A Plea from a Child of Jacob ... and of Adam

“Jews will not replace us.  Jews will not replace us.   Jews will not replace us.”

Those words have been ringing in my ears ever since last weekend.  For some reason, they are the words to which I return, even more than “blood and soil,” “many sides,” or “not all of those people were white supremacists, by any stretch.”

Now don’t get me wrong.  All those phrases deeply wound me.   But “Jews will not replace us” – that’s the one I can’t stop saying to myself, over and over again.

Try it.  Repeat it like a mantra.   It goes very well with “Never again.  Never again.  Never again.”

I first encountered that latter phrase when I was in grade school.   I found it to be incredibly compelling.  It was as if a supernatural being had assigned me a mission to work for justice.  And that mission was triggered by a simple directive: “Never again.”   Never again will my people walk into the gas chambers like sheep to a slaughter.  Never again will my people assume that if we Jews are unable to fight evil for ourselves, The Holy One, Blessed Be He, will deliver us from evil.  Never again can my people count on being safe anywhere in the world until we can live in the majority in at least one country.

You can obviously see in my childhood thoughts why I’ve become a Zionist.  But more than that, I became committed to the cause of justice for all peoples and all individuals.  The Holocaust reminded me that justice is not the privilege of any one group.  It is a right that belongs to every human being, and with that right comes a whole set of duties.   None of us has the privilege to fight for our own kind unless we’re also willing to fight for others.   As we Jews would like to say, we are children of Adam even more fundamentally than we are children of Jacob.  If we take that seriously, it means that “Never again” applies to more than just Jews and Holocausts.  Never again can genocide be tolerated, no matter which group is murdered.  Never again can slavery be tolerated, no matter which group is enslaved.  And never again can virulent racism be ignored, even if it manifests itself in seemingly peaceful forms, because such “peaceful” racism is the seed of the most depraved violence that our species has ever known. 

Once Germany reached the point where Hitler won an election, those seeds of depravity were already planted.  They were planted in the ‘20s, as millions of Germans sowed their resentment toward the western powers that defeated them in World War I and decided to vent much of that resentment on “the Jews,” who supposedly wielded disproportionate power among the media and the financial system.  Today, I see similar winds blowing here in America.   Jews represent only two percent of our population.  Yet whether you’re talking about newspapers, TV, Wall Street, Hollywood, or the President’s inner sanctum, children of Jacob abound.  Apparently, this has come to be a source of resentment among the “Blood and Soil” set in rural America.

In the Good Old US of A, most people have been taught that true evil can never happen here.  We have a Statue of Liberty, a separation of powers, and a hatred of monarchy and even aristocracy.  What can go wrong?   In fact, however, our history is replete with large-scale injustice, from the African slave trade, to the Trail of Tears, to the Japanese Internment Camps, to Jim Crow.   Oh believe me, it can happen here.   It can happen wherever we allow the seeds to take root and we look the other way.

A few days ago, I called a dear friend who I know to be very loyal to the Administration.   I wanted to get his perspective on the events earlier in the week.   I asked him about the phrase “Jews will not replace us.”  And he replied that he was more concerned about the “Alt-Left” than these “fringe groups” on the right.

Believe me, these groups always start as fringe.  Whether they remain that way is up to us.   Do we take a stand against them before enough seeds are planted?  Or do we tend to our own gardens and let other people confront the problem?   That is up to us – not just our leaders. That’s our choice as grass roots individuals.  Choose wisely.  Please.