Hey, tribe.
I hope if you’ve attended seders on either or both of the first two nights of Pesach, they were meaningful and comforting.
Both of ours were just lovely. The first night we joined our community at Chabad and on the second, we went to the home of a cherished friend. In a very early newsletter titled The Origin Story of My Zionism, I wrote about Judith Meller, the child survivor of Auschwitz who took care of me when I was very young, remained in my life until her death decades later, and sowed the earliest seeds of this fiery love for the Jewish family that will never be rooted out of my heart. The hostess of last night’s seder was her beautiful granddaughter, Stephanie. It included Judith’s younger daughter Dara, my first-ever friend, and her older daughter Rikki, my closest political and emotional comrade at this very fraught cultural moment.
I once heard an Orthodox Jewish man posit that in hell, there’s a seder every night. And I definitely get this, especially when I think of how many hours Orthodox seders tend to last. And there’s also the fact that I have literally taken part in this long ritual more than a hundred times before.
But oh, how grateful I was to be sitting at those tables this year. It reminded me of the Matisyahu show I attended early in the war. Outside the room was insanity, hatred, rank hypocritical violent blame for the dominant society’s own worst failings.
While inside was nothing but light, warmth, love, tradition, resilience, endurance, stamina, celebration.
I love Jewish faces, Jewish hair, Jewish jewelry. I love being surrounded by so much that’s familiar and familial. I love Jewish intellect, Jewish humor, the relentless Jewish tendency to turn a complex issue this way and that, invoking one hand and then the other a la Reb Tevye from Fiddler, offering three opinions for every two Jews, always supplying answers that include both yes and no.
If I couldn’t take shelter in the community of other Jews at this time, I could never withstand what’s going on outside those spaces. And in fact, even now, typing these words, I feel everything in me resist the pull back into the outside world from the haven of the last two evenings.
But we have to look at what’s happening. And today I want to circle back to something I touched on not long ago: the idea that our political landscape looks less like a horseshoe at this point, and more like a long-necked vase.
To recap what I mean by that: around a decade ago, the Tea Party was the lunatic fringe of the GOP. While I never came close to aligning ideologically with John McCain, there was no denying he was a decent man who was able to generate bipartisan cooperation in Congress on issues important to most Americans.
His cynical choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate sparked a fascinating response from the American public. The left was appalled by her ignorance and extremism, while the right was galvanized by it. Her presence energized the Republican campaign in a dramatic and undeniable way.
Though her half of the ticket may well have ultimately cost McCain the election, it sparked the rise of mainstream extremism and its direct correlation with voter enthusiasm on the right side of the aisle.
Obama’s next opponent in the general election for the U.S. presidency — Mitt Romney — was another man whose baseline human decency was plain for all to see — and who generated complaints within his party of an “enthusiasm gap.”
We all know what happened next. The extreme right wing of the GOP essentially became the entire GOP, and an overtly racist and morally bankrupt provocateur won the White House in the next general election cycle.
And now it’s my ever-mounting belief that the same ideological extremity is taking over the left.
To me, the left seems to mirror the right more closely with every passing day, in more ways that I can count, but for the purposes of this column, I will introduce five of them here.
These are:
Each side upholds and incessantly parrots its own Big Lie.
On the right, the big lie is that the 2020 election was rigged and Trump was its rightful winner.
On the left, the big lie is that Israel is guilty of settler colonialism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and ultimately its own unforgivable existence.Each side generates journalism that is less straight reportage than politically motivated curation.
On the right is Fox News, Newsmax, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Wire and a host of other outlets where there’s not even an attempt at appearing non-partisan.
On the left, the selective reportage is far less overt but anyone reading coverage in the Middle East itself and comparing it to the U.S.’s version of the same stories will see an unmistakable trend toward spotlighting bad behavior on the part of Israel, injecting skepticism into any mitigating information, and suspending such skepticism when it comes to reports from Hamas. This tendency in print journalism is discussed in great detail and depth by Matti Friedman here, here, and here, and at NPR by its senior business editor here.Each side scapegoats a subset of fellow Americans as Public Enemy #1.
The right blames Democrats, socialists, “woke” liberals, BLM, transpeople, and a world-controlling cabal of Jews for social ills they find overwhelming and threatening to our nation.
The left blames “Zionists” for the same. Israel is invoked in demonstrations on behalf of every conceivable social justice struggle, including racism, labor abuses, police violence, LGBTQ+ rights, feminism, political repression — the umbrella covering the entire spectrum of intersectional oppression. Somehow the Jews are to blame for all of it.Each side is guilty of historical revisionism or outright erasure when it comes to a set of inconvenient truths — as well as an absolute refusal to consider or acknowledge relevant facts.
The right is fighting tooth and nail to censor academic curricula and ban books that cover American genocide, slavery and other atrocities inherent to its rise as a global superpower.
The left denies that Jews are indigenous to Israel, that we have maintained a continuous presence there for millenia, and that the Jewish movement for self-determination in a region historically and systemically oppressive to its Jewish minority has much more in common with any other minority struggle than it does with the machinations of a socially dominant oppressor. In this Orwellian world, Israel — whose citizens are mostly descendants of refugees and people of color — is a white European settler colonial project. The most diverse and democratic nation in the Middle East is an apartheid state. The tiniest, most vulnerable country in the region is Goliath. Palestine is a feminist issue. A queer issue. An environmental issue. And Jesus was a Palestinian.Each side is driven by hatred and an insatiable appetite for cruelty.
How many times did we all say, with unflagging naivete, “That’s it, Trump has finally gone too far — he can’t come back from this”? Surely boasts of grabbing women by the pussy, of insulting the parents of dead veterans, of mocking a disabled reporter would force Americans to face who Trump was. Surely pushing bleach injections, refusing to mask, and stoking anti-vax conspiracy theories during a pandemic would do it. Surely trying to extort President Zelensky… surely being found guilty of rape… surely trying to strongarm election officials… leading an insurrection against the U.S. capitol… encouraging the murder of his own vice president and half of Congress… flinging top secret classified documents protecting our national security around Mar-A-Lago…
We just couldn’t believe, no matter how many times we were confronted with it, that the prevailing ethos on the other side was “The worse, the better.” Even after being shown that over and over and over, we could not believe it.
American Jews have long held onto a very similar naivete when it comes to sympathy for jihadist terrorists trying to annihilate Israel, despite the fact that Israelis have made continual efforts toward peace for the last 7 decades and the Palestinian leadership has never once done the same.
After the most generous offer ever extended to Palestinians by Ehud Barak was refused and followed by the Second Intifada — a relentless wave of terror attacks in which upwards of 1,000 Israelis were killed — we thought, “Now maybe people will get it.”
After Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza and left a lot of civic infrastructure as a goodwill gesture, which was followed by the election of Hamas as the Strip’s governing body, rocket attacks launched at Israel within a mere two hours of Israeli withdrawal, and the conversion of the entire territory into a $2.6 billion 400-mile subterranean terror compound, we thought, “Now maybe people will get it.”
And after the most brutal imaginable terror attack on Jewish civilians, the rape of Jewish women, the torture of Jewish families followed by setting them on fire, the barbaric slaughter of 1,200 citizens — including vast numbers of peaceniks — in a single day, once again we fantasized that “Now surely people will truly get it.”
Instead, Hamas has only become more admired with every atrocity, and has never enjoyed more popularity among young Americans — including and especially at the most prestigious universities in the country — than after October 7th.
If the most highly educated young people in America — and huge numbers of their professors — are capable of applauding Jewish torture and murder as “resistance” and “justified” and well within the parameters of “any means necessary” while the deaths of Palestinians within a just war is taken as evidence of unparalleled Israeli evil, then the far left is fully and inexorably becoming the mainstream left.
Okay, now that I’ve explained some of my reasons for calling out this trend, what to do about it? I offered 5 supporting points for my observation, so let me also provide my top 5 prescriptions for this political moment:
1. Talk about it. With everyone in your circle. Create awareness that this is happening and be vocal in opposing it. Post about it on social media. Share this newsletter if you agree but don’t feel you have all the words to write your own message.2. Support President Biden. Work to get him re-elected. Counter the lies that he’s too old, too demented, too weak, too hapless, and an enemy of Israel. He is none of those things; he is eminently capable, seasoned, experienced, strong and a very good friend to the Jewish nation.
3. Support left-leaning candidates and already-elected officials who align themselves on the side of good AND support Israel and Jewish Americans.
4. Support the Jews on the front lines of this struggle. Open your home to Jewish students who would rather be off campus right now but don’t have the option of going to a home far away. Support the work of Jewish writers and artists who are in too many cases watching the gates of their livelihood be locked against them. Stand with and actively befriend the Jewish social justice activists who are being pushed out of their formerly safe spaces.
5. If you have the time, money or bandwidth to actively join a Jewish advocacy group fighting the forces of anti-Semitism, please do so.
Okay, fam. I will be back with you by Friday at the latest. In the meantime, I hope you’re finding all kinds of ways to enjoy matzah as we press along our continual path out of Egypt.
Chag Pesach Sameach. Next year in Jerusalem. Am Yisrael Chai.
Oy vey iz mir! I love Judith Meller, Rikki, Dara, Stephanie, Sarah, and her kids, who I only know from Facebook. Your posts make me feel so many things. I’m sad, angry, hurt, confused, heartbroken. Then I feel a little better because I know that you are doing all you can, and I am doing my best, and together we can survive this. Am Yisrael Chai! Mir zenen do! We are here! ✡️🇮🇱❤️🎶
Thank you for this.