Jews have been cursed to be lonely. The war is a reminder to fight back against that fate
A Jewish man walks through Jerusalem’s Old City. Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images
Michael Oren March 18, 2024
“Outside the rain begins and it may never end.” So opens the Boz Scaggs 1976 hit “We’re All Alone,” later recorded by Rita Coolidge and Frankie Valli.
I was reminded of that song recently while getting a haircut: My barber, a recent immigrant from France, confided that for him, the worst aspect of this war was not the anguish of the hostages’ families, the plight of the displaced, or even the near-daily deaths of our soldiers, but rather the the loneliness.
“Nobody in the world understands us, supports us, or even sympathizes with us,” he lamented between scissor-clips. “Everyone condemns us, and not Hamas, of committing genocide.” Behind the hairdryer’s wail, I heard him sigh, “We’re all alone.”
The idea of Jews as a particularly lonely people is not new. In the Book of Numbers, the pagan prophet Bilaam describes us as “a people that dwells alone.” Whether his pronouncement was a blessing or a curse has been debated by Jewish scholars ever since, but the fact of the loneliness has remained incontestable. Whether voluntarily lonely — as in the case of Abraham who left his home and set off alone for Canaan — or confined to ghettos and mellahs, forced to be lonely via exclusion from society at large, the Jews have dwelt apart.
And each time the Jews have sought to end their loneliness — as in Hellenistic Judea, before the Maccabean revolt, or in Weimar Germany — gentile society has ruthlessly reinstated it.
Zionism was a response to loneliness. Still suffering despite their efforts to assimilate, the early Zionists sought to leave Europe and recreate their ancient state in the Land of Israel. Such a state, they believed, would be welcomed as a normal member of the international community. Loneliness as the Jewish national condition would end.
For a while after Israel’s founding in 1948, it seemed our longstanding loneliness was at an end. Supported by a West still guilt-ridden over the Holocaust, Israel was widely admired, even by most of the political left.
Not so anymore. The Israel once perceived as brave, liberated and cool is now seen as oppressive and reactionary — the polar opposite. Israeli Jews are once again lonely.
A similar trajectory was traced by diaspora Jews, especially in the United States. Pre-war families, like those of my parents, cowered behind locked doors while the powerful, antisemitic Father Charles Coughlin ranted against them on the radio.
But American Jews entered the second half of the 20th century punching. Quotas on Jewish admissions were lifted on elite campuses and in previously restricted industries. The worlds of politics and the arts opened wide. The prevailing idea of a heroic Israel, imagined as an entire nation of Ari Ben Canaans as portrayed by Paul Newman in the movie Exodus, only reinforced the sense that American Jews had been fully accepted.
Their humor became American humor; their novels American literature; their bagels as American as apple pie.
Then — déjà vu — loneliness.
Just as the early triumphs of Israel contributed to American Jewish success, so, the tarnishing of its image has started to erode it. The Gaza war has only accelerated that process by exposing, and even legitimizing, the latent antisemitism in America.
That hatred, of course, arises from far more than an abhorrence of Israel. It stems, on the left, from suspicion of the idea of meritocracy, and a harsh insistence on separating the world into oppressors and oppressed. On the right, it follows from claims of Jewish power and conspiracies.
Either way, the result is isolation. The result is university campuses that once more feel unwelcoming to Jewish students, decades after the age of quotas, and social media feeds in which anti-Jewish memes intermingle with photos of adorable kittens.
Even Jews who have long believed that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are distinct from one another are beginning to discover that antisemites make no distinction between pro- and anti-Israel Jews. Ultimately, they, too, will be lonely.
Should Jews simply embrace their growing separateness — as they have done so often in the past — and regard Bilaam’s curse as a blessing?
I don’t think so. It is still possible to defy this fate, no matter how inevitable it seems. My fellow Jews can do so by reaching out, not drawing inwards: After all, the majority of Americans, according to a recent Harvard Harris poll, support Israel in its war with Hamas.
At the same time, Jews can act as we have so repeatedly in our past, to overcome our differences and unite. In synagogues and community centers across the United States and throughout the diaspora, Jews are coming together as rarely before — giving, volunteering, and sharing their feelings and fears.
In Israel, too, many of the bitter divisions of previous years have been sidelined by an overriding sense of national purpose.
The U.S. Constitution, historians have noted, transformed these United States — a loose confederation of former colonies — into one nation. Similarly, the Torah turned the Jewish people who arrived at Mount Sinai as a plural people into the singular noun, Israel.
Now is the time to once more seek that unity. My barber’s lamentation needn’t be permanent if Jews stand together and resist the forces that seek, again, to make us separate. Though the “rain may never end,” Scaggs warned us nearly 50 years ago, we can still “close the window” and “calm the light.” Do that, he assured us, “and it will be alright.”
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