This ain’t your grandfather’s Judaism any longer.
An argument that I have seen from time to time goes something like this: “If the Jews in Germany had been armed, then they could have stopped the Nazis.” There are two problems with the reasoning. The first is gun ownership: I have no idea if it was common to have a personal weapon after World War 1. The second problem is bigger: we now know what they didn’t know then. My father told us that on Saturday afternoons his family and others would sit around and guess in how many weeks or maybe months Hitler and his government would collapse. Everybody knew his rhetoric from Mein Kampf and his interminable speeches. But it was all bluster and would be gone soon. Many of the Jews who did not get out of Germany could not; others could have but felt that the risk was low as who had ever heard of mass murder at an industrial scale? Unfortunately, six million Jews were murdered when Hitler’s words jumped off the page and into the Zyklon B gas canisters and Einsatzgruppen machine guns.
If one were to do an association game and blurted out, “Jew”, a person might answer: accountant, Nobel laureate, professor, businessman or the like. Some things that one probably would not say would include professional athlete, ham sandwich, and Santa Claus. One more thing probably not quickly associated with Jews in America would be guns. Sure, many Jews have served in the armed forces, but one does not expect to see a rabbi packing heat. That was then. A Harvard classmate of mine, Sal Litvak, has just put in theaters his new movie, Guns & Moses. There is plenty of action, suspense, plot twists, and humor. There also is a rabbi who concludes that not being a “gun guy” does not cut it anymore. I don’t want to give away the plot, but Sal has done an amazing job showing the dilemma of religious American Jews in a country where their safety is no longer a given. A third classmate actually gave classes to Los Angeles Jews on proper gun handling. This is something that 10 years ago would have been considered irrelevant. Not anymore. Our synagogue in Las Vegas had security cameras as well as a guy in tactical gear outside the front door every Saturday morning. It was an expense for the community but there was no way to ignore that there are people there who have attacked Jews and Jewish centers. Sal said that the movie was inspired by the 2019 shooting at Poway, California Chabad synagogue in which one woman was killed and three others were injured, including the rabbi.
It is not only American Jews who are reevaluating their personal safety in a changed environment. Israelis love to travel. When we were in the Austrian Alps, I felt that I heard more Hebrew than in Jerusalem. One time, we were taking a shuttle bus in Mammoth Lakes, California. Everyone on the bus was either Israeli or Jewish. So it comes as a worrying development to learn that one of the top Google search entries from Israel is, “What European countries have the least antisemitism?” Europe is a few hours flying and the flights are much cheaper than those to the States—the actual destination that most Israelis would want to visit. I threw in some dates in August for our own potential travel, and I found myself on the floor when one of the popular travel search engines returned direct El-Al flights between Tel Aviv and Newark for over $11,000 per ticket. It was an economy seat, and it was not April Fool’s Day. I’ve seen some pretty high ticket prices, especially since the war started and many carriers have stopped and started their service. But $11k per person was beyond anything I had ever seen before. People I know who have traveled since the war with Iran paid over $4,000 per ticket from New York to Tel Aviv.
How bad is the antisemitism? Obviously for those bothered at a restaurant, spat on in the street, or denied access to a venue because they are Israeli or Jewish, it is a major problem. One of the challenges inherent with the news is that it obviously focuses on unusual or extreme events. While on a given day, over 99 percent of New Yorkers are not pushed onto a train track, the one guy who was will get 10 minutes of coverage on the nightly news. Anyone planning to go to New York now concludes that 1 in 10 straphangers gets pushed onto the track and dies either from the third rail, the hard fall, or a train cutting off his arms and legs. The reality for almost all of the 2 million New Yorkers who use the subway every day is that the train is safe. But for those coming to visit, they rely on news and word of mouth. And they often get frightened by what they see and hear.
A professor I had at Harvard said that Yasser Arafat’s greatest accomplishment was to flip the script. Israel was always the David to the Goliath of the large Arab states. The 1967 Six Day War reinforced this idea of the little guy beating the big bully. Then Arafat portrayed Israel as a colonialist power that had stolen the poor Palestinians’ land. The press in the West was only too happy to gobble up stories that made the Jews look bad. Eventually, Israel became the official bad guy bully while the Palestinians became the poor unfortunate victims. The Gaza War has only pushed that narrative onto steroids. People conveniently turn on their memories on October 8, 2023. By forgetting or ignoring the rapes, torture, mass murders, and kidnappings, they have developed a picture of the mean Israelis coming in and killing Gazans en masse for no justifiable reason. It would be like there being no Pearl Harbor and the US Navy suddenly attacking the Imperial Japanese fleet for no apparent reason.
Thus, when Israelis are heard speaking Hebrew in Spain or Greece, the righteous Jew-haters attack or threaten the tourists because they are genocidal! Easily ignoring the violence of October 7, 2023, the food, water, and electricity provided and the attempts by the IDF to move civilians away from active warfighting allow Europeans the right to attack Israelis abroad. There is no place to reason or explain that Hamas started the war. Anyone given an opportunity to justify his or her Jew hatred can now give it to those Israelis for being such evil people. Thus, Israelis are consulting Rabbi Google to determine where the least dangerous place is to take the family for some R&R.
Where are we going this summer? I don’t know. If the ticket prices to the U.S. do not go down, I might ask to get off of the plane over the Atlantic.
Editor's Note: Help us continue to report the truth about the rise of antisemitism in the U.S. and abroad.
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