The purpose of Judaism is not to fight antisemitism. We fight antisemitism so we can focus on our purpose – to spread G-d’s message of truth and love, to sanctify G-d’s name, to enlighten and uplift the world.
—Rabbi Ari Berman, President and Dean of Yeshiva University, New York, November 28, 2023
It was sudden, severe and tenacious: Jew-hatred has erupted and swept throughout the Western world since October 7, 2023, and in many ways it is personal, not something that can be sluffed away like water off a duck’s back, although I still see such a reaction attempted among a few Orthodox friends. “I don’t give a s–t about anti-Semitism,” confided one man during a synagogue meal, even as another was giving a lecture on the recent surge in the phenomenon – and emphasizing how this time there won’t be any submissive shuffle-walks into gas chambers. Attempts at denial like my friend’s are becoming increasingly threadbare, however. Shock, pain, fear, images of the Holocaust. Jews throughout the West are feeling and thinking about all of this, many for the first time in their lives.
It is hard to grasp the intensity of Jew-hatred that has sprung up since the Hamas terrorist attack against Israel last fall. The immediate reaction was sympathy and support from around the world for Israel and Jews. That should be no surprise, since some 1,400 innocent Israelis of all ages – including babies sleeping in their cribs and young people partying at a rave – were murdered, mutilated, beheaded or kidnapped after being raped, burned, beaten, stabbed, shot, stomped on and/or publicly paraded and humiliated.
The world’s compassion proved ephemeral, quickly devolving into sniping at Israel’s government, then rallies and protests billed as “pro-Palestinian” but featuring ever-more-vocal “anti-Zionism”, and soon an unmasked anti-Semitism that included praise of the Hamas atrocities and chants signifying an agenda to expunge Israel as a Jewish state and subjugate or eject its Jewish population. Even “anti-Semitism” has become too dainty an expression – a euphemism for something even darker.
So let’s call it what it is: Jew-hatred. It is a sickness that infects, as we are re-learning, so much of humanity. For those of us who lived into our 60s and 70s never having personally encountered a single act or comment against Jews, this dramatic rise has figuratively kicked us in the teeth. Since October 7, entire world views have been transformed for multitudes of Jews, who had enjoyed, in North America anyway, decades of benign, peaceful, uncomplicated and effortlessly safe existence. It is like day and night, like somebody threw a switch.
Jew-hatred is all the rage today – pardon the strained pun – though sometimes it is subtle. One influential example is the “pro-Palestinian” slant of the large majority of news bulletins and mainstream media accounts – as if Israel had no reason to be entering Gaza to root out Hamas. The media, in some cases unknowingly, are repeating and thereby endorsing libels that, though proven lies, are extremely difficult to refute and bury.
As Michael Posner recently described in C2C, the torrent of pro-Palestinian (or pro-Hamas) propaganda can have widespread consequences. Unfounded defamations – like U.S. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s recent statement that Jewish students should feel safe on campuses “whether they’re pro-genocide or anti-genocide”, or keffiyeh-clad Ontario NDP MPP Sarah Jama blaming Israel’s “settler colonialism” for the October 7 Hamas atrocity just three days later, while Israeli bodies were still smoldering – normalize the dishonesty. The deceit gives weight and rationale and legitimacy to the pro-Hamas marches, the intimidation of Jewish students, the outbreaks of violence, even to a morally adrift International Court of Justice considering a charge of genocide against Israel.
What effect are these events having on regular, peaceful, innocent Jews? At best they are causing concern, and in some cases outright terror. As The Atlantic highlighted last month in a feature entitled “The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending,” Jewish teens in public high schools have grown terrified of some of their non-Jewish classmates. Jewish students at campuses across the continent – most notoriously at Columbia University – are hiding evidence of their Jewishness, staying at home/in residence, or trying to remain unnoticed as they slip in and out of class. Many Jews are stepping up their personal security. Though my husband and I decided to leave our mezuzahs on our outside doorposts, I am double-locking all the doors. Our American son-in-law just got a gun permit, and he is shopping.
Something else significant: Jews are coming to understand – or be reminded from lectures and discussions with rabbis and other Jewish intellectuals – that the current, shocking anti-Jewish attitudes are actually quite standard. This is true especially among the elites who inhabit universities, most of the media, bureaucracies, NGOs and even posh businesses. Throughout history, Jew-hatred has been normal, not just among the tribal peasantry but among the well-mannered.
‘Whose fault was the Black Death?’ was a 2009 New York Times article’s opening line. ‘In medieval Europe, Jews were blamed so often, and so viciously, that it is surprising it was not called the Jewish Death.’
“The last 80 years, and even longer in Canada and the United States and some other countries, have been the abnormal years for Jews,” explains Rabbi Chaim Mendelsohn, who heads up one of the six Chabad communities in Ottawa. “Throughout most of history and in most regions of the world, Jews have been the pariahs, the outsiders, or just plain weird.” We’ve been blamed for everything from the murder of Christ to the Great Plague of London, from international financial crises to – yes, in some circles – even the Second World War. Jews cannot escape being the scapegoat for any and all evil.
“Whose fault was the Black Death?” was a 2009 New York Times article’s opening line. “In medieval Europe, Jews were blamed so often, and so viciously, that it is surprising it was not called the Jewish Death. During the pandemic’s peak in Europe, from 1348 to 1351, more than 200 Jewish communities were wiped out, their inhabitants accused of spreading contagion or poisoning wells.” And of course Jew-hatred goes back centuries and millennia farther – to the Romans, Hellenistic Greeks, Babylonians, Egyptians and other tormentors lost to history. It’s not for nothing that author, poet and C2C contributor David Solway has described the Jews as humanity’s “eternally persecuted” minority. Solway, interestingly (though I do not agree), sees this as the Jews’ defining characteristic.
By that standard, the peace felt by the latest generations of Jews is a historical anomaly, a golden age without precedent. It can best be explained as largely a reaction to the Holocaust, coinciding – paradoxically – with the peak of the Western world’s cultural pluralism and tolerance of minorities. When news of the Shoa – the Hebrew word for calamity and used for the Holocaust – spilled out right after the Second World War, guilt seeped into the conscience of every right-thinking person. How could such clinical brutality be perpetrated by one of the most technically advanced and culturally sophisticated countries on Earth? The society that had been among the most Jew-friendly countries in Europe?
Millions killed with the state’s official sanction, at the state’s behest, just for being Jews; it was more than enlightened, civilized society could tolerate. Once the entire truth came out, with photos and first-hand accounts from respected journalists and the Allied officers who liberated the death camps, international sympathy gushed forth. It was a remarkable time. In 1947 the newly formed United Nations – which has since become infamously anti-Israel – voted solidly to give Jews their own state in their Biblical homeland. The Western Allies organized the Nuremburg Trials of major surviving Nazi officials and officers, helping to publicize and bring severe – yet legal and civilized – accountability for the Shoa. Despite lingering anti-Jewish sentiment domestically, Canada and the United States brought in some Jewish refugees from Europe.
But the most profound change really took place throughout everyday society: it became discourteous, boorish even, to insult or condemn Jews. This made a huge and positive difference for all Jews, mainly secular Jews trying to thrive and to fit in, to assimilate. But all Jews were safer than ever, and more accepted. (Incredibly, a Gentile friend who was a teenager in the late 70s says he only learned that anti-Jewish slurs even existed from reading Catch-22, written by a Jew.) Jews felt so safe, and sufficiently respected, to be able to lend their weight to civil rights campaigns for other minorities – most famously with Martin Luther King, Jr. in the U.S. This positive attitude spread and strengthened throughout North America for decades.
It certainly describes my family’s experience. Never once in my 66 years have I knowingly brushed up against an openly anti-Semitic person. Now, I fear many of my own neighbours, wondering where they stand. I misinterpret comments and body language that I never thought about before. I worry about our synagogue being attacked during services, though we hire security. Throngs of vicious Jew-haters gather every weekend just a few kilometres from my home. My daughter and her family live in a religious community north of Toronto where Jew-haters regularly spread their bile. I was sickened at video of a Toronto police office giving coffee to a “pro-Palestinian” protester blockading a highway overpass leading to a mainly Jewish neighbourhood. The University of Ottawa, where I got a degree in the 1990s, has Jew-haters camped out on the lawn. All of this has happened in the last 15 minutes, it seems.
Upon reflection, I realize there was building evidence the kindness was not going to last. But who would want to recognize it? It began gradually, as anti-Jewish remarks made a comeback among the elites, in Europe especially. In December 2001 – just three months after 9/11 – journalist Barbara Amiel reported that France’s ambassador to the UK at a private party had blamed all the world’s troubles on “that shitty little country Israel” – with the hostess chiming in that she couldn’t stand Jews and that whatever happened to them was their own fault. Looking back now, this was prescient. Tellingly, the “issue” became not the appalling remarks and attitudes, but Amiel’s reporting of them. Jew-hatred, seemingly almost natural, for many as prevalent as anger or sadness, was re-establishing itself.
Today, leaders give contrived speeches or issue Tweets condemning Jew-hatred in the same breath as they denounce Islamophobia, almost as if it is a competition, a race to the bottom of the victim barrel. Barely a month after October 7, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was conflating the two – actual Molotov cocktails hurled at actual synagogues seemingly no worse than unspecified (imagined?) “expressions” of anti-Muslim sentiment. Still, it is hard to place blame directly, because it is hard to change widespread opinions and attitudes, especially unreasonable and deeply ingrained ones like anti-Semitism.
By nearly any measure, the Jews as a nation should be adored. We have given the world so many timeless gifts: the concept of One G-d, the Ten Commandments, the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), Jewish mother jokes, potato latkes, and the importance of schmaltz. Moreover, says the Genesis Prize website, “Remarkable Jewish leaders have propelled humankind forward by discovering cures for diseases, developing new technologies, composing musical masterpieces, advancing causes of freedom and human rights, and serving as trailblazers in countless other fields.”
Think of names like Albert Einstein, Saul Bellow, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergei Brin, Marc Chagall, Felix Mendelssohn, Lenny Kravitz, Daniel Day Lewis, Lauren Bacall. With just 0.2 percent of the world’s population, Jews as of 2020 had earned a stunning 23 percent of all Nobel prizes awarded since 1901. Since its founding in 1948, Israel has produced hundreds of useful innovations, from ubiquitous PC computer chips to the most water-conserving irrigation systems to the dual-lens smartphone camera to new types of life-saving bandages.
But instead of being loved to death, we are spat upon. Theories abound about why this is the case (though a deeper theological discussion is definitely out-of-scope here). American columnist David Goldman (aka “Spengler”), a financial expert, amateur musicologist and non-religious Jew, has pondered this question at length, and puts it down to the tension between every other culture’s deep-seated foreknowledge of its ultimate doom, in opposition to the Jews’ singular status as a nation promised immortality by their G-d. “Antisemitism is the grudge against the living borne by the soon-to-be-dead,” is how Goldman summarizes it.
Why should a Jew have to obsess over why they hate us? That’s the mistake liberals often make in relation to crime and criminals. Pondering the ‘why’ implies there might be an excuse where there is none.
On a more rough-and-ready level, right-wing American polemicist Ann Coulter calls it jealousy, the only of the seven deadly sins that people almost never brag about. There are many other theories, with many books written. One possible explanation is that the “People of the Book” are resented for their literacy, their learning, their theological inquisitiveness, for knowing things that people who simply obey don’t know. Still another – my husband’s, in this case – is that anti-Semitism is a spiritual struggle, like that between Biblical brothers Yacov and Esav over who was to get their father’s blessing.
Personally, as I absorbed the facts of our long history of persecution, I learned to avoid struggling with the why of Jew-hatred. Why agonize over something that can never be answered definitively? As an Orthodox Jew, I noticed that none of the Orthodox rabbis and other writers I admire bother much with the “why” question, focusing instead on the astounding fact that we cannot be destroyed.
Anyway, why should a Jew have to obsess over why they hate us? That’s the mistake liberals often make in relation to crime and criminals. Pondering the “why” implies there might be an excuse where there is none. As Jews, our job is not to figure out why they hate us, but how to survive them, defend against them and overcome them. My conclusion, which is not original, is that the reason for anti-Semitism is obvious and straightforward: because we are Jews. Period.
The stark transformation in attitudes toward Jews is prompting another form of reflection. Aware to the point of desperation of the facts of the Shoa, Jews ask, how is today’s situation different from that of pre-Second World War Europe? Some recent articles have alluded to the similarities between 1930s Germany and today’s North America, insinuating that extreme, government-sanctioned danger is afoot.
I’m not sure. I see us as a long way from state-initiated anti-Jewish policies, such as the Nuremburg Race Laws of 1930s Germany. Still, something bad could be coming. For now, seemingly all Canadian and American governments remain supportive and protective of the Jewish minority. Despite ambiguous appearances and statements, and the egregious mistake of the U.S. in releasing funds to Iran, backing Israel is still a bipartisan policy there, one supported by a decisive majority of U.S. citizens. Even some left-leaning politicians have expressed unequivocal support for Israel, like Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman and New York Mayor Eric Adams. Here in Canada, the first politician I heard supporting Israel after the Hamas attack was Ottawa mayor Mark Sutcliffe. I felt proud. Two months later Sutcliffe even attended a Jewish candle-lighting service during Hannukah. Thank-you, Your Worship.
Compare this to the pre-war situation: Jew-hatred was prevalent throughout Eastern Europe, and basically the further east you went, the worse it was. Though blatant state-driven Jew-hatred was not rife, there were webs of discriminatory anti-Semitic laws, regulations and other restrictions, from quotas for university admission to Russia’s pervasive Pale of Settlement. Governments did little to assist Jewish victims of property or physical crimes. In some countries, Jews were encouraged or required to reside in inner-city ghettoes or gather in rural villages we called shtetls in Yiddish. But much of the actual Jew-hatred sprang from the people themselves, like the infamous anti-Jewish riots called pogroms in the late Russian Empire.
In my own family, my grandmother’s niece and her husband fled Poland in the 1920s to get away from the brutal treatment of Jews by neighbours and fellow citizens. Aiming to immigrate into the U.S., the Skrandes were denied entry and forced to disembark in Cuba. There they found “heaven on earth,” as their daughter Rosita, who was born in Cuba along with her brother Gutman, later put it during interviews for my 2011 book, Bloodline: A Family History. “There was no anti-Semitism in Cuba, and we had a wonderful life.” The Skrandes eventually had to flee Cuba for the U.S. after the Communist revolution in 1961. (Rosita, as I recount in Bloodline, blames the Trudeau family for Communist Cuba’s longevity, but that is another subject for another article.)
Perhaps North America’s Jews, then, may be headed towards a situation akin to pre-war Europe outside Germany. No concentration camps, but possibly pogroms. The recent attacks on Jewish schools, businesses and synagogues are disturbing, modern-day mini-pogroms not dissimilar to what my great-grandfather fled when he left for the New World in 1905. Yecheil Kekon (who later changed his surname to Cohen) waited till his wife died, of what we know not, and followed three of his children who had arrived in Nova Scotia in 1895, dragging along the last three, including my then 19-year-old grandfather.
It is almost unbelievable to think how well the Jews were treated here in Canada. Of course, in those days, being ‘well-treated’ didn’t mean being mentioned in every-second speech by senior politicians, receiving copious public grants, or being officially apologized and grovelled to. It simply meant being left alone to make a living and raise a family.
They landed in Halifax, made their way to Cape Breton, and helped settle the small but bustling Jewish community of Glace Bay. Just to give a tidy ending to this sidebar, my grandfather married 19-year-old Sophie, who had arrived from Poland in 1901 to work as an au pair in New York City. They were fixed up, sight unseen, and married in 1905. They had seven children whom they raised in the tiny village of Reserve Mines, three miles outside Glace Bay. “There was some, but very little, anti-Semitism in Nova Scotia,” my dad, the youngest of the seven, told me many years later, when there was even less.
So even my dad’s generation, born in the 1920s, lived without pervasive Jew-hatred invading their space. It is almost unbelievable to think how well the Jews were treated here in Canada. Of course, in those days, being “well-treated” didn’t mean being mentioned in every-second speech by senior politicians, receiving copious public grants and subsidies, having lavish cultural centres built for you – sometimes a separate one for each different faction in your ethnic group – or being officially apologized and grovelled to. It simply meant being left alone to make a living and raise a family.
For Jews, Canada was a place where their farming heritage, entrepreneurial spirit and academic/professional prowess could thrive. A few black marks on our country must be mentioned: there were university quotas, no-Jews-allowed golf clubs and, notoriously, the federal government’s rejection of the desperate pleas of the SS St. Louis ocean liner to land here in 1939. Cuba (the ship’s original destination) and the nearby U.S. had rejected the ship (wrenchingly portrayed in the 1976 movie Voyage of the Damned), as then did numerous other countries. It was ultimately forced back to Europe where about one-quarter of its passengers would be murdered in the Shoa.
Not without blame: The tragic fate of the more than 900 Jewish refugees aboard the SS St. Louis ocean liner, refused safe harbour by the Cuban, U.S. and Canadian governments and sent back to Europe, is wrenchingly depicted in the 1976 movie Voyage of the Damned.Another point of comparison with pre-war Europe: we should be deeply thankful for our still-mostly-free press. Through censorship, manipulation, bullying or direct control, and plain murder, Hitler’s Nazi regime transformed all communications media into pure organs of state propaganda. Do we, analogously, now yearn to simply shut up Jew-haters? Yes, of course; but the instruments to do so – and the results – would be more dangerous than the vocal hatred itself. You might even say it is good to know what Jew-haters are thinking.
While I’ll pick freedom of expression over censorship every time, I do worry about the media’s evident biases. Their portrayal of the Israel Defense Forces’ conduct in Gaza – and their credulity towards “information” stemming from Hamas – is roughly analogous to Texas suffering an incursion by Mexican cartel criminals who quickly murder 50,000 innocent Texans, prompting the American media to become obsessed solely with Mexican casualties when the disciplined, ethical U.S. military responds.
During the past 40 years, according to the Fondation pour L’innovation Politique, ‘more or less, all the regions of the world have been hit’ by Muslim terrorism. The total body count is grim: some 167,096 deaths, representing, as the report puts it, ‘A multifold of tragedies.’
No civilized person desires innocent casualties. But responding to the current situation by demanding a ceasefire from the Israel Defence Forces, the world’s most careful military – which sometimes sacrifices its own soldiers’ lives in order to save civilians – appears bizarre and incomprehensible if it isn’t based on a cruel double-standard explained, at bottom, by resentment, anger or even hatred towards Jews. Just how to effectively counter habitual fake news cannot be answered in this essay, but either way, I maintain that a free press is imperative even if only a handful of media outlets provide balanced and honest coverage on this issue.
As mentioned, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are commonly mentioned in the same breath by politicians and media personalities. Yet, they are as different as apples and poisonous mushrooms. Are there people who hate Muslims, all 1.8 billion of them, just because they are Muslims? Yes. Are there people who hate Jews, all 15.7 million of them, just because they are Jews? Absolutely. That is not the point, nor is it the critical problem. What people feel or don’t feel, including hatred, is a personal, individual matter, as long as they keep those feelings to themselves. If this feeling turns into threats, intimidation or outright violence, then it becomes a police matter or, if terroristic in scope, an intelligence/military problem. So, let’s compare.
In the 40 years from 1979 to 2019, Muslims committed an astounding 40,000 terrorist attacks. Prominent examples include: 9/11, which killed nearly 3,000 in one morning; the 2008 Mumbai strikes by Pakistani infiltrators that lasted four days, killing 174 people; the 2015 Charlie Hedbo shootings in Paris killing 15 people; the January 2013 attack against a natural gas facility in Algeria by the al-Murabitum Islamic terrorist organization, which killed almost 40 people; and the 1992 and 1994 Buenos Aires bombings by Islamic Jihad of, first, the Israeli embassy, killing 29 people, and, second, a Jewish community centre, killing 87.
During those 40 years, according to the Fondation pour L’innovation Politique, “more or less, all the regions of the world have been hit” by Muslim terrorism, and quite a number of attacks took place in Muslim countries, with Muslims as their targets. The total body count is grim, according to the French think-tank’s report: some 167,096 deaths, representing, as the report puts it, “A multifold of tragedies.” A “phobia” is an irrational, baseless or severely exaggerated fear that warps the sufferer’s perceptions and behaviour. The litany of events above suggest ample reason for fear. This is almost never mentioned in the mainstream press.
Regarding recent anti-religious attacks in Canada, the U.S. and France, the scorecard also leans heavily in one direction. It should go without saying that Jews have not set up any illegal university encampments strewn with stolen furniture, from which any who disagree are excluded, have not demonstrated in front of Muslim-run hospitals, have not blockaded highway overpasses leading to Muslim neighbourhoods, have not thrown Molotov cocktails, have not attempted to organize comprehensive boycotts of every Arab country. But I guess I better say it anyway.
And in the previous 10-15 years, Jews also suffered far more. According to the Ontario Human Rights Commission, in 2009 “similar to trends in previous years, 70 percent of all religion-based hate crimes in Canada were committed against the Jewish faith (283, a 71 percent rise from 2008). The largest increase of hate crimes based on race involved hate crimes against Arabs or West Asians, which doubled from 37 incidents in 2008 to 75 in 2009.” In Statistics Canada’s 2011 National Household Survey, Canada’s Jews numbered 329,500 versus Canada’s Muslims at nearly 1.1 million. The math is unmistakeably stark. In the U.S., anti-Muslim attacks ranged between 200 and 300+ per year in 2010-2022, according to FBI statistics reported by CNN. By contrast, in 2013-2022 anti-Semitic attacks ranged from 900 to over 3,500 per year. While the Muslim population in the U.S. was approximately half that of the Jewish population, U.S. Jews were proportionately still far more vulnerable than Muslims.
Since the pre-state-of-Israel days – when Jews did commit some questionable acts of violence to force their way – Jews haven’t been known for terrorism. Depending on how you define the term, Jewish terrorist acts number between zero and four. Jews are usually too busy working, learning and raising families. There is truly no reason to fear the Jews; anyone concocting a term like “Hebrophobia” would be laughed out of the public square. Yet Western leaders twist themselves into rhetorical pretzels trying to equate age-old malevolent Jew-hatred with concern about the threats, violence and terrorism that are actually committed by Muslims. Who are they fooling? Apparently, many people, who are desperate to avoid the entire topic.
How are Jews dealing with the post-October 7 emotional turmoil? It depends on so many variables, including age, personality, mental health, physical strength, security measures and even level of religious observance. I admit I was terrified for a few weeks, at times my heart racing and my breathing shallow; I had difficulty sleeping. An observant Jew of the modern Orthodox variety, I did not learn about the terrorist attack until after the Jewish holiday, when I checked my computer. I was still trying to absorb the news when, moments later, I received a spine-chilling phone call from my screaming daughter in New Jersey.
As time passed we calmed down with the help of family, friends, our rabbis and prayer. I made daily calls to my daughters, stepson and sister. My stoic husband was always there for an uplifting joke and a hug. Community social events and keeping up with the (eventually encouraging) news in Israel also helped. I kept up a vigorous exercise routine, swimming twice a week to exhaustion. I would read and, yes, zone out by watching TV.
Many secular liberal Jews, after the initial shock, felt even worse when they realized they were being abandoned by their non-Jewish leftist friends, many of whom were either rationalizing or, in some awful cases, actually rejoicing in the slaughter, along with their radical Muslim allies. American Jews were “forced to face a stark reality,” wrote Adam Milstein in the Jerusalem Post: “Mobilizing under a guise of liberation (‘From the River to the Sea’), and civil rights (‘justice’ in Palestine), one thing became increasingly clear – for a large coalition of leftists and Muslims in America, Jews have no right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland and deserve no safety anywhere.”
Some liberal Jews have even performed the utter self-abasement of crawling back to their far-left pals by agreeing that only a unilateral Israeli ceasefire will save innocent Palestinians, instead of the release of the still-more-than 100 hostages and the surrender of Hamas.
We continue to take strength from ‘righteous Gentiles’ like retired Canadian Forces General Rick Hillier, who this week not only called out Trudeau et al for their weak-kneed failure to take on the pro-Hamas protesters, but provided a virtual how-to manual on political leadership.
Completely different – and to me, utterly inspiring – is the response of the ultra-Orthodox. G-d love them. They keep on doing what they do, learning Torah, praying to Hashem, taking care of family and business, and keeping joy in their hearts at all times. I’m reminded of an anecdote in a Holocaust book. The writer, a survivor of the Shoa, was busy sitting at a table sewing for the Nazis. Out the window, she saw a train carrying ultra-Orthodox Jewish prisoners pull up to an Auschwitz gate and the train door fly open. Inside, a Chassidic Jewish marriage ceremony was just being completed. The chassan, or groom, walked to the edge of the open door, threw his hands in the air and yelled at the top of his lungs, “Baruch Hashem,” praise G-d!
As Jews, we need to follow that lead. Well, partly. We must stay positive and cheerful – but never again go passively to the fate others have in store for us. We must be willing to throw the first punch if confronted. Whatever happens we, the Jewish nation, will survive. We have survived worse. We’re used to it. What we are going through currently is just a reminder – an unwelcome and unpleasant reminder – of our normal condition. But at least now, we aren’t scattered throughout the world, stateless, leaderless, disarmed, vulnerable and helpless. We have the truth on our side, not to mention a nation to call our own, with the ultimate deterrent of nuclear arms.
How can non-Jews help their Jewish friends? Let them know you care. My husband and I received some messages, emails and calls telling us they were sorry for what we were enduring. Every one of them cheered our hearts. We continue to take strength from “Righteous Gentiles” like Conrad Black, retired Canadian Forces General Rick Hillier – who this week not only called out Trudeau et al for their weak-kneed failure to take on the pro-Hamas protesters, but provided a virtual how-to manual on political leadership – Rex Murphy and other like-minded writers and public voices. Their support fills us with gratitude, faith and courage.
“These past two months have tested your faith and that of every Jew and of every Gentile who loves the Jews and civilization and who opposes barbarism,” wrote one friend last December. “But this time has also again shown that the Jews are a light unto the world’s peoples, and Israel a light unto the world’s nations.”
Lynne Cohen is a journalist and non-practising lawyer from Ottawa. She has four books published, including the biography Let Right Be Done: The Life and Times of Bill Simpson.
Source of main image: Milo Hess/ZUMA Press Wire.
