SPEAKING TRUTH TO FRIENDS: BEYOND VICTIMHOOD

Dear Deborah:

I want to thank you for spending so much time in correspondence with me and with Abigail. Given that in your most recent letters you’ve focused on what we should not do, I want to raise one last topic. I admit to having been a bit reluctant to bring this up, but I must because for me it is the elephant sitting in the middle of the room.

In recent years, when the subject of Israel has come up and I am with my Jewish friends, I have found myself behaving like some of the Jewish students you have described in your letters: self-censoring. The Israeli government has taken some actions that have troubled me greatly. Yet I’m reluctant to share my feelings with my Jewish friends, who might be hurt by what I say, and with some of my non-Jewish friends, who might take this as license to launch their own, less tempered attacks on Israel. And so I don’t speak up because I fear that my criticisms—which I think are valid—will be misinterpreted as unfair and even as antisemitic. If anything has become crystal clear to me as a result of our exchanges, it’s how much—though absolutely not all—of the criticism of Israel relies on antisemitic motifs or is simply a cover for antisemitism.

I’ve visited Israel a number of times and have enjoyed those trips tremendously. It’s an impressive place. I host scholars from Israeli law schools at our law school. But I continue to keep silent. I know that what I have to say has the potential to cause pain and offense. And if I cause pain, I know I will not be heard. Your honesty in your letters has given me the courage to admit this. How do I, as a non-Jew, speak critically about policies of the Israeli government that I may find troubling without being misunderstood? Is this even possible?

Your friend,

Joe

Dear Joe:

Your voice is greatly respected both on and off the campus. You have a long record of speaking truth to all, and you have repeatedly shown your support of and solidarity with Jews. You, above all, must not be afraid to speak out when you feel that the Israeli government is deserving of criticism. If Israel’s advocates want your support, they must be prepared to hear your critique. You will not be branded an antisemite, except by those who automatically categorize any negative comment about Israel as antisemitism—and you know what I think of them. In fact, you will be heard by the very people who are desperate to find a solution to the problems that plague Israel today.

Up to this point in our correspondence I’ve tried to speak analytically and professorially. But now I’d like to speak more as a Jew. This may sound strange, after our extended exchange about antisemitism, but in my opinion, antisemitism is not the greatest threat facing Jews today. Don’t get me wrong: I wouldn’t spend my time teaching and writing about this subject if I didn’t think it posed a threat today to both Jews in particular and the world as a whole. But if antisemitism becomes the sole focus of our concerns, we run the risk of seeing the entire Jewish experience through the eyes of the people who hate us.

I am hardly the first person to caution against this danger. More than eight decades ago, one of the great historians of the Jewish people, Columbia University professor Salo Wittmayer Baron (the first person in the United States to hold a named professorship in Jewish history at a secular university) cautioned against succumbing to “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history.” Writing in the mid-1930s, as the Third Reich was beginning to cast its shadow over Europe, Baron pointed to the prevailing perception of the Jewish experience as a “sheer succession of miseries and persecutions.” These bad experiences loomed so large in the Jewish people’s collective memory that they eclipsed the multitude of positive and noteworthy accomplishments that fill Jewish history. Baron was hardly an unrealistic optimist. He was born in Tarnów, Galicia, which before World War II had a large, thriving Jewish community with schools, synagogues, and a host of charitable and cultural institutions. When he returned after the war he found that his community had been obliterated. But he understood that focusing only on what has been lost negates centuries of extraordinary economic, intellectual, and communal achievements. It allows the “oy” rather than “joy” to become the prism through which our view of the Jewish past is refracted.

In his 1948 essay “Israel: The Ever-Dying People,” the philosopher and historian Simon Rawidowicz addressed this phenomenon of Jewish pessimism. “The world makes many images of Israel,” he wrote. “But Israel makes only one image of itself: that of being constantly on the verge of ceasing to be, of disappearing.” With good historical reason, Jews have long been inclined to assume that some sort of catastrophe was just around the bend. This, of course, fits my earlier description of the Jewish optimist as someone who thinks things cannot get any worse. The pessimist is certain they can and will get worse, but is not sure precisely how soon. Both traditionalists and secularists have frequently expressed pessimism about the future of the Jewish people. From the earliest rabbinic writings in the first and second centuries of the Common Era to the twentieth-century Zionist poets, our literature is filled with predictions that this generation might well constitute the “final link in Israel’s chain.” Some feared that the end would come through physical destruction at the hands of an enemy. Others were convinced that it would be caused by internal apathy or too great a faith in the promise of emancipation and enlightenment.

For Rawidowicz, this Jewish view of itself as “ever-dying” is in fact a psychological coping mechanism, a kind of “protective individual and collective emotion.” By anticipating the worst, Jews protect themselves from being blindsided by bad turns of events. In anticipating a cataclysmic end, they prepare themselves for it and “become its master.” No disaster could take Israel “by surprise . . . put it off its balance . . . obliterate it.”1 The upside is that this teaches us to be on guard in a legitimately dangerous world. The downside is that this worldview could become the sum total of our identity.

I tell you all this because I don’t want you to see Jews as perennial victims who must be coddled. We are not. Do not fear speaking truth to us because you worry that it might hurt or offend us. We cherish people like you who have stood by our side not out of pity or guilt, but because hatred in all its forms is something you cannot abide and because you recognize that antisemitism is a threat to the well-being of any just and democratic society.

Despite the fact that only seven decades ago one out of every three Jews on the face of the earth was murdered, the Jewish people thrive today as a culture, a community, and a nation. There are many explanations for this, and one of them is that good friends like you stand with us. And good friends speak truth—not just to power, but to one another.

Your appreciative colleague,

DEL