Can American Jews shake off their defensive posture rooted in fear and a distorted conception of Jewish values to begin acting to deter those who attack them and convince them that the Jews are not easy prey for antisemitic thugs?
According to JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin, that’s the question the Jewish community must confront of an unprecedented surge in Jew-hatred in the two years since the terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
He is joined in this week’s episode of “Think Twice” by Benjamin Kerstein, author of the new book, Self-Defense: A Jewish Manifesto.
Kerstein says it’s time for Diaspora Jews to shake off the constraints of what he calls “learned helplessness,” a mindset that conditions victims to believe they have no recourse but to endure violence without seeking to take action to defend themselves. Historically, this was overcome by the Zionist movement and the founding of the modern-day State of Israel. But in America, most Jews react to the post-Oct. 7 assault on their rights and safety with passivity. As seen on college campuses where pro-Hamas mobs terrorized Jewish students, they were told to shelter in place and not to confront their tormentors.
Kerstein argues that what happened at the University of California, Berkeley in 2024 was a model of how to end the harassment of Jews. There, a group of Jewish students responded to a pro-Hamas encampment by aggressively making it clear that Jews would not be intimidated. Though the action was flawed by violence, this forced the university administration to act to end the encampment. A better idea would have been non-violent action in which Jews confronted the antisemites wherever they sought to block access to campus sites.
He says the model not to follow was that of the former Jewish Defense League and its leader, Brooklyn, N.Y.-born Rabbi Meir Kahane. That group descended to illegality and violence that not only led to the government shutting it down, but also discredited the entire idea of Jewish self-defense for generations. What is needed is a Jewish version of the civil-rights-era group, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), that confronted racism across the United States and helped usher in an era of equality.
What is also clear, says Kerstein, is that the Jewish establishment and those organizations like the Anti-Defamation League, whose task it is to defend Jews, are not doing their jobs. Their policies are a product of politics in which they have long preferred to focus on lesser threats like that of neo-Nazis rather than on the greater peril posed by progressives, who have effectively imposed their antisemitic beliefs on the education system and much of American culture.
Above all, Jews must, he argues, embrace the anger they feel about what has happened in the last two years and start to make “good trouble”: the phrase coined by civil-rights hero and longtime congressman Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who urged African-Americans to stand up against discrimination in nonviolent ways. Jews must now do the same when it comes to the broad array of antisemitic threats posed by forces on both the political left and right.
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