The archetype of the European Jew has subsumed the reality of worldwide Jewry. Scholarly, studious, non-confrontational, more interested in the intellectual than the physical. And of course the prevailing historical truism that millions of Jews went meekly to the slaughter from 1933 to 1945.
And this well-meaning fool accepts the paradigm that Jews don’t fight, that we should run away and let the “authorities” calm the waters before we return.
“The events of the last few days, especially last night, have made it clear that Columbia University’s Public Safety and the NYPD cannot guarantee Jewish students’ safety in the face of extreme antisemitism and anarchy,” Buechler wrote. “It deeply pains me to say that I would strongly recommend you return home as soon as possible and remain home until the reality in and around campus has dramatically improved.”
He is wrong.
Jews have been fighting for as long as we have been a people. We fought the Babylonians, we fought the Greeks, we fought the Romans, and we even fought God! He described us as a “stiff-necked” people.
And the Lord said to Moses: I have seen this people and behold! they are a stiff necked people.
— Exodus 32:9
The modern state of Israel never got the message about not fighting. Many of the people who were instrumental in the refounding of Israel were survivors of the Holocaust. They had seen first-hand the world’s indifference to the Nazi’s destruction of European Jewry, and they knew that without self-determination, it would happen again and again.
That self-determination required fighting…lots and lots of fighting. It began even before the state of Israel was formally founded, and it has never stopped. The idea that American and European Jews can insulate themselves from the world-wide hatred of Jews, Judaism, and Israel is irrational in the extreme. We will always be hated by some; we will always be attacked by some; and we will never be safe unless we embrace the historical stiff-necked attitude of Jews and say, “NO!” We will not cower. We will not run. We will fight.
here are appropriate archetypes for Jews…
She was one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and one of only 34 fighters to survive the war. After leading her group of surviving fighters through the sewers of Warsaw with the aid of Simcha “Kazik” Rotem in the final days of the ghetto uprising (on May 30, 1943), she continued her resistance activities in the rest of Warsaw outside the ghetto. She took part in the Polish Warsaw Uprising in 1944.
Mordecai Anielewicz (born 1919, Wyszków, Poland — died May 8, 1943, Warsaw) was a hero and principal leader of armed Jewish resistance in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II.
A Kibbutz in israel was renamed “Yad Mordechai” after him, and they managed to fight off most of the Egyptian army for several days in May of 1948. It delayed them enough that the rest of Israel was able to organize a defense.
THAT’S how it’s done.
