Do you consider yourself cosmopolitan, sophisticated, properly skeptical of simplistic doctrines? Do you believe yourself to be philosophically curious and therefore uncomfortable with absolutes because you believe there are many different ways of coming to understand truth—including that there might be no such thing as truth but rather there might be your truth and my truth and his truth and their truth? Well, then, you might be a politically and socially liberal Jew in the United States in 2024.
This has been a horribly difficult year for you intellectually because your utter assurance that your worldview combines warmth, wisdom, capaciousness, and a humanistic grasp of life’s complexities has run headlong into a reality it cannot easily argue away. The slaughter of October 7 was not only brutal in a manner you really haven’t encountered in your lifetime, but it involved your own people—maybe some people related to people you went to summer camp with, or cousins of friends of yours who live in Israel.
And while you have an explanation at the ready for why the troubles in the Middle East are the troubles in the Middle East, you were utterly unprepared for what happened here at home in the wake of the attacks. The instantaneous rise in anti-Semitic activity just days and weeks after October 7 could not really be dismissed as a by-product of Bibi Netanyahu’s judicial-reform proposals, for how does tearing down a poster featuring a photograph of a baby being held hostage speak to that? Why couldn’t the president of the Ivy you attended call out anti-Semitic activity on your beloved alma mater’s campus? And why are you feeling nervous in a way you’ve never felt nervous before? Maybe your sense of the world is askew. Maybe it has always been.
And that’s why, in the year since October 7, you have taken odd solace at odd moments, as when Israel comes under criticism for the supposedly indiscriminate tactics it’s using in Gaza. That wouldn’t seem to be a good thing, but it does allow you to express that wondrous complexity, according to which, yes, of course, Israel must be allowed to defend itself—but within limits, within reason, and certainly not with this brute at its helm. Gazans must eat! Israeli soldiers must be put at greater risk of harm to lower the death toll!
The fact that under any proper understanding of moral responsibility, Hamas is to blame for every bullet fired, every meal missed, and every death recorded since October 7 is just too simplistic for the wonderful complexity of your preferred worldview. And so, you take a byway rather than facing the stark reality. You focus your primary attention not on the need to protect Jews in the wake of October 7—which requires tough efforts to restore Israel’s deterrence and the establishment of new rules in the United States to address the unprecedented rise of anti-Semitism—but on a demand to “bring the hostages home.”
Does it matter that neither you nor anyone else has any idea how to achieve this aim? Does it matter that Hamas has rejected 14 separate cease-fire proposals designed with that very purpose? It doesn’t. Because the harsh reality—that Hamas and the Iran axis are evildoers who seek the mass murder of Jews and the elimination of the Jewish state—is just not very complicated at all. It’s something else. It’s an actual truth, not a relative truth, and it compels you to accept that the blessed gift of being an American Jew over the past century has lulled you and people like you into an entirely false sense of safety and security. From your privileged perch, you have spent decades viewing with withering contempt others who take in the span and arc of Jewish history and say, as on Passover, “In every generation, they stand against us to destroy us.”
So simplistic, you thought. So vulgar. And yet, so true.
Photo: Charles Sykes/Invision/AP
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