Several things occurred this past week that made me feel very alone as a Jew.
First, an article in Newsweek, entitled, I’m a Jew at Harvard—I’ve Never Felt So Alone. Written by Charlie Covit, an outspoken Harvard undergrad, he describes what it’s like to be at Harvard on Holocaust Remembrance Day, hearing shouts of intifada echo through his dorm room window.
Covit writes, Standing in the (Harvard) Yard, wearing my Star of David necklace—I’d never felt so alone.
Sadly, what Charlie Covit is feeling and experiencing isn’t just a Harvard thing.
The loneliness and delegitimization of Jews is occurring on many college campuses.
The article in the New York Times from this past Wednesday, On Campus, a New Social Litmus Test: Zionist or Not, described how Jewish students at Columbia and elsewhere are being ostracized from campus clubs, teams, sororities and even by old roommates. Why? Because they care about Israel, because they believe there is room in this world for one Jewish state, that Jews have a right to live in their ancestral homeland.
It doesn’t matter if you believe Palestinians should have a state, coexisting in peace with Israel. It doesn’t matter if you don’t agree with everything the Israeli government does. At American universities these days, you are illegitimate simply because you are a Jew.
If that isn’t outright antisemitism, I don’t know what is. And university presidents and boards of directors that ignore this reality are as complicit as those illiberal students that are making life miserable for Jewish students.
It’s as insidious and as antisemitic as signs from the 1920’s and 1930’s that read, No Dogs and Jews Allowed, or Rooms with a View, Never a Jew.
On the world scene, the International Criminal Court did its part this past week in delegitimizing Israel and Jews. Its chief prosecutor requested arrest warrants for war crimes and crimes against humanity for two Israeli leaders, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and leaders of Hamas, including Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif, the murderous masterminds of the October 7th atrocities.
What the court is saying is the premeditated murder of Jewish children, women and men by bloodthirsty terrorists who vow to repeat their carnage, is the same as a sovereign nation’s right of self-defense.
It’s saying the government of Israel is led by war criminals on par with the terrorists of Hamas, both equally deserving of condemnation, castigation and delegitimization.
It’s really saying it prefers meek Jews, Jews that don’t have the ability to stave off another Holocaust. It doesn’t like it when strong Jews won’t allow the slaughter of their sisters and brothers to go unpunished.
Here’s the truth. Hamas is the perpetrator of evil beyond imagination, not Israel.
How do I know? Because of three things I saw this past week.
I visited the Nova Festival exhibit in New York City. It is devastating to walk through the exhibit and watch the videos. What was supposed to be a joyous festival of music and dance on October 7th, became an unrestrained orgy of death, sexual violence and abduction.
Hamas killed 300 festival-goers on 10/7 for only one reason. They were Jews, legitimate targets to be shot in the back, in the head, in the genitals. Legit targets to be raped and abducted.
Then on Wednesday, I watched the October 7th video just released to the public, of the five female Israeli soldiers being rounded up and taken hostage. They were beaten and bloodied, and they were told by their Hamas abductors they were so beautiful and are the ones who can get pregnant.
Those women are still in the clutches of Hamas. So I ask you, who are the war criminals?
And finally, as if going to the Nova Festival exhibit and watching the newly released video wasn’t enough, at a private screening, I viewed the IDF compiled videos from terrorist body cams, cell phones and security cameras from southern Israel on the day of the attack.
I watched gleeful, grinning terrorists and their enablers wantonly murdering, dismembering, defiling and torturing Jews.
They called their victims, settlers, even though the area of Israel they invaded is part of the original partition of 1948. Can anyone now doubt what from the river to the sea really means?
Their victims were called dogs amidst shouts of Allah Akbar, God is great. The subhuman brutality is indescribable and unforgettable. The Jewish victims dehumanized into burned and disfigured corpses, abused, beheaded, and butchered
One ecstatic terrorist uses the cell phone of one of his victims to call his parents in Gaza, elated that he just killed ten Jews with his bare hands. His father and mother are heard thanking God for their son’s heroics and exhorting him to kill, kill, kill.
If I tell you the human depravity of that day is beyond anything anyone can imagine, it would be an understatement.
Even though this video has only been shown to select groups so it won’t be turned into a social media snuff film spectacle, the ICC knows what it shows. The UN knows what it shows. Ireland, Spain and Norway that this week granted Hamas a victory by declaring their recognition of the State of Palestine, know what it shows.
It’s all part of the cancer of the dehumanization of Israel and its Jewish supporters that has metastasized from Gaza to The Hague, from Manhattan’s east side to Morningside Heights, from Cambridge to California.
It’s a cancer that cannot be ignored by the good people of the world.
And yes, there are still good people. Eighty percent of US registered voters surveyed last month said they support Israel in its war against the Gazan terrorists. More than 60 percent of New Yorkers in a poll released this past week say the ugly campus demonstrations have crossed the line into antisemitism and 70 percent support the police breaking them up.
But if there is a crack in the darkness from 10/7, it must be pried open further by people with moral clarity, who know what is right and what is evil.
Perhaps then will I be able to expunge the images I saw this past week that have caused me to feel so abandoned, so adrift and so alone.