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By Brooke Goldstein
August 31, 2020
The Jewish community has a long and proud tradition of mobilizing for positive change. When Rabbi Abraham Joseph Heschel and Martin Luther King Jr. marched hand-in-hand for racial equality, they made cross-cultural support for civil rights a hallmark of liberal doctrine. "Intersectionality" comes naturally for the Jewish people, the oldest and most persecuted minority community in the world. These days, our signs say "Black Lives Matter" (BLM) and "Love is Love" and a litany of other slogans designed to bring attention to just causes that are important, but are not exclusive to our tribe. Yet we cannot seem to gin up even a small fraction of this enthusiasm and support when members of our own community come under attack.
A few months ago, my client Lihi Aharon was brutally attacked while riding on the New York City subway, leaving with a scar on her face for life simply because she is a Jew. No one demanded that we "say her name." When Josef Neumann's skull was hacked to pieces by a machete-wielding racist at a Chanukah party in Monsey, Jews didn't occupy the streets and demand justice as he laid unconscious in the hospital. When four Jews were gunned down in a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, we didn't blackout our Instagram accounts. It's open season against Jews in this country, yet only a few of my Jewish friends even bothered to share these stories on social media.
Instead, the Jewish Left is organizing for LGBTQ rights, Black lives, women's rights and against President Trump. They write op-eds demanding we march behind BLM, a movement plagued with Jew-hatred, afraid they will "cede the space" if they don't "show up" but failing to demand the same loyalty when a Jewish cause arises. The just cause of Jewish rights has been abandoned by the Left and replaced with a reform agenda that includes gender-neutral Mattel dolls, protesting ICE and asexual pronouns. Traditional liberal values that Jews have championed for decades, like free speech, self-sovereignty and criticism of religion have been replaced with safe spaces, open borders and criticism of Islamophobia. With appropriate irony, these new values are used as a weapon, especially on campus, against Jewish students and the Jewish state.
On the other hand, millions of philanthropic dollars, dozens of think tanks and a ton of effort have been put into "pro-Israel advocacy." It has barely moved the needle. Students are sent into the campus arena with a shield, not a sword. They are told to memorize 15-page pamphlets on why Israel isn't an apartheid state so that they might be able to regurgitate the facts when attacked. So-called pro-Israel advocacy is never as sexy as posing for a selfie with your fist up in the air. The Jewish community made a strategic mistake by allowing arguments about a complex foreign conflict to define Jewish advocacy.
If a Jewish student is harassed on campus and told she must answer for the alleged crimes of a foreign country, our answer to-date has been, "let's debate the points." Instead, our response should be, "you're targeting me with a political litmus test because of my cultural and ethnic identity as a Jew, and that's racist." Muslim students are not required to reject Iran's nuclear ambitions as a necessary precondition to joining student clubs. Why are we teaching Jewish children that they must debate Israel? Why have we focused our efforts on pro-Israel advocacy, instead of launching a great civil rights movement?
BLM and the New Women's Movement (NWM) have become masters at strategic mobilization in the civil rights space. They operate at a level the Jewish community has yet been able to achieve. Their broad appeal is a result of key tactics, which our community must adopt and mold to fit our cause.
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