Hate Comes Home

In Numbers 23:9, Balaam’s attempt to curse the children of Israel is foiled by divine intervention and he pronounces that Israel “is a people that dwells apart, and is not reckoned among the nations”.

Not since World War II has this pronouncement been truer, and not since then has the question been more acute of whether Balaam’s pronouncement is truly a blessing as the scripture implies.

I live in Teaneck, New Jersey, one of the most comfortable places in the world for Jews to live outside of Israel. About half of the town’s residents are Jewish (many of the rest are Black or Muslim) and it is home to more than a dozen synagogues and Kosher restaurants. It is a town that is proud of its history as the first white-majority town to voluntarily integrate its schools in 1965. Until recently, it was a town that felt like a model of respectful coexistence, with Jewish members of the town council sitting alongside Black members under a Muslim mayor.

The Hamas massacre and Israel’s response has revealed to us the depth of the fallacies of this illusion. Like many Jews on campuses and communities across America, as well those who counted themselves as fellow travelers with other social justice warriors, we now have a clear understanding that a lava flow of anti-Semitism was coursing below the surface of feigned comity.

The tensions began building within days of the Hamas massacre and culminated recently in a pro-Palestinian walkout by students on public school grounds during school hours. The rally mimicked those of their morally-corrupt and brainless elders at institutions of higher learning, replete with “From the river to the sea…” chants and accusations of Israeli genocide. Rather than prevent these clear violations of school rules and address associated safety concerns of Jewish students, the school superintendent and local Board of Education all but explicitly endorsed the protest, with the superintendent praising “our scholars” for exercising their First Amendment rights.

Last week, the moral paragons of the Board of Education held an open meeting during which the public was to be given the opportunity to comment publicly on recent events. After a number of inflammatory anti-Israel public comments, a resident of a neighboring town - who doubled as a featured speaker invited by the “scholars” at the aforementioned “peaceful” walkout – took the microphone and yet again proved that the claim of “just being an anti-Zionist” is glossy lipstick on the pig of anti-Semitism. He proceeded to spew an anti-Semitic rant that would have made Joseph Goebbels proud. Among his pearls of brilliance was his description of Jews as the “synagogue of satan” and “children of the devil”. After some Jewish attendees stood to leave in protest after this tirade was allowed to continue for minutes, he was finally silenced and escorted from the meeting as he put an eloquent exclamation point on every pro-Hamas protester’s favorite code for exterminating the Jews as he screamed into the camera, “From the river to the sea by any mean F-ckin necessary” (watch video: https://x.com/ksgoffstein/status/1735130976517341399?s=20).

One would expect these elected representatives to repudiate this vile display of anti-Semitism. One would have been sorely disappointed. One would expect our fellow residents to share the Jewish participants’ revulsion. Once again, one would have been sorely disappointed. The board members instead just shut down the balance of the public comment period, depriving Jewish residents of the opportunity to express their concerns. And a not insignificant portion of the audience heartily applauded our local cross between Kanye West and Louis Farrakhan.

And this is not Oakland, CA where perhaps it was not surprising that a late November town council meeting devolved into an orgy of anti-Semitism with speakers accusing Israel of having fabricated the October 7 attack and killed its own babies. This is Teaneck.

Where did these leaders learn this behavior? Where did these neighbors learn to applaud a public display of crass anti-Semitism?

If the leaders of our elite universities sit idly by while their faculty and students execute hostile takeovers of their campuses to support genocide of Jews, why shouldn’t these elected leaders?

Another obvious answer lies 15 miles east at the cesspool that doubles as the United Nations headquarters. If there was a moral bankruptcy code, the United Nations would have exhausted every chapter.

Last week, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire by a vote of 153 to 10 (and those 10 included world powers like Micronesia, Nauru and Papua New Guinea). Not a word of condemnation of Hamas, with an American amendment to add one soundly defeated. And in its grudging call for release of “all hostages”, a failure to mention that Hamas is the one holding hostages (an amendment proposed by Austria to make this seemingly obvious clarification was also defeated). And the results of each of these votes were met with explosive applause and cheers from the assembled crowd of world representatives.

The lessons in amorality coming from these two – the United Nations and the college presidents – are not unrelated. On October 24, while Israel was still counting its dead and missing, Secretary General Guterres all but justified the Hamas brutality by insisting that the massacre “did not happen in a vacuum”. The hymnal of amorality was passed on to Dr. Gay of Harvard and Ms. Magill of Penn who in their Congressional testimony opined that whether calls for genocide of Jews violated their institutions’ policies depended on “context”. Apparently, condemnation of genocide, whether actual or solicited, is a context-specific affair when the victims are Jews. I guess the Teaneck Board of Education needed context about its Jewish residents’ devil worship before repudiating our modern-day Father Coughlin.

Like all things, the immediate crisis will pass. But I doubt that the Jewish population of Teaneck will easily forget how quickly our neighbors seized the opportunity to unleash, or at least tolerate, torrents of anti-Semitism under the veneer of anti-Israel activism. When my child takes the soccer field this spring alongside her non-Jewish teammates on the town travel team, will I be able to share banter and jokes with the parents who not long ago may have been calling, or allowing their children to call, for the genocide of the Jewish people??

So, yes, the scripture’s description of Israel and the wider Jewish population of the world as alone and not counted among the nations has never been more true. And while sobering and frightening, perhaps therein lies the secret to Jewish survival. Many nations celebrated among their peers have sought to wipe us from the face of the Earth –Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Crusaders, Spanish inquisitors, Cossacks, Nazis, Arabs, and many more – yet none have succeeded. We have learned to seek out temporary alliance with those with the moral backbone to support us, but in the final analysis to rely on no one but ourselves.