Fear is something Jews have known all too well, but timidity is something else entirely. Fear is the Inquisition and pogroms, Nazis and Hamas – horrors for which fear has been a necessary, if not life-saving, reaction. Yet, there has never been anything Jewish about timidity.
That was until October 7.
Israel’s war in Gaza and the subsequent surge in global antisemitism may have turned Jews like myself into unlikely activists, but Jews of equal, if not greater, numbers have traded outrage for impotence as they tiptoe around the hatred that has arrived at our schools, workplaces, and even our front doors.
Take the case of African-American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose latest book, The Message, libelously brands Israel a genocidal apartheid state. Weeks after The Message was released last September, Coates was scheduled to give a reading at the Adrienne Arsht Center in Miami, the city’s preeminent cultural arena named after one of its preeminent Jewish philanthropists.
Many Miami Jews were horrified, and I received calls and emails asking for help. Why me? First, I wrote a series of pieces highly critical of The Message, which I believe is a Mein Kampf for the 21st century. But most crucially, I am both an African American and a Jewish American – as well as a full-throttled Zionist – and Coates’s racialized Israel critique felt particularly personal and egregious.
My background also gave me the license to speak out against Coates in ways many Jews – Caucasian Jews – felt they could not. And so Miami Jew after Miami Jew implored me to help prevent Coates from speaking at the Arsht Center, yet none would speak publicly against him themselves.
Timidity comes to an end
“We’re afraid of being called racist,” they confided as they sat silently, paralyzed by timidity and a perverse sense of politically correct propriety. Never mind that a man who has literally denied Jerusalem as Israel’s capital was heading to town. For this crowd, appeasement and acquiescence felt like the only options.
In the end, Coates stayed home – sidelined by Hurricane Milton. But the sense of timidity revealed by his intended visit can and must end with Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
We are living in a dangerous time for Jews. A “global emergency” is how Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt described the current climate last week following the release of an ADL report noting that 46% of the world’s population harbors antisemitic views.
But cases like Coates – and the endless other encounters I’ve had with American Jews too timid to speak out at the hate right in front of them – are only making things worse.
Believe me, I get it. White people taking on Black literary giants like Ta-Nehisi Coates within a culture overwhelmed by identity politics and “cancel” fears is a fraught and terrifying prospect. Particularly for Jews, continuously labeled as “privileged” by a punitive and overreaching DEI system that denies our ethnic distinctiveness, along with the violence and discrimination being waged against us.
TRUMP HAS committed to taking on – if not taking out – DEI on his first day in office. Indeed, even before he assumed office, Trump’s DEI threats saw companies ranging from Walmart to Facebook end their DEI programs.
Government action, even from the top, can change policy, but it cannot necessarily change minds – at least not immediately. It will take far more than an executive order to dismantle the conformity and coerciveness that has made DEI so fearsome for those, like Jews, who fall outside its purview.
But the recognition that race-based ideologies like DEI have failed many of America’s most imperiled presents an opportunity for Jews to unshackle themselves from timidity and speak up for their own. In a sense, we have no other choice. Jews were also among the most “secure” during Weimar Germany, yet many were mired, understandably, by timidity as Hitler implemented policy after policy that resulted in their extermination.
This is not about assigning blame, particularly to victims of Hitler’s horrors, but acknowledging that inaction ultimately leads to impunity.
Coates may have missed his Miami engagement because of a natural disaster, but he went on to appear at countless other public gatherings where he freely spewed his antisemitic agenda.
He might not have been allowed to had the Jews in Miami taken a stand last October or if the Jews who contacted me worried about a subsequent Coates event in New York had also not caved into fears of being branded a racist.
Regardless of our personal views of Trump, the president has made clear that this climate of intimidation and self-censorship must end, even if his primary focus is not on its impact on Jews. But as the post-October 7 silence of so many minority groups that we have supported makes clear today, Jews must be focused on Jews. And timidity is the enemy of this effort.
There has been nothing timid about Jews like Rachel Goldberg-Polin, who crossed the globe to secure the release of her son, Hersh, ultimately murdered by Hamas. Nor are the parents of teenage Israeli soldiers timid as they send their children to defend the Jewish nation.
Whether in Teaneck or Tel Aviv, we are all part of this Jewish nation, compelled by a shared sense of history to display equal levels of bravery. The arrival of Trump to the White House offers an opportunity to end this atmosphere of timidity, accusations of racism or privilege be damned.Because if not now, when?
The writer is an editor and columnist at the New York Post and an adjunct fellow at The Tel Aviv Institute.