Jewish silence in the face of hate is no longer an option: Bravery is essential.
By DAVID CHRISTOPHER KAUFMAN
Fear is something Jews have known all too well, but timidity is something else entirely. Fear is the Inquisition and pogroms, Nazis and Hamas â horrors for which fear has been a necessary, if not life-saving, reaction. Yet, there has never been anything Jewish about timidity.
That was until October 7.
Israelâs war in Gaza and the subsequent surge in global antisemitism may have turned Jews like myself into unlikely activists, but Jews of equal, if not greater, numbers have traded outrage for impotence as they tiptoe around the hatred that has arrived at our schools, workplaces, and even our front doors.
Take the case of African-American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose latest book, The Message, libelously brands Israel a genocidal apartheid state. Weeks after The Message was released last September, Coates was scheduled to give a reading at the Adrienne Arsht Center in Miami, the cityâs preeminent cultural arena named after one of its preeminent Jewish philanthropists.
Many Miami Jews were horrified, and I received calls and emails asking for help. Why me? First, I wrote a series of pieces highly critical of The Message, which I believe is a Mein Kampf for the 21st century. But most crucially, I am both an African American and a Jewish American â as well as a full-throttled Zionist â and Coatesâs racialized Israel critique felt particularly personal and egregious.
Timidity comes to an endÂ
âWeâre afraid of being called racist,â they confided as they sat silently, paralyzed by timidity and a perverse sense of politically correct propriety. Never mind that a man who has literally denied Jerusalem as Israelâs capital was heading to town. For this crowd, appeasement and acquiescence felt like the only options.
In the end, Coates stayed home â sidelined by Hurricane Milton. But the sense of timidity revealed by his intended visit can and must end with Donald Trumpâs return to the White House.
We are living in a dangerous time for Jews. A âglobal emergencyâ is how Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt described the current climate last week following the release of an ADL report noting that 46% of the worldâs population harbors antisemitic views.
But cases like Coates â and the endless other encounters Iâve had with American Jews too timid to speak out at the hate right in front of them â are only making things worse.
Believe me, I get it. White people taking on Black literary giants like Ta-Nehisi Coates within a culture overwhelmed by identity politics and âcancelâ fears is a fraught and terrifying prospect. Particularly for Jews, continuously labeled as âprivilegedâ by a punitive and overreaching DEI system that denies our ethnic distinctiveness, along with the violence and discrimination being waged against us.
TRUMP HAS committed to taking on â if not taking out â DEI on his first day in office. Indeed, even before he assumed office, Trumpâs DEI threats saw companies ranging from Walmart to Facebook end their DEI programs.
Government action, even from the top, can change policy, but it cannot necessarily change minds â at least not immediately. It will take far more than an executive order to dismantle the conformity and coerciveness that has made DEI so fearsome for those, like Jews, who fall outside its purview.
