My 13 year old son told me that he might decide to live in Israel when he's an adult. "It doesn't matter for you dad, you're old, but we may only have 20 or 30 years before it becomes like Europe for Jews here." I couldn't tell him he was wrong. 1/
This is an American Jewish emergency. But I look at the Jewish news, and my generation isn't treating it like an emergency. The Jewish-oriented charitable foundations are still building new Holocaust museums, still donating money to universities that are incubating antisemitism, 2/
still prioritizing that same things they were prioritizing a decade or two ago. Left-wings Jews are still apologizing for left-wing antisemitism, still supporting the likes of Mamdani or Platner because in their mind the main "emergency" is not enough leftism in American politics. 3/
Groups that exist to combat antisemitism have full coffers, but there are too many of them, too much redundancy, not enough strategic planning, and they are still neglecting some of the basics. Just for example, if you look up phony stories about Israel that feed antisemitism 4/
like the false claims that Israel steals Palestinian organs, or sterilized Ethiopian immigrants, you have to go pretty far into the google results to find rebuttals. Meanwhile, living an active Jewish life is still too expensive. I haven't seen any major initiatives to subsidize 5/
Jewish day school education, Jewish summer camps, Hillels and Chabads on campus, Jewish institutions that in general have had to ramp up their security spending... Progressive Jews remain largely in denial about how their pro-immigration/diversity views have helped get us where 6/
we are today, or, worse, argue that the increase in antisemitism is worth it because [ideological reasons divorced from the reality on the ground]. And in fairness, the minority of pro-Trump Jews are in denial about how his general war on truth in favor of conspiracies etc 8/
creates the exact type of environment where antisemitism thrives.
For many of us, there have been several wakeup calls over the years, culminating in many Americans celebrating the murder, rape, and torture of Jews on Oct. 7.
And many of us have altered our outlooks accordingly. 9/
However, it's clearly been way too little, and, going back to my son's remark, it will soon be too late. /end
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