This year I am celebrating my 80th birthday. In Europe, at the time of my birth, the Holocaust was grinding away 6 million Jews. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had ordered thousands of American bombers to attack positions throughout the continent but not the rail lines leading to Nazi death camps.
Three years later, while I was riding a three-wheeler, the United Nations passed, by a vote of 33-13, Resolution 181 calling for a partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. By my fourth birthday, the nascent Israel—the “valley of dry bones” miracle—declared her independence and was fighting for her survival.
My earliest awareness of sovereign Israel came in the form of sepia-colored Jewish National Fund posters of burly, suntanned Israelis working their fields. Each week at our synagogue’s Hebrew school, I dropped my quarter into the JNF Blue Box. My parents proudly bought and peeled me Israeli-produced Jaffa oranges.
Around 1960, in high school, I read Leon Uris’s powerful novel Exodus. I also followed news reports about the Israelis capturing Adolf Eichmann on Garibaldi Street in Buenos Aires and transporting him to Jerusalem to be tried for his crimes. In 1967, returning home from my first job, I watched on TV as Israel fought off the surrounding Arab armies and somehow emerged victorious. The descendants of David again defeated Goliath, and I, and much of the world, applauded.
Now, nearly six decades later, I am in my waning years. I am now old, but not yet very old. My children are grown and raising the next generation. I am a “mostly” observant Jew. My wife and I belong to pro-Israel organizations and a vibrant Chabad, and we have been to Israel two dozen times, including twice since Oct. 7 to show our solidarity.
While I can’t recall the very early years of Israel, I do remember the many other wars Israel has had to fight. Images of exploding buses and burned-out nightclubs still fill my head. At the same time, we are buoyed by remembrances of the golden hues of Jerusalem, our pride in Israel’s multifaceted goodness and the relationships we have with the many Israelis we know and love.
During this time of last hurrahs, I feel history is catching up with me. In shocked disbelief, I find the world has once again turned on the Jews and Israel. This reversal is a nightmarish retreat to the still unimaginable Holocaust that was occurring coincident with my infancy. The news is now of a barbaric Hamas pogrom on Israel’s Gaza border, of barrages of Hezbollah rockets raining down on Israel’s north, of hostages shot at point-blank range or used as bargaining chips. Israel remains strong but is wounded.
Bizarrely, however, the progressive Americans who applauded Israel in 1967 now condemn its self-defense, and march on campuses and city streets wearing keffiyehs supporting its attackers. Leaders of America’s great universities who have allowed vitriolic campus unrest testified before Congress splitting hairs over the definition of antisemitism. A squad of congressional Israel haters has been elected and has garnered far too many headlines.
A United Nations that helped return to Jews their ancestral homeland now denies this very history and passes outrageous resolutions threatening to shrink Israel’s borders and ultimately eliminate the Jewish state. The United Nations condemns Israel in wild disproportion to the rest of a very contentious world. Countries that witnessed the Holocaust first-hand vote against Israel.
Like Jews trapped in the ghettos throughout Europe, Israel hears on its borders “death to the Jews,” screams for its annihilation. These threats are made even more real by soon-to-be-built nuclear weapons like those that caused me and my pals in grade-school classrooms to practice “duck and cover” atomic bomb drills.
When I was a child, President Harry Truman stood with Israel in her earliest hours. Despite pressure from an antagonistic U.S. State Department, Truman began America’s official alliance with Israel. It was the brave thing to do, and with the Judeo-Christian tradition embedded deep in the American psyche, Americans respected Israelis for their Western values and unmistakable toughness.
When I came into the world, The New York Times was printing limited coverage of the Holocaust. Laurel Leff’s book Buried by The Times, outed the Gray Lady’s obscene behavior. Almost a century later, mainstream media as a whole seem to have perfected biased reporting with coded antisemitism and anti-Zionism that dovetails with progressive, far-left dogma.
Rounding life’s clubhouse turn into my eighth decade, I look sadly upon these tragic developments. As Jewish baby boomers, we have enjoyed golden years with an unprecedented run of societal opportunity and economic comfort. But with these turns of events, I cannot tune out distressing news and I feel less privileged and secure. I am sorely disappointed by the apathy and naivety of some fellow Jews, and wonder just what headlines would wake them up.
The often-quoted wisdom of George Santayana, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it” feels painfully relevant for the octogenarians who have witnessed this repetition of history. It may not be as easy as it once was, but on this birthday I still remember.
