On The Mark
Dr. Mark Meirowitz, Professor, State University of New York Maritime College
Are We Alone?
With the hatred against Jews swirling around us, with many, in universities and elsewhere, supporting Hamas and Hezbollah and the October 7 murders, rapes and mayhem - with international institutions abandoning Israel and supporting the anti- Israel cause, many of us in the Jewish community really feel a sense of loneliness - and we wonder — has the world abandoned us - left us to the mercy of haters who despise our very existence and protest and argue for the destruction of Israel? Should we give up hope?
As the son of survivors of the Holocaust, I have often wondered (especially in light of current events) about how my parents, who survived Auschwitz, felt as the Nazi persecutions began - my mother a young girl in Vienna had friends in school but after the Anschluss by Germany of Austria, she was shunned by the other children in school - same for my father in Germany - the teacher hit my father on the hand during class and exclaimed that “Moses war ein verbrecher” - “Moses was a criminal” - can you imagine how they felt - lonely and alone. Eventually they were deported to Auschwitz - where my father’s entire family was annihilated. Horrific!
And today Jewish students at top colleges are vilified and harassed - surely they feel alone as well. Political and academic leaders expostulate on the meaning of Jew hatred - saying it all depends on the “context” - as if anti-Semitism is ever defensible. The United Nations, which was established as a bastion of world peace after a world war in which 6 million Jews were murdered, now is the platform for the most malevolent forces in the world such as Iran, which facilitate Hamas’ and Hezbollah’s perpetrating its crimes and efforts to destroy Israel, while the hostages are ignored and languish in captivity. UN Affiliates, such as UNRWA actively participate in the propaganda against Israel.
The media such as NPR and the NY Times literally exult in obsessively twisting the news against Israel. Each day brings more sickening reporting which ignores the existential threat against Israel and tells a warped story about Israel, its leaders and its soldiers.
Israel has been condemned as an apartheid state and Zionism has been condemned as Racism, calumny upon calumny, lie upon lie - all with an agenda to dehumanize and stereotype Israelis - a society which has Arab judges and legislators, incredible freedom of speech and a vibrant economy, a shining star in the turbulent and fractured Middle East. In a recent article, (NY Post, “Jews May Feel Abandoned But Good People Will Step Up — As They Did for Me in the Gulag,” 9/13/24), Natan Sharansky contemplates our loneliness as a people and recollects his personal loneliness as a prisoner in the Russian Gulag. He refers to Bernard Henri Levy and Levy’s new book, “Israel Alone” to determine whether all is lost and we are alone. Sharansky says that Levy “passionately accuses the Free World of its unforgivable appeasement of evil and of failur to act when it mattered most.” Sharansky also wonders how “it could be that world leaders, themselves facing the challenge of grappling with homicidal Islamism, fail to support Israel as it stands up to the very same benighted forces”
In the meantime, Jews here in America and around the world are facing a real challenge - Jew hatred and contempt of Israel have been normalized. Can you imagine that protesters come up to synagogues to harass people wishing to express their religious freedom. We have not seen this before in America or elsewhere to this extent. The masked protesters have hidden their Anti-Semitism in the cloak of anti-Zionism, but if you want Palestine to be “free from the River to the Sea” - what are you actually advocating for?
Sharansky does say that “For the moment, we are alone” but “truth eventually prevails and that loneliness is not forever”. Let us hope this will be so and that these evil forces will be defeated - as we pray, during the high holy days, for our redemption, freedom for the Israeli hostages, and peace in Israel, the Middle East and the entire world.
Am Yisrael Chai.
