The anti-Zionist rampage through liberal institutions and basic decency is exhausting. We’re in perma-shock. The outrages keep coming, demonizing Israel, undermining the West.
It’s worrying, too. This constant condemnation, the ostracism, needing to stand against the haters, demoralizes many young Diaspora Jews. They’ve been raised to fit in – and to worship many establishments, movements, and professionals now abusing them.
But there they go again. Anti-Zionists hijacked the UN. They poisoned the universities. They muddied feminism’s fight against gendered violence. They’ve seduced doctors, nurses, therapists, and teachers into breaking professional vows of objectivity to target Jews. And now, they’ve profaned the Nobel Peace Prize to validate the Hamas-pleasing genocide libel.
In my Essential Guide to Zionism, Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism and Jew-hatred, I call it the antisemites’ triple double-cross. They betray the Jews, basic liberal-democratic values, and their defining mission, from protecting women to pursuing peace to respecting international law.
Others have scrutinized Navi Pillay’s characterization of Israel as an “apartheid state” in 2017, and the bias that led her to help redefine “genocide” to mean: “a campaign of intentionally, systematically destroying a nation on a mass scale – or anything Israel does in self-defense.”
Instead, I want to reassure my students that the world’s gone mad – not them. The triple double-cross offers them character-building opportunities to think independently, maintain moral clarity, view fads skeptically, and resist the mob courageously.
Sheep don’t make history; greatness doesn’t emerge from following the herd. And if you keep looking over your shoulder, wondering what others say about you, all you get is a sore neck.
In Numbers 23:9, Balaam views the Jews from above the rocky cliffs and the hills, finding them “am levadad yishkon, u’vagoyim lo yitchashav” – a people that dwells alone, refusing to define itself like the others.
In 11th-century France, the commentator Rashi read the rocky reference as evoking Israel’s forefathers and foremothers, starting with Abraham and Sarah, who were iconoclasts, trailblazers. Eight hundred years later, in the Pale of Settlement, Belarus today, the Netziv (Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehudah Berlin) emphasized that reflexive verb “yitchashav,” to celebrate Jews’ distinct identity. Our enemies don’t define us. We define ourselves differently, in unique terms.
'Do not follow the crowd to do evil'
Judaism celebrates our glorious distinctness. Reinforcing the message, Exodus 23:2 warns: “Do not follow the crowd to do evil, nor should you follow the majority to pervert justice when bearing witness.” That indicts the 61% of American Jewry finding Israel guilty of war crimes, and the 39% swallowing the genocide lie.
More affirmatively, Ethics of the Fathers 5:20 exhorts: “Be bold like leopards, majestic like eagles, swift as deer, and brave as lions when pursuing God’s will.”
Alas, in history, as in the schoolyard – and sadly some frat houses – those who stand tall are often shunned. For older viewers, Gary Cooper’s lonely, brave marshal abandoned by the cowardly townspeople in High Noon (1952), epitomizes the glorious loneliness that Jews and Israel-supporters feel today.
For younger readers, it’s the Ministry of Magic, the media, and his schoolmates shunning Harry Potter when he dares warn of Voldemort’s return. Then, in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2003), Harry does what Jews have always done and must do now. Proudly, defiantly, he launches Dumbledore’s Army, knowing he’s on the right side of history.
Admittedly, loneliness can also be a prison, locking people into echo chambers of self-righteousness.
Historically, American Jews and Zionists rejected Eastern Europe’s utter, paralyzing isolation. American Jews built an impressive Empire of Acceptance, shattering one glass ceiling after another. True, in pursuing success – and normalcy – many sacrificed their Judaism, or overly Americanized it.
But history constrained the mass desertion. Hitler’s rise rebalanced Reform Judaism. The movement Zion-ized, learning to appreciate peoplehood power, after decades of trying to renounce Jews’ enveloping solidarity and Israel orientation.
More positively, Israel’s growth and the crisis of Soviet Jewry invited many assimilating Jews into a broad, welcoming, Left-to-Right, religious and secular, blue-and-white tent.
Zionism’s relationship to Jewish apartness was more complex. Zionists believed that ending the exile and returning home would normalize their lives, making Jews less hated. But when I edited The Zionist Ideas, I couldn’t find one thinker who truly sought normalcy.
Judaism’s ideas and values are too catalytic, too counter-cultural. Even Theodor Herzl called Zionism first “a return to Jewishness.”
More recently, the high priest of Israeli “normaliyut,” normalcy, A.B. Yehoshua, actually celebrated being a “total Jew,” using “our texts, our past, our identity in such a way that will imbue us with greatness, hope, and consolation, now that we are home after a painful national journey.” That’s not a recipe for normalcy – or global popularity.
Beyond that internal ideological dynamism are the obsessive anti-Zionists who keep trying to isolate Israel, even as it has flourished. Even now, Israel has ties with 165 other countries.
Forty years ago, when Jew-baiting and Zio-bashing were hibernating in Europe, Norway’s Nobel Committee awarded the 1986 Peace Prize to Elie Wiesel. “Wiesel’s commitment, which originated in the sufferings of the Jewish people, has been widened to embrace all repressed peoples and races,” the committee proclaimed.
Back then, the Nobel committee could hail this unapologetic Jew and Israel lover, while validating the enduring Jewish formula that Wiesel embodied. By leaning into his particularism, into Jewish texts, into our glorious distinctness and distinctiveness, he taught the world enduring lessons about memory, hope, justice, and genuine peace.
We can also balance universalism and particularism, Western normalcy and Jewish singularity, while remembering Wiesel’s reassurance that hatikvah, “hope, is possible beyond despair.”
The writer is a Distinguished Scholar of North American History at McGill University and a Senior Research Fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute. He is the author of nine books on presidential history and, nine books on modern Zionism, including To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream as well as his latest e-book, The Essential Guide to the U.S.-Israel Partnership: the 250th Anniversary Edition.