What Happened to #JewishLivesMatter?

I’ve been a mess of emotions over the past couple of weeks. Things have coalesced into fear and anger. Let me explain:

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know about Hamas’ attack in Israel. Hamas — a terrorist group who includes death to Jews and Israel in their mission, and who the Gazan Palestinians elected as their leaders — tore into Israel, brutally massacring civilians in the worst possible ways, including beheading children and grandparents, raping women next to their dead friends, and taking civilian hostages to use as human shields and bargaining chips. Hamas has killed more than 1400 Israelis in the biggest extermination of Jews since the Holocaust.

But let’s pause that for a moment.

When George Floyd was murdered, it was a flashpoint for the Black community, garnering support from around the country and the globe and galvanizing so many people into action. Everyone turned their Facebook profile pictures solid black, everyone donated to #BlackLivesMatter movements and organizations, streets were repainted with #BlackLivesMatter slogans, pro-#BlackLivesMatter marches happened in tons of cities where people came out to demonstrate their support despite a still-raging global pandemic, serious discussions started happening about slavery reparations and how to undo redlining… it was like a dam broke, and we were suddenly able to come together and support the Black community in ways that hadn’t seemed possible before. Sadly, it took the death of an innocent man to make some progress, but it looked like progress was finally possible.

What happened earlier this month is not the first attack on Jews in recent years, although it is by far the most horrific and the largest. Within the past 5 years, synagogues in Pittsburgh and San Diego were specifically targeted by anti-Semites with the intent of killing Jews, and they successfully murdered dozens. These events generated a lot of copycat threats, including at my family’s temple. I still remember taking my child to daycare at our temple and walking her past an armed police officer, who had been posted there because someone threatened to attack the building and “kill the Jews.” After I brought her inside, I got back in my car and cried for 5 minutes that my child was potentially in danger — this, in a supposedly safe country where diversity was allegedly welcomed and supported.

It’s certainly not the first time that Jews have been “the other” in America. We can set aside the Holocaust, since it didn’t occur here — although the U.S. had strict immigration limits at the time that prevented a lot of Jews from escaping Europe, and there also was a ship of 1000 Jews trying to escape Nazi Germany in 1939 (who had qualified for U.S. visas!) that was denied entry at U.S. ports, eventually forcing the ship to return to Europe where its passengers died in concentration camps. Furthermore, there are so many businesses, hotels, country clubs and universities that were started in the U.S. during the 1900s by Jews for Jews, since we were excluded from mainstream establishments so we had to start our own. It seemed to be an easy jump from “No Blacks allowed” to “No Jews allowed either,” even if you weren’t in the Ku Klux Klan.

This kind of behavior stretches back hundreds and thousands of years. Before the Holocaust, there were pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe. The Inquisition. The Crusades. And the Romans. And so many more. Jews have been targeted for millennia. And we — perhaps naively — thought the Holocaust might be the last major campaign to exterminate us… but there go Hamas and Hezbollah with their mandate to kill all Jews, and they are certainly not the only groups with that charter.

So why am I angry? Simply, it’s because after all of this, after the brutal murder of so many of my brethren, so many people remain silent. Jews have reached our own George Floyd-esque flashpoint. 1400 innocent civilians killed, brutalized, tortured and kidnapped — some in their beds while their slept, some at a music festival, some while their families were forced to watch — and the world has said basically nothing.

I take that back. The world has said something. Pro-Palestinian marches have occurred and are still occurring in many cities around the globe. In New York, pro-Palestinian demonstrators were waving swastikas on their phones; in Sydney, the crowd broke into a “kill the Jews” chant. The only support Jews seem to have gotten is from each other.

Yes, there have been a few friends and co-workers who reached out to see how I’ve been doing. But by and large, many of us are feeling alone, left to fend for ourselves and forced to retreat — again — into our own community to get a small sense of security. Where are our Facebook profile pictures turned blue for Israel? Where are our #JewishLivesMatter marches and street painting and, if nothing else, calls for donations to the Israeli Red Cross to benefit some of the areas in Israel where Jews were massacred? The message we’re hearing loud and clear from our communities is that WE DON’T MATTER. We don’t matter enough to support, we don’t matter enough to speak up for, we don’t matter enough to be stood alongside.

And there’s the whataboutism. “But Israel basically made Gaza into an open-air prison.” Again, sanctions and restrictions were put into place because the duly elected government of Hamas kept attacking Israel and reiterating their mission of Israel’s destruction. If you have a guesthouse in your backyard and you rent it out to someone who repeatedly tells you they’re going to kill your family and burn down your house, in addition to throwing rocks at your house, would you just sit there and do nothing? What if they gathered their friends, broke into your house and brutally killed and tortured 1400 of your family members?

#JewishLivesMatter, plain and simple. And I’m angry and hurt and scared that I have to stand up for myself and my people because it doesn’t seem like anyone else is willing to do so for me and my family. Everyone seems to be willing to champion other causes and groups, and everyone seems to talk a good game about diversity, equity and inclusion, but the conversation stops when anti-Semitism enters the chat.