Pittsburgh. Poway. Jersey City. Monsey. These are the locations of brutal, recent anti-Semitic attacks. And that list doesn’t include the myriad anti-Semitic incidents in the past few months in Teaneck, Brooklyn and even my hometown of Elizabeth. As Jews, when we’re under attack, we circle up and watch out for each other. We step up to protect our own. We remember that kol yisrael areivim zeh la zeh, and we act accordingly.
But while we are thinking about Pittsburgh, Poway, Jersey City and Monsey, let’s take a minute to think of another place: Xinjiang. It is a semi-autonomous region of the People’s Republic of China, located in the far northwest of that country. It’s a hard country, mostly covered with uninhabitable deserts and dry grasslands, with dotted oases at the foot of Tian Shan, Kunlun Mountains and Altai Mountains. Xinjiang is home to an ethnic group called the Uighurs, a Turkic minority originating from the region of Central and East Asia, the majority of whom practice Sunni Islam.
On the surface, the deserts of Xinjiang and the Uighurs who live there have nothing in common with Pittsburgh, Poway, Jersey City, Monsey and us as American Jews. But appearances can be deceiving. Both here and there, the “differentness” of a group has sparked a hostile backlash. And while the backlash here has been the work of a handful of violent and often troubled individuals, the backlash there is through the might of the ruling Communist Party of the People’s Republic of China.
Details are hard to come by due to Communist-party censorship and restrictions on the access of journalists to that region. Some details, however, have become available. According to reporting by The New York Times (“Her Uighur Parents Were Model Chinese Citizens. It Didn’t Matter,” by Sarah Topol, January 29, 2020), we know that since 2016 China has spent millions of dollars constructing facilities for “transformation through education”—in reality, a system of internment camps with guard-tower turrets and barbed-wire fences—into which Uighurs in China are being forced against their will for compulsory “re-education.” A recent academic study based on analysis of Chinese government procurement and construction notices estimated that approximately 1 million people were in these “political education” camps—about 10% of Xinjiang’s Uighur population.
As noted, stories from detainees in these camps are few and far between, but include “1984”-esque tales of people—innocent of anything aside from being Uighur and Muslim—being forced to learn Mandarin in classrooms where a metal gate separates the students on one side from the teacher and two guards on the other. Other former inmates have told of being compelled to renounce religion and give self-criticism in “struggle sessions”; of being confined to their dorm rooms when not in class; and of being beaten, caged and shackled. And these camps are in addition to the restrictions against Uighurs that the Chinese government has instituted since 2014, which include requiring Uighurs who travel outside their hometowns to carry a special card listing phone numbers of their landlords and local police stations and banning baby names considered to be too Islamic, among other restrictions. Not to mention the omnipresence of police stations and cameras—with advanced facial recognition technology—that allow the Communist Party to monitor every movement of the Uighurs who live in Xinjiang.
Nowadays comparisons of modern-day oppressions to the concentration camps of the Holocaust come far too quickly, and I certainly won’t raise that analogy now. What I will suggest, however, is that as Jews, our experience of oppression—both in Nazi Germany and throughout our existence as a people—both “qualifies” us and gives us a moral imperative to speak out against oppression—particularly oppression grounded in ethnic and religious hostility such as what is currently happening in Western China.
The Torah makes this concept—that our own suffering requires us to be a voice on behalf of the oppressed—explicit: “You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the soul of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt” (Ex. 23:9). We as Jews know what it is to be different. We know how it feels to be oppressed and attacked for our beliefs and traditions. We know what it means to hold on to our religion and way of life in the face of unrelenting pressure—often violent—to conform.
And yet, concern for the religious oppression of non-Jews does not necessarily come to us naturally. As Orthodox Jews, as the pages of this newspaper attest, we are typically focused on issues that affect the Jewish people: anti-Semitism, Israel, Jewish learning and education etc. And that tendency to focus on Jewish causes tends to be amplified during times such as these when we feel under attack as a people. And while Jews focusing on Jewish causes is certainly understandable and even desirable, we need to honestly ask ourselves whether our sphere of concern should stop at the borders of the Jewish community.
I would argue that, while being Jewish does mean taking care of our fellow Jew, it also means more. It means embracing a vision for the well-being of the entire world and all those living in it and striving to make that vision a reality. This idea appears in numerous places in Jewish tradition, including the words of the prophet Isaiah: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, nor shall they learn war any more,” and the Gemara, which rules that we must support the poor of the non-Jews, visit their sick and bury their dead (Gittin 61a). And it is fundamental to the Torah’s account of the creation of humanity, which underscores that we are brothers and sisters and all created in the image of God.
I don’t mean to suggest that these universalist concerns are absent from the frum community—they aren’t. For example, recently the organization Jew in the City pitched a tent in Harlem that included a sign listing “Foundational Principles of Judaism” such as “All people are created in the image of God and share a common ancestry” and “The world is built on kindness” (“Jew in the City Pop-Up Raises Awareness,” Jewish Link, January 30, 2020). And the state of Israel has been a leader in global crisis intervention, with aid teams poised to respond in the wake of natural or man-made disasters anywhere in the world.
But is this enough? Should concern for the rest of humanity be core to our mission as frum Jews, or should it be relegated to our moral periphery? Is it fair to expect us to care about a people whose name we cannot pronounce and who live literally on the other side of the globe?
My view is that, not only should we care, but rather the Torah requires us to care. And while caring may be difficult—many of the obligations in the Torah are—the Torah was given to human beings, not to angels, and only asks of us that which we can successfully do. So before moving on with your Shabbos reading, take a moment to think about a people with a hard-to-pronounce name, in a far away place, who nonetheless the Torah demands that we consider in our thoughts and our prayers.
Steven Starr lives with his wife, Keshet, and his children, Ellie, Moshe and Meira, in Hillside, New Jersey.
