I told it to my four-year-old kids, then when they were seven and nine and fourteen and eighteen and twenty-plus. It was a mantra that my Dad, of blessed memory, told me:
“Life is not a bowl of cherries. So stop whining!”
Stop whining, O Jewish college students of America. Stop your incessant whining. Your complaining and kvetching. Stop whining.
You were reared by rich, comfortable, Long Island and Westchester liberals to be liberals and woke. They had abandoned the Judaism of their parents and grandparents, and now had nothing Judaic to offer you. You attended reform temples where you learned nothing Judaic of substance. You learned no Rashi, no Talmud, no Rambam. All you know is that, by happenstance, you were born Jewish just as others, by happenstance, are born left-handed.
The mainstream Orthodox Jews among your generation, the students of Torah and Mishneh and Halakha (Judaic law), have gone to other colleges and advanced yeshivas where Jew-haters do not hold court. But you, the children of the liberals who advanced to be progressive and woke, chose Harvard and Columbia and University of Pennsylvania in an era when all your professors either are woke Jewish apostates or woke non-Jews. They all hate Israel. They all hate authentic Jews. Everyone knows this.
Fools: There is no room for Jews in DEI — Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Even as White Supremacists on the Crazy Right say Jews are not White, the reality is, O Jews, you are not Black. You are not Hispanic, even those of you born and reared in Latin and South America — even in Spain — because you are Jews.
You are not Asian. You are Jews. You are not from India, like Kamala and Ramaswamy, O Jews. Even if you win a thousand national spelling bees, you will not ever be of India, O Jews. You do not fit in. You are not Native American, O Jews. Not even in the case of the Jewish mother who goes searching for her long lost son and finds him in an Indian reservation. She finds he is happy. “Marvin, what are you doing here?” she asks. “Mom, I became an Indian. This is my bride, Floating Feather. This is her father, Flying Eagle. This is her mother, Running Lamb.” The father-in-law extends his hand to Marvin’s mother and asks: “Am much pleased to meet you, and what is your name?” She responds: “Sitting Shiva.”
You don’t fit in with DEI, O foolish left-wing woke progressive college Jews. Not Black. Not Puerto Rican. Not American Indian. Not Spelling Bee Indian. Not Asian. And G-d knows not Arab Muslim. None of the DEI Chosen People. Even the homosexuals among you do not fit in. One after another LMNOPQ association has voted its endorsement of Hamas-ISIS, the Arab Muslims who throw gay Arabs off rooftops. None of them wants you, O Jews who thought yourselves Citizens of the World.
At your parents’ behest, you ran from your roots, foolish progressive Jews, fleeing the anti-Semitism you feared would come from the right because anti-Semitism so often indeed comes from the extreme right. You thought, having abandoned your G-d and His Torah, that you would find succor among the left and the progressives and the Woke because they care about everyone. They care about Black street rioters who smash and grab from stores and then are released without bail, and about the climate and the homeless, everyone. So you all became variations on George Soros and Bernie Sanders and Ben & Jerry — fleeing your heritage. “Jewish? Yeah, I guess I’m Jewish. But not really. I eat pork. I vote for Bernie. I hate Netanyahu and that Nazi extreme-right coalition of his. My family in Israel demonstrate against him every night. Here, The Squad speaks for me. I’m for Palestine, a two-state solution. I am woke. I oppose climate change. I fit in here at Harvard / Yale / U. of Penn / Columbia.”
No, you don’t, O foolish, hapless, and whining Jews. You never did. You never will. Remember that Greta Thunberg you adore? Guess what, O liberal progressive woke Ivy League Jews? That little snot also supports Hamas-ISIS.
No one respects people who deny who they are. It never works. You should learn about the Soviet Union, a hell that existed once upon a time. Many foolish apostate Jews — people like you — thought that was their ticket to fleeing the endless murderous Tsarist pogroms. So these Jews — like Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev, Karl Radek, and Leon Trotsky — embraced Communism. A Yevesekzia existed to target Jews.
You know what happened to them, O Jews of Harvard and Columbia? The first two were arrested, forced to sign confessions after weeks of being kept sleepless, then were put on trial in the middle of the night with their signed confessions read, and then were shot in rooms that had shower heads to quickly wash their blood down the drain, one by one. Radek signed his confession after two months of torture and died in a labor camp. Trotsky hid in Mexico, so Stalin sent someone to slam a hatchet into his head. Trotsky was axed from the Communist Party.
So stop whining. “Mommy, they hate us! Arab Muslims and all our friends are turning on us! They are cheering for the Hamas-ISIS butchers who slaughtered peace activists.” Hamas began by slaughtering 270 peace activists, butchering and raping and beheading peace activists at an all-night Trance Rave music festival, while more authentically committed Jews in Israel were in synagogue observing Shabbat and Shmini Atzeret. “Mommy, the Hamas-ISIS terrorists slaughtered families, murdered children, as many as 40 babies in a kibbutz, then cut off their baby heads, set their baby corpses on fire, burned others, cut off limbs, then photo’d and video’d all of it, as the Nazis had documented their atrocities. And all the students here support that, Mommy. And, Mommy, now they are chanting ‘From the River to the Sea, Palestine Must Be Free” — meaning no more Israel because Israel is the only thing that stands between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.”
“Mommy, I’m scared. I don’t feel safe here. Mommy, I don’t know what to do. You always taught me that, as liberals, we can count on people feeling sorry for us. You taught us to worship the victims of the White Male Privileged class: Blacks, Hispanics, Homosexuals, Transgendereds, Women Of Color. You taught us victimology. The only thing Jewish you ever taught us about was not the Torah but the Holocaust and how everyone should feel sorry for us. But how come no one here is standing with us as the victims, Mommy? Why is no one feeling sorry for us?”
Stop your incessant cowardly whining, O coddled and over-protected Ivy League Jews! Grow up. Instead of being Woke, the real world invites you to awake.
It was your parents and their “Jewish” organizations that fought Trump when he tried to keep out haters from radical Arab Muslim countries. HIAS stopped promoting Jewish immigration and instead focused on increasing Arab Muslim immigration, and the president of HIAS became the leader of the Presidents Conference. Now the campuses are flooded with a tsunami of Arab Muslims imported as full-tuition-paying exchange students from foreign lands that hate and despise America, the countries that blew up the World Trade Center or cheered it. They dominate the Middle Eastern Studies departments because the Saudis and their ilk put up the money to fund them. The few Jews who teach in Middle Eastern or even “Jewish Studies” must prove they are anti-Israel to get tenure. The anti-Israel petitions are filled with Jewish signers, all professors of Middle Eastern and Jewish Studies. Hate for Israel is their ticket to tenure.
Listen to this, O progressive, woke, sensitive whining Jewish college students: I went to Columbia University a bit ago. Not only did I attend, but I attracted the undergraduate student body to elect me to represent the entire college in the University Senate from 1974-1976. Look it up. I, a politically hard-conservative Orthodox Jew with yarmulka and tzitzit, was the elected representative of all Columbia College students. You know how I did it? By being a proud Jew. I was known on campus. No one dared mess with me as I led Jews on campus to make Jewish demands. At the time, Pepsi was dealing only with Arab countries, and essentially boycotting Israel, while they also were dealing with the Soviet Union that persecuted Jews and would not let them leave. At the time, Coca-Cola famously was marketing in Israel. So we demanded that Columbia end its contract with Pepsi and replace them with Coke. We won.
We demanded days off for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur — and we got it. We demanded that Columbia end all academic exchange programs with the Soviets until Prof. Vitali Rubin, some Jew who taught Chinese, was freed from the U.S.S.R. Columbia responded that they are not going to end an entire academic exchange program just for one Jew. So things happened on campus, and Columbia ended its exchange program with the Russians. A year later Vitali Rubin was in Israel, and we allowed the exchange program to resume.
So stop your despicable whining. You are a disgrace and a shame to Jews like my friends and me who, for two thousand years, never had life as good and as privileged as you have it. They were getting butchered in Kiev and Odessa in their meager hamlets. They were burned at the stake during the Inquisition. The Crusaders broke into their homes and treated them as Hamas-ISIS does. And you are whining that 32 Muslim and Indonesian and Pakistani and Black Student groups sign a statement hating Israel and loving Hamas-ISIS? That is what they are.
Grow up. They cheer the subhumans who cut off limbs, beheaded, and burned even children and babies. The Left distinguishes between bad rape and good rape. Hamas-ISIS is good Woke rape. Rape women who want peace. #MeToo.
So, O Jews of campuses, stop whining. If they chant “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free!” then gather a hundred of you and chant “From the River to the Sea, Yis-Ra-El Will Be Free!” If they chant for a “Palestine” that is a fraud because there are no “Palestinians,” then you chant for Israel. Defy them; they are nothing.
As Woke leftists, you have been taught to whine, to seek safe spaces, to cringe at microaggressions. But whining will do no good. It never does. Whining over the Holocaust did not create a Jewish country. Rather, the war of the Irgun, Lechi, and Haganah did, blowing out the British. Get out there and affirm you are Jews. Affirm Israel’s right to live, even if it must kill 100,000 Gazans as collateral damage to exterminating Hamas-ISIS. Accept that the DEI Woke have no room for you.
Stop waiting to be saved by off-campus organizations.. You have to save yourselves, for G-d’s sakes. Christians will respect you for it. Many will join you. You don’t have to let a handful of foreign students — who do not even belong in America — along with a bunch of Jewish self-hating apostates, beat you down. There are more of you than them. Stop shuffling to the showers like lambs. This is not Auschwitz; it’s Harvard Yard.
Stop whining. Fight back.
Adapted by the writer for The Jewish Press from a version of this article that first appeared here in The American Spectator.
