American Jews’ traumatized responses to antisemitism and anti-Zionism are hurting our children
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Contributing Columnist Jay Michaelson August 15, 2024
The American Jewish community is unintentionally harming the young people it’s trying to help.
Over the last several months, I’ve spoken to a wide range of Jewish professionals about the mood in their communities regarding the increase in antisemitism. The near universal response: some combination of anxiety, dread and fear. This is borne out by survey data suggesting that over 60% of American Jews have felt unsafe to be Jewish in places where, a year ago, they felt comfortable.
Communal institutions are taking this challenge seriously. There are new security protocols at seemingly every school and synagogue in America. There are outreach and educational efforts to counter antisemitism in the public square. And there are numerous efforts to help adults and children navigate this frightening new terrain with less fear and more resilience.
But along with all this important work, there are also ways in which we, as a community, are making matters worse. While the increase in antisemitism is real, we are often exaggerating it. We are responding out of fear and reactivity, rather than sober reflection. We are spreading conspiracy theories. We are conflating antisemitism with anti-Zionism. We are causing our children to be more afraid and anxious than they should be. We are attacking Jewish professionals — Hillel leaders, rabbis, educators — who are doing their best in a difficult situation, and who are often simply exhausted. And we are creating a climate of polarization which causes many Jews to feel attacked from all sides.
I sit at some unusual intersections when it comes to this crisis. On the one hand, I am a rabbi and spiritual teacher who has worked in a pastoral role with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Jewish young adults over the last 20 years. On the other hand, I am a journalist, lawyer, and political commentator who has written about Israel/Palestine in these very pages for 15 years. And I am a progressive Zionist (an oxymoron according to both Left and Right) who supports the state of Israel but deeply opposes the cruelty and scale of the Gaza war. In the same comments section, conservatives call me a self-hating kapo and anti-Zionists call me an apologist for genocide.
Yet my interest, in this column at least, is focused entirely on the well-being of Jewish young adults, particularly high school and college students who are soon to return to school. I am not interested in political persuasion; I am concerned that we’re hurting the people we mean to help.
First, let’s talk about anti-Zionism. The ADL, the Republican Party, and, apparently, Hillel International have all decided that there is no difference between opposing the state of Israel as it is currently constituted (i.e. a Jewish state built atop an existing non-Jewish population, where Jews enjoy legal privileges) and hating Jews.
Analytically, this conflation is preposterous. There are numerous anti-Zionist Jewish people, and not just on the Left; for decades, much of the Haredi community was anti-Zionist; a few Hasidim still are. While the Jewish yearning for the return to Zion is ancient and central to the Jewish religion, political Zionism is a new ideology born in the cradle of 19th century European nationalism. Not all Zionists are Jews, and not all Jews are Zionists.
But the conflation is less preposterous when I reflect on my own upbringing as a conservative Jew in 1980s America. There was an Israeli flag on the bimah of my synagogue, where we recited the prayer for the State of Israel and celebrated Israeli Independence Day as a holiday. I grew up with JNF’s little blue tzedakah boxes next to our shabbos candles, and as a teenager, I planted trees in a JNF forest outside of Jerusalem. Zionism was completely woven into the Jewish curriculum at my Schechter-style elementary school.
I’m not objecting to any of this in principle; schools should teach the values they deem important. But it does lead to the belief — no, the deep-seated feeling — that Zionism is an intrinsic part of Jewish identity. So of course Jews feel attacked when they see Israel being attacked. Of course they feel unsafe on campus. Yet they are responding not only to outbursts of antisemitism (again: real, unacceptable and deplorable) but to the far larger presence of anti-Israel protests and rhetoric.
To be sure, the hard Left is equally responsible here. They have conflated Zionism with support for ethnic cleansing, genocide and colonialism. They have told as much a one-sided and incomplete story of Israel/Palestine as my Zionist education did. And they have tolerated overt antisemitism within their own ranks: harassing Jews and protesting non-political Jewish gatherings, using loaded language like “baby-killers,” and, as I heard repeatedly from the Jewish educators I spoke with, banning “Zionists” from sports teams, student groups and cultural events. (China has committed far more egregious genocidal acts than Israel, but I haven’t seen any “No Chinese” signs at campus meetups.)
But again, my focus is on helping young American Jews feel more confident and resilient. And if that is our objective, we need to help them understand what is happening, not validate and enflame their every sense of unsafety.
To be sure, when I see someone in a keffiyeh shouting that Israel is an apartheid state, I, too, feel angry and afraid. But these emotions don’t have to dictate my thoughts or actions. I step back, reflect, and try to see what’s really going on. Because often, a lot of what’s happening is less a reflection of reality and more an expression of my own inner demons.
It has really been tragic, watching how generations of trauma are playing themselves out on this massive, communal scale. It’s like everything psychologist Gabor Maté has written about: deep-seated memories, often secondhand, of persecution and violence triggering present-moment trauma responses. We are literally not ourselves when we are triggered in this way; our personality, our very brain chemistry is different.
And then, when we act unconsciously on trauma, we are quick to judge, quick to dismiss, quick to be certain about other people and their motives. We engage, as Clare Sufrin recently wrote about in the context of the response to antisemitism, in emotional, instinctual thinking, in which “our brains are so caught up in emotions that they sometimes cannot separate emotional urgency (which may or may not be long-lasting) from what is actually important.” As a result, as Sufrin movingly described, we berate anyone we think hasn’t done enough, and neglect the work they are trying to do to help young people develop positive Jewish identities that aren’t oriented primarily around threat and vulnerability.
And more. We spread conspiracy theories, use incendiary language, and relate inflammatory accounts of events. I have seen this countless times over the past few months: basically sane, moderate people spreading factually untrue and emotionally terrifying stories. I wrote about one such tale, of a “stabbing” at Yale University, in a previous column. But there are countless other examples. We are in pain, and we are causing more pain.
Of course, there are those who take advantage of this trauma for their own purposes, which I have called “antisemitism-baiting.” It suits their political goals to scare us to death, and then exploit that fear to fight against higher education (three Ivy League presidents down!) or to win an election, or whatever.
But there are more people, I think, who are engaging in this process unconsciously. We hear a terrible story, it activates deep-seated trauma within us, and we repeat it without checking the sources. This was true long before Facebook, of course, but social media has made our grapevine more toxic and misleading than ever.
This has happened on a large scale as well. It turns out campus protests were a lot smaller than we all thought they were. As David Masciotra wrote in Washington Monthly, there are approximately 1,500 four-year colleges in the United States. Encampments, walkouts, protests, and sit-ins took place at almost 140 campuses — most of them poorly attended and alienated from majority opinion.”
Masciotra also noted that “Columbia University has 37,000 students. At its peak, perhaps a couple of hundred participants created the campus melee… At nearby New York University… protestors also numbered in the low hundreds. NYU has over 29,000 students.” And yet, even liberal Jews were afraid to send their children off to college.
Masciotra’s main argument, by the way, is conservative, not liberal: “By amplifying a relatively marginal group of campus protestors to a deafening volume in the discourse,” he writes, “the prestige media risks encouraging Americans to perceive the “divestment” campaign as transformative.” But that same “amplification” has terrified entire families and blown the crisis out of proportion.
Again, any time a Jewish person or institution is singled out or harassed, that is antisemitic. If someone is wearing a kippa and walking along on a college campus, it is antisemitic to shout at them, even if the words are supposedly “political” in nature. It is antisemitic to protest a synagogue or Hillel, unless there is a political event going on inside. It is antisemitic to vandalize them, to tear down mezuzahs, to suddenly include political litmus tests in non-political spaces, to paint swastikas or use them to criticize Israel. And these things are happening. Jews are being excluded and marginalized. The crisis is real.
But there’s an old Buddhist teaching that suffering is like being hit by two arrows. The first arrow is the actual pain or loss that we experience; that is unavoidable in life. But the second arrow is our reaction to it, like wishing it hadn’t happened, rage that it did, and so on — and that, we have some control over.
Antisemitism is real. But we don’t have to respond to it this way. We can be smarter and wiser than we have been. And we can do better for our kids.
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