opinion, the adoption of the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act would basically outlaw the entire New Testament, an opinion promulgated on X by Representative Matt Gaetz (R-Florida). That sounds even loonier than the idea of Jewish space lasers, but students of Jewish history have long since learned not to wave away anti-Semitic tropes or remarks just because they sound crazy. And so should we not pass lightly by this kind of statement, especially when used to justify opposing a bill that would criminalize the use of extremist religious rhetoric to justify harming or killing Jewish people.

Unlike most rabbis, I know the New Testament well. (I spent years of Graduate School working on my knowledge of New Testament Greek, and took courses in New Testament theology at the Union Theological Seminary and the General Theological Seminary, both Christian institutions of higher learning in Manhattan.) So I feel entitled to an opinion. All four of the Gospels are set in first-century Israel. The Romans are in charge; Judea is a province (or, in the very beginning of the story, a client kingdom) of the Roman Empire. Other than the Roman overlords, pretty much every person in the story is Jewish: Jesus himself, all his disciples, all of his relatives, all (or almost all) of his followers, the Temple priests, the High Priest, the citizens of Jerusalem. It was a fully Jewish place, Roman Judea in the first century CE. And leaving that detail out of the mix more or less guarantees that the resultant sense of what life was life in that time and place will be basically false.

The authors of the Gospels wrote decades after Jesus’s death and for Gentile audiences. As a result, “the Jews” were depicted—I’m generalizing here, but not to the extent of giving a false impression—the “Jews” were depicted as the non-Christians and the followers of Jesus as the Christians, without it being over-emphasized (or emphasized at all) that those followers were themselves Jewish as well and that the sharp division between Jews and Christians that later became basic to the Christian self-conception did not apply really at all in the days that Jesus himself walked the earth. And so, somehow, starting with the earliest extant Christian literature, the followers of Jesus were de-Judaized and depicted as proto-Christians, while the Jews who chose not to follow Jesus ended up depicted as “the” Jews. As a result, a casual perusal of the Gospel literature suggests a struggle between proto-Christians and Jews, thereby missing the point that Christianity doesn’t exist in Jesus’s day and that all the players in the story other than the land’s Roman overlords were Jews.

The bottom line, though, is that many Christian denominations have moved past the anti-Jewish tropes of the Gentile authors of the Gospels. (To give just one example, the papal encyclical called “Nostra Aetate,” promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1965, specifically renounces that belief, saying explicitly that “what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.”) But for a member of Congress to oppose a bill criminalizing anti-Semitic behavior because she perceives it possibly to be denying her the right to hold Jews responsible for the execution of Jesus—that is precisely the kind of statement of extreme prejudice that Jews know far better than to wave away as “just” silliness. When I ask myself what the future could possibly hold for the Jews of the United States, I find it impossible to consider an answer without hearing Marjorie Taylor Greene’s comment ringing in my ears. I suppose there are many people who feel the same way. I’m sure there are, actually. And that is precisely why the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act should become the law of the land.

And what actually are the bill’s chances in the Senate? We shall find out soon enough!

 

The President's Warren-Harding-Moment

Warren G. Harding, the 29^th president of the United States, came to the presidency on the heels of a landslide victory over his Democratic opponent, James M. Cox. (He was also the first of our three presidents to move director from the Senate to the White House, the other two being JFK and Barack Obama.) And there truly was a new age dawning as Harding took the oath of office on March 4, 1921. The Great War was over, the Treaty of Versailles in effect for more than a year, our troops all back home. It was the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, les années folles in our nation and across the Atlantic in Europe. The future felt bright, our national potential for growth almost limitless.

And then, just a couple of months after Harding came to office, America experienced a race-based pogrom on a scale that had never been seen before. Called the Tulsa Race Massacre (or, sometimes, the Black Wall Street Massacre), the event featured mobs of white citizens rampaging through the Greenwood district of Tulsa, a Black neighborhood, eventually destroying 35 square blocks of homes and businesses. The precise number of people killed during those days, May 31 and June 1 of 1921, is not known, but the estimates range from 75 to 300. About 10,000 people were left homeless. It was, even by the standards of the day, a shocking event that seized the attention of the nation. To learn more, I recommend Tim Madigan’s book, The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, which I read a decade ago when it first came out.

The riot presented President Harding with a remarkable challenge because he was scheduled just two days later to deliver the commencement address at Lincoln University in Oxford, Pennsylvania, the nation’s first degree-granting Historically Black College. He could surely have given some sort of color-by-number speech about graduating college and moving into the future and been forgiven for his blandness. But he saw an opportunity, a great one, and he took it. He only spoke for ten minutes. But in those ten minutes, he identified himself with his Black listeners (a remarkable thing for a white man in his office to do, and especially for the President who followed Woodrow Wilson, a known racist and segregationist). He wondered aloud how government, lacking a magic wand that could somehow alter attitude and stance, could lead Black Americans forward to a position of equality by working to offer Black Americans a chance to go to school, to become educated, and to enter society on an equal footing with their white co-citizens. And he spoke about Tulsa, calling the riot “an unhappy and distressing spectacle” of the kind that the nation should not and cannot tolerate. And then, in a gesture that will seem ordinary to most today but which at the time was considered astonishing, the white President of the United States shook the hand of every single Black member of the graduating class, which was all of them.

That fall, Harding went south to Birmingham, Alabama, to speak at the celebration of the city’s semicentennial. The Black third of the audience was separated from the white two-thirds by a chain-link fence. The President began his remarks, as everybody expected, by praising the city and commenting on its beauty. But then he reverted to Tulsa and, without mentioning the massacre, addressed its aftermath clearly and precisely. Black Americans fought in the Great War just as patriotically as white citizens, he began by noting. And then he went on to say clearly that Black people should not only not be prevented from voting, but should be encouraged to vote. Educational opportunities should be extended equally to all, he said, and without reference to race. And white Americans should be encouraging their Black neighbors to find their own leaders and to participate in the effort to advance humanity morally and politically. For the time and place, it was a remarkable statement. The white listeners greeted his speech with stony silence. The Black listeners responded with “uproarious applause,” to quote a journalist who was present. There was no question where Harding stood. It was his moment and he neither flinched nor equivocated. He is remembered today as, at best, a mediocre president. But he was a brave man as well. And delivering that speech in the heart of segregationist Alabama was a message as loud and clear as any President could have delivered. In many ways, the Birmingham speech was Warren Harding’s finest hour.

I reminded myself all about these two speeches as a way of preparing to hear President Biden speak Tuesday morning about the surge of anti-Semitism in America. I was especially curious to see if he would offer concrete steps forward or merely condemn prejudice, if he would address the haters in the manner of Warren Harding standing in front of a segregated audience in the heart of the South and daring to insist on equality for Black Americans. Would Biden merely announce that he is opposed to anti-Semitism in the way that people are opposed to bad weather, i.e., without anyone supposing that he could actually do something about it? Or would we hear concrete proposals about how our nation should move forward? I was especially interested in hearing what he would say about our nation’s college campuses. Would he call for the expulsion of students who openly call for the murder of their Jewish classmates? Would he announce that guest-students in our nation who openly espouse genocide directed against Jews (or anyone) be deported? Would he say clearly that college professors, including tenured ones, who espouse hatred of Jews should, at the very least, be fired? That was what I was waiting to hear.

In the end, the President didn’t call for any of the measures mentioned just above in so many words, but, almost despite myself, I was impressed, even moved, by his words. The man is not a great orator, but his words were clearly heartfelt and personal. And what he had to say was beyond resonant with me because he artfully made the single point over and over that I personally find it the most exasperating when our elected officials seem not to understand.

To my relief and slight amazement, the President seemed fully aware that it is not possible for Jewish Americans with any sense of their own history to consider the events of October 7 other than in the context of the Shoah. Yes, I understand that Hamas-governed Gaza is not Nazi Germany. But I am incapable of hearing stories about children being murdered, women being sexually abused and then killed, elderly people dragged from their homes and shipped off to unknown destinations to meet whatever fate awaited them there—I am just not able to hear any of that without being transported back to the dark days of the 1940s. Nor, I think, should anyone be able to be. And then the President tied the two together unambiguously: “Now here we are, not 75 years later, but just seven-and-a-half months later and people are already forgetting, are already forgetting that Hamas unleashed this terror. That it was Hamas that brutalized Israelis. It was Hamas who took and continues to hold hostages. I have not forgotten, nor have you, and we will not forget.”  That is the precise point for Jewish Americans: that to talk about Hamas without reference to murder, rape, and barbarism towards babies is exactly the same as discussing the Nazis without reference to Auschwitz.

And then the President made that point even more clear, stressing that he understood fully that the Israeli response to the Simchat Torah pogrom was rooted in the history of the Jewish people and that those memories are, for better or worse, ineradicable: Too many people [are] denying, downplaying, rationalizing, ignoring the horrors of the Holocaust and October 7th, including Hamas' appalling use of sexual violence to torture and terrorize Jews. It's absolutely despicable and it must stop…Some injustices are so heinous, so horrific, so grievous they cannot be…buried, no matter how hard people try.

I recommend reading the whole speech, which you can do by clicking here. And I recommend comparing it to a document published on the White House’s own website, a fact sheet detailing the Biden-Harris administration’s national strategy to combat anti-Semitism. It’s a remarkable document in its own right, something very worth your time to consider. (To see a copy, click here.) You will find there more than 100 specific steps the administration is taking or wishes to take to fight anti-Jewish prejudice in these United States. Some of them seem a bit odd (will things really change if enough NBA players visit Yad Vashem?), but other initiatives seem solid and potentially very effective. But what struck me, aside from the details, was the larger image here of the President offering not one or two, but dozens upon dozens of initiatives to make Jewish people in our nation feel and be safe and secure.

But that document was from last year, published in May 2023. It still reads well. But this is now, not then. In May of 2023, our nation’s college campuses hadn’t turned into battlegrounds onto which Jewish students barely dare to wander and our nation’s high schools hadn’t become breeding grounds for anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hatred. We hadn’t yet had the surge in anti-Semitic incidents that the President himself characterized as “ferocious.” So the efforts outlined in last year’s policy paper, for all they were surely well-meaning and even potentially game-changing, need to be revised and revamped in light of the new normal. The President did address the situation on campus. And what he said was spot on (“In America we respect and protect the fundamental right to free speech, to debate and disagree, to protest peacefully and make our voices heard. But there is no place on any campus in America … for antisemitism or hate speech or threats of violence of any kind.”) But I was disappointed that the President didn’t call for the three-pronged approach to the situation on our nation’s campuses I recommended above. And I do believe that things will not change until it becomes clear that calling for more October 7’s, the equivalent of calling for the murder of Jewish children and the rape of Jewish women and the wholesale slaughter of Jewish families, will result in expulsion for students, dismissal for faculty, and deportation for visitors from foreign lands who received visas to come to these shores to study and not to call for the murder of our citizens. That was what I wanted to hear and didn’t.

President Harding’s Birmingham speech was a grand moment for the man and for the nation. But that was in 1921 and it took more than forty years for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to become the law of the land. We can’t wait forty years for focused, effective action on anti-Semitism. Nor should we have to.

 

  

The Campus Anti-Semitism Report Card

I get a lot of mail, especially e-mail. Some of it, I always read. Some of it, I read sometimes or just partially. A fair amount, there just being so many hours in the day, I delete without reading. But I got, unsolicited, something in my inbox this week that was so eye-opening that I resolved not only to read it all (which I did, and without getting up from my chair even once), but also to share it with you all this week. It is the first annual ADL Campus Anti-Semitism Report Card, available to all by clicking here. It was not pleasant reading.

Like all eye-opening surveys built on careful research, it is filled with little details and tiny facts that, considered entirely on their own, would sound banal or even petty. You could say the same, I suppose, of a single brick from the Taj Mahal or the Parthenon: it’s only just a brick if you consider it entirely on its own, but nothing like that when considered in the larger context of the structure of which it has survived as a single, tiny part. Obviously, not every college and university in the nation was included in the study. (That would have been too gargantuan an undertaking even for an organization as well equipped to undertake such things as the ADL.) So, instead, a sampling of eight-five of the nation’s schools were chosen for study, some because they have an especially large number of Jews in their student body and others because they are widely considered—or at least up to now have traditionally  been considered—to be our nation’s finest, most desirable institutions of higher learning. When considered against the fact that there are just shy of 4000 degree-granting institutions of higher learning in the United States (click here for corroboration of that number), the number sounds low. But when the actual roster of schools included in the study is considered, that number sounds reasonable: if I had been challenged personally to make up a list of the schools that are the best-known and most popular in the Jewish community, more or less every single school that would have been on my list appears in the survey, as do also the college I myself attended and those from which two of my children got their degrees. So waving the survey away as not broad enough in scope would be, in my opinion, a huge error of judgment. As noted, you won’t enjoy your time spent reading. No normal person would. But this is something every American should read—and not just every Jewish American either. This is the social fabric of our country we’re analyzing here, the institutions that train our young people to take their place as productive citizens. To put it another way, what percentage of members of Congress in twenty-five years will be people who are in or who soon will be in college in the United States? Surely not 100%, but I’m guessing that a serious majority of our nation’s leaders in a quarter-century will be people enrolled as undergraduates in our nation’s colleges and universities in the 2020s. If they are poisoned as undergraduates with prejudice and bigotry, and if they are trained to see nothing abnormal in hating Jews or Judaism, then we are in, I fear, for a very rough ride. And be “we,” I don’t mean just we Jews. I mean we Americans, we who imagine ourselves to live in the world’s most enlightened democracy, in a nation where the civil rights of the citizenry are not only universally respected, but understood to serve, each in its own way, as the foundational principles upon which the republic rests.

Like all complex documents, this one gives up its secrets slowly. But there are also shortcuts to be taken: the ADL has actually awarded letter grades to the surveyed institutions based on their efforts to create a safe environment for Jewish students and to combat anti-Semitism on campus. A quick survey yields some surprising results and some expected ones. Some of our most prestigious institutions were awarded D’s: Cornell, Columbia, Barnard, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins, Brown, Northwestern, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania. So were many others. But the list of schools awarded F’s is also interesting: some obvious institutions (Harvard, Tufts, Stanford, Swarthmore, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Chicago) and some that came as a surprise to me (SUNY Purchase, for example, or the University of Virginia at Charlottesville).

Of course, these letters grades—both the high one and the failing ones—have to be approached with caution. The ADL site itself offers the following advice: “Just because a school has received a letter grade A or B…does not mean that the school does not have an antisemitism problem. It also does not mean that the school is in compliance with existing legal frameworks, including but not limited to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Similarly, just because a school has received a C or D does not mean that the school is failing to support its Jewish students. For example, some schools received lower grades relative to others due to the severity and prevalence of incidents on campus, administrative policies notwithstanding.) In other words, the grade is meant to address two simple questions that are merely two sides of the same coin: how safe would a young Jewish person be as an undergraduate or graduate student in the college in question and how rational a choice would that institution be for high school seniors having to decide now where to attend university.

Looking more carefully at the survey leads to some interesting results. Let’s consider Princeton, for example, which has always been considered one of America’s finest institutions of higher learning. When you consider Jewish life on campus, every box is checked off: active Hillel, active Chabad, kosher dining hall, Jewish studies courses, pro-Israel activities permitted, Jewish religious services held on campus, etc. Then, when you consider the school’s policies, it also sounds wonderful: Princeton publicly condemns anti-Semitic incidents when they occur, has a clear process for reporting anti-Semitic incidents, maintains an advisory council specifically charged with monitoring anti-Semitism on campus, etc. So that sounds ideal too. So how could such an ideal institution end up with a D? Well, that’s a different column, the one that takes note of the fact that the school has tolerated severe anti-Semitic and anti-Israel incidents, has permitted hostile anti-Israel student government activity, has not censured anti-Zionist student groups, and tolerates anti-Semitic guest speakers on campus. In other words, Princeton seems to have all the right councils and advisory boards in place, plus they seem not to tolerate but to foster Jewish student life. But when it comes to protecting those Jews from predatory groups whose rhetoric is clearly meant to intimidate Jewish students and to humiliate those who dare speak out as Jews or as pro-Israel advocates, the school seems to fall seriously short of its own theoretical agenda. Yet it also bears noting that things are improving: the school originally got an F, but was upgraded to a D just a few weeks ago.

The other schools I investigated were similar in many ways: all had formal policies in place decrying anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic bullying and all tolerated overt Jewish activity on campus under the aegis of the local Hillel or Chabad House. But again and again they fell down on the actual application of those policies when such decisions might anger the extreme leftist students bent on denouncing Israel and condemning any who disagree as murderers and torturers.  The University of Chicago, for example, earned its F not by not formally condemning anti-Semitism or by not permitting kosher dining or on-campus religious services, but by tolerating extreme anti-Israel and anti-Semitic rhetoric on campus—rhetoric that is threatening, intimidating, and insulting to Jewish students—and not feeling obligated to deal with the matter forcefully or conclusively. To make believe that Jewish students can walk past signs condemning IDF soldiers as terrorists or see “bring home the hostage” posters vandalized but left in place by the university without feeling—to say the very least—unwelcome is just the kind of fantastical thinking that seems to be the norm in the nation’s colleges. When the president of Harvard couldn’t quite bring herself to say that calling for the annihilation of the Jewish people (i.e., the murder of every single Jewish person alive, which was Hitler’s goal as well) was not quite severe enough to warrant intervention by the Harvard administration, that weakness of moral character cost her her job. That certainly worked for me. But applying that standard to tuition-paying undergraduates seems to be the problem here: we will not see real progress until the nation’s schools can bring themselves to understand that bullying and threatening the safety of Jewish students who are not willing to condemn Israel and, in effect, join their own enemies in calling for the destruction of the Jewish state, should result, if not in the offending student being arrested, then at least with that student’s expulsion from the school. That would certainly happen if violent rhetoric were to be levelled against Black students or Latino ones, or against gay students or against Asians. But somehow violent anti-Jewish rhetoric gets a pass in the groves of academe that no other kind of prejudicial language ever would.

I strongly recommend my readers to visit the ADL site and spend time with the Anti-Semitism Report Card. (The link is above in the first paragraph.) You won’t enjoy your time there, that I can promise you. But it will remind you, as it did me, that all is not lost, that we have allies and friends, that there remains the possibility of the nation’s schools taking strong, meaningful action on behalf of Jewish students. We’re nowhere near there now, regretfully. But we could get there—I truly do believe that. And perusing the ADL’s Report Card, in addition to horrifying me, also made me feel (even I can’t explain this) slightly hopeful. What has been ruined by inattention, moral laziness, and political ineptitude, is surely fixable if the will is there to do right and to do good. Why wouldn’t it be?

  

An In or Out Moment Is Upon Us

There’s a line in the Haggadah that seems to me especially meaningful this year. And, although my letters to you all have been getting darker and darker as the year has progressed since last October, the line in question—when read in the correct light and with the correct background information—that line contains a message of hope that I think may be just the thing for all of us as we live through our annual festival of freedom and feel, it seems with each passing week, less certain where this will all lead.

The line opens the long Magid section in which seder-meal participants fulfill the mitzvah of telling the story of the Exodus from Egypt. The setting really could not be better known. The leader uncovers the matzot, lifts the plate, and recites words we’ve all heard a thousand times. “This is the bread of affliction. Let all who are hungry come and eat…and let us gather together next year in Jerusalem.” Most seder-regulars can easily recite the words from memory. At some tables, they are sung aloud, which only makes it easier to remember them from year to year. But hiding behind the words is a riddle that will feel particularly relevant to this nightmarish year through which we have all been living since last October.

The invitation to the hungry to come and join in the feast is suggestive of the natural sense of hospitality that Jewish people bring easily to the celebration of Jewish holidays. But there is a problem here, and it has to do with the second part of that invitation, the part represented above by the three dots that separate the invitation to the hungry and the prayer that we all have seder together next year in Jerusalem. The familiar words, kol di-tz’rikh yeitei v’yifsach, are often mistranslated as “Let all who are in need come and celebrate Passover with us.” That makes it sound like a mere restatement of the opening remark: “let those who are hungry come and eat / let those who have no seder to attend feel welcome at ours.”

So that’s a nice sentiment. But that’s not precisely what the words mean. The Torah enjoins upon the Israelites the eternal obligation to celebrate Passover by offering up the sacrifice called the paschal offering or, more commonly in Hebrew as the korban pesach or the zevach pesach and then by consuming its meat on Erev Pesach, on the Eve of Passover. That being the case, a more literal translation would be something like “Let all enter who need to share our korban pesach, our paschal offering.”

And that too, of course, is a noble thought. The Torah says unequivocally at Exodus 12:8 that “you shall eat the meat [of this sacrifice] on that night; broiled in fire and with matzah and bitter herbs shall you eat it.” So what could be more natural than helping others perform the very mitzvah your own family has already gathered to undertake?

But there’s a detail that needs to be considered: the Torah specifically requires that the Israelites consume the sacrifice in chavurot, which is to say: in pre-formed groups constituted of the specific sponsors of the specific offering they will then consume together. And, indeed, this is the law. Maimonides, for example, writes unequivocally that “the paschal offering may only be slaughtered as a specific offering for its specific sponsors,” who become the people thus entitled to consume it (Hilkhot Korban Pesah 2:1). So how can the seder leader blithely invite any in need to eat the korban with his or her own family? Such people specifically cannot accept the invitation without breaking the law.

So that’s the riddle. What the “real” answer is, who knows? But what the riddle means to me, and particularly in this year of pogrom and war and surging anti-Semitism, is that sometimes you need to step around your normal practice for the sake of a greater good. Yes, the invitee—the specific person the seder leader is addressing when inviting the hungry to come eat and the needy to share in his or her family’s paschal sacrifice—that person being invited in should have signed up for his own sacrifice, should have sponsored a korban pesach in the specific way required by law. But that’s not what happened! And who can say why not? Was the invitee too poor, too shy, or too unfamiliar with the law properly to have dealt with its requirements? Was the invitee held back by physical disabilities, or by mental or emotional ones? Was the specific person being invited in a traveler, a stranger, or perhaps an alienated local who up until that very moment was certain that the very last thing he or she wanted was to do the whole Pesach thing with someone else’s family? Whatever! This person has somehow appeared at the door. The time limit for slaughtering the pesach is long past. The kohanim, the Temple priests, are all off to attend to their own seder meals with their own families. The Temple itself is shut down for the night, its nighttime security detail in place but otherwise empty. The moment has clearly passed to do this the right way. And yet, as the burden shifts from obligation to generosity, from harshness to kindness, from halakhah to aggadah, the host, accepting the situation not as it ought to be or could be but as it actually is, turns to the person standing at the door and, preferencing the real over the ideal, invites that person in to join the family inside and to participate in celebrating Passover by consuming the flesh of the sacrificial offering with which the festival shares its name. The folk genius of the Jewish people allows for things like this, for people knowingly to step occasionally around the rules for the sake of a greater good.

And that is where we are today in the wake of the Simchat Torah pogrom. What is needed, more than anything really, is for the Jewish people to set aside the political or even religious debates that divide us and to face the future united as one people possessed of one Torah and devoted to the service of the one God. As everybody knows all too well, we are a fractious people. Arguing is what we do best. (The old joke about “two Jews, three opinions” is funny and not funny at the same time.) But the bottom line is that what we need to do now is to come together. We don’t all have to agree about everything. We certainly don’t all have to like Bibi or his politics, and neither do we all have to agree whether the IDF has done all it could to free the hostages held captive in Gaza. We certainly don’t have to agree with anything our own President or Vice President have said about Israel over the last half year, both speaking so regularly out of both sides of their own mouths that we barely even notice the disconnect between today’s comment and yesterday’s and the day before’s. But what the Haggadah is saying is that we have to open the door and invite all in who are somehow still on the outside wondering if they even would be welcome at a seder without having first signed up to sponsor a korban pesach in the Temple.

What that line in the Haggadah about the korban pesach and the unsigned-up stranger at the door is there to teach us is that the pursuit of the greater good will always be the wiser choice. That thought should be our watchword as we negotiate these stormy seas on which we are all afloat this year: the key is to draw into our ranks all who would seated at our table and then, united and with one voice, to face the world and demand justice—justice for the captives in Gaza, justice for the people whose own lives were ruined on October 7 or whose loved ones were murdered, justice for Israel in the international halls of justice that so frequently, almost routinely, treat Israel unfairly and unreasonably harshly. If we can’t speak as one now, then when exactly will we? And if not now, then when?

If we can manage that, we’ll have done a lot. Yes, there will be those who cannot bring themselves to stand with Israel or with the Jewish people. I regret that, but I also accept it—but I am thinking about swelling our ranks, not thinning them. And so, even with the seder meals behind us now, I invite you all to join me in opening up the doors—of our homes, of our synagogues, of our communities—to all those Jewish people (and they are legion) on the outside and inviting them in to stand with Israel and to stand with all of us who stand with Israel. And allies in the non-Jewish world whose hearts beat with Israel are welcome in my house too. There are moments in history when you have to stand up or back off, to be in or out, to declare yourself a part or apart. This, I think (and, yes, fear) is one of those moments.