A question was placed before American Jews this past week. Should the community continue spending gobs of money on a group like the ADL that fights antisemitism by collecting data and gathering intel on possible plots against Jews, or would the money be better spent on educating Jewish children to be knowledgeable of their heritage and lovers and defenders of Israel?
Bret Stephens, in the annual lecture on the State of World Jewry that seems to rotate yearly amongst Jewish journalists and podcasters, torched the decades-old strategy of fighting Jew hatred with big Jewish organizations like the ADL. Stephens said we’re seeing the evidence right before our eyes that approach ain’t working.
Jew hatred is in full bloom in the United States despite the tens of millions of dollars that have been spent to bring attention to the disease. Stephens said we’d be better off spending our bucks on strengthening Jewish identity with our Jewish youth so they know the truth about Israel and Zionism when confronted by the haters.
Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the ADL, politely and predictably said Stephens was “misguided.”
I say, it isn’t an either/or choice.
I say, there’s enough money amongst Jewish American philanthropists to support both approaches.
I say we need the ADL’s of our world because they still have cred with the people in power.
But, I say we need to do a helluva lot more to Jewishly educate our youth, to teach them to not buy into the bullshit the Qatari-funded professors are pumping out on our college campuses.
Just so you know, the US Department of Education, this past week, revealed just how much Qatar has gifted the US universities last year.
Wanna take a guess?
How about $1.1 billion dollars, by far and away the largest source of foreign money going to US colleges and universities. The next closest foreign money source was the United Kingdom at $633 million. China spent $528 million.
If that isn’t a wake-up call that we need our Jewish kids to be more Jewish before they hit the quads, I don’t know what is.
Getting back to the main issue, sure, let the ADL continue to be the data supplier to the non-Jewish world for all the antisemitism that’s taking place on the streets of our cities. Sure. It helps with the power brokers. It helps with freeing up government grants for security cameras at schools and at synagogues. It also helps focus media attention on antisemitism.
But, if we don’t fortify our youth, if we don’t wrap them in the kevlar of Jewish knowledge and Jewish pride, if we don’t spend the money to establish more Jewish schools, more Jewish camps, more Jewish trips to Israel, and make them more affordable and more attractive to Jews of every ilk, we will lose our children to the Jew haters, for sure.
Sy Syms, that great philosopher and haberdasher, always said, “an educated consumer is our best customer.” Our young people, well-educated in what it means to be proud Jews and Zionists, are our best hope to slap down the Jew haters.
There’s also this approach. It’s from the female emissary of the Chabad movement on the campus of Emory University in Atlanta.
For the uninformed, that Hasidic group sends thousands of it’s rabbis, their wives and children, not only to the far-flung corners of the earth to bring Jews closer to Judaism, they are also ubiquitous on American college campuses. They don’t just show up for a couple of years and then leave. They make those college towns their homes, living amongst the students for decades.
Miriam Lipskar is one of those dedicated emissaries. She recently gave a stirring one minute and eleven second speech that caught my eye on social media. She basically said she doesn’t give a rat’s ass (for the record, she didn’t use that phrase:) about the antisemites on her campus.
Ms. Lipskar said, “I don’t care if you don’t like me. I don’t care why you don’t like me…it’s your problem.”
Ignoring the hate-filled students, she is laser focused on her mission to her Jewish students at Emory. Her job, she says, is to be “pro-semitism.” “I’m for Jews, I’m for Judaism,” she says.
She’s not preoccupied with Jew hatred at Emory. What preoccupies Ms. Lipskar is making sure the Jewish kids on her campus will marry another Jew and raise their kids in a Jewish family so “we could have more loud, proud Jews.”
So if the ADL wants to continue to do its thing. I say, go for it.
But maybe we should cease obsessing over the haters; they’re never going to be our friends no matter how much we preach love and tolerance, no matter how many stats we throw in their faces.
If you believe, like Miriam Lipskar does, that we desperately need more, “loud, proud Jews,” then our big shots need to get off their butts, open their bank accounts and put their money straight into the mouths of our future; our America’s Jewish youth.
Hey, everyone! Can I hear an amen?!?