Jews, Jews, Jews; How Do We Choose?
That’s the title of an article by Mikey Weinstein posted in Daily Kos on November 2. As founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, Mikey works every day to protect religious freedom for members of the U.S. military. As a Jew, he has experienced the venom and hatred of antisemitism all his life, even more so as a result of his work with MRFF. With his permission, the article is reprinted in full in today’s blog. [Watch my interview with Mikey and read more about his work.]
This time it just feels very different. The anti-Jewish hatred, I mean.
I just can’t stay mute on this any longer. I have even been asked by Jewish and non-Jewish DoD leaders to end my “loud silence” and to “say something NOW” given the bully pulpit that I have.
I have started and stopped this short piece a hundred times. It is both wrenching and emotional for me to write this.
It's time for me as a Jewish American to talk about the current unprecedented explosion in Jewish hatred.
The first time I felt it I was only five years old when my “friend” in kindergarten told me that I had “Killed God.” I never really felt it significantly again until I became a cadet at the United States Air Force Academy in the summer of 1973. In my very first few days there during BCT (“Basic Cadet Training”), I got my next repulsive stench of genuine antisemitism from the upper-class cadre of training cadets. This consistent abuse included the forced singing of a brazenly antisemitic trope-chant during mandatory “training runs.” It only got worse from there and then was cruelly visited upon my own children decades later when they became U.S. Air Force Academy cadets.
Look, I’m a public figure and I know the hell that comes with that. I’m a civil rights advocate as the leader of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF). Being in the public eye constantly, especially in such a bitterly divided country like today’s America, is often lonely, dangerous, brutal, and expensive. My family and I are no strangers to being recipients of the most vile and hateful antisemitism extant on a regular basis. We employ many countermeasures to try to protect against it but we never really get used to it.
But after the unspeakable war crime horrors and grotesque bloodbath perpetrated by the terrorists of Hamas in Israel on October 7, 2023, the tsunami of ubiquitous antisemitism has been unleashed in ALL directions, irrespective of any of the Jewish targets’ own political views or related opinions on Palestinian civil and human rights.
For many years, I have advocated for a two-state solution and full recognition of both Israel's right to thrive and exist within safe and secure borders as well as, concomitantly, for the human rights of Palestinians. Why the latter? Because Palestinians are FREAKING human beings, THAT’S why! Multitudes of Jews have done the very same thing in the U.S. and abroad, especially in Israel itself. MRFF currently represents over 85,000 military members and veterans (about 95% of whom are practicing Christians), including, by our best estimates, a little more than 18% of all Muslims in today's U.S. military. MRFF has long advocated for religious freedom for Islamic (including Palestinian) United States sailors, soldiers, airmen, Marines, guardians, Coast Guard personnel, cadets and midshipmen, active and reserve components, as well as for hundreds of Jewish military members and veterans.
Notwithstanding this well-established support for Muslims, generally, and Palestinians, specifically, innumerable Jews, myself and much of my family included, have not been spared as targets from the filthy, vicious miasma of antisemitism.
You see, now it doesn’t matter who you are or even what you believe and do anymore. Merely identifying as a Jew qualifies you enough for this Old School spewing of hatred, bigotry, and prejudice. I’m sure you are all reading about how the FBI and other well-respected organizations are now reporting on the suddenly explosively precipitous rise of antisemitism everywhere in America.
I have spoken recently about how it PERSONALLY feels to experience these evil anti-Jewish attacks. If you’ve never been the target of something like this it’s hard to put into words how it makes you feel. When you’ve had Nazi swastikas and Christian crosses painted on your front door and bullets blasting the windows out of your house, how do you translate that shock to another human being who has not experienced it? It’s next to impossible to explain to non-Jews or those who have never felt the nauseating insecurity of not being safely in the “majority.”
I am surprised by people I haven’t heard from in years suddenly reaching out to me to see if I and my family “are OK”? I’ve hardly heard a peep from most of them over the last 20 years of our highly visible civil rights activism to protect the wall separating church and state in the U.S. armed forces. Why all of the sudden now? Why is it different this time? WHY?!
I don’t have any good answers; just painful questions. It seems that many are searching for “which Jews to hate” whilst others paint ALL of us with one stroke of searing hatred as we are ALL apparently complicit in either (1) the Roman execution of Jesus Christ 2000 years ago and/or, (2) the present day plight of the Palestinians. Choose one, or the other, or both.
There are some straightforward words of another man that make my point succinctly:
““The paradox of anti-Semitism is that it is invariably up to the Jews to explain away the charges. The anti-Semite simply has to make them.””
And, one last, very serious thought. Today’s America is fraught with disastrous troubles — not unlike the times of the 1850s when the blight of slavery lay upon the land and had to be excoriated in blood. Daily, we are at one another’s throats, figuratively, rhetorically, and, too often, actually. Too realistically, we could fly apart, as in 1860, at any moment. Now is not the time to denigrate any of us because we need all of us to make it through this perilously taxing, dangerous period. Antisemitism — indeed, ANY “anti” that is needless, bigoted, harmful, stupid, unlawful, or demeaning of our fellow human beings, is a damn nail in our eventual coffin. We must do better and before it’s too late.
