An open letter to all of my progressive friends – New York Daily News

On Oct. 7, the Jewish people suffered our greatest losses in a single day since the Holocaust. More than 1,200 Jews and others were murdered; babies killed and burnt; our women were raped and paraded naked through the streets of Gaza; more than 200 people, from a variety of countries, were taken hostage.

Where were you?

You were either silent, or you said there was wrong on both sides (like very fine people on both sides at Charlottesville?), or that all human losses are the same (recalling how none of us liked the all lives matter thing), or you were outright hostile to Israel and the Jews.

Yes: on Oct. 7, you offered us, perhaps, a day of sympathy.

But, it is easy to sympathize with Jews who are suffering. After all, we have so much experience with it.

But, when Israel fought back, you went ballistic. You criticized Israels response. You ignored how Hamas operates placing its operatives in schools and hospitals, deliberately using its people as human shields. You called for a ceasefire but not a release of the hostages. You did not demand that the Red Cross be permitted to visit those hostages.

And, why? You were victims of your binary categories of powerful/powerless that you could not see the pain of the Jewish people.

You have ignored the growing nihilism in our universities. Professors were exhilarated by the actions of Hamas, and you were silent.Imagine if someone had said that after the homophobic attack on the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, or after the attack on Emanuel AME Church in Charleston.

There has been an explosion of antisemitism in this country masquerading as pro-Palestinian support. From the river to the sea is not a cry for a two state solution (which many Jewish organizations have supported). Rather, it is a call for genocide against the Jews of Israel. When crowds at Columbia University chanted Long live intifada! do you not realize that this means the spreading of violence against not Israelis, which would be bad enough but against Jews?

Frankly, I dont get it.

I remember being in fourth grade in our synagogue religious school. Our teacher held up a photograph of Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld of Cleveland, from the New York Times. Rabbi Lelyvelds face was bloody. White supremacists had beaten him during a civil rights march.

That teacher told us: This, boys and girls, is a Jewish hero. Of all my years in synagogue religious school, that is the moment that I remember most vividly.

White supremacists killed Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, along with James Chaney, in 1964 in Mississippi for their civil rights activism. Goodman and Schwerner were New York Jews.

Many American Jews suffered, personally and professionally, because of their support for progressive causes of all kinds long before it was popular, when there were real prices to be paid.

When George Floyd was murdered by a white policeman, we were there with you.

But, when it came to the mutilated bodies of our people; the hostages, whose photos are ripped off lampposts: Where were you?

If you blithely turn away, then I must ask: What did these years of our activism mean to you?That is why I am calling you to account.

Because that is what we must do, as Jews. You must surely reprove your fellow (Leviticus 19).

Because that is what we must do, in order to maintain our self-respect. No other group would be expected to stay silent in the face of such inaction. To do anything less would be to betray our Jewish pride, which is the credentials that we carry into those alliances in the first place.

Do not expect us to cower and to erase ourselves. No ally would expect us to do that, and no ally would maintain respect for us if we chose to do that.

In a Hasidic tale, we learn that the only way to love someone is to know what causes them pain.Our losses have caused us immeasurable pain.Your silence has caused us pain. Together, we will work on listening, and hearing, and being present, and bearing witness.

But, again, we need to ask the first question that anyone asked in the Bible, the question that God asked Adam in the Garden of Eden: Where are you?

Salkin, a rabbi, is a contributing editor to Religion News Service, where he writes Martini Judaism: for those who want to be shaken and stirred. His new book, Tikkun HaAm: Repairing Our People: Israel and the Crisis of Liberal Judaism, will be published by Wicked Son in January 2024.

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An open letter to all of my progressive friends - New York Daily News