One of the oddest (and hardest) things about being Jewish right now is watching other Jews – often famous, powerful, influential Jews – champion our own people’s denigration.
Jews like Jonathan Glazer, director of Oscar-winning The Zone of Interest, who used his acceptance speech at last year’s Academy Awards to publicly “renounce” his Judaism and censure Israel for its war with Hamas in Gaza.
Well, Glazer is back – and this time he’s not alone. Late last week, some 350 prominent Jews – actors like Joaquin Phoenix, playwrights like Tony Kushner, along with rabbis and academics – signed a full-page advertisement in The New York Times denouncing President Donald Trump’s controversial plan to transfer Palestinians from Gaza.
“Trump has called for the removal of all Palestinians from Gaza,” screamed the ad’s headline. “Jewish people say NO to ethnic cleansing,” it continued.
Trump’s Gaza transfer scheme may be many things – immoral, illegal, unfeasible – but it’s far from ethnic cleansing. But this is the least of the horrors wrought by the ad in the Times. Some 16 months after the Hamas invasion of Israel, American Jews who should know better by now, still believe their hearts and politics are more aligned with the fate of the Palestinians than with Israel and their fellow coreligionists. They could not be more mistaken.
Anti-Zionist Jews
THERE HAS always been a strain of global Jewry – particularly in America – convinced they can opt out of Israel and Zionism. Many have never visited Israel; most have little interest in the Jewish state; and all probably just wish Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and noisy pro-Israel advocates like AIPAC would shut up – or at least heavily reduce the volume.
Israel, in their world view, is not the consequence of the antisemitism that has been a hallmark of the Jewish experience – but the cause of it. Remove Israel, folks like Glazer apparently believe, and you distance yourself from the antisemitism and public scorn they’re convinced Israel has brought upon the world and in particular the world’s Jews.
The problem is that the epidemic of Jew-hate that has so infected the planet isn’t really about Israel – it’s about the hatred of Jews. Folks like Glazer, Phoenix, and feminist philosopher Prof. Judith Butler must learn to accept that they can never be exempt from this Jew-hatred – no matter how many pricey ads they buy in the NYT.
Beyond the obvious – violent, blood-lusting, genocidal antisemitism existed long before Israel’s arrival (the Holocaust, pogroms, the Inquisition) – is the fact that antisemitism, like all forms of bigotry, simply doesn’t work that way.
No real equivalent
WHAT’S SO curious about Jews, like those who signed into the NYT ad, is that there is no real equivalent among any other American minority group. While prominent African-Americans, such as Barack Obama and Bill Cosby, may have occasionally chastised their fellow Blacks in speeches or articles, they didn’t extend these missives to full-on public doctrines.
Indeed, no Black – even those as assimilated as possible into “mainstream” or “white” culture – fools themselves into believing that they can virtue signal their way out of racism like many American Jews seemingly believe about antisemitism. I write this as someone who is both Jewish-American and African-American. Take it from me, Blacks – no matter how integrated – never forget about the racism swirling all around us. The world simply never lets us.
So why are so many Jews blind to the Jew-hatred and anti-Zionism now swirling so potently all around us?
Particularly today – with antisemitism at “historic” and “shocking” levels, according to an October 2024 Anti-Defamation League report – when it’s as impossible to deny the hatred no African-American would ever fool themselves into forgetting.
For one thing, there’s social currency to be earned and money to be made for Jews willing to align themselves with their own haters. It’s the same money – from many of the same sources – that has fueled similarly performative progressive causes, like #blacklivesmatter, over the past decade.
Deep-pocketed Jews like George Soros, for instance, donated tens of millions to “racial justice” organizations in the wake of George Floyd’s killing in 2020 – including groups that championed the reduction in police patrols that have now allowed massive anti-Israel protests to flourish with violence and impunity.
Soros, unsurprisingly, has also channeled cash toward leading anti-Israel organizations such as those behind the noxious encampments at universities like Columbia.
Having survived the Nazi occupation of his native Hungary, Soros obviously should know better. But who can blame him when such misguided altruism comes with rich rewards. Or at least it used to when the Democrats ran Washington.
Both Soros, and now his equally obsequious son Alex, have become major Democratic players via those millions spent saving Blacks and scorning Jews. Alex is even engaged to Democratic operative – and former Hillary Clinton adviser – Huma Abedin; you can’t get more liberal establishment than that.
But despite those millions of dollars, folks like the Soroses must finally realize that no matter how much money they spend, they can never buy their way, or proclaim their way in The New York Times, out of antisemitism. Jews cannot opt out of the hatred against us because our haters – whether Hamas in Gaza or their surrogates chanting across the West – will never let us. Whether or not we march for Israel, they still seek our demise.
Antisemites love to decry Jews as “privileged” or “entitled.” But there could be no greater “privilege” today than being a Jew who speaks publicly against other Jews.
The writer is an editor and columnist at the New York Post and an adjunct fellow at The Tel Aviv Institute.