When I was seventeen years young, I was working a game at Kennywood Amusement Park in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was one of those games where you tossed pennies or dimes and tried to get the coin to cover any of the multiple bullseyes on a wood platform. A boy, who couldn’t have been older than twelve cracked a few Jewish jokes, none of which were original considering small coins were being tossed, but sensing the crowd’s indifference, he said rather directly, “I hope no one here is Jewish.
I responded with, “I am Jewish.”
To which he looked at me as if we were discussing the Pirates and said, “Oh, well no offense. I just hate Jews.”
There’s a classic antisemitic question asked of Jews in America: ‘Are you an American Jew or are you a Jewish American?’ It is not so much a question as it is a test to cast aspersions on your loyalty. Do you choose America first or do you choose being a Jew first (and choose Israel) and betray your country. This question found its way to me once when I was attending a Catholic High School (that’s a different story for another time). A fellow student posed the question that if America and Israel got into a war, which army would I join? There is no right answer of course. If you respond with America, they cough up the reply, America? What kind of a Jew are you to turn your back on your own kind? And if you choose Israel, we already know what response that musters.
But there is often confusion among the gentile population as to why Jews still care so much about Israel when they are so safe in America? Especially if they have never taken the time to visit. The answer is quite simple.
In 1939 a boat named the MS St. Louis carrying over 900 Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany attempted to seek refuge in the United States. They were denied and sent back to Europe where the majority experienced their systematic death at the hands of the Third Reich. Americans will shake their heads and claim that we didn’t know what was happening fully or it was a mistake nobody could have understood the implications of back then.
Except that when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a chance to bomb the rail lines that provided transport to the concentration camps, he chose to save munitions despite the fact the American Industrial Complex was full steam ahead in manufacturing our war effort in Europe. Some Americans will say well which would you rather have, Berlin bombed or the rail lines, as if it had to be one or the other? As if Berlin’s downfall wasn’t at that point a future certainty.
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| The MS St. Louis in New York Harbor |
I’ve heard reassurances all the time from non-Jewish friends that these kinds of things could never happen in America, that we have changed.
I say turn your heads and peer toward our southern border crisis and the radical cries of indignance and indifference Americans have offered to those seeking refuge here again. Those refugees too, are going to be sent back to places where they felt so threatened that without any means or transport, they made their way to America on hope alone. I ask you, should there be anybody more empathetic to the cries of these refugees than a Jew?
The difference now is that should I find myself a person that America no longer wants, and America has had a funny way of choosing when it does or doesn’t want people, there is a place I am lucky enough to be accepted because I was born. If I wanted, they would resettle me there right now and be happier for it.
After the events of this past weekend, my heart aches in a way it hasn’t in a long time. For family. For friends. For people I don’t know yet share that common bond of simply being born a Jew and being hated for it. For acquaintances I knew as children who are now in their thirties and likely going to war for the first time. For a country that has truly never known peace in its almost 65 years of existence despite its charter wishing to make peace with anyone offering it. For a country who despite its youth has seen as many wars and conflicts as any other modern country in history against countries and against bands of radical militias calling for one thing and one thing only: the death of more Jews. Two hundred and sixty people, the majority between the ages of 18 to 25, were slaughtered in cold blood at a music festival Saturday. Imagine what happened in Las Vegas happening again but with almost no survivors. There were old women and children kidnapped on video being tortured by people claiming they are fighting for freedom.
Just what kind of freedom are they fighting for?
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| An Israeli mother and her two boys at gunpoint Saturday |
When the Hutus were slaughtering the Tutsi in Rwanda, the outcries were clear that something had to be done to stop the violence. When the genocide took place over in Bosnia against the Bosnian Muslims, there were outcries for it to stop. Even President Bill Clinton, against the advice of his detractors, attempted to bomb Bosnia-Herzegovina as a way of doing something.
Yet we know what the international community in Europe, and particularly in Asia, will say the moment Israel decides to respond with the mighty force such slaughter demands. Whether they want to recognize Israel as a sovereign nation is irrelevant. Israel exists. It is a nation and has been so since 1948, and to deny their people and government a means to put an end to an intransigent government faction on its eastern border, one which has gone far beyond disobeying international laws with non-stop missile barrages and barbarous attacks on civilians living near that border, is to practice the type of hypocrisy one can find only in current despotic and communist regimes.
And why is that?
And why is that?
Is it because Israel is so important to them? Or is it because the idea of Jewish State makes them sick to their stomachs due to the clarification that it is ‘Jewish.' Perhaps that feels elitist to them or they feel left out, jealous, envious, or worse… angered to see the continuation of a people they cannot understand and secretly despise.
Why, Israel, you ask?
I have watched and listened to Americans, many of them my friends, stand up and support a populist in this country who has uttered such rhetoric as killing of the Joints Chief of Staff. I have heard them all say when the election was decided, if he lost, he would step down and allow the transfer of power peacefully. And even despite seeing the video that shows the carnage in our schools, in our churches and sanctuaries and on January 6, 2021, they insist America is safe.
Don’t tell me we are safe. The only place where there is guaranteed safety for a Jew is under assault right now. She is being attacked from the North and from the East, by proxies of a larger country to their North whose cowardly designs on world order is to wreak havoc on those who don’t heed their Ayatollahs.
Why Israel, you ask?
That is why.
And whether you believe it or not, an attack of this sort on Israel is an attack on all free peoples. May Israel find herself shrouded in a canopy of protection, her people returned home to their families, and may peace find a stranglehold on this situation once and for all.
I leave you with Martin NeimÓ§ller’s famous lines written just after the Holocaust:
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me
—and there was no one left to speak for me.
—and there was no one left to speak for me.
