Visiting Israelis

And Americans who know where they stand

Last week I was very fortunate to attend a dinner at the Penn Center for Jewish Life for a group of young Israelis who had just finished some of their IDF service and are visiting the US. I was a guest of the Chabad rabbi with whom I’ve become friends. He and his wife have provided support for Jewish Penn students for 24 years, I found out. This year has been the hardest, but the most important.

I had a long talk with one of the visiting Israelis before the dinner started. I asked how their reception here had been, and he said overall very welcoming, but he told me about one concerning incident.

He and his friends, in their twenties I’d say, had been at a bar the previous night. They had been dancing to music on what these days passes for a jukebox (I don’t go to dancing bars late at night so I don’t know - do they have Spotify that you play or something? Someone please fill me in.). They played American music, some Latino music, and all was well. Dancing and having a good time. Then they played an Israeli song.

Immediately, the bartender or manager or whoever was in charge shut off the music and told them they had to leave.

“I don’t know if he recognized the Hebrew or thought it was Arabic or what, but he kicked us out.”

Shocked but not surprised is a phrase that is used often these days.

The dinner was lovely, and we heard a presentation from some Jewish leaders in Philadelphia that I’ll probably write about elsewhere, so I will be vague here. I noticed how comfortable I feel in the presence of a) Israelis b) American Jews who are not ambivalent about either being Jewish or their support for Israel.

I read somewhere a few weeks ago that the current kind of antisemitism differs from Hitler’s version because it seeks not just to kill everyone who was born Jewish, from Jewish ancestry, but to erase the idea of being Jewish. Jewish people who will start by renouncing any connection to Israel, proclaim that they are not Zionists, and join the anti-Israel protests and encampments may be accepted, for a time. These young people are paraded in the media as examples of how “not all Jews are Zionists.” So the antisemites can claim that they are not in fact anti-Jew, they’re anti-Zionist.

As college kids are subjected to chants of “Jews on campus, pick a side,” it becomes clear that they are being targeted because they are Jewish. People just barely out of childhood should not be subjected to this when they are just trying to get an education and become adults. Then the chants became “Go back to Poland.” I read about how Jews in Poland used to be told, “Go back to Palestine.” This is becoming some kind of circular round trip ticket.

In the same way that college students should not be forced to “pick a side,” or otherwise make their lives about either identifying as Jewish and therefore putting themselves in danger, or renouncing their Jewish identity and maybe buying some safety for a little while, grown up Jewish people who this time last year were just doing their jobs, raising their families, observing whatever level of Jewish tradition, law or culture they wanted, and probably on occasion washing their cars (did you know that some people wash their cars once a week? I really can’t imagine. My Irish friend does that, though I doubt that is in any way representative of the Irish, and no one is shouting at them to pick a side on car washing.) shouldn’t be forced to deal with all of this. Yet as I hear repeated at Shabbat services every Friday: in every generation, this blank goes down. It’s been an unusual time of relative calm, but that time is over.

Many of my friends fear for their careers if they are outspoken in support of Israel, or if they denounce the antisemitism they see around them. Many are afraid for their children.

The leaders of the Philly Jewish community whom I heard speak on Thursday were not ambivalent at all about where they stand. That was a relief.

It has always seemed quite obvious to me that when large groups of people are actively trying to kill you, and have stated in public and in writing multiple times over many years that they never intend to stop trying to kill you, they probably mean it.

The war is here, and it’s not going away. Those who you would have thought would stand with the Jewish people who time after time stood with them have largely stood with the terrorists. How they think they would fare until radical Islamist rule is a mystery that many have commented on, and I have nothing original to say.

“Free all the people from the colonizers” is scrawled in graffiti on the bathroom door of a coffee shop in my neighborhood. The “colonizers” whose generations of work created the freedom for hippie coffee shops staffed by people of ambiguous gender in revealing clothing to exist, and charge high prices for mediocre coffee.

I know where I stand, and who I stand with. I pray for peace every day and night, and would love to see a world that resembles the beautiful dreams of one of my favorite Jewish poets, dreams of people who have been at war singing together.

Until that day, I think I’ll spend more of my free time hanging out with those who stand with Israel.

Nothing ambivalent about this one.