last week, At a live recording of the Ask a Jew podcast with Yael Bar Tur and Chaya-Leah Sufrin in Jackson Hole (WY), a mother asked me a heartbreaking question.
She had sent her daughter to the University of Michigan, only to watch her feel ostracized - and to find herself worrying about her daughter’s future because she is Jewish.
Her question was: What should we tell our children about being a proud Jew in the current environment?
You can watch my answer below.
I approached the question with some modesty. I have a rule when speaking to Jewish communities outside Israel: I try not to pretend that, as an Israeli, I fully understand the experience of living, surviving, and prospering as a minority. I grew up as part of the Jewish majority in Israel. My Israeli instinct is always somewhat combative: Israelis don’t need to teach their children to be “proud Jews.” They grow up that way (and yes, sometimes with too much of it).
There are different answers to this question. During the full Ask a Jew conversation, Chaya-Leah gave a powerful answer about Jewish pride. I appreciated it. There’s a link to the entire episode below.
My own instinct was to offer perspective.
Long before the modern arguments over Israel, Zionism or Gaza, Jews struggled with the consequences of remaining different while living among larger societies. Jews were expelled from Rome under Emperor Claudius in the first century CE, while the Second Temple in Jerusalem was still standing. Antisemitism did not begin with the Galut, the exile - but much before that.
Throughout Jewish history, maintaining a distinct identity carried a price.
Emancipation transformed that reality. Today, Jews in the United States and much of the West can lead lives integrated into the societies around them. That freedom also means that Jewish identity involves choice.
Whether to identify publicly as Jewish. Whether to support Jewish institutions. Whether to participate in Jewish communal life. Whether to marry Jewish. Whether to give your children a Jewish education.
Those are real choices, and sometimes they carry painful costs. I didn’t want to sugarcoat when answering a mother worried about her daughter.
But there was something else I wanted her daughter - and other young Jews - to know:
You are not experiencing this moment alone. You have entered a story that began long before you.
There is useful research behind this intuition. Psychologists Marshall Duke and Robyn Fivush at Emory have studied how children understand their family histories. They found that children who knew more about the generations before them tended to show greater psychological well-being - including higher self-esteem and a stronger sense of control. Their work also suggests something particularly relevant here: stories about hardships a family endured and overcame can help children understand adversity as part of a larger, continuing story.
Maybe something similar can happen with collective memory.
When I speak to Jewish students struggling with what has happened over the last few years, I try to remind them: we have been here before. Our story did not begin with this crisis. It will not end with it.
I posted this exchange on X. What followed was an illustration of the mother’s concern. There was nothing in the video clip about Israeli government policy, Gaza or the war. Yet the replies quickly filled with antisemitic abuse and hate. Look at this:
The reactions were so dripping with hatred — all in response to an internal Jewish conversation.
It wasn’t hard to see what had triggered people, or what lay beneath their resentment: the idea that Jews should be allowed to live without hatred. That Jews are not collectively responsible for every alleged wrong committed by Israel.
In other words, the idea that Jews have the right to live normal human lives while maintaining a distinct identity.
Is there much comfort in knowing that Jewish identity has always encountered this kind of hostility? Many would say there isn’t. But recognizing that this, too, is part of our story as a people is both truthful and, in a certain sense, liberating. This isn’t ours to carry. It’s the haters’.
If I stopped there, it would amount to sloganism. Antisemitism may be a moral indictment of those who harbor it, but its practical consequences are borne by Jews in their actual lives. That is why the work of exposing antisemitism - of identifying it and calling out the wrong - is essential.
You can watch the entire conversation here. I also want to thank the wonderful community in Jackson Hole for inviting me — and for showing us true Western hospitality.
One of the great ironies of history: The mass persecutions, ethnic cleanings and genocides of Jews over the past few centuries are what made Israel the powerhouse it is today. Jew haters are too stupid to understand that they continue to make the case for a strong Jewish state better than any Zionist ever could.
Pat Johnson, substack:
“Israel is not viewed by progressive activists as the world’s embodiment of evil because of settlements or policies or any of the other red herrings that are thrown up to justify the hysterical condemnations. It is viewed as the embodiment of evil because Jews have traditionally been the empty vessel upon which humans have projected their sins — and the Jewish state is both the national embodiment of the Jewish people and the natural inheritor of centuries of projection and vilification of Jews.
Jews worldwide are not targeted because of Israel’s existence. On the contrary, Israel is targeted because of Jews’ existence. At a minimum, it is the Jewish people’s insistence on existing as a self-determined people that sets off the haters.
It is not, fundamentally, the existence or actions of Israel that lead to global condemnations and acts of hate against Jews around the world. No, we’ve got this exactly backward. It is the hatred of Jews around the world that leads to the military and rhetorical assaults against Israel. Global antisemitism is not a byproduct of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a byproduct of global antisemitism.”
The replies on X were vile. But let me answer the mother's question from inside, because I am closer to this than you might assume.
A Jewish friend of mine is Israeli. His family was from Holland and Austria; they were slaughtered to the last, or ended in Auschwitz. His grandfather saved his bare life by trading the house and everything they had for a ticket to Argentina. His grandmother was liberated from Auschwitz. The survivors went to Israel because they were promised a land without people. His brother came back from the army destroyed, suicidal. Nobody counts that in the price.
Some years ago the relatives, now in Berlin, asked me to find out what happened to their kin Lucy, who had married into Ruma, in Serbia, before the war. They knew she was registered at Jasenovac and had never found more. I found it. Part of the problem was that we called her Ljubica, not Lucy. And the truth was that she did not die passively in the camp at all. She was freed from Pag, joined the partisans, and was killed at the very end of the war, in the fighting around Jasenovac, together with Serbs. The relatives didn't like that version. They prefer the innocent passive victim. When you remind them that we were in it together, they diminish it.
Searching for Ljubica, I found the testimony of Eva Akerman, a Jewish girl from Varaždin who lost everyone, survived on a chain of strangers' decencies, joined the partisans, and said in her old age that fighting back cured her psyche and the very feeling of being a victim. She refused to go to Israel. Yugoslavia was her country, she fought for it in blood. And she lived long enough to watch the nineties and to name honestly what was done to Serbs then, because a person who has been a real victim recognizes the mechanism in any direction.
That is what your piece is missing, and I think you know it. The victim card is being played, on camera, by a state that is doing to another people the thing your ancestors died of: collective guilt. Children as targets. Starvation as method. Journalists as combatants. And every one of those norms, once you normalize it, is a precedent. It does not stay in Gaza. It is being written in a language the world will one day read back to Jews, and the target is being placed on the foreheads of the little Jews in my own life. That is what I would tell the daughter: your ancestors were not murdered so that you could memorialize them while their state repeats the mechanism. Honor them by correcting in time. Wake up, before it is too late.