WhatsappAnti-Israel protests have brought to the fore a contingent that would please both Hitler and Stalin.
(JNS / Jewish Journal) On Jan. 25, Temple Emanu-El in New York City held a memorial service for Henry Kissinger. This was unacceptable to leftist millennials. Hundreds gathered across the street to cheer on the diplomat’s death, holding signs that read “F*** Kissinger” and “Death to U.S. Imperialism.”
But that wasn’t enough for a group of white millennials. Six surrounded an elderly couple as they were leaving the service, shouting: “You’ll burn in hell forever!” “You f***in’ piece of s***!” “We will burn your homes, too!” The leader of the pack, a tall redhead, mocked the couple and threw water in their faces.
The synagogue on the Upper East Side was the first Reform congregation in New York City and is now one of the largest shuls in the United States. It is also fairly close to where I live. But that’s not what made the scene so disturbing. As my teenage son said when I showed him a video of the assault: “Who does that to an elderly couple?”
Who indeed? Anti-Israel protests have brought to the fore a contingent that would please both Hitler and Stalin: They’re white, neo-Marxist, ignorant and despise Jews. They are the new white supremacists, who in both their ignorance and abhorrence of Jews might share some laughs with the old white supremacists.
New Yorkers are all too familiar with this group. As “teachers,” they screamed at our sons for being male and tried to indoctrinate them with every aspect of leftist orthodoxy. At “protests,” they savage both the American and Israeli flags with glee. Their European and Australian counterparts have taken to chanting “Gas the Jews” while offering up a Sieg heil.
While there was no shortage of violence and incivility in the Antifa protests of recent years, this contingent of leftists considers Jews a far bigger menace than neo-Nazis. Indeed, the new white supremacists came to their antisemitism the old-fashioned way: scapegoating us. Their great-grandfathers were no doubt part of the gangs who beat up our great-grandfathers on the Lower East Side. Those who went to college were taught that Jews, less than 2% of the world’s population and the most persecuted minority in history, are hyper-privileged oppressors and neo-colonizers.
Indeed, the explosion of antisemitism in academia would never have been able to gain ground without the aid of white professors and administrators. They glommed on to neo-Marxism and Islamism as vehicles for their hatred, but neither ideology created that hatred.
This hatred became the answer to their own intersectional dilemmas: If “whites” are the root of all evil, how can they absolve their own white guilt? By spitting, literally or figuratively, on Jews. Never mind that we are an ethnicity that hails directly from the Middle East, multi-hued only because of the rapes and forced conversions we endured after being exiled from our homeland.
Leftists’ self-anointed supremacism was another way out. Why listen to Martin Luther King Jr.? Essentializing race and calling for re-segregation allows the anointed ones to maintain control while fending off questions about their own oppressor status. Why make the schools in Harlem better? That would give blacks agency. Leftists’ bigotry of low expectations—that is, blatant racism—is necessary to both their own hyper-privilege and longed-for path to power.
And then their trump card: The “cause” of Arabs who identify as “Palestinian.” Not only could the new white supremacists fabricate the most vile and ahistorical lies about the world’s only Jewish state, but all Jews—leftist or not—could now be harassed and abused for the sin of being Jewish.
Jewish students have been forced to stand in the corners of classrooms, walk across stages with their heads down and verbally self-mutilate. Leftist professors could barely contain their glee. They finally had us where they and their brethren wanted us: lined up for the guillotine.
Except their final solution missed a key element: These were not the poor, persecuted Jews that their great-grandfathers beat up. These Jews are Zionists—Maccabees. These Jews are proud; they fight back. Not by using lies and violence. But by using precisely what white leftists fear the most: our brains.
Bill Ackman, who took the fight to Harvard University’s antisemites, represents the new Maccabean Jew. He’s currently giving leftists nightmares. As for the white millennials attacking elderly Jewish couples in New York City, I’ll just quote my Israeli neighbor who told me, “The one benefit of social media: We know who they are.”
This was originally published by the Jewish Journal.
