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Beyond the ‘Day of Hate’: The best strategy to keep American Jews safe over the long term
(JTA) — My synagogue sent out a cautiously anxious email yesterday about an event coming this Shabbat, a neo-Nazi “Day of Hate.” The email triggered fuzzy memories of one of the strangest episodes that I can remember from my childhood.
Sometime around 1990, in response to local neo-Nazi activity, some Jews from my community decided to “fight back.” I don’t know whether they were members of the militant Jewish Defense League, or perhaps just sympathetic to a JDL-style approach. When our local Jewish newspaper covered the story, it ran on its front cover a full-page photo of a kid from my Orthodox Jewish high school. The photo showed a teenage boy from behind, wearing a kippah and carrying a baseball bat that was leaning threateningly on his shoulder.
As it happens, “Danny” was not a member of the JDL, he was a kid on his way to play baseball. Sometimes, a baseball bat is just a baseball bat. But not for us anxious Jews in America: We want to see ourselves as protagonists taking control of our destiny, responding to antisemites with agency, with power, with a plan. I’m sorry to say that as I look around our community today, it seems to me that we have agency, and we have power — but we certainly don’t seem to have a plan.
The tactics that the American Jewish community uses to fight back against antisemitism are often ineffective on their own and do not constitute a meaningful strategy in the composite. One is that American Jews join in a partisan chorus that erodes our politics and fixates on the antisemitism in the party they don’t vote for. This exacerbates the partisan divide, which weakens democratic culture, and turns the weaponizing of antisemitism into merely a partisan electoral tactic for both sides.
Another tactic comes from a wide set of organizations who have declared themselves the referees on the subject and take to Twitter to name and shame antisemites. This seems to amplify and popularize antisemitism more than it does to suppress it.
A third common tactic is to pour more and more dollars into protecting our institutions with robust security measures, which no one thinks will defeat antisemitism, but at least seeks to protect those inside those institutions from violence, though it does little to protect Jews down the street. Richer Jewish institutions will be safer than poorer ones, but Jews will continue to suffer either way.
A fourth tactic our communal organizations use to fight antisemitism is to try to exact apologies or even fines from antisemites to get them to retract their beliefs and get in line, as the Anti-Defamation League did with Kyrie Irving, an approach that Yair Rosenberg has wisely argued is a no-win proposition. Yet another tactic is the insistence by some that the best way to fight antisemitism is to be proud Jews, which has the perverse effect of making our commitment to Jewishness dependent on antisemitism as a motivator.
And finally, the most perverse tactic is that some on both the right and the left fight antisemitism by attacking the ADL itself. Since it is so hard to defeat our opponents, we have started beating up on those that are trying to protect us. What could go wrong?
Steadily, like a drumbeat, these tactics fail, demonstrating themselves to be not a strategy at all, and the statistics continue to show a rise in antisemitism.
Perhaps we are too fixated on the idea that antisemitism is continuous throughout Jewish history, proving only that there is no effective strategy for combating this most persistent of hatreds.
Instead, we would do well to recall how we responded to a critical moment in American Jewish history in the early 20th century. In the aftermath of the Leo Frank lynching in 1915 – the murder of a Jewish man amid an atmosphere of intense antisemitism — Jewish leaders formed what would become the ADL by building a relationship with law enforcement and the American legal and political establishment. The ADL recognized that the best strategy to keep American Jews safe over the long term, in ways that would transcend and withstand the political winds of change, was to embed in the police and criminal justice system the idea that antisemitism was their problem to defeat. These Jewish leaders flipped the script of previous diasporic experiences; not only did they become “insiders,” they made antisemitism anathema to America itself. (And yes, it was the Leo Frank incident that inspired “Parade,” the forthcoming Broadway musical that this week attracted white supremacist protesters.)
For Jews, the high-water mark of this strategy came in the aftermath of the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh. It was the low point in many ways of the American Jewish experience, the most violent act against Jews on American soil, but it was followed by a mourning process that was shared across the greater Pittsburgh community. The words of the Kaddish appeared above the fold of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. That is inconceivable at most other times of Jewish oppression and persecution. It tells the story of when we are successful – when antisemitism is repudiated by the general public. It is the most likely indicator that we will be collectively safe in the long run.
We were lucky that this move to partner with the establishment was successful. I felt this deeply on a recent trip to Montgomery, Alabama. Seeing the memorials to Black Americans persecuted and lynched by and under the very system that should have been protecting them from the worst elements of society is a reminder that not all minorities in America could then — or today — win over the elements of American society that control criminal justice.
Visitors view items left by well-wishers along the fence at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on the first anniversary of the attack there, Oct. 27, 2019. (Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)
A strategic plan to defeat antisemitism that must be collectively embraced by American Jews would build on this earlier success and invest in the infrastructure of American democracy as the framework for Jewish thriving and surviving, and continue the historic relationship-building that changed the Jews’ position in America. It would stop the counterproductive internecine and partisan battle that is undermining the possibility of Jewish collective mobilization.
It means more investment, across partisan divides, in relationships with local governments and law enforcement, using the imperfect “definitions of antisemitism” as they are intended — not for boundary policing, but to inform and help law enforcement to monitor and prevent violent extremism. It means supporting lawsuits and other creative legal strategies, like Integrity First for America’s groundbreaking efforts against the Unite the Right rally organizers, which stymie such movements in legal gridlock and can help bankrupt them.
It means practicing the lost art of consensus Jewish collective politics which recognize that there must be some baseline agreement that antisemitism is a collective threat, even if any “unity” we imagine for the Jewish community is always going to be be instrumental and short-lived.
It means supporting institutions like the ADL, even as they remain imperfect, even as they sometimes get stuck in some of the failed strategies I decried above, because they have the relationships with powerful current and would-be allies in the American political and civic marketplace, and because they are fighting against antisemitism while trying to stay above the partisan fray.
It means real education and relationship-building with other ethnic and faith communities that is neither purely instrumental nor performative — enough public relations visits to Holocaust museums! — so that we have the allies we need when we need them, and so that we can partner for our collective betterment.
And most importantly, it means investing in the plodding, unsexy work of supporting vibrant American democracy — free and fair elections, voting rights, the rule of law, peaceful transitions of power — because stable liberal democracies have been the safest homes for minorities, Jews included.
I doubt we will ever be able to “end” individual antisemitic acts, much less eradicate antisemitic hate. “Shver tzu zayn a Yid” (it’s hard to be a Jew). We join with our fellow Americans who live in fear of the lone wolves and the hatemongers who periodically terrorize us. But we are much more capable than we are currently behaving to fight back against the collective threats against us. Instead, let’s be the smart Americans we once were.
The real work right now is not baseball bats or billboards, it is not Jewish pride banalities or Twitter refereeing: It is quiet and powerful and, if done right, as American Jews demonstrated in the last century, it will serve us for the long term.
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The definitive Oct. 7 book was written — and sketched — before the attack
As Salomé Parent-Rachdi and Zac Deloupy worked on the drawings for a book about Israeli-Palestinian romance, they had no way of knowing the world they were depicting was on the brink of collapse.
The day they finished their pencil sketches, we learn in the book’s introduction, was Oct. 6, 2023. The next day, Hamas invaded Israel, killing about 1,200 and taking another 251 hostage. By the time the book was published in April 2024, Israel was locked in a multi-front war that still hasn’t quite settled.
That context — a looming attack, a forever war that has not yet begun — colors every panel of Love and Desire in the Promised Land: The Private Lives of Israelis and Palestinians, a French graphic nonfiction book whose English translation was released this summer. Reading the book feels like opening a time capsule that had been buried in the distant past: Even as it reminds you how bad the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was before Oct. 7, it leaves you wishing desperately you could restore things to how they were.
The book follows Parent-Rachdi, a French journalist, as she travels across Israel and the Palestinian territories to interview 16 subjects about their love lives. She talks to a mix of singles and couples, straight and gay, in Israel, West Bank and Gaza. (That’s one giveaway this book couldn’t have been made today: No journalist has been permitted to enter Gaza unaccompanied since Oct. 7.)
A few tell of dating across Palestinian-Israeli lines. Lana, an Arab Israeli, finds herself in a situationship with a right-wing Israeli — and ends up marrying him. Samira, an Arab Israeli woman, tells us about her Israeli ex, whose enlistment during the 2014 Gaza war — when they are living together — brings the unspoken tension in their relationship out into the open. And we learn the complex family dynamics of a celebrity Muslim-Jewish couple: Fauda star Tsahi Halevi and his Arab-Israeli wife, TV anchor Lucy Aharish.
The less politically fraught experiences are relayed with the same empathy. Avi, an ex-Hasid, reveals that, despite unbearable teenage horniness, he initially didn’t know how to find porn on the internet due to his insular upbringing. (He searches for “woman in pajamas” instead.) Rami, Parent-Rachdi’s fixer and taxi driver in Gaza, says, as a single man in his thirties, he told people he had erectile dysfunction so they wouldn’t grow suspicious.
In between these revelations are glimpses of life as it was in Israel and the Palestinian territories before Oct. 7. We ride shotgun as Parent-Rachdi navigates checkpoints on her way out of the West Bank and deals with Israeli and Palestinian officials on the way into Gaza. Rami — who did finally marry — says he made sure his son was born in Jordan so that he wouldn’t be trapped in Gaza as an adult. Parent-Rachdi has brought his stepson a remote-control car — the kind of toy Rami can’t buy in Gaza due to the Israeli blockade.
The love stories describe conflict, of course, and they do not uniformly lead to happy endings. (Or for that matter, breakups.) What they consistently show instead is people — as far as we can tell, basically good people — reaching out to each other in a pressure cooker of cultural, religious, sexual and political attitudes.
The stories also betray civilians’ genuine skepticism of their own communities with a frankness that seems unimaginable today. The clearest example of this comes in Gaza, where Mohammed, a closeted Palestinian looking for hookups, tells Parent-Rachdi about Hamas honor killings of gay men and his own brush with death. “They’re more likely to kill you if you’re a bottom,” he says matter-of-factly. Catfished by a Hamas intelligence officer, Mohammed escapes arrest by swearing he’s a virgin and flees to the U.S. a few days later.
Would Mohammed make the same disclosures today, when “What about Hamas?” has become a refrain for anyone defending Israel’s response to Oct. 7? The Gaza he left behind no longer exists. The book’s afterword, written in Feb. 2024, reveals that Rami’s wife’s cosmetics store — lovingly illustrated by Deloupy earlier in the book — was leveled in Israeli airstrikes; the family was now living in a refugee camp in Rafah. “We have gone from a life with all the modern comforts to a reality where we move with a cart, where we buy wood to split and burn in order to cook and take a shower,” he says.
As for Mohammed, his house was destroyed, as were many friendships with Jews and Israelis: “I write to them,” he says in the afterword. “They don’t respond, but they read my message.” As for Hamas, he says, “today, seeing the suffering, somehow I feel like I better understand their resistance.” When the authors checked in with the subjects, several did not respond. By then, some 30,000 Palestinians were dead.
As it reminds us what we’ve lost, Love and Desire in the Promised Land also points the only way toward a shared future: people on all sides defying the forces pulling them apart. It shows us it can be done. Even in the afterword, one of the interviewees, a Modern Orthodox Jew named Jean-Marc, is optimistic: “I am still convinced, even more so now, that we have to work with the Palestinians,” he says. “Our safety depends on it.”
The post The definitive Oct. 7 book was written — and sketched — before the attack appeared first on The Forward.
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Christian leaders are racing toward the Rapture. Is Israel really to blame?
End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World
By Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 384 pages, $32
Judaism is not usually a religion associated with apocalyptic thought. There’s no Jewish version of the Book of Revelation. There is a concept of a Messianic Age, but most observant groups forbid interfering with — encouraging or discouraging — its arrival.
Yet Judaism, or at least Israel, is central to Christian apocalyptic thought. The lines that drive its connection to Israel are well-traced. The Book of Revelation requires Jews to return to the promised land, and a Third Temple to be built for Jesus to return, and so, for years, Christian Zionists like John Hagee, the founder of Christians United for Israel and Mike Huckabee, the current U.S. ambassador to Israel, have encouraged wars in the region, seeing them as part of prophecy.
Hagee and Huckabee have talked in glowing terms of the many lands they believe comprise “greater Israel” all becoming part of the modern nationstate, in fulfillment of biblical requirements for the Rapture. Byron Stinson, another wealthy evangelical leader, has worked to breed and import blemish-free red heifers to Israel, because their ashes are necessary to build the Third Temple that will herald the return of Jesus.
More recently, the Jewish extremists who are also hungry to build a Third Temple have moved from the fringe into the Israeli government. Several times now, Israeli security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has stalked around the Temple Mount, where Jews are officially forbidden from prayer, and led a large group in prayer, flanked by the police force he heads. Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s minister of finance, has promised to fund the construction of a Third Temple.
But as powerful as these Jewish leaders are, the Christians are far bigger. CUFI, the group led by Hagee, is the biggest Zionist group in the U.S., far larger than AIPAC.
And yet End Times Fascism, a new book from activists and writers Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor — Klein is known for books like No Logo and Shock Doctrine, where she coined the relevant term “disaster capitalism” — focuses largely on Israel, and the extremists in its government.
The book’s central argument is that accelerationist fanatics believe an apocalyptic future will benefit them — whether in heaven or on earth. And they’re racing toward that future with increasingly fascistic terms.
These apocalyptic futures vary. For Christians, it might be the Rapture, and ultimately heaven. For AI techies, it’s a world ruled by the silicone grip of an all-knowing machine — or at least a world ruled by the superrich and filled with AI-driven propaganda masquerading as the voice of God while it surveils its users. For ethno-nationalists, it’s a homogenous country in which they can live out their nostalgia for an imagined perfect past. End Times Fascism is divided into sections, each taking on one of these groups and its ravenous vision for the end of the world, and how it is leading the world into fascism — through moral policing, surveillance, xenophobia.
But in the section on religious extremism, Israeli extremists get at least as much airtime as the Christians, despite the fact that these end time fanatics have far less global influence and don’t represent the vast majority of Jews.
It is, of course, important to understand the interplay between Christian apocalyptic thought and Judaism, and this is where things can get tangled. Christian Zionists’ desire for the Rapture leads them to support Israel and, sometimes, to display a kind of philosemitism. Ultimately, they are neither true friends to the Jews nor supporters of Israel; Hagee once gave a sermon claiming God sent Hitler as a kind of shepherd to force Jews back to Israel, in alignment with the biblical plan — when, of course, Jews will convert or burn in hell. But these beliefs have not made most Jewish groups cut ties with CUFI; Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has, for decades, referred to U.S. Christian Zionists, and Hagee in particular, as beloved supporters of Israel, and has said that Christian Zionists made Jewish Zionism possible. Many Jews are similarly grateful for evangelical support of Israel, regardless of what less supportive beliefs might undergird it, and are willing to ally with these religious extremists if it means support for Israel’s wars and annexations.
Certainly, all of these thoughts build on one another, and are difficult to untangle; plenty of hawkish Jews and Israelis want Israel to expand for non-biblical reasons. But the vast majority of Jews are not actively working to build a Third Temple and bring about the end of the world as we know it. Yet Klein and Taylor represent Jews largely through extremists like Ben-Gvir, and even focus their discussion of Christian apocalyptic thought on its overlap with Judaism and Israel. These religions share the Hebrew Bible, but little else.
There is far more to Christian apocalyptic thought than Israel. Plenty of Rapture-hopefuls in the U.S. believe their own country is the promised land; indeed, theological power is shifting away from Israel, as a new cohort of Christian extremists like Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson catch hold of the political discourse and steer it toward open antisemitism and harsh scrutiny of U.S. support of Israel.
The old guard is being replaced by a new Christian right that is suspicious of Israel’s every action, and doesn’t egg on its wars. When Tucker Carlson interviewed Ted Cruz, a staunch supporter of Israel, the senator explained the Christian theological grounding of his support for Israel; Carlson, also a loudly devout Christian, jeered.
That’s not to say, of course, that there aren’t still many Christian Zionists in power in the U.S., shaping its foreign policy regarding Israel. But End Times Fascism feels as though it is stuck in a previous era of American Christianity, and of U.S. politics.
This problem is not limited to the section on religious apocalypse. The second part of the book, focused on the AI hunger of transhumanist tech titans, spends time on neoreactionary thinker Curtis Yarvin’s plan for a New Gaza, as it was presented at a Peter Thiel conference. Thiel is, himself, a Christian who is famously obsessed with the antichrist and the end of the world — once again, there is crossover, and these topics all share threads. But Israel is not the major driver of the race toward AI killing us all, or any other tech-related doom.
The fundamental idea of Klein and Taylor’s work is that rapturous obsessions drive not only worldly destruction — that much seems obvious — but also fascism. It’s a smart idea, and they have plenty of examples, whether surveillance by our internet overlords or ICE raids pushed for by white nationalists. But the book spends so much time on its trendiest target — Israel — when it should direct its energy examining figures like U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the muscular Christianity driving his new testosterone regime for the U.S. military, or influential online figures like Owens or Fuentes agitating for a white, Christian U.S. (Some of these influencers are mentioned, but not as primary drivers.)
Certainly, Israel is involved in U.S. politics, in Christian nationalism, in the building of an ethnostate. (Israel in fact appears least in the third section on ethnonationalism, which is surprising given its identity as a Jewish state.) But despite Israel’s importance, the U.S., and its leaders, are still far more powerful.
The issue might be the book’s structure. The idea that apocalyptic thought drives fascism is a fairly simple one, and many of Klein and Taylor’s examples are familiar. The idea that is more subtle, and harder to grasp, is the way the threads of eschatological thought, ethnonationalism and tech wealth all share ideas and shape each other.
Peter Thiel alone, given his tech companies, his antichrist obsession, his love of Nazi theorists and his influence over Vice President JD Vance, could generate at least a chapter in any of the book’s three sections, or serve as a throughline for the entire book. Yet the topics are divided, as though each form of apocalyptic thought is its own entity, instead of woven together to show the ways they all reinforce each other.
End Times Fascism closes with a section on how to fight the rising fascism. Perhaps this should be the main focus of the book; many people who read the news already feels as though our leaders are racing toward the apocalypse, or at least WW III and a second Great Depression. The real question is what to do.
End Times Fascism offers some inspirations, including New York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, as well as the Jewish Labor Bund. At least if the focus is once again on Jews, this time it’s positive.
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Why Dolly Parton sang a song about a Jewish journalist
A Broadway show, a star-studded television tribute, a new hotel and museum in Nashville. As odes to Dolly Parton keep coming, a recording of the late country music singer honoring an American Jewish journalist has recently surfaced.
Never before released in America, the song, “A Bridge Across,” sung by Parton and accompanied by the Nashville Symphony, honors slain journalist Daniel Pearl.
The song features spare lyrics set to violin music composed in honor of Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter who was brutally murdered by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002.
Originally recorded in 2008 by Parton, renowned fiddler Mark O’Connor, and the Nashville Symphony, the song was intended to be part of a compilation album called This is My America, produced and funded, oddly enough, in Canada but never released in the U.S.
It was O’Connor and his wife Maggie who resurrected the recording this fall, shortly after the deaths of Parton and another musician that connected the four artists: Oregon violinmaker Jonathan Cooper, who died in September.
Deeply troubled by the journalist’s murder in 2002, Cooper learned Pearl was an amateur fiddler and set out to create a quartet of string instruments – two violins, a viola and a cello – in the journalist’s honor. He entrusted the instruments to O’Connor to use during his annual summer music camp in North Carolina. Every year since, four students from the camp have received one of the Daniel Pearl memorial instruments to play for a year.
“These young people carry the message that love fights hatred through music-making and understanding that Daniel Pearl’s family want him remembered for,” O’Connor told The New York Times. Likewise, Cooper’s loving gesture inspired Parton, O’Connor said.
Canadian violinist Samantha Robichaud received one of the violins in 2005 and has gone on to become a successful recording artist with more than a half dozen albums. She has toured North America as an ambassador for the Daniel Pearl Foundation, sharing Pearl’s story, including his passion for
music and its power to change lives. Enter songwriters Tom McBryde and Lynn Wilbanks, whose introduction to Robichaud inspired verse.
On the album, the Nashville Symphony played one of Robichaud’s compositions while Parton introduced Pearl to listeners.
“He believed that music was something that could cross all social barriers, political borders and imaginary boundaries,” Parton says, before singing McBride’s and Wilbanks’ lyrics.
“A bridge across a question one journey begins, one step at a time to a place within.
A bridge across a border, a hand reaching out one heart at a time to erase the doubt.
A bridge across a difference can close a divide, one song to be sung on the other side.”
“It was perfect. She knows what he stood for,” Pearl’s father, Dr. Judea Pearl, told the Forward. “She was such a giving person.”
Judea Pearl met Parton in 2018 at the Los Angeles Press Club where she received that year’s Public Service Award for Contributions to Civic Life for her Imagination Library, which sends free books to children. (It inspired the creation of the PJ Library for Jewish books.) The Press Club recently dedicated its upcoming National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards to Parton’s memory.
In 2018, Judea Pearl was there to present the Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity in Journalism to Saudi Arabian writer and blogger Raif Badawi whose wife accepted the award while he served a 10-year prison sentence for his online activism.
The foundation devoted to Daniel Pearl’s legacy has been less visible since the 2021 death of Pearl’s mother Ruth who, as a young girl, witnessed and survived the anti-Jewish pogroms in Baghdad known as the Farhud.
As the 25th anniversary of his son’s murder approaches in February, Judea Pearl said the foundation will start a new chapter under his daughters’ leadership. Parton’s song lends the effort a touching soundtrack.
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