Many, including myself, have written about Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s recent bizarre call for American Jewry to commit more or less literal suicide on behalf of the Democratic Party.
In the face of the conquest and colonization of her party by antisemitism, Nessel, who is Jewish, told a meeting of Jewish Democrats, “We have a moral imperative to place the needs of the world above even our own self-interest and, yes, even our own survival.”
Through a tortured and inaccurate interpretation of the story of Queen Esther, she further urged, “It is perhaps up to us now to follow in her path and sacrifice the comfort, safety and security and even the very future of our own people in exchange for the opportunity to save the rest of humanity.”
For the most part, the American Jewish community has reacted with shock and surprise to Nessel’s recommendations, but perhaps they should not have done. In many ways, Nessel is a culmination, the inevitable outcome of an ongoing trend.
I refer to the astounding failure of American Jewish leaders to meet the challenge of the current moment. In the face of the rise of the “Red-Green Alliance” between progressive and Muslim antisemites, most of them have been, at best, suicidally impotent and ineffective. In this sense, Nessel is not an outlier but the logical endgame. After all, without prompt intervention, suicidal behavior tends to end in suicide.
This descent into self-destruction is manifest and tends to come in stages.
First, the most striking quality of American Jewish leadership has been its dumbfounding cowardice, which may well be the origin of all its other shortcomings. By and large, it is perfectly capable of fighting antisemitism when it is easy to do so, when the targets are marginal and generally agreed to be evil. When the culprits enjoy wealth, cultural immunity, widespread popularity and political power, however, the situation is quite different.
In other words, American Jewish leaders are perfectly willing to fight antisemitism up to and until the point that it might actually cost them something.
This presents American Jewish leaders with the question of what to do in the face of antisemitic acts like incitement, assault and even murder. Unable to muster up the necessary courage to take effective action, they by and large choose surrender through silence. In other words, they do nothing. Worse still, they generally say nothing, allowing even the most egregious acts of antisemitism to pass without comment.
The result of this surrender is paralysis, an inability to do anything whatsoever. This leaves American Jewish leaders facing a terrible question: Why should they be leaders at all? They are, after all, unelected and thus enjoy no democratic legitimacy. Their status depends solely on their effectiveness at doing their job, and in the end, they have only one job, which is to defend the American Jewish community. Having manifestly failed at doing so, they must somehow justify or explain away this failure.
The result of this surrender is paralysis, an inability to do anything whatsoever.
This is when things begin to get very, very ugly, because American Jewish leaders have tended to resort to apologetics in order to justify themselves. Some of them try to obfuscate the issue, asserting that it is “white supremacist” or “right-wing” antisemitism that is the real threat, not a mass movement that has seized control of one of America’s two major parties and thus wields enormous political power.
At other points, they either directly or indirectly assert that Red-Green Alliance antisemitism isn’t really antisemitism, but rather strident criticism of Israel and its leaders, or simply the exercise of free speech by misguided but sincere activists.
Worst of all are those like Nessel, who at least dared to say what, one imagines, most American Jewish leaders will never admit. She acknowledged, openly and publicly, that Red-Green Alliance antisemitism is indeed antisemitism and an existential threat to American Jews. With even more striking honesty, she asserted that the best reaction to this is that of most American Jewish leaders: cowardice, surrender, inaction and apologetics, even unto suicide.
However demented and horrifying this may be—and it is both—it was, in a sense, inevitable. Nessel is not an aberration but a culmination.
For decades, American Jewish leaders have become increasingly decadent, drunk on massive funding, perfidious “allies” and political access. All of these things, it has now been revealed, meant nothing at all. The funders demanded collaboration, the allies abandoned the Jews at the first opportunity and the doors of access were unceremoniously slammed shut. In a sense, American Jewish leaders made the same mistakes as the Israeli security establishment before Oct. 7: complacency, hubris and failure of imagination.
After Oct. 7, however, the Israeli security establishment regrouped and mounted a ferocious counterattack. In contrast, American Jewish leaders simply broke. As a result, they have been decisively defeated—not only politically but, more important, psychologically. In the face of this defeat, they can no longer muster up the necessary energy and resolution to defend not just their community but even themselves. In such a situation, suicide may seem like the only honorable option.
It is, of course, their right to commit suicide should so wish. But they have no right whatsoever, of any kind, to demand that American Jewry do the same; let alone to claim, as Nessel did, that it is morally incumbent on American Jews to do so. In the face of this, American Jews have only one option: They must remove their so-called leaders and replace them with more strident and radical activists who are determined to live.
The first step is for American Jews to face the fact that their leadership cannot save them, so they have no choice but to save themselves.
