Unlike most voters, American Jews apparently do not get to choose which policies or government actions they support based on political principles. There’s a list, you see, of Special Obligations. Jews must do this or that, because as Jews we have a special obligation to everyone except ourselves.
This Law of Special Obligations is on full display in a New York Times article on the pro-Hamas crackdowns on college campuses.
The Times article itself was inevitable. Any time a politician or government does something ostensibly “for the Jews,” the Times will assign a reporter to write a story on how “the Jewish community is divided” over that thing. If kosher Chinese food were to fall like manna from the heavens, the New York Times would write a story titled “U.S. Jews Are Divided Over Free Chinese Food.” If the Times were around during the Exodus from ancient Egypt, it would publish an article titled “Schism Within Jewish Community Over Freedom From Slavery.” If the Purim story were to happen today, we’d get “How Haman’s Humiliation Has Become Fraught For Many Jews.”
The current version is “Trump’s Fight Against Antisemitism Has Become Fraught for Many Jews,” though another Times article about this topic used the “schism” framing, and a third used “divide” in the headline.
The point is not that it’s unusual for Jews to have varying opinions on the same issue—that’s the norm. Instead, what jumps out from the Times piece and others like it is the idea that Jews don’t get to choose. Like Hebrew National hot dogs, we answer to a higher authority apparently. Unlike Hebrew National hot dogs, the higher authority being referenced isn’t God.
It turns out that, like Judaism itself, Jewish political opinion-forming entails many rules. As far as I can tell, here are the main ones.
From the Times: “‘Find me a moment in history when Jews anywhere benefited from a mix of rampant nationalism and repression,’ wrote the journalist Matt Bai in a Washington Post opinion piece on Tuesday. ‘You’ll be looking awhile.’”
You’ve heard, no doubt, the refrain that “Jews are the canary in the coalmine.” It’s true: When Jews are systematically mistreated, others will likely be in for some pain in the near future. But here we have the inverse: Jews are not the canaries but the miners who are saved by the selfless sacrifice of the precious yellow birds.
Hence we have a new rule: Jews are the coalminers in the coalmine. (How’s that for an image.) If something is happening to someone else, that thing will also happen to the Jews. It’s the corollary of: If something is happening to the Jews, that thing will also happen to others. (Sensing a pattern here.)
On to the next rule. The Times writes: “‘Anytime you put Jews in the middle on an issue, it’s not good for the Jews,’ said Jonathan Jacoby of the Nexus Project, a progressive Jewish group that has been searching for a way to combat antisemitism without suppressing political debate. ‘That’s a classic antisemitic position that antisemites like to put Jews. So they can be scapegoated.’”
The Nexus Project is an organization designed to essentially kosherize anti-Zionism in order to protect progressive political activists from extremely accurate accusations of anti-Semitism. The group is, basically, dedicated to what we might call anti-anti-anti-Semitism.
And the new rule is: Jews on the side. This side or that side, it doesn’t appear to matter. Just not in the middle. The middle is where we can be scapegoated, as if we’re safe from scapegoating so long as we’re not center-stage.
The great Zionist and political theorist Vladimir Jabotinsky once grappled with this idea. During World War II, a consensus formed that the Jews should not form fighting battalions and head into combat with the Allies, as they did in the First World War. The reason: Anti-Semites would say that such battalions prove the war is all about the Jews—you’re either fighting for or against Team Jew. Jabotinsky’s response to this, while admittedly in a very different situation, is instructive. Nonsense, he said: They will accuse us of being behind the war no matter what. We might as well show up on our own behalf.
Though we are not in a world war at the moment, the principle seems to apply just as well. Anti-Semites will scapegoat us either way, so we should not reject policy on the grounds that it centers the Jews; we should only reject policy if it is bad policy.
That is the correct approach to this wider debate as well, including the third and final “rule for Jews” we find in Times piece: “Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky, who leads a socially progressive but religiously Conservative Jewish synagogue in Manhattan, said he had been stopped days ago on the sidewalk by a congregant who expressed how distressed she was that ‘people are being disappeared from street corners in the name of fighting antisemitism.’”
In truth, the “disappearance” to which she is referring was in the name of the United State of America. The administration claims to have made the arrest of someone “engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans.” But the larger point is that if the policy is bad, it’s bad no matter in whose name it is carried out. Focusing on the idea that this is being done in our name simply gives anti-Semites more reason to believe in the conspiracy theory of Jewish puppeteers pulling the strings of American politicians.
Thus, this last rule, which can be expressed as “Jews must be policy-anonymous,” overcomplicates things.
There are already enough rules we are asked to abide by as Jews. Let’s not add special rules for Jewish participation in public affairs.
