The recent events on college campuses across the U.S. are alarming and deeply disturbing. As a Jew and a parent of Jewish teens who will be of college age in a couple years, I am-for the first time ever in this country– afraid for their safety. As a Jew, I know all too well what happens when a country embraces antisemitism on a large scale.
On the one hand, the complexity of everything going on is overwhelming; on the other hand, the need for moral clarity in the face of all this Jew-Hatred is urgent. I’ve been struggling for weeks to figure out what I might say that illuminates this moment in ways that are productive. Here’s what I’ve come up with, offered with gratitude to Rudyard Kipling, whose poem “If” inspired this in clear ways.
IF you are saying “Free Palestine”, and you are calling for peace and security for both Jews and Palestinians co-existing on land on which they both have ancestral roots, I stand with you.
IF you are saying “Free Palestine”, and you mean Palestinians dominating land “from the river to the sea”, you are calling for either ethnic cleansing or genocide of millions of Jews who are indigenous to that land, and you are advancing the vision of antisemitic terrorists.
IF you are saying “Let Gaza Live” and your dream includes the wish to see Palestinians living free from the murderous oppression of Hamas, who have exploited and oppressed Gazans for decades while seeking constant war with Israel, I stand with you.
IF you are saying “Let Gaza Live” and you see Israel as the irredeemably evil oppressor and Hamas as noble warriors for liberation and justice, you are amplifying the narrative of a terrorist organization.
IF you are calling for “Ceasefire Now”, and you understand that to mean that Israel will end military actions in Gaza AND Hamas will release all the hostages that it has held since October 7th, I honor your call for peace.
IF you are calling for “Ceasefire Now”, and you understand that to mean that you call on Israel to end its military actions but you make no demands of the terrorists who initiated this war on October 7th, than you are letting Hamas and other terrorists around the world know that they can do anything–LITERALLY ANYTHING- to Jews and they will get a pass, even as you call on Israel to uphold the values of human rights.
IF you believe that “Free Speech” demands calling for justice while taking full responsibility for the impact that your words and deeds have on the beloved community, I support you fully.
IF you believe that “Free Speech” is your opportunity to don a mask to disguise your identity while you spew hate speech and harass and physically attack Jews with abandon, then you cannot be trusted to be in community with others. You are either blind to or don’t care about the ways that your energy of Jew-hatred and aggression is destroying the norms that make shared society and productive dialogue possible.
IF you are calling for liberation, and your vision of liberation is about collective liberation in which relationships of oppression are transformed into relationships of equality, dignity, and peaceful co-existence then I join you in that call for liberation. It’s a vision that sounds like this:
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
(MLK’s “I Have a Dream” Speech”)
IF you are calling for liberation, and your vision involves murdering Jews wherever you find them, then you are in league with a nihilist death cult that spreads murder and destruction rather than liberation. That vision sounds like this:
The hour of judgment shall not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, so that the Jews hide behind trees and stones, and each tree and stone will say: 'Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him,' except for the Gharqad tree, for it is the tree of the Jews.
(Hamas’s Original Charter)
IF you claim to stand against racism, hate, and violence, and recognize that that struggle involves confronting those forces within ourselves and within our own tribe as well as with “the other”, then I am with you in that struggle.
IF you claim to stand against racism, hate, and violence and believe that “they” are pure darkness and “we” are pure light, then you are projecting your own unclaimed darkness outwards in ways that amplify and perpetuate hatred and violence in the world.
These are complex times. May we learn to be with this complexity with wisdom and insight so that we find our way to collective liberation, justice and peaceful co-existence in the years ahead.