Watching Charlottesville From Jerusalem
In the almost 20 years since we moved our three young children from a bucolic street in West Los Angeles to a Jerusalem apartment in the rough-and-tumble Middle East, my wife and I consciously taught them that in going from the United States to Israel, we had not been fleeing anything. We had moved not from something but to something. The country in which they were born, we reminded them time and again, not only was the greatest democracy on the planet (after which Israel largely models itself) but also has been unique in Jewish history. Everywhere else, Jews had lived tenuously, doing their best to be accepted until their host community eventually tired of them. When that happened — as in England in 1290, Spain in 1492 and Germany in 1933 — horror ensued.
Charlottesville, Va., on Aug. 12.
Credit Steve Helber/Associated Press
America, even in its occasional ugly moments, was fundamentally different. Yes, many Americans harbored no love for Jews. But the country’s proud self-image as a nation of immigrants and, more important, the rights guaranteed in its revolutionary Constitution, usually demanded that they more or less keep that to themselves. Growing up in Baltimore in the 1960s and 1970s, I experienced not a single instance of blatant anti-Semitism. True, there was that day in Manhattan when an enormous guy suddenly blocked my way and yelled, at the top of his lungs, “Jew!” When I periodically find myself at the corner of Madison Avenue and 54th Street I still relive that memory. But it lasts for a moment and I immediately move on. Jew-hatred in America seemed no laughing matter, but I was never worried about the future of Jews in America.
Then came Donald Trump and a series of “missteps” that added up to something deeply ominous. There was the refusal to distance himself from David Duke. And the Holocaust Remembrance Day speech in which Mr. Trump neglected to mention Jews. There was the campaign ad against Hillary Clinton, with a background of a Jewish star and images of money. Steve Bannon and the alt-right got increasing access. At some rallies, his supporters shouted, “Hail Trump.” It wasn’t “Heil Trump,” but in front of our eyes, more quickly than we ever feared, America was transforming.
Throughout the campaign, though, our now thoroughly Israeli adult children refused to worry. We had taught them that America was different. And they had grown up in a country the very purpose of which was to eradicate Jewish fear. Max Nordau, a Zionist ideologue and contemporary of Theodor Herzl, wrote about the need for “Muskeljuden,” or “muscular Jews,” who would put victimhood behind them. Zeev Jabotinsky, a contemporary of Mr. Herzl and Mr. Nordau, argued that if Jews had any hope of succeeding in their sovereign aspirations, they would have to be an “Iron Wall” — they would have to make their enemies understand that attacking Jews never ended well for the attackers. In myriad ways, the Jewish State was about eradicating diaspora Jewish fear.
Israel has a military draft, and all of our kids served. Those years of service, of coming home on weekends with M-16s that we had to remind them not to leave on the sofas, inculcated in them a confidence about the world that I never had at their age. To the Israelis they had become, the diaspora fear of a Jew being attacked on the street just because she was a Jew seemed but a vestige of a horrible past, now long gone.
Amos Oz, one of Israel’s greatest living novelists, wrote in his autobiography, “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” about how his painfully distant father danced with him in the streets of Jerusalem on Nov. 29, 1947 — the day that the United Nations voted to create a Jewish state. Later that night, still drenched with sweat and with his clothes still on, the young Amos got into bed. To his shock, his father got in with him.
The father told the young boy that night how Polish children had treated him in school, stealing his pants and ridiculing him for being a Jew. Then, in a rare nocturnal moment of intimacy, he said to his son: “Bullies may well bother you in the street or at school someday ... because you are a bit like me. But from now on, from the moment we have our own state, you will never be bullied just because you are a Jew. ... Not that. Never again. From tonight that’s finished here. Forever.”
Israelis know well that Jew-hatred fuels much of the continuing Arab assault on the Jewish state. But worry about anti-Semitism outside the region and unrelated to the conflict is ballast we have long-since jettisoned.
This summer, I taught a course at Jerusalem’s Shalem College on foundational American texts. We read the Declaration of Independence; some Federalist Papers including James Madison’s Federalist No. 10 on the danger of “factions”; Abraham Lincoln’s 1838 “Lyceum Address” on the rule of the mob; the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail”; Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me”; and more.
To illustrate how alive the issues raised in these texts remain, this week I had the students — a highly knowledgeable group of undergraduates — watch video footage of Charlottesville. They sat stunned as they watched the parade of the torches, an image they understood. When I explained that the men with flak jackets, helmets and semiautomatic weapons were the protesters, not the police, they were incredulous. When the Nazi flags appeared, the room was silent except for the sounds of the protesters onscreen.
Then the video cut to one of the marchers, who explained their “republican principles.” The first was the supremacy of “white culture.” The students listened, disgusted. The second was free-market capitalism. Still, they were quiet. Then, the third principle, the protester said, was “killing Jews.” The entire class burst into laughter.
Stunned, I paused the video. Even with the video stilled, they were chuckling. I asked them what they found so amusing. Finally, one student said: “What, does this guy believe that in today’s world you can just go out and kill Jews? It’s funny, that’s all.”
It is, of course, not funny at all, but I chose to focus their attention on the history behind their laughter. “You,” I said, “are actually the living embodiment of that new Jew of whom Nordau and Jabotinsky wrote. People say they hate blacks, and you watch in stunned, horrified silence. They say they’re going to kill Jews, and you laugh.” Israel has normalized Jewish existence in ways of which the headlines rarely remind us.
Not everyone is equally complacent. The morning after Mr. Trump’s Tuesday news conference in which he walked back the conciliatory tone of his Monday statement, I woke up to an email from our 27-year-old son Avi, studying law at Hebrew University after eight years in the army.
“Has the day arrived?” was the subject. “I have a very clear memory from 7th grade of coming home from school after several hours of classes on the Holocaust,” he wrote. “I remember saying to you, ‘Abba, I don’t understand why we spend so much time learning about the Holocaust. It can never happen again and the U.S. will always be there to protect us.’ As the years went by, I wondered if I would live to see the day when America would no longer ‘be there’ for us anymore. I thought about that a lot during my time in the army. Today, for the first time in my life, I asked myself if that day had arrived.”
Has it? I pray not, though it is too early to tell. But here is what we do know. The tiny, embattled country our family now calls home has raised a generation of young people to understand that ultimately, the only people who can be fully trusted to safeguard the safety of the Jews are the Jews. For having afforded our children a chance to grow up with no sense of the vulnerability that we knew growing up in America, we owe Israel and its founders a profound debt of gratitude. It is a debt that I don’t believe we fully appreciated until Charlottesville and its disgraceful aftermath.
Daniel Gordis (@danielgordis) is the Koret Distinguished Fellow at Shalem College in Jerusalem. His latest book is “Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn.”
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by Daniel Gordis
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The morning after Mr. Trump’s Tuesday news conference in which he walked back the conciliatory tone of his Monday statement, I woke up to an email from our 27-year-old son Avi, studying law at Hebrew University after eight years in the army.
“Has the day arrived?” was the subject. “I have a very clear memory from 7th grade of coming home from school after several hours of classes on the Holocaust,” he wrote. “I remember saying to you, ‘Abba, I don’t understand why we spend so much time learning about the Holocaust. It can never happen again and the U.S. will always be there to protect us.’ As the years went by, I wondered if I would live to see the day when America would no longer ‘be there’ for us anymore. I thought about that a lot during my time in the army. Today, for the first time in my life, I asked myself if that day had arrived.”
Has it? I pray not, though it is too early to tell. But here is what we do know. The tiny, embattled country our family now calls home has raised a generation of young people to understand that ultimately, the only people who can be fully trusted to safeguard the safety of the Jews are the Jews. For having afforded our children a chance to grow up with no sense of the vulnerability that we knew growing up in America, we owe Israel and its founders a profound debt of gratitude. It is a debt that I don’t believe we fully appreciated until Charlottesville and its disgraceful aftermath.
America is not transforming; however, there are elements that are more emboldened to make their presence known in larger numbers. They've been there all along. Trump's buffoonery is, on the whole, detrimental to our Republic. There is a great deal of work to be done which is mired in the political mud. Had President Trump merely used a teleprompter rather than his Twitter account, we'd be in much better shape.
I honestly think that there is an upside to his refusal to single out the Nazis as he should have. By doing so, these heinous groups came out of their holes, and exposed themselves to the light. By doing so, they have sufficiently alarmed our nation to the point where it is clear that greater vigilance is warranted. In recent years, we have learned to equivocate; to shrug off these threats as mere nuisance. The recent events in our country have caused us to give pause, and take these seemingly small threats far more seriously.
I hesitate to give Trump "credit" for this, but his actions have unwittingly given us greater focus on the baseless hatred that exists within our borders.
Did you see my seed a few days ago about Meyer Lansky ?
There's something undeniably satisfying about Brown Shirts getting the stuffing knocked out of them... but it's still not something I want to have happen today.
I have witnessed enough gang fights in my lifetime to know that armed confrontations between competing elements of society should be avoided at all costs. And yes, there is an element of satisfaction watching skinheads getting rolled in the gutter.
I did read your Meyer Lansky seed.
Here's another article for your reading pleasure:
Yup, there's definitely a vicarious satisfaction... Good link.
Truth in every word.
Neo-nazis, white-supremacists hear encouragement in Trump's words: