Making Sense of Our Moment

For those of us trying to make sense of the challenges facing American Jewry in 2020 – antisemitism, anti-Zionism, BDS (boycotts, divestments and sanctions), intersectionality, and more – 1960 is as good a place to start as any. This morning, I want to focus on today, but I want to get to today by way of yesterday. Specifically, I want to focus on three events or movements anchored in the past, which together provide a prism through which to view the present and maybe, if you stick with me, provide direction forward into the future.

Event number one is eerily resonant given recent news. Sixty years ago, in January 1960, – a swastika epidemic broke out across Europe. First, a newly rededicated synagogue in Cologne, Germany was vandalized with swastikas, antisemitic graffiti and the words Juden Raus. “Out with the Jews,” scrawled on the walls. But, as James Loeffler explains in his book, Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, Cologne was just the beginning. In the days, weeks, and months that followed, synagogues and Jewish communal buildings were vandalized throughout Western Germany and in London, Antwerp, Vienna, Paris, and New York. Swastikas appeared in East Germany and Latin America, in Hong Kong, Algeria, and South Africa. By the end of 1960, the total had climbed to some 2,500 incidents in over forty countries.

Historians now know that the swastika epidemic began as a Soviet effort to discredit West Germany in the eyes of the west, a fact then unknown to Jews and unimportant to the many antisemitic copycats. The epidemic prompted outrage, condemnation, calls to action, and, no doubt, fear. Think about how we, an empowered American Jewry of 2020, react to the appearance of swastikas. I shudder to imagine the impact of this outburst of antisemitism on the global Jewish psyche just fifteen years after the Holocaust. Had the world learned nothing? Would Jews ever be safe? How would the world respond to this virus of Judeophobia? With the epidemic in full swing, Maurice Perlzweig of the World Jewish Congress called for international action, a UN resolution condemning “manifestations of anti-Semitism,” a story to which to we shall return soon enough.

But 1960 was not just the year of the swastika epidemic; for the global community, it was best known as “The Year of Africa,” the second 1960 event on our list of three. Fifteen years before, Africa had been nearly entirely under colonial rule. Decolonization and the declaration of new states in the 1950s brought a new geopolitical reality and also an international consensus that human rights would be defined not only as protection of the individual from the abuses of state power, but also as the right of people to national self-determination. This assertion grew, in Loeffler’s words, into a vehicle “for anticolonial nationalism.” With respect to the emerging Soviet/Arab/Afro-Caribbean alignment, the international community was committed to “the right of self-determination,” with one notable exception: the Jewish people. In the eyes of the global community, Israel – far from reflecting the multi-millennial Jewish hope for self-determination – was an extension of Western imperialism.

An all-out assault on Israel began at the UN in the name of anti-colonialism. When the Israeli delegate, Michael Comay, lodged a complaint about the omission of antisemitism from the resolution being drafted in response to the swastika epidemic, the UN representative from Mauritania blasted “Zionist expansionism” as the antithesis of human rights, unperturbed both by the fact that his country still permitted legal slavery, and that whatever his animus may have been against the Jewish state, that animus had nothing to do with the threat of global antisemitism. (Loeffler, p. 249) In the hands of Mali, Nigeria, and the United Arab Republic, who actually accused Zionists of engineering the swastika epidemic, any talk of antisemitism was perversely reframed as a Zionist plot. The very word “Zionist” became a convenient and fungible term used by antisemites as a cover against charges of Jew hatred. Indeed, by the time the 1962 racism law was actually passed, the very law prompted by the swastikas, antisemitism was not even mentioned. A world turned upside down twice over. First, by its inability to understand Israel as anything other than some nefarious colonialist enterprise. And second, by its inability or unwillingness to differentiate between the safety of a vulnerable global Jewry and the deeds of Israel.

Truth be told, I had never heard of the swastika epidemic or the Year of Africa until I read Loeffler’s book, but the third 1960 event I knew a bit about: the Eichmann trial. On May 23, 1960, Israel’s Prime Minister David Ben Gurion announced to the Knesset and the world that the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann was under arrest in Israel and would stand trial. While we are familiar with the impact that announcement and subsequent trial had on the emotions of post-Holocaust Israeli and world Jewry – the transformation of a people from the persecuted to the prosecutor – this morning my focus is the reaction of the international community. The Washington Post scolded Israel’s actions as “jungle law.” Eichmann’s capture and planned trial were deemed a mockery of justice, not to mention the international outrage that Argentina’s sovereignty had been violated in his capture. Never mind that Eichmann had inflicted unspeakable crimes against the Jewish people, world opinion could not conscience a Jewish state with the power to seek justice for crimes committed against the Jews. Such hypocritical denouncements of Israel reached their ugly apotheosis with the image of a swastika embedded in a star of David in a satirical Soviet magazine. Zionism had become worse than Nazism, for whereas Nazi crimes occurred in some remote past, the Zionist outrage continued. In Loeffler’s words “Zionism itself was on trial in the symbolic court of human rights.”

There is more to say. Loeffler’s book is a must read, and, in case you are wondering: Yes, I have already invited him to address our community. In simple terms, the story he relates is the story of how three forces – the struggle against antisemitism, the recasting of Zionists as colonialist oppressors, and the world’s inability to countenance a Jewish state who could and would stand up for itself – converged into a perfect and toxic storm that would pit Jews and the Jewish state in direct opposition to the progressive agenda. There was a time, lest we forget, when human rights and Zionism were seen as two sides of the same coin. It is no coincidence that in 1948 Jewish hands penned both Israel’s Declaration of Independence and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But it was an alliance that would not last long. The events of 1960 became the backdrop for a world inhospitable to the proposition that Jews could lay claim to both the universal and particular, the progressive and parochial strands of their DNA.

It is now sixty years later, and it is tempting to think that the challenges on our campuses, in our high schools, and now even in our middle schools – of BDS, intersectionality, Britain’s Labor Party, and otherwise – are new. It is tempting to lay blame for the Democratic party’s increasingly lukewarm support for Israel on the toxic bromance between Trump and Netanyahu. No question, the Israeli and American administrations are not doing the world any favors lately, and anyone who knows me and my politics knows how horrified I am at the death of the two-state solution. But to think that somehow it is this or that policy of the Israeli government, or this or that peace plan proposed by the US administration that is the root of our present-day challenges, misses the longer arc of the story. The events of 1960 are significant because they demonstrate that the challenges of our day are neither new, nor the result of any one news cycle, leader, or annexation plan. It is important to think about 1960 because 1960 came before 1967: before the Six Day War, before the occupation of the West Bank, before Oslo, before Netanyahu, before Trump, before intersectionality, white privilege, before all these things. 1960 reflects a world which, like our own, tells Jews that, unlike any other people, they should not have the right to self-defense nor the right to self-determination, and that their expectation of either right only serves to reveal their unseemly and parochial privilege and national chauvinism.

This is what the world told the Jews in 1960; this is what the world is telling Jews today; and this is arguably what the world has been telling our people since our very founding as a nation, when we left Egypt, as told in this week’s Torah reading. Hundreds of years of servitude under the yoke of Pharaoh’s oppression. The children of Israel crossing the sea from slavery to freedom. Finally a tribe of our own, en route to the Promised Land, a place to call home. Yet scarcely had we crossed the sea, when along comes Amalek, attacking us, telling us that we were one tribe too many, that we should go back where we came from, to the place we had fled. Rabbinic tradition abounds in explanations of what Amalek represents: from the ancient antisemitic enemy of our people in the Torah, to Haman, to Hitler himself. This year, I ask you to consider that Amalek represents the pernicious and perennial claim that it is untoward for Jews to want the very thing every person and every nation wants: safety and self-determination. Consider Amalek as the ugly and untrue allegation that for Jews to defend themselves is somehow in conflict with a commitment to building a just society. Amalek as the act of denying Jews the right to live in peace in their own sovereign homeland. It is the noxious contention that a Jew’s right to a home is less valid than anyone else’s. Amalek as a progressive world that prizes equity and inclusion for everyone – except Jews. A world that prizes diversity in just about everything – except diversity of opinion. A world eager to celebrate its liberalism except at the expense of its own unchallenged orthodoxies. Sometimes Amalek makes no bones about its intentions, attacking us openly on our journey, as in the Torah reading. Sometimes, as in 1960, Amalek disguised itself, cloaked in the language of anti-colonialism or human rights. Sometimes, like today, Amalek arrives in the form of the progressive vocabulary of intersectionality. It can come from our enemies, and yes, it can come from within our own ranks. It goes by different names, but it has been there since the very beginning, from generation to generation, the antisemitic claim that the only good Jew is a powerless Jew.

Some people say history repeats itself, others say that it rhymes. Interesting as that observation may be, far more interesting is how we respond to our present circumstances. As I stated a few weeks ago, I believe it is the obligation of Jews to stand strong and stand together in the face of anyone who would do harm to any member of our community no matter what kippah they wear or don’t wear. I believe it is the obligation of all Jews to call out antisemitism as it comes from the right or the left, whether brazen or discreet, refusing to make allowance or alliance for either in the name of any short term or injudicious gain. I believe that Zionism, the right of the Jewish people to a sovereign homeland, is a self-evident right and a Jewish obligation to defend. I believe that the nation-state of Israel, like all nation-states on this earth, is deeply imperfect and that my calling out its imperfections make me no less a Zionist than my criticisms of the United States make me any less a patriot. I believe that the fact that I believe myself to have journeyed from Egypt means that I have an obligation to my covenanted people and to the stranger in my midst and these obligations are part and parcel of my very being. I believe that these beliefs, self-evident as they are to me, are not so self-evident to all Jews (certainly not in the face of antisemites) and that it is the obligation of Jewish educational institutions, this one included, to position our youth to enter this world with the vocabulary, sophistication, and information they need to respond to the inhospitable thought-communities that await them. Most of all, I believe it to be the obligation of every Jewish family to instill in their children a love of Judaism and love of Israel so that whatever their future holds, they will be proud and knowledgeable of who they are, of who their people are, of where they came from, and for what they are fighting.

Friends, our era does not lack for challenges. But for those with an eye for such things, in the broad arc of Jewish history, the decades in which our lives are playing out are as good as it gets. If it is to remain that way, if we are to ensure it remains the case for our children and grandchildren, we dare not sit complacent. There is work to be done; there are challenges to be addressed. No different than any generation, Amalek remains in our midst. Let us be vigilant, let us fight the good fight and let us plant the seeds for our shared future.