Bari Weiss: The Old World Is Not Coming Back It is on us to build the new one—and to ensure that it is free. That begins by telling the truth.
On November 12th, I spoke to the General Assembly in Washington D.C., which is an annual conference of the Jewish Federations—the largest Jewish organization in North America. There was a lot to talk about this year.
When did you know?
Looking back, now that we are on the far side, I wonder: When did you realize that things had changed?
When did you know that the things we had taken for granted were suddenly out of our reach? That the norms that felt as certain as gravity had disappeared? That the institutions that had launched our grandparents had turned hostile to our children?
When did you notice that what had once been steady was now shaky ground? Did you look down to see if your own knees were trembling?
When did you realize that we were not immune from history, but living inside of it?
When did you see that our world was actually the world of yesterday—and a new one, one with far fewer certainties, one where everything seems up for grabs, was coming into being?
Maybe it was September 11, 2001, when Islamist terrorists murdered 3,000 Americans. Maybe you noticed, as my friend Jonathan Rosen did, that “an explosion of Jew hatred seemed to have ridden in on the contrails of the airplanes that jihadists had turned into weapons of mass destruction and aimed at the heart of American civilization.”
Maybe it was the second intifada, in which everyday places—Mike’s Place and Sbarro and Café Moment and the Dolphinarium—became synonyms for slaughterhouses, even as few of our would-be allies said their names.
Or maybe it was on February 1, 2002, when al-Qaeda beheaded the journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan as he spoke his final words: “My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish.”
Or maybe it wasn’t until the Shabbat morning of October 27, 2018, when a neo-Nazi gunned down 11 Jews at Tree of Life while shouting, “All Jews must die!”
Or maybe it was the shooting, six months later, at the Chabad of Poway. For Hannah Kaye, who witnessed the murder of her mother, Lori Gilbert Kaye, it surely was. Or maybe it was in January of 2022, when a gunman held the congregants of Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, hostage.
Or maybe it was beforehand—the bombing of the AMIA Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina; the terror attack at the Chabad of Mumbai, India; the school shooting in Toulouse, France; the murder of Sarah Halimi, who was thrown out of her apartment window in Paris. (French prosecutors decided to drop murder charges against her killer, who had shouted “Allahu Akbar” and who had told them: “When I saw the Torah and a chandelier in her home, I felt oppressed,” because, those prosecutors said, he had smoked weed.)
Maybe it was the rise of Jeremy Corbyn in England. Or the white supremacists marching through Charlottesville, Virginia, with their tiki torches. Maybe it was the antisemites at the helm of the Women’s March. Or maybe it was the social consequences you suffered when you dared to notice them.
Maybe, as it was for so, so many, it was the morning of October 7, when Hamas terrorists came across the border into southern Israel on foot and on motorbike and by truck and by car and by paraglider to murder and maim anyone they could find. They came armed with maps that indicated which houses had children. Which family owned a dog.
But maybe even that wasn’t enough. It was still over there. Not here.
Maybe it took until October 8 when, in Times Square, people were cheering, exhilarated at news of Jewish death.
Or perhaps it was the moral inversion in the days that followed: the Chicago chapter of BLM using the symbol of a hang glider—the symbol of mass murder—as a sign of liberation. Or when the heads of Harvard and Penn and MIT, who run schools that cater to the most minute of microaggressions, could not answer in the affirmative to whether calling for the genocide of Jews qualified as bullying and harrassment. Or the professors and Broadway producers that tore down posters of women and children and babies taken by Hamas.
Maybe it was when you organized the march. And none of the people who post about being allies showed up.
Or maybe it was physical attacks on Jewish students at Tulane, at the University of Pittsburgh, at DePaul. Maybe it was the school shootings in Toronto and Montreal. Or maybe it was the now near-daily assaults on the streets of Brooklyn against the most visible members of our community.
Or maybe it was more subtle—the quiet purging of proud Jews, like the novelist Elisa Albert, who refuses to be quiet about Israel, from the arts, from museum boards, from human-rights groups. Maybe it was watching what your children were learning in their “ethnic studies” class about Israel and the Jewish people.
Maybe it was the mobs that gathered outside of Michael Rapaport’s comedy show, calling him a “racist Zionist,” or the venue in Chicago that canceled a Matisyahu concert because they claimed they couldn’t guarantee his safety.
Or maybe you knew when an Orthodox Jewish man was shot while walking to his synagogue on Shabbat in Rogers Park, Chicago—only to be offered “thoughts and prayers” by the city’s mayor.
Or maybe it took the event of two weeks ago, when Jews were hunted in the streets of Amsterdam. A pogrom in twenty-first century Europe. They called it a “Jew hunt.” In one of the recordings from the attack, a man jumps into one of Amsterdam’s canals to escape his assailants. He is forced to say “Free Palestine” as he treads in the water. His assailants laugh and jeer that he is a “cancer Jew.”
Soon, I am sure, Columbia students will hold a protest on the pogromist’s behalf. Don’t believe me? A group of them just spent Veterans Day on the quad, holding a memorial event for Sinwar.
Perhaps at the time, each one of these events felt like a nightmare or an illness. Something terrible to be endured until, in due time, it passed. Until things would go back to “normal,” as they surely would.
But those whose parents fled Tehran and Moscow and Beirut and Baghdad—they knew better.
The Persians. The Russians. The Cubans. They never didn’t know.
And that is because they came from a world where to be Jewish required knowing. They understood tyranny, because they have lived it. And so they have been alive to the threats against us and against liberty that left too many comfortable American Jews asleep.
The task for the rest of us in this moment is to learn this state of mind: the resilience, the vigilance, the mental strength, the courage, and the pride not just to survive but to thrive in this new world.
We must learn from those who never had the luxury of losing their instinct for danger.
And that begins with articulating first to yourself—and then out loud—what you know. Because only then can we get serious about what this new world requires.
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