We Are Jewish, And We Are All Connected.

September Mad Mensch: Dead Jewish Bodies Aren't Social Justice.

Sep 03, 2024

The tremendous pain felt in the Jewish world over the past year is hard to describe.

First, in October 2023 on the day of the biggest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. Then, every day since, our peers, colleagues, and former friends either denied its horrors or, worse, celebrated them.

And finally, just this holiday weekend 6 hostages taken on that October day nearly one year ago were found executed.1

The Jewish community never recovered from the Holocaust, spiritually or otherwise. There are fewer Jews alive today than before 1939 still. And yet, even had this not occurred, all Jews are connected. We maintain one of the earth's oldest, tightest bonds as a tribe and nation.

That is why when news broke late Saturday / early Sunday morning that 6 hostages, including 1 American citizen, were found executed by the terror group Hamas, the entire Jewish world grieved and came together. They were:

Hersh Goldberg, 23
Eden Yerushalmi, 24
Carmel Gat, 39
Alex Lubnov, 32
Ori Danino, 25
Almog Sarusi, 26

Hersh, the American citizen, was known not just for his nationality but because his parents had been so active and vocal these past months. Their strength and grace are a tragic inspiration to us all, and we are all rooted in his survival and safe return. Learning his avoidable fate was a gut punch.

. . .

Four short years ago, I completed a journey I never imagined; I rediscovered my Jewish roots and converted fully. As I wrote then, the word "conversion" is bizarre to me; it denotes a religious-only affiliation. That isn't remotely what it means.

Jews are a people and a tribe first and foremost; the word "ethno-religion" gets used to describe us. And as with most misunderstandings about who Jews are and what we believe, we get reduced to simple Christian colonial ideas about religion (and spoken over by bigots).

You can't separate Jews from Jewish practice; our religion, though portable and continually evolving for Jews, is closed. You have to "convert" to participate and contribute. And boy, did the Goldberg-Polins contribute.

As did each of these six souls, and all before them.

A fascinating thing overcame me that day in the mikvah in 2020 amid COVID and isolation: I felt waves of every Jewish triumph and tragedy. I fully joined the Jewish people, and I felt it; I felt the Holocaust, I felt the Spanish Golden Age, I felt our origins and continuous maintenance of Jerusalem and the lands of Israel as our sacred homeland.

And like every Jew I know and love, I felt a sacred connection to Hersh, Eden, Carmel, Alex, Ori, and Almog, as well as every soul lost that day and since.

In April this year, I visited the NOVA Exhibit on Wall Street in New York City and laid eyes on every young soul lost at the music festival on October 7. They were all strikingly youthful, beautiful, and decidedly not white. Yet all I've heard screeched from computer screens and rallies since that day is that I and every other Jew are white colonizers who don't belong in Israel—or anywhere, really. Jewish lives are cheap; the newest trend is to sacrifice Jews for “social justice.”

I see echoes of the Holocaust, the Roman genocide of Jews, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Crusades in all of this. In the span of 24 hours, I went to two vigils in my new home of New York City for these 6 souls lost. In between, I crashed the pro-Hamas (it's not pro-Palestine) protest in Union Square. The things I heard and saw were vile.2

These people want more dead Jews. Dead Jews are their currency. They want a political revolution in the West, and they want Dead Jews to pave the way. I saw a Hezbollah flag; others saw a Hamas flag. I saw calls for Jewish genocide ("intifada"; "From the River to the Sea") and muted calls for the same ("resistance” complete with a photo of a bulldozer tearing through the wall on October 7 before 6,000 people poured into Israel and slaughtered entire families).

Above: Hezbollah flag; photo by Bobby Apperson; Union Square, NYC, 2 Sept 2024. Below: more calls for violence against Jews.

What I didn't see? Calls for peace. Acknowledgment of Israel and its legitimacy. Acknowledgment of Jewish lives, pain, and suffering, including the six people just lost.

Israel isn't at war because it chose to be, and not because of any policy. Israel is at war because its neighbors have genocidal intent and always have. We pay for this every century with the lives of our youth and entire families; each soul an entire universe.

. . .

More reading:

Hezbollah is no one's friend. It is essentially its own rogue government and military, occupying Lebanon, and impoverishing and endangering Lebanese the same way Hamas endangers Palestinians.