There has been an attack on Jews, nearly every night of Hanukkah this year. Violent hate crimes, clearly fueled by anti-semitism, and a desire to divide communities already wrought with division.
One of the goals of anti-semitic violence throughout history, has been to make us afraid, and to attempt to make us ashamed. Of who we are, where we come from, and what we have always endured.
This is part of why many Jews place their menorah in the window, as a statement of courage, reminding their neighbors of who they are, the ancient heritage they honor, and that they are not afraid.
The last few years have emboldened a set of ideologies, some thought the world had left behind long ago. There are many forces at play, but without question, the current administration has protected and supported those who perpetuate racial supremacy, and bigotry in all its forms.
Over the last generation or so, some American Jews have found their way into many of the highest echelons of culture and power. We have, in so many ways, been normalized into whiteness, and been allowed to traffic in circles that had previously been reserved exclusively for the colonizer. To be sure, this welcome has not been complete, and any Jew who has spent time in largely white cultures will tell you there remains a distinct and pervasive othering. But certainly the privileges afforded this generation of Jews, have surpassed nearly any generation before.
This photo is of the Carasso family in New York City, more than a hundred years ago. The man with the mustache is my great grandfather Jack, who was the first to arrive from Thessaloniki. He spoke eleven languages, and began a restaraunt supply business, to sell goods to all the other immigrant communities. He eventually made enough money to bring his brothers out, and then his cousin and mother as well.
In the front is my great great grandmother Miriam. The matriarch of the family, who ruled with an iron fist. Like everyone else in the family, she arrived speaking Ladino - a dying language that is in many ways a mixture of Hebrew and Spanish. It was the language of the Sephardics, who traveled across the Mediterranean and Northern Africa, fleeing a new wave of persecution every generation or so, for nearly two millennia.
There was no question when they arrived on these shores, to a power structure dominated by the descendants of northern and western europeans, that they were distinctly other. Even among the Jews, they were not welcomed in the large synagogues of the Azkanazai, finding instead the Shuls of the Sephardim.
My grandfather Seymour continued the restaurant supply business, until it eventually failed, and he spent the rest of his days as a salesman, selling kitchen goods on behalf of others. My father was then born in the Bronx, moved to Queens, and was bar mitzvahed with the other Sephardic boys. All his life, he wished he could have spent those formative years of Hebrew School, learning baseball with the Irish and Italian kids in his neighborhood.
When he turned eighteen, he looked around at a cramped apartment, and a family still playing out the traumas of generational persecution in how they treated one another, and decided he wanted something new. On thanksgiving day, he packed up his car, and headed west.
He would eventually find quinoa, and holistic agriculture, and meditation, and a blonde babe from southern california who loved the ocean. But at eighteen years old, all he knew was he was ready for change.
When my brother and I were born, he decided to not have us bar mitzvahed. He believed the most important path a human being could pursue, is the discovery of their own, personal and unique relationship to truth. As a result, he felt his roll as a parent was to expose us to as many paths as possible, and give us the tools necessary to make these larger choices for ourselves.
He believed in questioning, and seeking. In debate, and the great challenging of ideas.
At least one morning every weekend, we would wake up early, put on our sunday best, and find our way to a new house of worship. Sometimes we would stay for several months, sometimes only for a single visit. We would always listen and learn, sing and pray, honor the traditions, and learn whatever insights they had to share. And inevitably, we would always move on.
Looking back, its clear we received an invaluable education, and gained an expansive empathy for different cultures, perspectives, paradigms and cosmologies. And while it was not a traditionally Jewish journey, something about it was also profoundly Jewish. As a people who had been forced to survive in one place after another, under power structures that were never our own, we had always had to learn to adapt and listen, in ways that were simply not necessary, for cultures who existed as the majority, on the land of their ancestors.
Before my great-grandmother on my grandmothers side passed away, she gave my Dad three clues about her homeland, that she remembered from before the war. The first was butterflies. More butterflies than she would ever see again. The second was the smell of oranges. Orange trees and olive trees, lined the river they lived beside. And the third was a cave. In the cave had been a great loom, where her mother, and her mother before her, had made large rugs to be sold among the Ottoman empire.
When I was eighteen, my father and I flew to the island of Rhodes, and found the only synagogue still on the island. There we shared these clues, and went on a great adventure to find our family land. I will never forget walking up to the cave, and seeing the old broken loom, covered in a century of dust. Walking along the river, we ate the oranges that grew abundantly, and cried at the site of the old stone homes, bombed by the Italians. Even today, that river is home to one of the worlds great migrations of butterflies. Every time I see one nearby, I suspect my great-grandmother is there, guiding my path.
A few days later, the Rabbi brought us to a large black rock, placed high above the mountains. On that rock were seven hundred family names, each taken from the island by the Italians, and handed over to the Germans. There were seven names of our direct family on that rock, forever engraved, and forever erased.
At eighteen I laid at that rock all day long. There were hours when i wept hysterically, my body heaving sobs that shook me to my core. And hours when i would simply stare at the clouds, and imagine how different my life would be with cousins, and relatives from all these ended lines. More than anything, my body cried the tears of generations, asking why the world would ever allow such a thing to happen.
It would be seven years before i backpacked into the Congo, and encountered a conflict that in modern times, had claimed more lives, than Jews who died in the holocaust. Clearly it was different, in a vast variety of ways. But i knew without question that there was a great work ahead, and that if the people of the world responded with the full force of our conscience and will, the great grandchildren of these persecuted women, would eventually be able to make their way in the world, with some modicum of freedom and dignity, as my brother and I have been able to do.
I remember sitting at a dinner table in eastern Congo, just along the beautiful Lake Kivu, and enjoying a feast with a heroic man who had become a surgeon to serve his people, and whose medical care had saved tens of thousands of lives. We were talking about violence, and he said that if I really wanted to understand war and peace in the world, the very center of global conflict was Palestine and Israel.
Of course I objected, as we were only a few hundred miles from the deepest red zone in the world, where there were the highest rates of death. But he was was adamant. Congo was where the world was fighting for control of the resources that would power the modern world, but Israel and Palestine is where the great powers had locked horns in perpetual war.
Many years later I would lock the door to the falling whistles office for the final time, and hand the keys back to our landlord. That same day, I got in a taxi and headed for the airport. It would be my first journey back to the promiseland.
What followed was a luxurious and deeply illuminating trip, where we were given a chance to see Israel in all its beauty. The entrepreneurs and the modern cities. The power brokers, and the weapons that guard them. The politicians who are working to create a new way, and the religious leaders who work toward peace. The activists who are striving to hold power accountable, and the journalists who choose to cover or ignore their stories. The communities who share all they have, and the kibbutz’ that support them. The socialists who fight for what they believe was the original intent of Israel, and the soldiers who defend what it is today.
The only thing we were not given a chance to see, was Palestine.
At the time I was too shocked to properly communicate my anger and disappointment. I would comment to a friend that week, that it felt like touring Mississippi in the 50’s to understand the battle for civil rights, and never visiting a black neighborhood. Such erasure would be an outrage of epic proportion. And yet here we were, on an adaptation of Birthright, normalizing the complete exclusion of a persecuted people.
For years I had naively hoped, to never need to comment publicly on this conflict. It is one of the few issues that is guaranteed to cost friendships, where well meaning people from all sides, find alternative perspectives from their own so offensive and hostile, that they cut people out of their lives forever. I knew I had to do what I could to contribute toward peace, and support those at the frontlines. But my own hypocrisy was glaring, as I asked a generation to be whistleblowers, and could not find the courage to do so myself.
Much has changed since then, and the last few weeks have changed everything forever. Among the many seismic shifts, is that the International Criminal Court has opened an investigation into War Crimes committed by Israel. This is no small thing, and must be taken as the gravely serious step that it is.
During this same season, our current administration has issued an executive order, connecting all American Jews with the nationality of Israel. This is aligned with anti-semitic tactics throughout history, which have claimed we could never belong to any nation, as thoroughly as we belonged to one another. The obvious conclusion being that we ultimately cannot be trusted, paving the way for the accusation that we are traitors. It is in many ways, reminiscent of Nazi Germany, which said we were Jews first and Germans second, and therefore had to be forcefully removed.
Just after this order was placed into law, the Presidents lawyer Rudy Giuliani claimed he was more Jewish than George Soros - whose family was killed in the holocaust for being Jewish - because Soros does not support Israel.
During the same few weeks, there was also a coordinated smear campaign waged against Jeremy Corbyn, a life long defender of human rights, decrying him as an anti-semite because he dared to demand dignity for Palestinians.
And then the Washington Examiner had the audacity to question the Jewishness of Bernie Sanders - whose family was also killed in the holocaust - for having done the same. They specifically called him “ethnically Jewish”, insinuating that any Jew who supports Palestine, cannot be fully Jewish.
And now, a string of targeted attacks against Jews, many made with abrupt and dramatic violence. Synagogues and schools have been defaced with swastikas, a woman's dorm at a Jewish school was set on fire, posters have been placed across Vermont saying “its okay to be anti-semitic”, Jews of all ages, from children to elders, have been punched on the streets of New York, a fraternity in Indiana was suspended for hate-speech against Jews, Jewish cemeteries across Europe have been defaced, and just last night, five people were stabbed in a Rabbi’s home. The attacker used a machete.
Here are the names of the Monsey attack victims, for those who pray.
יחיאל מאכל נחמן בן אלקה לאה
Yehiel Michel Nahman ben Elka Leah
שלמה בן וויטאל
Shlomo ben Vittel
יוסף בן פארל
Yosef ben Perel
נפתלה צבי בן גילה
Naftula Tzvi ben Gila
מאיר יוסף בן וויטאל
Meir Yosef ben Vittel
Given their pain, the suffering of their families, and the fear felt by so many, it felt time to finally sit down and write, if for no other reason than to say - this is going to get worse yall. It has the potential to get much, much worse. We are going to need allies around the world, to stand with the Jewish people, as Jewish people have so often stood with oppressed people in every corner of mother earth.
The attacker was a Black man, and his race is being used as a chance to call for more policing, more profiling, and more violence. We will not become safer by persecuting other people, who are also under siege by the violent forces of the State, as we have so often been.
There is a cycle. Anti-semitic violence drives fear into Jewish communities, and that fear often moves in two directions - toward calls for further police, and toward support for further militarizing Israel, in the hopes that someone will actually protect them. Both give power to those who profit from war, and both separate us from building meaningful coalition with all the other communities, who are also facing daily, systematic violence.
Here in the states, the claim that one is not patriotic enough, has often been enough to take down movements and figureheads. The same has been true of the accusation of anti-semitism. These are charges that get bandied about without real concern for the consequences. There is a vast and enduring difference, in being patriotic to a land and a people, versus swearing fealty to a set of symbols and rituals that define a particular power structure over that land. And yet here we are, with so many Jews attacked over the last week, and the Presidents lawyer is rattling on about how anti-semitic a Jewish man is. Giuliani, and the man who employs him, are men without honor.
White evangelical leaders have been playing a very dangerous game in this country, for a very long time. Specifically one in which they tolerate, or even outright support, white supremacy in their congregation, while courting Zionists who they believe will help usher in the second coming, when the chosen people have returned to the holy land. Zionist leaders who work to use this cultural movement for their own supremacy in the region, are playing with a fire that has scorched our people far too many times.
If you want to support Israel, you have every right to do so. If you want to support Palestinians, you have every right to do so. But to pretend that Zionism, and the movement to impose the modern borders of a nation state, is the same as being Jewish, is both false and dangerous.
Jewish culture, faith and identity are fundamentally distinct from Zionism, and there are whole ideologies and theologies of Jews, who foundationally disagree with the project of nation building in any form. It is not my place to say whether they are right or wrong. But they are without question, Jews.
There are over 36 passages in the Torah, calling us to care for the vulnerable and the immigrant. In this time of great mourning and fear within the Jewish community, I pray we return to these teachings, and reject calls to meet violence with further violence.
A 14th century philosopher said “Those who are conquered, always want to imitate their conqueror.” I first began to realize this in studying Mobutu Se Seko, one of the great Kleptocrats of the last century. He ruled in the wake of Patrice Lumumba’s assassination by the CIA, and dominated the country for the next four decades, exploiting the people as the Belgians had done before him, and selling raw goods such as Uranium, back to the U.S. and other imperial powers. In expansive and often absurd ways, he lived his life in imitation of King Leopold - the king of the Belgians who had ordered the butchering of over ten million Congolese. From his mansions to his boats to his clothing, Mobutu found a way to mimic this criminal colonizer, and despite the differences in the color of their skin, to continue the brutal legacy Leopold had begun.
Few nations have militarized their society on the scale of Nazi Germany. From the little boys to the little girls, everyone was recruited into the war machine. Those driving this project, were motivated by a belief in their supremacy, and their ordained right to live on germanic land, free from the influence of those they considered outsiders.
Spending time in Israel for the first time, I was struck by how similar the rhetoric used against Palestinians, was to the rhetoric that had so often been weaponized against Jews. Words such as cockroaches, and scum, and worse. In that language I felt the fear of my family, and the way that fear had been manipulated for generations. And I felt the stockholm-syndrome exhibited by Mobutu, where he idolized his capturers, and in so doing began to imitate them as well.
There is a difference, between Israelis who simply wish to live their lives in peace, and those who actively promote war and bigotry. Just as there is a difference, between so many Americans who arrived as oppressed religious minorities, indentured servants and the enslaved, as opposed to those who came to actively colonize a continent filled with millions of people, and thriving civilizations. We are not responsible for everything the power structure does in our name, but neither are we without responsibility. The crimes fueled with our tax dollars, our silence, and ultimately our compliance, are ours to own as well.
There can be no doubt, that Jewish people around the world deserve safety, and a chance to raise our families in peace. And there can be little doubt, that in the wake of such structural violence and oppression at the scale of what happened in the holocaust, it was reasonable to demand an army of our own, and a place where we can protect the vulnerable among us.
But Palestinians are human beings as well. Inherently valuable, and intrinsically free. They deserve their sovereignty, as all human beings do. Their liberation will now forever be tied up with the liberation of Jewish people, and our fates will forever be intertwined. Violence does not simply hurt those being abused; it hurts the abuser as well. There will never be a peace, absent a commitment to the liberation of all.
Hanukkah is complete, and the eight candles have all been lit. Last night in the Grand Army Plaza, Hasidic Jews danced in the rain while lighting a large public menorah. Around them, were Jews of every race and theological persuasion. And around them, were Muslim allies as well as non-Jewish Black and Brown allies, protecting the celebration of light against the darkness. I can think of no greater visual for the path forward.
Nothing is harder than unity in the face of violence and bigotry. Nothing is more important. May we stand together, shoulder to shoulder and across the world, in demanding a future of peace, where all our families are protected, and all our people are free. Amen.