Time has weight and the Jewish year just ending has been the heaviest year in recent memory. Every day brought fresh rockslides of headline news crashing round about us. When you are buried in rubble, you struggle to get out. So I have been struggling.
The looming presidential election alone has been a heavy burden. How can so many Americans be so cruel as to watch one school shooting after another and still reject all gun control? So deluded as to send death threats to Haitian immigrants because they purportedly eat their pets? So willing to replace democracy with a home-grown version of right-wing fascism? But liberals must now reckon with an ever noisier far-left coalition that applauds every identity except “Jewish.”
The state of the American electorate alone would elicit a serious Dayyenu: “Enough, already!”
Eclipsing all of that, however, is the Hamas butchery of October 7, a boulder massive enough to convert the rockslide into an avalanche, as if time itself came tumbling down upon us – and then stopped, refusing to let October 7 slip quietly into the past. Hostages are still imprisoned, or dead. Hamas is still fighting. I wake up to October 7 every day, a nasty Jewish Groundhog Day.
The closest parallel to October 7 was 9/11, which Americans watched obsessively, as if super-glued to TV screens. A direct line connects the two events as chapters in the same story. The mastermind behind 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was schooled by the Muslim Brotherhood, which seeks to “liberate” Jerusalem and rid “Palestine” of Jews – in World-War-II parlance, to make it Judenrein. The Holocaust connection is real. Political scientist Matthias Küntzel cites an Al Jazeera speech in which another Brotherhood leader, Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi preached the need of every generation to produce its own divinely appointed agent to “punish Jews.” Hitler was one. Islam is destined be the next.[i]
Meanwhile, right wing anti-Semitic parties are gaining power in Hungary, Germany, France, Italy, and the Netherlands. Here at home, where hurricane victims are cleaning up from inundating floods, Elon Musk’s X carries anti-Semitic charges that “Jews are conspiring to orchestrate the disasters, sabotage the recovery, or even seize victims’ property.”[ii]
So I struggle with anti-Semitism.
I have never believed that anti-Semitism is some metaphysical pollutant, indelibly soldered into world culture. The scientifically minded historian in me seeks a causal chain that links Nazi anti-Semitism to Islamic anti-Semitism. Küntzel provides that link.
But here’s the rub: Having been traumatized by Islamic radicalism in 2001, Americans should have rallied to, and remained steadfast allies of, Israel. Many did, but many did not. I am no apologist for Israel’s right-wing coalition; I abhor the settler-movement on the West Bank; I deplore the Jewish thugs who carry it out. But the Hamas attack had nothing to do with that. It would have happened anyway. And yet, so many Americans replaced their horror at the Hamas massacre with their vilification of its Jewish victims. Any rational argument accusing Israel of an overly destructive retaliation would at least deplore as well the Hamas attack and call for the release of innocent Jewish hostages. That does not happen. Opposition to Israel is not rational.
No one I know has cheered the tragedy of children dying in Gaza. But Palestinian activists — even UN agency teachers — cheered wildly at the Hamas carnage.[iii] On October 10, just three days after the attack (before the Israeli response even began) the Harvard Student Body declared “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence. Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum. For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison.”[iv]
They were partly right. Gazans have indeed “been forced to live in an open-air prison.” But who is the culprit? Israel or Hamas? The Modern War Institute at West Point estimates the extent of the Hamas tunnel system to be somewhere between 350 and 450 miles long, and costing “as much as a billion dollars”![v] Canada’s Mackenzie Institute (which specializes in security and military intelligence) details a further eleven billion dollars held by just three Hamas leaders living in Qatar.[vi] How many starving children would all those billions of dollars have fed?
And the rockslides continue. Just yesterday, the one-year anniversary of the Hamas bloodbath, New York Public Radio’s Gothamist Daily reported hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters gathered on Columbia’s campus, chanting, “Free, free Palestine,” and, “There is only one solution, intifada, revolution.” Read that as “only one solution, violence, violence, by any means possible.” The organizer of this and other protests is Within Our Lifetime, whose cofounder, Nerdeen Kiswani, a Palestinian American CUNY Law School alumnus supports the complete replacement of the state of Israel with one called Palestine.[vii]
None of this is (or should be) actual news. It is a new-year reflection on the heaviness of time and the exacting struggle that it demands from us who are buried under it. How bad can history get? Will the American democratic experiment come to an end? How long can so many well-meaning observers miss the anti-Semitism behind the Hamas/Al-Qaeda Islamism? How deep does university anti-Semitism go? How much war can Israel manage without losing the peace at the other end?
The Yom Kippur message of human frailty seems especially apt now. I look forward to the sound of the shofar at the day’s conclusion, a long blast that heralds my own task for 5785: to hold out hope on all these fronts, in part by digging my way through the avalanche of the past year, and rescuing memories of the way our lives once were, and the way, perhaps, they can be again. As hard as it is to recall those buried years, I know this much: underneath the rubble lie tales of kindness, hope and happiness.
When archeologists unearth specimens of the past, they display them in museums for visitors to see. They are a mixed bag: the artistry of the human spirit; but also weapons of war. I am an archeologist of pre-5784, excavating memories of times when wars were fought and people killed, but when, also, optimism ruled; when anti-Semitism was something we studied, not something we feared; when extremes both on the left and on the right were just that – extremes; and when beauty and science and love and laughter were our lot.
[i] “German expert warns: Islamist and European antisemitism now dangerously intertwined,” Jerusalem Post (September 26,2024).
[ii] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/10/08/hurricane-helene-antisemitic-misinformation-x/.
[iii] https://www.nationalreview.com/news/u-n-agency-teachers-cheered-hamas-as-october-attack-unfolded-called-for-execution-of-jews-in-group-chat/; https://www.timesofisrael.com/pro-palestinians-celebrate-hamas-attack-as-israel-supporters-rally-in-new-york/.
[iv] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/10/10/psc-statement-backlash/.
[v] https://mwi.westpoint.edu/gazas-underground-hamass-entire-politico-military-strategy-rests-on-its-tunnels/.
[vi] https://mackenzieinstitute.com/2023/11/hamass-top-leaders-are-worth-billions-heres-how-they-continue-to-grow-rich/.
[vii] Jessica Gould and Bahar Ostradan, “Hundreds of Columbia students walk out as NYC campuses brace for Oct. 7 protests,” Gothamist Daily (October 7, 2024).
Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, Ph.D. 