World

Redemption through resistance

17h ago · Source: JNS 80Objectivity score80/100

“Redemption through resistance,” Lisa Barr’s underground leader pleaded from the Mila bunker in her 2024 bestseller, The Goddess of Warsaw. “Our secret weapon is the element of surprise. We have only one shot at this. Don’t stop, don’t pause, don’t breathe, don’t retreat. No matter what.” Jews who are willing to stand up to tyranny by fighting against all odds.

We are here again. Not with our lives but in an existential fight for America’s Jewish identity.

We sincerely believed our fight for Russian Jewry typified that identity. For the civil rights of African-Americans. Against the Vietnam War. We fought valiantly with our presence, our money and our institutions for what Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize laureate Elie Wiesel urged us to do—causes that were universal, that spoke to helping those who were treated like strangers.

We weren’t wrong. American Jews defined by American causes.

History forgotten, history denied, history canceled.

It’s not that we don’t want to fight for ourselves; we don’t know how. Perhaps it’s too surreal, too frightening to believe we are under existential attack.

Mark Twain’s satirical political novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-Day, co-authored with Charles Dudley Warner, is often misquoted. It states that “History never repeats, but present combinations use old legends.”

Ancient legends murdered us in the past. These same legends, boosted by social media and AI, are of today. We dismiss them as lies, but the cunning and well-endowed enemies of American Jews have become a powerful coalition, consisting domestically of our fellow Americans, politicians, newspapers, media, schools—and us. Too many of us have subscribed to these legends. We are addicted to being Americans first, even when it weakens us.

We have two choices as we stand attacked with a familiarity previously lived through and died from: quotas keeping us out of colleges and universities, our professionals kept out of hospitals, law firms and companies, and they’re not publishing our books. Our “friends” have deserted us in a time of desperate need.

We join them against ourselves. By not fighting. By remaining silent. By fitting in. By saying, “We’ve [still] never had it so good.”

Many of our people have made aliyah and now live in the only country where Jews fight for themselves (and all Israelis, including Christians and Arabs, totaling in excess of 2 million).

It’s not something we expect American Jews to understand. The bomb shelters, service in the Israel Defense Forces, husbands away for months on end on reserve duty, wives shouldering the child-rearing responsibility, often with the assistance of grandparents.

The misunderstanding is mutual; Israeli-American Jews cannot understand the mass voting in our birth country for those who seek mayhem upon us. Our differences and divisions weaken us, emboldening those who seek to undercut first and then destroy.

The High Holidays approach. For American Jews to be included in the proverbial “Book of Life” in a way that will allow them to regain their collective footing, we turn from ancient legends to ancient wisdom. This historical moment begs us to look inward, individually and as a community.

It is time to privately confess the misdeeds that threaten us from within by adding to our prayers:

As American politics seemingly begins and ends with Israel, we pretend.

As local, state and federal elections are filled with candidates running on a Jew-hating platform, we pretend.

As our children are unsafe at pre-schools to campuses because we refuse to rise up as a group against administration policies, we pretend.

As parents and grandparents with children living in Europe, Canada, Australia and across America desperately tell anyone who will listen that our children are safe and everything is wonderful, we pretend.

From the rivers to the seas throughout the world, we pretend that it can’t be happening again.

As Rabbi Alan Lew titled his book about transformation: This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation.

Jews’ search for meaning and redemption will begin in earnest when we stop pretending that conformity will bring societal acceptance. We have no answers—only facts we must confront from within. That will surprise our enemies, and then this fight against all odds can begin in earnest.