Most of us are familiar with the saying of Hillel, “If I am not for myself, who am I? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?” The plain meaning is that a person should consider both his or her own needs and the needs of others. There arises a question of whose needs take priority – ours or someone else’s? The familiar rabbinic decrees seem to favor the former. “To take an extreme case, if you see someone drowning, most poskim hold that while you are required to try to rescue him, if the attempt would endanger your own life (for example, you’re not a good swimmer) you are not permitted to take the risk; though some opinions, Rav Moshe Feinstein for example, hold that you can do so if you want. (See www.outorah.org/p/27309/)
The question becomes more complicated when we move from the level of individuals to that of groups. Over the centuries, Jews have been so compelled to take a back seat to other identity groups that self-sacrifice has taken hold of our collective psyche. Let’s consider several contemporary manifestations.
With the onset of the Great Depression, Jews voted overwhelmingly for President Roosevelt and the New Deal with the expectation of benefits both for us and for society as a whole. As the Nazi persecution of Jews in Germany grew, however, a conflict arose. The new German regime cultivated ties with American universities, notably Harvard; demagogues like the radio preacher Father Coughlin stirred up the already potent antisemitism in America, with about half the country believing Jews have too much power; and critics referred to President Roosevelt’s administration as the “Jew Deal.” So it was that when voices were raised to ask that America admit Jewish refugees from Hitler, FDR refused to engage.
Thus, when Senator Robert Wagner of New York and Representative Helen Rogers of Massachusetts introduced a bill to admit 10,000 refugee children for each of the years 1939 and 1940, FDR allowed the First Lady to advocate for it but took no action himself, resulting in the bill being killed in committee. Likewise, Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long, a pro-Mussolini fascist sympathizer (as was FDR himself until Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 rendered it impolitic) found every excuse imaginable to deny refugees entrance to America, so that immigration quotas for Europe went unfilled at the same time that the British cut off Jewish emigration to Israel to appease the Arabs.
What was the American Jewish response? Writing in World of our Fathers, the late Professor Irving Howe found it to be as ineffective as the administration’s was hard-hearted. He wrote that organizations such as the American Jewish Committee restricted themselves to “quietly lobbying in corridors – which in this case proved to be utterly inadequate. Others were frightened by the rise of domestic antisemitism: Might not raising the refugee issue in too forceful a way play into the hands of the Jew-haters?…And the Jewish organizations lacked political leverage with the Roosevelt administration precisely because the American Jewish vote was so completely at the disposal of the president.” In the final analysis, the most prominent American Jewish leader, Reform Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, though he had close ties to FDR, thought it unproductive to try to pressure him.
Many of the same considerations still apply to our present plight, as documented in the book Betrayal: The Failure of American Jewish Leadership, edited by Dr. Charles Jacobs and Avi Goldwasser. (Full disclosure: I authored one of the 22 essays in the book.) Moreover, as Dr. Jacobs, my mentor in Jewish activism, noted in an article on JNS April 17, our communal leadership insists on a “Big Tent” approach that includes anti-Israel Jewish leftist organizations, as exemplified by selecting an Ameinu/Americans for Peace Now activist allied with J Street to serve on the small committee that nominates the president and executive council of the Conference of Presidents of American Jewish Organizations, thereby diluting further the American Jewish establishment’s Israel advocacy.
As Dr. Jacobs wrote, “The establishment told us to embrace all the leftist groups’ causes so that presumably these groups would reciprocate and have our backs, too. We followed this advice: We supported blacks and feminists, gays and Latinos, and even Muslims, and then all of them stabbed us in the back. To this day, neither local nor national establishment leaders have given an accounting of this colossal and perhaps lethal failure.” (Parenthetically, an example of backstabbing was the statement by Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP, an organization founded jointly by Blacks and Jews, calling for an indefinite suspension of U.S. weapons shipments to Israel, which was rewritten and effectively withdrawn hours later after considerable criticism.)
Globally, the peril facing Jews today is rapidly escalating. That the morally bankrupt United Nations, via the International Criminal Court, could seek to arrest and try Israel’s leaders for the “crime” of defending their nation is proof positive that a significant portion of the “civilized” world yearns for the days before 1948 when defenseless Jews could be slaughtered with impunity, and beyond that, for the pre-Sinaitic, pre-Abrahamic era when they could freely indulge their pagan lusts for idolatry, murder, and immorality. Here in America in 2024, the danger is approaching the level of Nazi Germany in the early 1930s. Now, as then, the antisemitic wave originated in the universities. It has propagated itself into academia, K-12 education, corporations, the media, sports, and even some religious denominations, as the duly indoctrinated students graduate from college and enter the working world, and has begun to erupt in physical assault. Now, as then, the antisemites seem unconcerned about being “outed.”
For example, at Harvard, as reported on JNS by Kenneth L. Marcus of the Brandeis Center, three Jewish students at the Kennedy School of Government proposed a class project about “the shared ethos of Israel as a liberal Jewish democracy.” In response, their instructor, a senior lecturer at the school who self-identifies as the son of a rabbi, declared the very concept of “Jewish democracy” would “create an unsafe space” for others in the class, and told them to drop the project. When they persisted, on the last day of class the instructor taunted and humiliated them, and denied them the opportunity to present their position. While an outside investigator brought in by the Kennedy School found that the college had violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by creating a “hostile environment,” the dean accepted the majority of the report’s conclusions but did nothing to implement them. In the spring, an Israeli student was physically assaulted by a mob, and apart from opening an initial investigation, again Harvard took no action. Similarly, elite university administrators across the country have capitulated to the demands of pro-Hamas demonstrators. The latest and most outrageous such demands at Drexel University in Philadelphia and the University of California, Santa Cruz, as yet unapproved, are that Hillel and Chabad be expelled from campus.
As if the foregoing weren’t enough, the Jewish Harvard instructor is not alone in persecuting fellow Jews. Jewish college students are increasingly uniting with anti-Zionist organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now to condemn Israel, akin to a form of Stockholm Syndrome, which reinforces Alan Zeitlin’s recommendation in the May 10 issue of The Jewish Press that Jewish schools teach a class about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Even more remarkably, both the Jewish Majority Leader of the United States Senate and the Jewish ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee have endorsed the Biden administration’s partial cutoff of military aid to Israel, effectively agreeing with the propagandists who falsely accuse Israel of genocide.
In that regard, cutting off military aid to Israel has been a long-standing American gambit. As Daniel Greenfield explained in Front Page Magazine, President Truman felt compelled to support the partition of the British Mandate that created the State of Israel to match the position of the Republican nominee, Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York. Greenfield asserted that President Truman, like our current president, played a double game, supporting recognizing Israel when speaking to Jewish audiences (which won him 75% of the Jewish vote) while privately assuring Muslims of Israel’s impending demise. Not only did his Secretary of State, General George Marshall, threaten to resign if Truman recognized Israel, but Secretary of Defense James Forrestal pronounced definitively that 40 million Arabs would throw 400,000 Jews (actually 600,000) into the sea. (Forrestal subsequently suffered a nervous breakdown and ended up being confined to a psychiatric hospital. Perhaps he shouldn’t have said what he did.)
In fact, Truman set up Israel for defeat by declaring an arms embargo on the Middle East, which may have sounded equitable but in fact wasn’t, as the Arabs could buy weapons from anyone, while Israel found it difficult to find a seller. And American Jews who tried to bring weapons to Israel were prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Fortunately, Czechoslovakia sold arms to Israel, and sympathetic French officers allowed Israel to acquire naval vessels.
Truman became frustrated when Israel started winning the war in the latter half of 1948, so he forced them to give up Gaza, setting the stage for Hamas 40 years later. He finally sold arms to Israel in 1950, in conjunction with selling to the Arabs to maintain “parity” between the two sides. To be non-partisan, the Eisenhower administration was equally hostile to Israel, collaborating with the Soviet Union to stop the joint war on Egypt aimed at regaining for Britain and France the Suez Canal nationalized by President Nasser, in conjunction with Israel’s rolling through the Sinai Peninsula to stop the fedayeen gang terrorist raids originating there.
Since that time, following Israel’s lightning victory in the Six-Day War in 1967, America has used its control over Israeli armaments to restrict the IDF’s operations. In particular, the U.S. has compelled Israel to depend on America for its highest quality weapons systems, as exemplified by the cancellation of the Lavi jet fighter project. The Biden administration’s recent withholding of arms shipments reprises then-Senator Biden, as a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, having threatened Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin with a cutoff of military aid because of Jews living legitimately in Judea and Samaria, to which Begin reacted sharply. Once again, the U.S. prevented Israel from winning by pressuring Begin and Ariel Sharon to allow Yasser Arafat to escape the encirclement of Beirut and take up exile in Tunisia.
The Zionist Organization of America’s national president, Mort Klein, observed in his May 21 column in Israel Hayom that withholding or threatening to withhold armaments is but a part of Biden’s longstanding animus toward Israel, for which Klein offered numerous proofs. As Martin Oliner advised in a recent issue of The Jewish Press, Israel can no longer trust the United States.
Let us return to the initial theme of Jews having to subordinate our interests to those of others. There is now a seemingly unbridgeable disconnect between Israel’s existential need to destroy Hamas and the Biden administration’s political determination that Hamas survive, which arises, as Lee Smith alleges in Tablet, because “[t]he Biden team’s moves to shelter Hamas are best understood in the context of a revolutionary program of domestic initiatives that aim to reconstitute American society on a new basis, and which in turn require the outright rejection of the country’s history and culture, its existing social arrangements, and constitutional order…. For the party that Obama remade in his image to triumph at home, the Palestinians must win.”
Writing in The Jewish Press, Rabbi Simcha Feuerman observed, “People tend to act with false righteousness and self-serving piety, too pure to even look at evil, and then are complicit in the face of real evil,” which, following Blaise Pascal, he attributes to the emptiness caused by abandoning religion. He continued: “To the misguided humans who are concerned about the Gazans, spend fortunes of money and time worrying about some obscure Amazonian rain forest creature that might become extinct, and dutifully compost (which is G-dly, nevertheless, when in proportion), please pay heed. The approximate genocide of one million abortions in America per year, the murder, rape, and sexual torture committed by Hamas on Israelis, or the persecution committed against women in many Islamic countries seem to escape your protestations and outrage. Please, instead of being woke, wake up, or these countries will be blowing up cafes right at your doorstep! And then, that will be a real humanitarian crisis, because you won’t be able to get your sustainably sourced lattes and kale sandwich at Starbucks.”
Enough said.
