A Time for Advocacy

What a week it has been. Since last Wednesday (2/7), our community has been abuzz over whether we might join the many other American cities that have adopted polarizing and anti-Israel-biased ceasefire resolutions. After close to 200 members of our community came to Cincinnati City Hall this Wednesday—with nearly 100 of them speaking publicly—we were able to resolve our concerns. The Mayor spoke out, announcing he would not support City Council taking a position on the contentious issue.

Many moments of Wednesday stick out in my mind: The fact that council chambers were fuller than essentially anyone there had ever seen. The sobering words of members of our community, like our own Jeremy Spiegel (“four months ago, I sat in this chair and warned that I worried we were about to experience a surge of antisemitism. Sadly, the last four months have blown even me away.”) The way our community, despite high tensions, stayed respectful and peaceful. The way anti-Israel activists booed many of our community members, including one saying aloud, after a rabbi spoke, “go f*** yourself.” But one line especially hit me, when a speaker said:

“If Gaza was populated by Jewish residents...everyone in this room—irrespective of religion—would be calling and screaming for a ceasefire.”

Local Holocaust-survivor, Zahava Rendler, was sitting right there.

It is unfortunate, but—as Dara Horn notes in her new Atlantic article—none of this is new, and it is tied up in hatred of Jews—even if the speakers themselves aren't conscious of it. As Eric Ward (whom we recently had visit Cincinnati for the Cohen Family Leaders in Light fellowship) puts it, “antisemitism is in the air we breathe and the water we drink.” Or, as Horn writes:

In 2013, David Nirenberg published an astonishing book titled Anti-Judaism. Nirenberg’s argument, rigorously laid out in nearly 500 pages of dense scholarship and more than 100 pages of footnotes, is that Western cultures—including ancient civilizations, Christianity, Islam (which Nirenberg considers Western in its relationship with Judaism), and post-religious societies—have often defined themselves through their opposition to what they consider “Judaism.” This has little to do with actual Judaism, and a lot to do with whatever evil these non-Jewish cultures aspire to overcome.

Nirenberg is a diligent historian who resists generalizations and avoids connecting the past to contemporary events. But when one reads through his carefully assembled record of 23 centuries’ worth of intellectual leaders articulating their societies’ ideals by loudly rejecting whatever they consider “Jewish,” this deep neural groove in Western thought becomes difficult to dismiss, its patterns unmistakable. If piety was a given society’s ideal, Jews were impious blasphemers; if secularism was the ideal, Jews were backward pietists. If capitalism was evil, Jews were capitalists; if communism was evil, Jews were communists. If nationalism was glorified, Jews were rootless cosmopolitans; if nationalism was vilified, Jews were chauvinistic nationalists. “Anti-Judaism” thus becomes a righteous fight to promote justice.

I have no perfect nechemta (consolation) for this upsetting status quo; it simply is. But I would leave you with this final thought: In a world that often won’t protect Jews—whether from physical violence or hateful rhetoric—we have learned that Jews can protect themselves. And that’s precisely what we did on Wednesday.