Dear Son of Abraham:
This is the first of several letters I will be writing to young Jewish men in the United States over the next several months. I don’t want to sound too much like an Evangelical Christian (in part because I’m a Roman Catholic), but in the sixteen months since the October 7 massacre, I have had the distinct sensation of G-d pressing His thumb to the back of my head to have me to put into words my thoughts about the Jewish condition in the modern world, the United States especially.
I understand that it is profoundly presumptuous of me, a non-Jew, to opine on this subject, but the fact is, it’s something I’ve been struggling with and thinking about for the past two decades. I write to you, a young Jewish man responsible for the safety and welfare of the women and children in his life, in hopes that maybe it will prepare you for the challenges you face in your adulthood. And perhaps the things I write might warn non-Jews away from the habits of mind and patterns of speech that have led so many people to disaster throughout history.
I used to joke with people that I am not a Jew but played one on the internet. It was always good for a few laughs, but there was some truth to it. Once I started defending Israel against the moral adventurers in the mainline churches—who use the Jewish state as a scapegoat to demonstrate their moral and intellectual superiority and affirm their status as the anointed elites in American society—I experienced a certain distancing or alienation from people, places, and things that had previously served as sources of meaning, comfort, and familiarity. That feeling of alienation and distancing has long since disappeared as more and more people have recognized that the war against the Jewish people has morphed and expanded into a war against Western civilization, but for a few years, it was pretty isolating. One of my colleagues at the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) seemed to recognize what was happening and did what he could to bring me into the fold.
We Knew You Could Do It
He had driven me and another coworker to an Israeli-owned pizza shop near our place of work and as we drove back, we saw another one of our coworkers walking amiably down the street enjoying the sunshine. My colleague slowed the car to a snail’s pace and rolled down the window to my right and looked at me challengingly. I knew what was expected of me, but I still shook my head ruefully, as if to say, “You really want me to do this? This is sooo beneath, me, so juvenile, so puerile.”
My colleague continued to stare at me. He would not relent. After one last shake of my head, I leaned my head out the window and yelled in a bold, clear, and challenging voice, “Hey Jew!” at our shared friend. He wheeled around to see who was baiting him in such an ugly manner — with a particularly hard “J” and a contemptuous “ew” to boot. For a brief, agonizing moment, I panicked, wondering if I overdid it. My relief was immeasurable when his face broke into a wild grin upon recognizing me. My colleague and the friend in the back seat, another good guy, were both elated. I had passed the test.
“Do you want a ride?” the driver asked our friend. “No,” our friend said. “I need the exercise.”
“Ok. Be safe,” my friend and colleague said before rolling up the window.
“We knew you could do it,” my friend said as he brought the car back up to speed. “Yes, good job,” said our friend in the back seat. It was a transcendent moment. If I were a Cultural Marxist reliant on Freud, I’d say I was, by proxy, giving voice to the self-hate Jews have internalized over the course of their history. But I’m more of a Jungian and I’ve decided it was my way of telling the Jew-haters to go to hell. In any event, it was an ironic break from the relentless hostility directed at Jews and their homeland in the Middle East that we dealt with on a regular basis at work.
Problem Has Gotten Worse
So here I am writing a letter to young Jews about the challenges they will face in a post-October 7 environment. I tried writing some form of this letter (and the ones that will follow) many times over the past few years but could never get beyond the first few paragraphs. I just couldn’t get past the presumption of me, a non-Jew, opining on how Jews should respond to the existential challenges they face in 21st century America. I made a pretty good living “fighting antisemitism” in the United States with every little effect. Sure, I exposed and countered a lot of lies and, rumor has it, even cost a few people their jobs. But the problem of antisemitism has only got worse over the past two decades. Instead of countering and reversing the defamation of the Jewish people, I merely documented its increase, feeling really good about myself while doing it. “What a good boy am I!”
Then October 7 happened, and my conscience really started to bother me. A bunch of terrorists inspired by an ideology of Muslim Male Supremacism (MMS) went on a rampage and murder, rape, and kidnapping. The violence against women was appalling.
For a few hours after learning of the attack, I was afflicted with unholy feelings of I-told-you-so triumph. I was gripped with the delusion that the spectacle of mutilated and desecrated corpses of Jews being put into freezers in southern Israel would finally bring people to their senses. But I was wrong. Instead of responding with civilized horror, many people reacted with triumph over what Hamas had done. They tried to obscure this triumphalism by calling for a ceasefire before Israel had even massed troops on its border with Gaza. In the months since, folks have accused Israel of “genocide” as part of a campaign to grant give Arabs and Muslims license to rape and murder Jews while depriving Jews (and other groups) of the right to defend themselves against such attacks.
For much of the past sixteen months, Islamists and their allies on the left have laid siege to Jews on college campuses. Pro-Hamas “progressives” have made it perfectly clear that they believe acts of violence against Jews are legitimate. Other protesters, under the leadership of Islamist charities and their leftist allies, have bullied city councils throughout the United States into passing “ceasefire” resolutions.
With its October 7 massacre, Hamas conducted a referendum on the continued existence of the Jews as a sovereign people and the votes are coming in. Many people are not interested in living in a world where Jews can exercise the right to self-determination, and some are interested in a world without Jews, period.
Time for a New Approach
October 7 and its aftermath revealed that the methods used to “fight antisemitism” since the end of World War II no longer work and that it’s time for a new approach. What used to qualify as a useful strategy has become a damaging gimmick. To my shock and dismay, Jews can no longer rely on the grace (or pity) that was accorded to them in the first few decades after the Holocaust. People have forgotten the Holocaust and as a result, portraying Jews as the ultimate victim of humanity’s capacity for evil doesn’t work like it used to. In fact, it invites more abuse because people hate being around others who undermine the story they use to justify feeling sorry for themselves. It’s time for a new strategy.
That means your life is going to be pretty tough and difficult in the years ahead. So, in the course of a dozen or so letters, I will try to explain to you what I think is going on and what you can and should do about it. The central message of these letters is that you, as a Jewish man, will have an obligation to make yourself and your fellow Jews hard to kill. You’re going to have to defeat your enemies who cannot be reasoned with until these folks figure out something else to do with their lives.
I know there is something incongruous about me expressing so much concern for the continued existence and flourishing of the Jewish people. As a Roman Catholic I’m supposed to pray for your conversion, but frankly, I’m more worried about my own conversion and that of my fellow Christians. And while I believe that the Catholic Church is the one truth faith, there is a problem. Christianity doesn’t make much sense without Judaism. It’s a conundrum that I’m glad I don’t have to resolve.
Hard to Kill
But ultimately, my concern for the Jewish people, as irrational as it is, is visceral. And I’m not the only non-Jew who gets it. I think it has something to do with the characteristics of the G-d we think we worship. Once, while giving a talk to a group of orthodox rabbis and Evangelical Christians in Jerusalem, I was overcome with anger and emotion. In my grandiosity, I thought I was afflicted with the spirit of the Lord and the recipient of some sort of divinely inspired insight but maybe it was just the coffee. Still, I told the gathering that if there were another mass killing of the Jews on planet earth, G-d himself would be entirely within his rights to abandon humanity to its fate and leave us to suffer whatever disaster that would befall us. The rabbis looked at me in shock and dismay, astonished that I would say such a thing.
The Evangelical Protestants? They nodded in agreement.
The fact is, there is Biblical warrant for what I said. It’s all laid out directly in Genesis 12:3 in which G-d declares “I will bless those that bless you and curse those that curse you.” Even in those moments when I despair of the presence of the living G-d in my life, I regard that declaration as an enunciation of a cold, hard, inescapable reality. People who menace the Jews bring disaster on themselves. Those who make peace with them, burden them with adoration—or even bless them with indifference, have better lives than those who scapegoat and murder them. Maybe it has something to do with people choosing and embracing agency and taking responsibility for their lives instead of using anger and resentment to guide their actions.
The upshot is that Jews who are intent on being a light unto the nations, as their scripture and G-d requires of them, have an obligation to make themselves hard to kill. The light Jews are to provide this world is not from their burning corpses but from the vehicles for human flourishing they bring into the world.
Israel is one of those vehicles.
Sincerely,
DVZ
P.S. Will write soon.