Last month, in an apparent oversight, the 92nd Street Y in New York did not invite me to deliver its State of World Jewry address. Instead, they went with Bret Stephens of The New York Times. Although he’s also a very good choice, I feel obliged to remedy the shortcomings in his presentation.
Stephens argued that the Jewish community in the US needs to “stop being wounded and indignant” about anti-Semitism, which he characterized as a “neurosis” resulting from “resentment marinated in envy.” He summed up anti-Semitism by saying “they hate us because of our virtues and successes.”
In response to this he argued that we need to stop trying to prove those who hate us wrong by focusing on our achievements as individuals. Instead, we need to focus on building Jewish institutions that will strengthen the bonds of Jewish community amidst inveterate hatred that cannot be eliminated, no matter how vigilant we might be about it.
Had the 92nd Street Y wisely asked me to deliver this address, my argument would have started with one word, “Amdur.”
Understanding world Jewry today cannot be disconnected from where we have been in our past. For me, the critical inflection point in that past is Amdur, a tiny, forgotten shtetl.
My paternal grandfather, Louis Friedman, left Amdur to come to the US in 1912. His journey is entwined with the story of world Jewry because he was one person amidst the wave of Eastern European Jewish immigrants to the US from 1880 to 1924. Hidden among the masses and bearing a common name like Friedman, his lonely experience stands out because our family does not have any extended relatives named Friedman.
My dad’s parents married at a relatively advanced age for the early 1930s, and my dad’s mother passed away before he was four years old. Louis Friedman had a brother who also came to the US, but he and his wife suffered the loss of an adopted son, leaving my dad as the only surviving Friedman.
All of my other grandparents came to America with their entire clan around the same time. Today I have so many cousins that are their progeny that I do not even know them all. Louis Friedman, on the other hand, was sent to America unaccompanied at around age 15, without his parents or other siblings and relatives.
When the Nazis came, those who remained in Amdur, if they managed to survive for any length of time, found themselves herded into a ghetto in Grodno and from there the Holocaust Chronicle records them having been transported to Auschwitz.
Somewhere during that time, the story of the Friedman family, most of it at any rate, ends.
Amdur’s relevance to contemporary world Jewry is more than symbolic. It is empirical evidence about anti-Semitism. In this century, Amdur, which is known as Indura to its non-Jewish population in Belarus, still exists as a tiny town of maybe 1,500 souls halfway between Grodno and nowhere. Amdur (Indura) is a nothing scrap of land, barely worth inhabiting by anyone, even a century after Louis left. Yet, even this was too much to allow for Jews who committed the crime of existing and were therefore herded away to be slaughtered.
When I read Genesis 4:10, “the bloods of your brother cries out to Me from the ground,” I hear the telling of my own story of lost generations.
I can see in three-fourths of my own family the multitude that sprouted from those who survived while constantly sensing the absence of those whose bloods cry out from the ground of Auschwitz, Grodno and Amdur. Even today, 80 years after the Holocaust, there is but a small cadre of Friedmans left to rebuild what was lost.
They were not murdered by a neurosis.
They were not lacking in Jewish community or strong Jewish institutions.
Their destruction came because the evil of anti-Jewish hatred is so pervasive and so ingrained in non-Jewish culture that their annihilation scarcely afflicted the conscience of those who killed them and those who stood idly by.
Reductionist notions of anti-Semitism characterizing it as a product of resentment, envy or neurosis, suggest that the hatred of Jews is merely schoolyard bullying that can be ignored.
This kind of thinking fails to apprehend that the enemies of the Jewish people are real, deadly, and gaining momentum.
Do we need, as Stephens contends, more vibrant Jewish cultural institutions, more investment in Jewish day schools and education, and the fortitude to acknowledge that decades of assimilation and intermarriage are not strengthening our community in the US?
Yes, but we need to do these things without pivoting away from the struggle against anti-Jewish hate. Moreover, Stephens’ emphasis on the issues of American Jewry as the issues of world Jewry simply misses the mark.
For Jews worldwide, survival is a paramount virtue. Acknowledging the threats to our survival is not being wounded or indignant. It is a recognition of fact, both contemporary and in the not-so-distant past. I would be among the first to say that Jewish identity must be about more than Holocaust remembrance and combating anti-Semitism and
Bret Stephens is 100% right to say that the Jewish people must turn to our heritage and tradition as the manna which has sustained us in a millennial wilderness. But, world Jewry cannot afford to be deluded into thinking that there is only one battlefront in this war for our survival.
It may be that anti-Jewish hate can never be eradicated, but fatalistic acceptance of it is misguided.
We must fight it by strengthening our sense of pride in ourselves, but we must also fight against it through intolerance of those who yield their consciences to anti-Jewish bigotry. We cannot be afraid to be zealous for the cause of our survival here in the US, in Europe and in Israel.
Our survival is non-negotiable. The bloods of our brethren who know the end game of anti-Jewish hate call out to us to remember that.