IT IS NOT THE SAME AS IT EVER WAS: GORDIS, JEWS AND HISTORY
Danny Gordis (Israel from the Inside) has been pushing the argument that the two largest Jewish community, Israel and the United States are reentering history. By history, he means Antisemitism, the desire of non Jews to persecute and kill Jews. He believes that the two communities both believed that they were immune from history i.e. Antisemitism, but that has proven false. Holocaust Memorial Day gave him another opportunity to reflect on this theme.
The two communities, according to Gordis, are reentering history but from different angles. In the US he sees the rise of Anti Semitism meaning that we American Jews can’t just float by as members of a big tent in which we feel safe, as has basically been the story of American Jewish life for the last 50 years. From Israel’s perspective, Gordis argues that the promise of Israel was that the state would protect Jews from our enemies and would mean that Jews who lived in Israel would not experience anti semitism in their daily lives. But the ability of the state to protect them has broken down.
I’ve written more than once about my rejection of identifying anti Israel or Anti Zionist sentiment with antisemitism. It is absolutely possible to be against the existence of the state of Israel and not be Antisemitic. I don’t agree with the rejection of the state, but it is a possible position. This piece today is oriented towards the question of the responsibility of the state of Israel in our reentering history. Why do I focus on this? Because in Gordis’s telling, Antisemitism is a constant and we were basically deluded, in different ways, to think we could escape it. And it is such a constant that it is always going to be the case, and our task becomes to create robust communities and robust Judaisms, even in the face of Antisemitism.
I believe that antisemitism is always possible. But I don’t think the problem is as severe as he thinks it is, at least in the United States. I also strongly believe that the state of Israel’s actions have something to do with anti-Israel sentiment which sometimes is intermingled with antisemitism but sometimes is not. Israel flattening Gaza both increased anti-Israel sentiment in the United States and gave permission to Antisemites to be more open about it. Netanyahu persuading Trump to launch the disastrous war against Iran doesn’t absolve Trump of his stupidity and evil, but it gives aid and succor to the enemies of Israel and the Jews who overlap but aren’t the same. Israeli settlers with the complicity of the Army killing Palestinians in the West Bank and/or stealing their land, gives aid and succor to our enemies.
if Israel weren’t busy using its vast military might, things would be easier for Jews in the United States. Would there still be Antisemites? Of course. Would they feel as empowered as they do? I’m skeptical.
I completely agree with Sartre’s contention (in Anti Semite and Jew) that Antisemitism is created by non Jews and in that sense is not a Jewish problem. Sure we suffer the consequences and in that sense it is our problem, but we didn’t create it. In the Ashkenazi ancestral pale of settlement, a lot of anti-Jewish sentiment was fueled by our role as tax collectors for the nobility. This was a role in which we might have been the identified villains, but we were acting on behalf of someone else and we had been squeezed into that role by having other economic avenues closed off to us. We were just as much victims of a corrupt nobility as the Christian peasants who wound up killing us in pogroms.
Israelis are just not in the same position as our ancestors, Ashkenazi and Sephardi were. They have more agency, more power. Israel could choose to have a different kind of relationship with the Palestinians, one focused on creating justice for both peoples. Israel didn’t have to attack Iran either in 2025 or in 2026 and could have worked towards forging some kind of peace with the Arabs in Lebanon. Israel did not have to invade Lebanon in 1982--these have been wars of choice. Israel needed to find some way to address Hamas, but didn’t have to carpet bomb Gaza. The method of war was a choice.
I’m no pacifist. I believe Israel needed to address Hamas after October 7 and that response had to be at least in part a military one. But does anyone think that Israel five years from now will be safer from violence from Gaza then they were on October 6? Military diligence is called for, but if it is the only tool in your toolbox—well we know what that looks like, and it is bad for everyone.
How bad? Gordis offers a poignant story about sirens that I think testifies to how Israeli government action has made things worse for that half of our people. For most of the time they have lived in Israel (he and his family made Aliyah in 1998) the most sirens they heard were the siren in the morning of Holocaust Remembrance Day and then the two sirens that sound during Memorial day when the country remembers the soldiers who have fallen in combat. Teachers would prepare the kids to stand silently and act respectfully. Now, with sirens going off all the time, the teachers’ job is to tell his/her students that the sirens that sound on Yom HaShoah and Yom Hazikharon (Holocaust Day and Memorial Day) aren’t “real” (his word) sirens and they don’t have to run to the safe room. Huddling in a safe room because of a war of choice is different than Anne Frank hiding in an attic because the Nazis want to kill her. And both are traumatizing.
Being a Jew is both beautiful and traumatizing. At least for me. I wish it weren’t so, and if maybe it was less so in the last 50 years, it certainly has become much more so recently—an area where Gordis and I agree.
