We are the Jews, we’ve seen this movie before, and it never ends well. There must be something enjoyable in a sick way about making anti-Jewish statements, blaming the Jews for controlling the banking or entertainment industries, or condemning Israel as the world’s most repressive regime.
What people like Kanye West, Kyrie Irving and Dave Chapelle fail to realize is that “the Jews” are not some abstract villain. We are human beings just like everyone else who want what everyone else in the world wants:to be left alone to raise our families, make a living and serve God as we choose.
We are your neighbors, your school teachers, your doctors and accountants, your plumbers, your shop clerks. We are the people you see at the mall, the gym, and the supermarket. We are not “the Jews.” We are just Jews. Just human beings. Just like you.
But somehow it’s okay, out of all the ethnic or religious groups in American society, to make us the evil ones, the ones allegedly pulling the strings behind the scenes, the ones controlling and oppressing everyone else.
It’s just not true.
We’ve seen this movie so many times, the one where an individual attains notoriety and power by making false claims about the Jews. The individuals named above and the progressive movement as a whole stand at the end of long, shameful line of craven, heartless individuals and groups, from the Hellenists to the Romans, from the Crusaders to the Inquisition, from the blood libelists of the Middle Ages to the Nazis, from the perpetrators of Arab terror to those who defend such terror by making Israel a pariah state.
Don’t they realize that as a community, we Jews are still unpacking the trauma of the Holocaust? And that by denying its existence, they pour salt in an already festering wound? Do the Kanye Wests and the Louis Farrakhans really believe what they say, or do they cynically derive status, power, and, yes, even pleasure by “othering” the Jews?
Like many Jews, I have photo albums that came with my family out of Europe in the early 1940s. The children, the aged, and everyone in between were killed by the Nazis. We don’t even know the names of many of the people in those albums. We just know that they were shot, gassed, raped, murdered. And yet today, the Holocaust is fictional in the eyes of people like West and Farrakhan.
Not to us.
Today’s progressive movement does not permit its positions to be accepted cafeteria style. You’re either on board with everything they claim or you’re an outsider, subject to shunning, cancel culture, and worse, whether you are a college student, professor, newscaster, or politician. As a result, otherwise intelligent people buy into the trope that Israel must be destroyed and that a Palestinian state must be established where Israel now stands, as they like to say, “from the river to the sea.”
Jewish college students can’t speak up for Israel in or out of class without incurring the McCarthyite wrath of the left. Jewish schools, temples, and synagogues have to spend increasingly large percentages of their budget protecting their institutions from the easily led to whom the appeals of West and others like him have resonance.
We shouldn’t have to live in fear any more than anyone else. And yet we do, simply because people like West and Farrakhan traffic in these obscene lies.
Like many Jews, I carry a licensed firearm to synagogue and serve on our security team. I’m not a gun guy by nature but I felt I had to act. I received my concealed carry permit by writing to my local chief of police, “My application consists of two words—Poway and Pittsburgh— two Jewish communities where terrorists had killed innocents.”
Calling those people “terrorists,” while technically accurate, overstates their resumes. They were just folks conditioned to hate because they read the vile things that the Wests and Farrakhans of the world said about the Jews and viewed those statements as accurate and as calls to action.
It must have come as some surprise to Irving, whom no one in the Jewish community believes is actually anti-Jewish, when he stirred up such a hornet’s nest with his posts that praised an anti-Jewish film. I’m glad he got educated and I hope others did, too, as a result of that brouhaha.
We’ve seen Kyrie’s movie before, too, and it never ends well.
Here’s to hoping that the haters have a change of heart before they motivate the next person to etch his name into a long, sad history of those who have shed innocent Jewish blood.
We are not “the Jews.” We are just…Jews. We want what everyone else wants—the ability to go about our business, raise our children, make a living, and worship God. That’s what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis defined as “the right to be left alone.”
And that’s what the Jewish people want in 2023.
By Michael Levin
