Optimists beware. You may not be one after reading this.
An overwhelming sense of aloneness came upon me this past week as a Jew in the United States and in my city, New York City.
A couple of Mondays ago, around 400 Hillcrest High School students left their classrooms and took to the hallways, waving Palestinian flags and shouting anti-Israel slogans. They went berserk when they discovered one of their teachers attended the March for Israel rally in Washington, DC.
It was reported that the teacher had to be hidden in an office to avoid the mob. Maybe they should have squirreled her away in an attic.
The students wanted her out of their school because she attended a peaceful rally with 290-thousand other supporters of Israel. They wanted her gone because she is Jewish.
It’s bad enough, that so many young people, indoctrinated by their woke curricula and by TikTok, have been taught to hate Jews.
The New York City Schools Chancellor David Banks, went to the school to listen to the students and to their truths. The kids are fine, they aren’t radicals, he said. Teachable moment about the history of Jewish persecution and oppression? Nah.
The response, or lack of one, from the United Federation of Teachers, the union that’s supposed to stand up for their members, was even worse.
A local newspaper, the Queens Chronicle, contacted the UFT and asked if its leader, Michael Mulgrew, planned to say anything in support of the Jewish teacher. They issued a statement instead and here it is:
The UFT has been working with the individual teacher, school safety, the Department of Education and the NYPD…The union will continue to send staff to the building and to work with the administration, DOE safety personnel, school safety and the NYPD to restore and maintain a safe environment for faculty, students and staff.
Organized labor’s antisemitism is becoming more prevalent.
Jacobin.com is a website that touts itself as a leading voice of the American left and claims a web audience over 3-million a month.
It bemoans organized labor’s long standing support of Israel and is gleeful that, in its own words, US labor’s pro-Israel consensus is finally beginning to come undone.
The article goes on to cite various labor unions that have criticized Israel, support the BDS movement and have demanded a cease-fire in Gaza due to Israel’s indiscriminate bombing in particular and it’s occupation and apartheid, in general.
From sea to sea, US organized labor will be free of its blind support for the illegitimate, colonialist entity that calls itself Israel. That’s their goal. Being a union member means you are on the side of the oppressed, facts don’t matter.
Here’s something else we kinda already knew. Unionized, progressive, woke journalists are pushing to take sides in the Israel-Hamas war.
The NewsGuild, the union repping writers and reporters at the biggest newspapers in the nation, had to deflect a demand from 750 of its members about making a public statement demanding a cease-fire in Gaza. Journalists, pressuring their union leaders to take a political position on news they’re covering. It’s not the journalism I practiced for more than four decades.
Today’s new journalists, taught the same lessons as those kids from Hillcrest High, equate children, violently ripped from their homes and taken hostage by terrorists and cynically manipulated by them, with prisoners in Israeli jails who were arrested for violence and bloodshed. A sovereign nation’s right of self-defense is held to a dastardly double standard.
I guess it’s not surprising when you consider that objectivity is no longer the north star of newsmen and newswomen. News is reported through the lens of cultural conflict and vetted by race and culture units, and yes, that is what they’re called, that have the final word on what’s fair and accurate.
Adding to my aloneness, this past week is the plight of Jewish students on college campuses.
Dani Dayan, the chairman of Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel, just made a tour of some major US college campuses, meeting with presidents, administrators and students. Dayan said the Jewish students have deep feelings of being ostracized from the rest of the student community.
Polls by Hillel International, the preeminent Jewish college organization, show how serious the problem of Jewish fears on campus really is.
Since 10/7, more than half of Jewish college students say they feel less safe. More than a third of Jewish students say there has been violence or acts of hate targeting Jews on their campus and they feel compelled to hide their Jewish identity.
Jewish Americans are now closer to sheltering in place than we are of living without fear in our place. We are as alone now as we’ve ever been.
For me, it’s a simple question. We were there for you, and now, when our feeling of aloneness is so overwhelming, are you there for us?
Look, I’ll never be elected president of the Chuck Schumer fan club. But on Wednesday of this past week, he gave an emotional and personal speech on antisemitism on the Senate floor.
Click the link if you want to read it. But keep in mind, he still hasn’t called out antisemitic members of his own party.
https://jewishinsider.com/2023/11/senate-leader-chuck-schumer-antisemitism-congress/
I don’t want you to finish reading or listening to this blog without a modicum of optimism from someone far smarter than me.
Here are some words of encouragement on the struggle against Jew hatred and aloneness, from the late Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi of Britain. Rabbi Sacks said, Antisemitism is not mysterious, unfathomable or inexorable…The battle of antisemitism can be won, but it will not be if Jews believe that we are destined to be alone.
Rabbi Sacks was a man of great faith. Believe me, I could use some of that, because right now I’m feeling very destined and very alone.