Hannah Einbinder and Bernie Sanders are two Jews, along with plenty of others, who have committed Jewicide recently. For those unfamiliar with the term, I just made it up.
But surely, if it appears in a dictionary, soon, I hope, is a noun: Jewicide (Jew·i·cide ’jü-ə-sīd), plural: Jewicides; the act or an instance of ending one’s own Jewish identity intentionally, as well as erasing the characteristics of other Jews, whether religious, national, cultural or ethnic, that define the essence of being Jewish.
Post-Emmy awards ceremony, at a backstage location, after her de rigueur shout out of “Free Palestine,” Einbinder said she wished to speak out about Palestine, and the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Why? Well, because it’s an issue that’s “very dear” to her heart, along with her favorite football team, which was also included in her final shout-out.
She told the attending reporters: “I have friends in Gaza. ... It’s an issue that’s very close to my heart for many reasons. I feel like it’s my obligation as a Jewish person to distinguish Jews from the State of Israel because our religion and our culture is such an important and longstanding … institution that is really separate to this sort of ethno-nationalist state.”
She also reminded them she had signed the recent Film Workers for Palestine pledge, adding, “it only boycotts institutions that are directly complicit in the genocide. So it’s important to me … It’s an important measure, and I was happy to be a part of it.”
Of course, as Einbinder should know (after all, she did grow up in a Jewish environment in Los Angeles), there is no such “obligation” on her part to do what she has done. Of course, if, unbeknownst to me, she belongs to a secret society (or a not-so-secret society) that has forced her to publicly declare inanities and prevarications such as those that she spoke, that would be a different matter altogether—and one quite interesting.
As for the essence of her remarks, it is very much impossible, I would suggest to her, to separate a core national identity from being just sort of Jewish, as if the Jewish religion possesses no national elements. If she participated in a Passover seder recently, she heard the “Next Year in Jerusalem” finale. She also may have heard the breaking of a glass at a Jewish wedding, a symbol of mourning the Temple’s destruction and the loss of our political sovereignty.
I doubt very much if the Jew-married-to-a-non-Jew Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has had personal experience with Jewish faith traditions these past few decades. Shortly after Einbinder’s staged performance, he wrote, “The very term genocide is a reminder of what can happen if we fail. That word emerged from the Holocaust—the murder of 6 million Jews—one of the darkest chapters in human history. Make no mistake. If there is no accountability for Netanyahu and his fellow war criminals, other demagogues will do the same.”
He then added, “I agree. It Is Genocide. The intent is clear. … We, as Americans, must end our complicity in the slaughter of the Palestinian people.”
The propensity of Jews to link their identification to the Arabs of Palestine—never a state or even a country, but rather, an internationally charged territory to become the reconstituted historic Jewish national home—is mind-numbing. They falsely accuse the State of Israel of conducting actions that somehow remind them of the German Nazis and the Holocaust in a most psychologically corrupt and pernicious comparison.
Sanders not only resorts to hyperbole when discussing Jews. When he mentions Hamas, all he can do is write “Hamas, a terrorist organization, began this war with its brutal attack.” They apparently are not evil. They did not intend a genocide. They did not engage in a Nazi-like slaughter. They are not at all extreme, though he insists that the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “extremist.” He quotes Hamas-propagated numbers and claims and dismisses any of Israel’s counterclaims.
A third instance of Jewicide is the “Statement From US Jews,” predictably published in The Nation, that condemns U.S. President Donald Trump’s “disingenuous” weaponization of antisemitism to target universities and deport campus activists. More than 100 “Jewish Americans” signed on. They proclaim:
“We write, specifically, as Jewish Americans who condemn the charge of antisemitism being leveled against student activists—many of whom are Jewish—for their legitimate criticisms of Israel’s violence in Gaza and their universities’ connections to the Israeli occupation.”
One signatory, sports editor Dave Zirin, added that he signed the letter “out of respect for my great-grandparents, who fled the pogroms.” He then assumed that his progenitors would be pro-Palestinian and “certainly would have been appalled that anyone would take seriously … an administration of Nazi-curious Christian Zionists.”
If only these oh-so-important Jews would take on the Tucker Carlsons, the Candace Owens and the other outright anti-Jewish figures of the right with the same courage and forcefulness as they do Israel and its 3,000-year old Zionist essence—from the time that Abraham was told to go to Moriah, when the Children of Israel set out for the Land of Israel and those who had been exiled to Babylonia returned to Zion.
But they do not.
Their target is the authentic and genuine fundamentals of Judaism—a religion, a culture and a community that has a sacred territory at its core. They prefer to commit Jewicide. In doing so, they harm the more than 7 million Jews who live in Israel and the additional millions of Jews of the Diaspora who support Israel. They misrepresent what Judaism is to those from whom they seek favor and adulation.
It represents an act of betrayal that will also, eventually, come to harm them, too.
