It has been two weeks since I attended my daughter’s college graduation, and my pride in her achievements, in the person she is, and in the person she is becoming shows no signs of subsiding. I will be riding this tsunami of nachas for as long as it will carry me.
And yet, as I reflect on that weekend – the processionals, the joyful gathering of families – I find myself returning to a question that has left me unsettled: What was it about the graduation that triggered such disturbing emotions in me?
Was it the ubiquitous presence of Palestinian flags, keffiyehs, and divestment leaflets present throughout the ceremonies? No, I don’t think so. It may not be my cup of tea, but as a defender of free speech, I understand – and affirm – the right of those students to express their politics and point of view.
Was it the chants that momentarily disrupted the university president’s address to the students? Again, no. Having witnessed the disruptions at my older daughter’s graduation last year, I can say with confidence: These students neither protest (nor drink) as they do at my alma mater.
Was it the fact that some of those expressing solidarity with Palestinians also self-identified as Jews? That certainly gave me pause, and I will return to that, but I’m not naïve, nor do I believe in policing thought. They, too, have every right to express their beliefs.
So, what was it that triggered me so?
If I had to distill it down to a single thought, I would say this: What triggered me – what made me convulse then, and still makes me shudder now – was the sight of so many caps, gowns, and stoles emblazoned with the words “Free Palestine,” the same words spoken by the murderer of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim just three days earlier. Two beautiful young souls in their prime, gunned down in cold blood outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC Their lives stolen, their families left to mourn – an antisemitic hate crime of the highest order. The couple, about to be engaged, had not even been buried yet, and still with every parading student, the refrain of their killer stared me straight in the face.
A world turned upside down. Surreal. Unbelievable. Dystopian.
And it is a convulsion that was only compounded by this week’s attack in Boulder, Colorado. A peaceful vigil for the fifty-six hostages still held by Hamas, a rally akin to the ones many of us attend in Central Park on Sundays, assaulted by a man chanting “Free Palestine” and “End Zionists” as he hurled Molotov cocktails into the crowd. Twelve were injured, including an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor. Police later discovered sixteen unused Molotov cocktails. It could have been much, much worse.
American Jews are living in a fraught and harrowing time. From DC to Boulder; from the firebombing of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s home to the word “Gaza” spray-painted on the doors of Hebrew Union College in New York, no corner of Jewish life feels untouched. A rap song recently gained traction online for explicitly praising Hitler. Public figures casually flash antisemitic hand gestures. Politicians on the right embrace known Holocaust deniers, while voices on the left slander Israel with the charge of genocide. The lines between fact and fiction blur. Major news outlets falsely accuse Israel of firing on innocents, some issuing corrections only after the damage is done, some not at all. From coast to coast, online to campus quad, the message is loud and harrowing: Jews are not safe.
The precautions we now take come at significant cost, financial and emotional. Bag checks. Magnetometers. Police details. This week, I received an email from the convener of a conference I will be attending instructing participants not to share any details of the meeting in advance and to remain inside the hotel until our Uber arrives to take us to our location. As a community rabbi, I get stopped on the street all the time, usually by folks offering warm greetings or congregants asking to switch their children’s bnei mitzvah dates. Who is to say, whether, God forbid, those sidewalk exchanges will ever turn dark?
There is no shortage of threats, and there are, thankfully, ongoing efforts locally and nationally addressing them tirelessly as we see them. In light of recent events, I would like to call out what I believe to be an inescapable reality of our time. “Free Palestine” can no longer be understood merely as a slogan championing Palestinian self-determination. It must be understood as an antisemitic slur and a call to violence against Jews. It has no place in polite society; its usage should be condemned in civil discourse; and its usage should be avoided by all, especially by Jews whose very personhood is threatened by it.
I said it, I mean it, I stand by it. But before I continue saying what I want to say, let me also be clear about what I am not saying. I am not, presently, weighing in on Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza and its horrific human cost, about the conditions by which a two-state solution is or isn’t feasible, about Israel’s settlement policy in the West Bank, about the best way to secure the release of the hostages, or about a zillion things about which legitimate and civil debate is both kosher and necessary. I am not, presently, weighing in on the American administration’s policies vis-à-vis the Middle East, the university system, or immigration. I am certainly not – and I want to be very clear on this last point – making some sort of First Amendment legal argument suggesting that critique of Israeli policy or calls for Palestinian liberation be criminalized.
My “call out,” my plea, if you will, is a narrow one and it comes from the heart, or perhaps from what we Jews call sekhel, common sense. It is about the shifting landscape in which we live, about how the meaning of language changes, and about how each one of us is a stakeholder in the question of how unchecked language can and has become the instrument of violence. “Free Palestine” need not have been imagined, in its origin, as an antisemitic slur, but because the goalposts have shifted, because of its repeated use as Jewish blood has been threatened and spilled, because those antisemitic acts have found – Luigi Mangione-like – justification and lionization online after the fact, it has become exactly that. Not for all, but for many, enough to give us pause, “Free Palestine” has come to mean an end to the Jewish state and justification of violence against Jews.
I am no linguistic philosopher. I can’t even spell “Wittgenstein.” But I know enough to know that language changes and context matters. I know that there is a difference between words as they are spoken and words as they are heard. Mark Twain wouldn’t write the same way now as he did in his day. Street signs no longer say, “Men at Work.” Rabbis, at least this rabbi no longer refers to God as “He” or “She,” no matter the conventions in which I was raised. This recognition impacts how language is used over generations, but also how it could and should be used in any particular moment. “All Lives Matter” meant something very different following George Floyd’s murder than it did before. “Am Yisrael Chai” means something very different when it is being sung by an early childhood classroom than when it is chanted by right-wing Jewish extremists marching through an Arab neighborhood. And sometimes what was OK for one moment is decidedly un-OK for another. Not every man who has ever whistled at a woman is a misogynist, but it is not something one should ever do today. In my heart of hearts, I cannot bring myself to believe that Bo and Luke Duke of Dukes of Hazzard fame were racists, but they called their car the “General Lee,” they painted a Confederate flag on its roof, and the honk of their horn was the first twelve notes of “Dixie” – three things nobody should ever do today.
And you know what else nobody should do anymore? Say: “Free Palestine.” Add it to the list of other coded terms antisemites use to justify violence against us: “From the River to the Sea,” “Intifada Revolution,” “Globalizers,” “Zio-Jews.” No matter its origins, it has, through its repetition in violent or exclusionary settings, taken on dangerous new meaning. A slogan that has become a slur, a slur that when amplified by way of the cesspool of social media, is translated into violence-inducing hate speech and behavior.
And to those who contend that we must distinguish between the rhetoric of the few and the intentions of the many, that calls to curb language of Palestinian liberation are to grant victory to fearmongers, that we need to give folk the benefit of the doubt, to them I have four words or, more precisely, two names for you: Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim. They didn’t, and never will have, the benefit of the doubt. The fact that the self-same progressive instinct that would curb, cancel, and condemn the slightest verbal foot-fault as a damnable microaggression felt by any other community, but refuses to employ the same argument when it comes to protecting Jewish lives, is an irony and a hypocrisy that reeks itself of antisemitism.
And yes, if there is anybody who should be particularly careful in their use of language, it is Jews. I live my life with an abiding awareness that what I do matters – as a Jew, and especially as a rabbi. It is why I stand up for the people and State of Israel against her enemies and, sometimes, why I will take a stand when I believe the behaviors of my co-religionists, acting in the name of my faith, do not serve the long-term interests of my people. It is why I participated in the 2023 demonstration against the proposed judicial reform, or, more recently, why I participated in the protests against the extremist Israeli minister Itamar Ben Gvir when he set foot in Manhattan. Jews must hold ourselves to account. But for one Jew to brandish the very slogan of those who would perpetrate violence against other Jews is an act of moral self-immolation that only serves to provide cover to the very people who seek to do Jews harm. In this world of trigger warnings, land acknowledgements, and pronominal sensitivity, surely there is a way to express dissent with the Israeli government and empathy with the Palestinian cause that does not jeopardize the well-being of Jewish people. If the lead guitarist for Radiohead figured out a way to do it and you can’t, then you are either not trying hard enough, or this issue is more about you than it is about anyone else.
Too often, I am reminded of the protagonist of this week’s Haftarah, the tragic hero Samson. Samson didn’t fall because he was weak. He fell because he wanted to be loved – so badly that he forgot who he was. He shared the secret of his strength with Delilah, someone who sought not his flourishing, but his downfall. I get it, we all want to be accepted. Samson did. Everyone does. We long to be seen as just and good. But if we give up the source of our strength, if we give up our own truths in order to be embraced by those who seek our harm and deny our right to exist, as a people or a nation, then we, like Samson, may wake up one day to find our eyes gouged out and our power gone.
Antisemitism may be the most ancient of hatreds, but like a virus, its pathology mutates in every generation. Its most recent form is dressed in the language of anti-Zionism. As guardians of the global Jewish body politic, we stand on guard. Be it from the left or the right, be it a march in the street or a mayoral primary, be it expressions beyond our community or from within our ranks, we stand on guard. In every generation, and especially in ours, we summon the courage to name the hatreds we face, to confront them, and to stand unflinchingly in defense of our people.