A journalist's bad advice for American Jews

During the feckless Carter administration, a headline writer for a Boston newspaper provided this title to an article about a speech by the president: “More mush from the wimp.” I don’t know whether journalist Emily Tamkin is a wimp, but this article— “What Should American Jews Do With Our Fear?” — is mush.

Tamkin’s thesis is that American Jews, rightfully gripped by fear, should not let that fear “blind us to others’ fear, sadness, pain, and trauma.” Nor should frightened Jews “close off discussion and debate, including when that debate may make some uncomfortable.”

Personally, I haven’t felt fearful in the aftermath of October 7 and most Jews I know feel angry, not afraid. But perhaps if I were a student at an Ivy League college, I would fear being attacked by pro-Palestinian thugs because it has happened on some of those campuses.

If so, I wouldn’t want to shut down debate about Israel or to deny that residents of Gaza are fearful and sad. However, I wouldn’t be be adopting the let’s-feel-each-other’s-pain stance that Tamkin advocates.

Tamkin’s claim that Jews are trying to “close off discussion and debate, including debate that. . .make[s] some uncomfortable” is mush. She writes:

Palestinian writers, books about Palestinians, speech in support of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, calls for a cease-fire: None of these are threats to American Jews.

This statement is false. Writings that unfairly and inaccurately demonize Israel over issues relating to Palestinians and Gaza pose a threat to American Jews. By inflaming protesters, they put the safety of Jews at risk.

In addition, to the extent that such writings and speeches create pressure on Israel to back off in its war against Hamas — which is their intent — American Jews face the threat of seeing friends and family members in Israel becoming less safe from future Hamas terrorism. I hope Tamkin doesn’t regard this as a matter of indifference.

Tamkin then states:

And as the war continues, as Israel continues its aerial bombardment of Gaza, and as “ground incursions” expand, Americans will continue to discuss it, including on university campuses. That is not antisemitism. Again, there are actual threats to American Jews, but they should not be used as a pretense to silence speech on American foreign policy, or on Israeli politics, or to keep people from considering and indeed centering a war in which, according to one Palestinian NGO, a child in Gaza is killed every 15 minutes. (This statistic is not antisemitic, either. It also does not diminish the horror and tragedy of the murder and kidnapping of children by Hamas.)

The premise here is that the charge of anti-Semitism should be off limits when it comes to criticism of the war in Gaza. But in making this claim, Tamkin herself is trying to limit fair debate.

The question of whether (or to what extent) criticism of Israel’s conduct of the war reveals anti-Semitism is a legitimate one. The argument that Jews don’t have the right to respond to attempted genocide the way America has responded to less genocidal attacks suggests anti-Semitism. False claims about the way Israel is conducting the war — including discussion that fails to describe measures the Israelis are taking to protect civilians and measures Hamas has taken to leave civilians unprotected— are at least as likely as not to be the product of anti-Semitism.

And although accurate statistics of course aren’t anti-Semitic, uncritical reliance on statistics provided by Hamas, an outfit dedicated to killing Jews and that lies consistently, is certainly evidence of sympathy for Hamas and therefore evidence of anti-Semitism.

A less mushy article than Tamkin’s would distinguish between two types of “discussion” that has taken place on college campuses. The first is discussion about matters like Israeli-Palestinian relations past and present; whether or to what extent Gaza residents support Hamas;, and the legality and morality of Israel’s response to the horrors of October 7. Matters like these are, of course, legitimate subjects for debate (though it is not legitimate to lie about them).

The second type of “discussion” consists of applauding or defending Hamas’ massacre. For example, a Cornell professor said the massacre was “exhilarating.” And multiple student groups at Harvard blamed Israel for it, which can only mean the massacre was justified.

Does Tamkin believe that defending genocide is debate that should not be shut down? We don’t know because she avoids the question.

I’m skeptical that this sort of extreme speech should be permitted on campus, especially when it comes from professors. One thing is for sure: The colleges that are punishing teachers for the pronouns they use and students for “insensitive” speech would come down extremely hard on speech that defends genocidal attacks on minority groups other than Jews.

Tamkin is at her most mushy when she writes, “I hope we will. . .be careful [as Jews] not to. . .equate ourselves with our fear.” What the heck does it mean to equate oneself with fear. To Tamkin, apparently, it means something like this:

As the Israeli writer Etgar Keret told the New York Times recently, “when I see people watching the horrible tragedy that is happening here as if it were a Super Bowl of victimhood, in which you support one team and really don’t care about the other, empathy becomes very, very selective. You see only some pain. You don’t want to see other pain.”

I’m sorry, but there’s a war going on. The two “teams” are the IDF and Hamas. Do Tamkin and the Israeli writer object to Jews supporting the IDF team?

Maybe not. It seems, though, that they want Jews to have an equal amount of empathy for those massacred and kidnapped by Hamas and for Gaza civilians killed accidentally in the IDF’s response to the massacre.

I’ll pass. Not because of “fear,” but because the two things are quite different. Hamas’ victims woke up on October to find bloodthirsty terrorists invading their homes bent on killing them and their children in the most brutal ways imaginable.

The Gazans under fire were warned by Israel of what was coming and given more than a week to escape the war’s main theatre. They are still being warned. And the IDF has held back on all-out attacks on hospitals Hamas is using.

More fundamentally, humans naturally have more empathy for the victims of aggression against their country or members of their race/religion than they have for victims of the response to that aggression. Americans had more empathy for the victims of Pearl Harbor than for residents of Tokyo when that city was fired bombed near the end of World War II. We had more empathy for the victims of 9/11 than for Afghan civilians killed in our fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Why should American Jews be different?

The answer might reside in the desire of some American Jews to come across as fair-minded to a fault in dealing with our enemies. (I first encountered this tendency after the Israelis captured Adolph Eichmann. Some Jews we knew thought this monster should not be executed.) Ordinary Americans might reflexively strike back at the nation’s enemies without compunction, but Jews should take the moral high road.

Where does this tendency come from? Perhaps it has religious roots, though I thought it is Christians who are supposed to turn the other cheek.

Perhaps it’s a (misguided) survival mechanism. By coming across as especially high-minded and non-vengeful, maybe we’ll be less likely to face persecution. (I’ll also suggest that this kind of stance can be good for the career of a Jewish journalist who wants to swim in the mainstream, though I don’t believe this is what’s driving Tamkin.)

In tranquil times, striking a high-minded pose comes at no cost for American Jews. But these aren’t tranquil times.

There’s a war going on and, as Bari Weiss explained, the war is civilizational in nature. Furthermore, the war is being waged against Jews in this country. Some college campuses aren’t safe for Jews and the number of hate crimes against Jews has soared.

In that environment, American Jews can’t afford not to “support a team.” Certainly, we can spare a thought for dead civilians in Gaza. But we shouldn’t let that thought cause us to support a cease fire or to otherwise go mushy about the necessity and justness of the war Israel is fighting.

Tamkin says “We [Jews} are scared. But right now we have to be more than that.” The “more” I think we need to be consists of being strong advocates for Israel and enemies of mushy thinking that might direct us in a different direction.