Several years previously, I’d gone to Shabbat Services in Deauville. The synagogue door was burnt black and blistered from the fire that had been set the previous Yom Kippur, and the shul members decided to preserve it as a reminder. Back in the Seventies, the reminder was constant. Every day we Jews in Chicago and New York saw tattoos on the left arms of our neighbors.

These days, Holocaust Remembrance Ceremonies, however well intentioned, are inert. For, in the Diaspora, young Jews unaffected by antisemitism, and removed from living reminders of outrage, were invited to express sympathy for what were, to them, historical characters. (Israeli Jews, of course, spent and spend entire lives facing the reality of savagery.) We American Jews mouthed “never again”, but did nothing to prevent the reoccurrence. Our comfortable, old-school liberal attitude of “we must change the narrative” was essentially sedative. We did nothing to “change the narrative”. This was not indictable as there was no “narrative”. There was simply the endorphin of permitted brutality.

This year’s Erev-Chanukah, the day before Chanukah, broke with the news of the slaughter of Sydney Jews. That evening, when we first heard of the murder of Rob and Michelle Reiner, we assumed that it was more antisemitic savagery, and, at our Chanukah table, our actual Holocaust Remembrance was that husband-and-wife conference which has been going on intermittently for 2,000 years: “Oh my God, is it time to move…?” The traditional Jewish conference was intermittent as, with most potentially vast changes, it is always too early, save when it is too late.

At its release in 1982, someone wrote of Sophie’s Choice that it was “Mandingo for Jews”. I have always loathed the film subgenre of Jew Porn, allowing folk to feel they are experiencing Good Will for watching actors portray “The Other” being thrown into The Oven.

The inescapable notion that Jews are The Other inspires and allows us to be treated as other-than-human. The crocodile sympathy of moviegoers, and devotees of Anne Frank, Fiddler on the Roof, and so on, is expressed for Jews as victims. And only as victims. The Jew, here, given an award for passivity. Not only is the award moot, it is not even extended to a real Jew.

Forty thousand firearms were taken from the Jews of Warsaw before the Nazis exterminated them. The Jews, of course, hoped to better their position by acquiescence. Hope is the placebo of the powerless. But it is not a strategy.

Violence is a constant and universal possibility. That it can be deterred by Good Feelings was disproved, rather dramatically, by the slaughter of young Israelis at a music festival on October 7.

Some years back I was tasked with taking my niece on a college tour of Brown. The student guide showed us this and that on the beautiful campus, and pointed to a phone kiosk. “There’s one every hundred yards,” he said. “Which will summon our gloriously unarmed Campus Police.”

I thought, at the time, that the University must be a congeries of fools. Not so much as their cops were unarmed (that was, to my mind, simply a dereliction of common sense, understandable in an institution largely engaged in make-believe), but that its representative was selling to prospective buyers, the notion that to be unprotected was laudable — an attitude certainly of interest to the violent. To announce to the world that campus cops were unarmed was merely stupid. To praise that folly was delusion on the order of “changing the narrative”.

A few years back, three Presidents of the Ivy League were called to Congress to testify about their schools’ passivity about antisemitism. Each was asked if the calls on campus for the murder of Jews were antisemitic, and each responded: “it depends on the context.”

Why would any Jewish parents then allow their kids to attend these schools? I’d be pleased to term it a “mystery”; but it is no mystery, it is a horrible passivity — not even the (understandable) dismissal of danger as statistically remote, but something finally much worse — a sort of death wish.

That Jewish parents send their Jewish children to institutions which allow, encourage, and so ensure, antisemitism is an act of sacrifice. It is an endorsement of the majoritarian’s right to oppress the Jews, in the hope the gift will forestall further violence. For the Warsaw Jews it was the surrender of their guns, in the Ivy League, the offer of our children.

These institutions offer Jew-baiting as an extra-curricular activity. What possible benefit could our children derive there which would offset the trauma of their abandonment?

The beleaguered Jewish student there can either embrace passivity as a necessary survival strategy, or — horribly more likely — march with the antisemites calling for the eradication of Israel — an apostasy which would spare them as little as did the Warsaw surrender of firearms.

Jew Hatred isn’t caused by Jews.

The Chanukah celebrants at Bondi Beach, the dancing kids on October 7, the Ivy Jews sheltering in Hillel, neither these nor those they’re persecuted for resembling did anything to inspire hatred. That something in their DNA, appearance, or religious beliefs excuses their persecution is delusional. It’s not a hatred of Jews, but a love of hatred.

Is antisemitic speech and violence a Hate Crime? All crime is hate crime; there is no such thing as Love Crime. To mete out justice based on the ethnic or religious status of the victim or the prejudices of the perpetrator is insanity. We’re all human beings as equal in our legitimate desires for safety as we should be in accountability for our acts.

Jews have been persecuted for 2,000 years because we were defenseless. Since the establishment of the Jewish State, we’ve been reviled because we asserted our right to exist, independent of permission.

Moses fled Egyptian luxury not alone because he slew the taskmaster, but because he was denounced by the Jew he saved. He was heartbroken. After the appearance of Moses, most of the Jews in the Torah plead, scheme, and betray in order to return to Egypt, which is to say, to the security of slavery.

Slavery is the sole possible state of that which the liberal mind celebrates as “equality”. To aspire to it is not merely wrong, it is immoral. For, in preferring subjugation to self-determination, we not only choose for ourselves, but provide example to those groups of which we are members.

My Brown graduate niece, now 43, wears a Free Palestine t-shirt; and the Jews of the world’s largest Jewish city have just elected an antisemite mayor.

More from this author

Harvard University has no shame

By David Mamet

On Erev-Chanukah, last Saturday, we neighborhood Jews gathered, as planned, to light candles. But the day began with the slaughter on Bondi Beach, and ended with the murders of our Community members, the Reiners.

We were grieving, which is to say, in a state of Cognitive Dissonance. Nothing made sense save that nothing made sense. The last thing we wanted to do was to abandon the safety of our grief for a “religious celebration”. Then an elder explained the Miracle of Chanukah.

We all knew that the desecrated Temple had to be rededicated, that the resanctification required illumination of the sacred lamps. We knew, from childhood, that there was Only Enough Oil to burn for one day, but that the Jews lit the lamps and they burned for the required eight days. We all knew the persistence of the lamps was a miracle; but the Rabbis wrote that the true miracle was not the length of the lamps’ illumination, but that the Jews, knowing the oil was insufficient, lit the lamps in any case. As commanded.

After we heard the story, and, still grieving, we lit the lamps.

As Chanukah is, finally, the Festival of Lights, I’ll end with this note: in Sydney, at the Great Synagogue, I was in line, waiting to be frisked, and a man behind me said, “Aren’t you David Mamet?” I admitted I was. He wished me an easy fast, and a Good Inscription in the Book of Life, and said he was honoured I’d come to his shul.

I asked his name, and he told me. He was the shul’s Rabbi. The line had moved up, and the armed guard saw us talking and asked, “Rabbi, shall I just pass him in…?” “Nah,” the Rabbi said, “frisk him.”

Happy Chanukah.

The presence of death has become more tangible in recent years. The first thing a Yom Kippur shulgoer will notice now is the security. There may be a police car or two in sight, and watchmen at the door, eagle-eyed for suspicious behavior. In order to enter a Yom Kippur service at a synagogue in Germany earlier this year, I had to present my passport to a gruff Israeli bouncer. He was satisfied by my Jewish name and countenance; another man in the queue behind me was patted down.

Over the years, Jews have had to grow accustomed to such inconveniences and precautions. Jewish schools have tight security, and they have emergency procedures in place, in case that security were to fail. They run drills and “invacuations”. In 2015, after a spate of antisemitic attacks on the Continent, it was reported that children at Jewish primary schools were being trained to play “sleeping lions” when the alarm sounded.

But Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the calendar, is both a moment of heightened vigilance, and a moment Jews have their guard down. The Arab states worked this to their advantage in 1973; and vigilance was proved necessary, again, by Jihad al-Shamie at Manchester’s Heaton Park synagogue earlier this year.

Hanukkah is the opposite of Yom Kippur: it is frivolity. Some Jews gripe about its commercialization, the way religious Christians do over Christmas. But Christmas was the birth of the Messiah, the Incarnation of God; Hanukkah celebrates a historical event, the Maccabean wars, which do not even merit mention in the canon of Jewish scripture. It is widely admitted that Hanukkah attained its prominence, both among Jews and in the non-Jewish cultural imagination, as an explicit counter to Christmas. Shorn of long prayers and arbitrary restrictions, and bringing with it a bounty of gifts, doughnuts, and chocolate coins, it is naturally the festival that children most look forward to.

This was the jubilant mood, blessed with Antipodean sunshine and golden sands, that a father-and-son pair of Islamists, Sajid and Naveed Akram, saw fit to desecrate. The attack at Bondi Beach on the first night of Hanukkah was the deadliest terror attack in Australian history, and the second-deadliest mass shooting. It was an attack on a robust Jewish community, with the largest per-capita population of Holocaust survivors anywhere outside Israel. One of those Holocaust survivors, Alexander Kleytman, was killed while shielding his wife of sixty years, Larisa, from the bullets. Another of those murdered was Eli Schlanger, a rabbi born in London. It speaks to the smallness of the Jewish world that one of Rabbi Schlanger’s relatives served as rabbi at Heaton Park.

Jews are frightened and angry, and they recognize where the threat is coming from. Of course they are concerned about the far-Right, and the Pittsburgh attack in 2018 gave them ample reason to be — not to mention the subsequent rise of Nick Fuentes. They have reason to worry about the far-Left, too: when Aaron Bushnell set himself ablaze for the sake of Palestine, it was feared that such propensity for violence would soon turn itself outwards; and so it did when Elias Rodriguez killed a young couple working at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. But Jews in the diaspora perceive Islamist terror as the principal danger. They saw what happened in Israel on 7 October 2023, and they now see similar occurrences closer to home. The rap sheet is long. The Jewish school in Toulouse. The Jewish Museum in Brussels. The kosher supermarket in Paris. The Great Synagogue in Copenhagen. The synagogue in Colleyville, Texas. The synagogue in Manchester. Bondi Beach in Sydney.

A report published earlier this year by the Counter Extremism Group — “Islamist Antisemitism: A Neglected Hate” — found that, in Britain, “speakers in certain mosques have promoted the idea that Allah is pleased by the killing of Jews, led prayers for the Mujahideen (without directly naming Hamas), and promulgated conspiracy theories about the 7 October atrocities”. Plenty of those who recite the slogan “globalize the intifada” on London’s never-ending Saturday marches do so out of conformity and ignorance. They might prefer not to give much thought to what it means in practice; but others take the precept very seriously indeed.

Suggested Reading

History has caught up with British Jews

By Tanya Gold

The modern Hanukkah may be a frivolity, but it imparts a powerful message. Partly that is one of hope, of light in the darkness: hope found, in Sydney, in Ahmed al-Ahmed, the heroic fruit-vendor who disarmed one of the attackers.

The Hanukkah story is not just a generic “festival of light”, however: it has teeth. It is the classical expression of Jewish defiance. No matter that it is uncanonical: the story is known to every Jewish child. It is the story of Judah Maccabee — Judah the Hammer — and his brothers redeeming their homeland, by force of arms, from the Seleucid Empire. It is, in a sense, a national epic, whose heroes win the day through sacrifice, valor, and divine favor. There is an episode, in the first book of Maccabees, when Eleazar Avaran, one of Judah’s brothers, charges at a Seleucid war elephant, and stabs it at the belly; he brings the beast down but is crushed beneath it. Al-Ahmed clearly possessed that Maccabean courage.

The Maccabees story is rousing stuff. Emma Lazarus — the poet best known for her sonnet “The New Colossus”, now inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty — was much moved by it: “Wake, Israel, wake! Recall to-day / The glorious Maccabean rage, / The sire heroic, hoary-gray, / His five-fold lion-lineage.” So was another, lesser-known 19th-century Jewish woman poet, Marion Hertog: “And still the Festival of Lights / Recalls those deeds of yore / That make our history’s page sublime / And live for evermore.” Probably the most consequential echo of the Maccabees story occurs at the crescendo of Theodor Herzl’s clarion-call for Zionism, Der Judenstaat. “A wondrous generation of Jews will spring into existence. The Maccabeans will rise again; the Jews who wish for a state will have it.”

Jews know well what Maccabean defiance looks like: it looks like Israel. If each Jewish holiday will now be seen by antisemites as an opportunity for terror, then the prognosis for diaspora Jewry is bleak. There will be fewer public events, and, generally, less fun. There will be more drills, more alarms, more bag checks at doors; there will have to be more security and more police. There will, for all this, be more attacks and more deaths: no matter how much security is tightened, something will always slip through the cracks. There will be a lamentable turning-inward. Some Jews may choose, this Hanukkah, not to put their Chanukiah on the windowsill, lest it be seen by malevolent passers-by. Unless things change, Jewish life in the diaspora will come more closely to resemble Israel: sealed off from the world, armed to the teeth, and terrified, with some justification, of the enemy at its doorstep.

More than two millennia later, Judaism’s spiritual reserves endure. They caught flame in recent decades among the Bnei Menashe (Children of Menasseh) of northeast India, a group of roughly 9,000 Tibeto-Burmese people of the Chin-Mizo Hmar tribe. The tribe’s rituals and legends echo very ancient Jewish priestly practices as well as the story of the Exodus, down to the pillars of cloud and fire and the parting of the Red Sea. 19th-century missionaries convinced these former animists, whose ancestral patriarch was named Manmási, to adopt Christianity. They now believe they are descended from Menasseh, one of the Ten Lost Tribes that conquering Assyrians sent into exile in 720 BC. After 1951, when a tribal leader had a dream that Israel was their ancestral homeland, they began to learn prayers and observe Jewish rituals. In the Eighties, they started moving to Israel, where the government has just announced plans to help the remaining 5,800 immigrate by 2030.

The story of the Bnei Menashe raises fundamental questions about Jewish identity, questions which have been debated since the time of the Talmudic sages. Who is a Jew? What does it mean to be a Jew? And, not least, why would anyone want to remain, let alone become, a Jew? These are matters of existential import,  in which both Jews and their enemies have always had a say. The unusually harsh proclamation that excommunicated Spinoza from the Jewish community of Amsterdam in 1656 — assailing him for his “abominable heresies” — declared that “the Lord shall separate him unto evil out of all the tribes of Israel”, nullifying even his ethnic identity. Conversely, unimpeachable ideological orthodoxy was not enough to save ethnically Jewish citizens of the USSR from persecution under Stalin.

Jewish identity, then, is clearly complex, framed as it is by ethnic, national, religious, and political components. The Book of Exodus relates that the 12 sons of Jacob — the Israelites who settled in Egypt — grew from a family and tribe into the Hebrew nation, a people that Pharaoh enslaved and ultimately sought to destroy. These slaves became Jews when Moses led them out of Egypt and they accepted the Torah given by God at Mount Sinai. In the Land of Israel, God ruled through intermediaries: first judges, then kings, and, in the Second Temple period, through high priests subject to various imperial governments. The Maccabean Revolt was thus politically as well as religiously significant.

More from this author

What happens when we forget the Holocaust?

By Jacob Howland

Politics played little role in Jewish identity over long centuries in the Diaspora, when the affairs of local communities were administered by rabbis whose authority derived from their knowledge of scripture and the religious tradition. Writing in the 17th century, Spinoza believed that other nations’ hatred of the Jews prevented them from assimilating, and so preserved them as a people apart.

But identifying as a Jew, and being recognized as one, became two separate things after the wave of political emancipation that began with the French Revolution. Emancipation destabilized Jewish identity by making it, by turns and in shifting combinations, both voluntary and compulsory. Jews could choose to be religiously unaffiliated, yet identify, for example, as “culturally” Jewish. Nor did conversion guarantee that one was no longer considered Jewish: Benjamin Disraeli, who was baptized as a child and bought up in the Anglican church, was “hounded and reviled throughout his life — and beyond — as an oily, devious, dishonest Jew.” Then there are those horrors of the 20th century, with both the Nazis and Soviets persecuting and murdering many ethnic Jews who had zero connection with the religion.

Since its foundation in 1948, meanwhile, the State of Israel has had a say in determining who is a Jew, and therefore eligible for the protections and benefits of Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return. Interestingly, Jews who have converted to another religion are not eligible for immigration, presumably because they don’t feel the connection with the ancient Jewish homeland on which the Law, and its assumption of patriotism, is based. For the same reason, Palestinians do not enjoy a right of return. As part of its effort to filter out opportunistic migrants who have no commitment to Judaism, meanwhile, the government has obliged the Bnei Menashe to undergo conversion under the authority of the Orthodox rabbinate, a process that involves demonstrating their knowledge of Jewish religious law and practice. In 2008, indeed, some Messianic Jews were denied on the ground that they sought to enjoy the legal benefits of Jewish status while practicing Christianity.

Tests aside, though, and unlike the persecutors of Jews in the 20th century, it’s surely telling that the Bnei Menashe chose to be part of the covenantal community, coming to Judaism in an act, if not of rediscovering their past, at least of giving themselves one from which they wished to be descended. And after the October 7 pogrom it somehow seemed permissible — yet again — to gang up on Jews in public, that free choice seems particularly meaningful.

Jews have long been criticized for claiming to be God’s chosen people, which implies their superiority to other groups. But devout Christians and Muslims, too, believe they are God’s elect, and it would be strange if they did not. More to the point, election is not so much a privilege as an obligation — often an onerous one. “I know, I know. We are your chosen people,” Tevye famously laments in Fiddler on the Roof. “But once in a while can’t you choose someone else?” Judaism survives today not because God chose the Jews, but because the Jews persist, through thick and thin, in choosing God. As the German theologian and Holocaust survivor Leo Baeck wrote, “Israel is elect if it elects itself” — if, as he understood it, it embraces its vocation of being a “light unto the nations” by trying to mend the world through exemplary righteousness and charity.

Baeck’s “ethical monotheism”, which embraces the moral core of the rabbinic tradition in a way that is attractive even to unobservant Jews, understands Jewish particularism as a necessary condition of its universal mission. Of course, this contemporary understanding of what it means to be a Jew is only one of many. But common to all is a sense of obligation internal to what the Israeli national anthem, Hatikvah (The Hope), calls the “Jewish soul”. This sense of obligation is a constant, even if its perceived source — God, family, polity, one’s ancestors — varies widely. The theologian Emil Fackenheim famously derived the obligation to remain Jewish from the moral imperative not to give Hitler any posthumous victories. In our day, antisemitism is no longer sufficient, as Spinoza supposed, to preserve the Jewish people. Still, one wonders: do Jews remain Jews in spite of the persecution they’ve suffered, or because of it? In the Bible, both Moses and God call the Jews “a stiff-necked people”, and many have felt more solidarity with their brethren after October 7. The greatest massacre of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust renewed old questions about the meaning of Jewish suffering. Who among us is willing to say that it was all for naught?

Here is where the perspectives of two very different groups of people — educated Westerners like me, who come from a long line of Jews, and third-world Easterners like the Bnei Menashe,who want to become Jews — find common ground. While it would be strange to suppose that antisemitism would make one want to convert to Judaism, one suspects that the survival of the people of Israel over more than three millennia is, for the Bnei Menashe, an argument in favor of conversion. For it testifies to the Jews’ vitality, adaptability, toughness, and so bodes well for the future of anyone who wishes to join (or return to) them. Similarly, admiration for the noble accomplishment of countless generations of forbears, who kept the faith under the most difficul conditions, is, for many Jews today, a source of increased resolve in the face of widespread hostility.

As the philosopher Leo Strauss has suggested, the Jewish soul is, at bottom, characterized by fidelity or loyalty to one’s ancestors, “piety in the old Latin sense of the word pietas.” That virtue, which opposes every instinct of modernity, is by no means unique to Judaism. It is exemplified by Virgil’s Aeneas, a Trojan who carried his father Anchises on his shoulders out of the burning city of Troy when it was razed by the conquering Greeks. The homeless Aeneas would later become a progenitor of the Romans — whose belief that the future belongs to those who cherish the past was reflected in their worship of Janus, the god of gateways (jani) whose two faces look back and forward simultaneously.

Through long experience as a people in exile, the Jews, too, have learned what it means to inhabit liminal spaces, and to stand on the threshold between a known past and a deeply uncertain future. The festival of Hanukkah commemorates their remarkable capacity to begin anew by drawing on old resources, and so to recover what would otherwise have been lost. That capacity is reflected in the rebirth of their ancient language, the restoration of their ancient homeland, and now, either the return of a long-lost tribe or the ardent self-election of unlikely Jewish wannabes. And the fact that neither the orthodox rabbinate nor the Israeli government care which of these is the case tells us that, unlike ethnic or national identity, a deep and serious attachment to Judaism is universally sufficient to make one a Jew. As an Israeli rabbi who has helped to prepare the Bnei Menashe for conversion and immigration vividly put it: “They want to be Jewish, and so they will be.”