Cover image via Facebook. 

In that bleak summer of 2020, when media was calling the burning of our cities a “peaceful protest” and we became all the more clear that a new ideology was driving the messages we heard, where people were canceled and free speech constricted, and partial truths and lies ruled the air waves, Bari Weiss provided one courageous breath of fresh air. She quit her job at The New York Times.

“Showing up for work as a centrist at an American newspaper should not require bravery,” Weiss wrote.

What rules that remain at The Times are applied with extreme selectivity. If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome. Online venom is excused so long as it is directed at the proper targets.

Op-eds that would have easily been published just two years ago would now get an editor or a writer in serious trouble, if not fired. If a piece is perceived as likely to inspire backlash internally or on social media, the editor or writer avoids pitching it. If she feels strongly enough to suggest it, she is quickly steered to safer ground. And if, every now and then, she succeeds in getting a piece published that does not explicitly promote progressive causes, it happens only after every line is carefully massaged, negotiated and caveated.

The paper of record is, more and more, the record of those living in a distant galaxy, one whose concerns are profoundly removed from the lives of most people.

Recently, Weiss was asked to give an historic address on “The State of World Jewry” and she said:

For a sense of the state of Jewish life in America these days, you need only to have walked by the building that night. You would’ve found that police had cordoned off the entire block—and for good reason. Anti-Israel protesters, many wearing masks, gathered to intimidate those who came to the lecture. On the way in, you would’ve been screamed at—told you were a “baby killer” and “genocide supporter” among other choice phrases. You might have even glimpsed Jerry Seinfeld being heckled and called “Nazi scum” on his way out of the talk.

We read almost every day about terrifying incidents of Jews in our own country persecuted, disdained, and heckled. Weiss noted a Jewish schoolteacher in Queens forced to lock herself in the school as “a mob of hundreds of ‘radicalized’ kids rampaged through the halls—for almost two hours—after they discovered she had attended a pro-Israel rally.”

She said, “Go apply for a job as a curator at MOMA and mention that you’re a Zionist or have the word Israel on your résumé. See what happens.”

This matters to all of us, because we have always told ourselves that if we had been there in a society that turned against the Jews, we would have done something about it. We would have at least raised our voices, decried the horror and injustice, ripped down the yellow star from a Jewish business. Yet before us, antisemitism grows, and is even celebrated.

Weiss said:

My friend Alana likes to joke that the only thing worse than a dumb Jew is a surprised Jew.

And yet even many of us credited with seeing it coming have been in a state of shock.

Why?

I can tell you why, because I’m one of them.

I knew antisemitism had seduced educated people in other eras, but I did not expect a wave of antisemitism to originate with them in ours.

I knew many of our sense-making institutions—higher education, journalism, even our biggest corporation—had become bloated and corrupt. Don’t forget I worked at The New York Times. But even I did not foresee how avidly so many of these institutions would actively embrace an ideology of illiberalism.

I knew people still hated Jews and that that hate was deadly…

I thought America was almost a different kind of diaspora. One where Jew-hatred surely existed, just as other forms of bigotry unfortunately do wherever humans live. But where it could never fully take root, as it did throughout history everywhere else.

Early founders of America reached out to the Jews, assuring them that this was a place where they would be safe, and Benjamin Franklin suggested that Moses parting the Red Sea should be the image on the country’s great seal. Unlike the countries in Europe where for centuries, Jews had been systematically turned out in vicious pogroms, this country would be a place where they were immune from danger. She said:

What made us immune wasn’t something permanent. It wasn’t the soil or the pedigree of our pioneers or our proximity to power. What made America immune were our ideas. The rule of law and equality under it. A God who made us all equal. Rights not granted to us by a king or a government but rights that were self-evident and endowed by our creator.

What made and makes this country exceptional are our ideas and our fealty to those ideas.

If we lose sight of those principles—or worse, if we allow war to be made against them from within—then we can become like everywhere else.

The Founders themselves anticipated that possibility.

Here’s how Alexander Hamilton put it in the first Federalist Paper: “It seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question: whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”

That urgent, existential question is now before us once more: Are we capable? What will we choose?

Weiss makes it clear, “It is that the state of world Jewry depends on the state of the free world. And right now its condition is in jeopardy.”

Weiss said, “we must become–inside and outside—free people. For the sake of America. For the sake of the free world. And for the sake of the Jews—those who came before us, and those yet to come.”

How we Lose Freedom

How do we lose the freedom that is so precious to us? Weiss points to the Old Testament story of Aaron and the golden calf. Moses had been away up in the mountain too long, and the people became restless and gathered against Aaron demanding a golden calf to worship. “for that fellow Moses—the man who brought us from the land of Egypt—we do not know what has happened to him.”

So the Israelites took off their gold, the rings and bracelets from their wives and daughters, and built a calf for the people to worship.

What? How can that be?

Weiss asks, “Why did they do it? Why did a people who had just experienced the miracle of their liberation from slavery turn away from the God who had given them their freedom. . . and toward an idol?

She quotes the Israeli singer Ehud Banai. He sings:

We are here, in the heart of the desert,

Thirsty for living water

You’re on top of the mountain

Above the clouds

There is no sign

No signal

So many days

In a closed circuit we circle

Around the Golden Calf.

There’s no one to hit the rock

Who will give direction?

So why did they do it?

They did it because they felt anxious and vulnerable and alone.

They did it because they were desperate.

They did it because they wanted temporary pleasure.

They did it because they lost—or thought they lost—their connection to God.

They did it because they did not have the imagination to conceive of a different future.

They did it because they had come from a place that worshipped idols. They imitated what they had grown up with. They reverted to what they knew. They imitated the dominant culture even though that culture had enslaved them.

And was that so crazy?

Not a moment ago these freed people had been slaves.

They may have dreamed, during the long night of slavery, of being “a free people in our own land,” as the words of Hatikvah would put it 4,000 or so years later. But that wasn’t the same as waking up inside a totally new paradigm. That wasn’t the same as being asked to leave behind everything about the world they knew to become a free people with all of the immense privileges, but also the terrifying responsibilities, that freedom comes with.

So: Why did they build the calf? Because freedom is so very, very hard.

Weiss warned the Jews in her audience, but it is a warning to all, that we have been worshipping false gods like prestige, power, social acceptance, popularity and elite opinion.” We are human beings seduced by pleasure and ease, however temporary. We “do it because we feel anxious and unsure” and “accommodation is the best route to safety.”

Our world is changing

Weiss again:

The world many of us were born into—the world we thought we would spend our lives inside—that world is over. There is no going back. And the things we took for granted—that America would remain exceptional (not just for us but in the world); that Americans would understand this as a place and an idea worth fighting for—those are no longer certainties.

Nor is the certainty of the free world itself, which is burning at its outer edges.

Why?

—

Because freedom isn’t only under siege in Russia and Iran and Hong Kong. It is also under siege here at home.

By leftists who glorify terrorists. . . and by rightists who glorify tyrants. By technology companies that revise history and tell us it’s justice. By demagogues who point to the grocery stores and the subway system in Putin’s Russia and insist that they are symbols of human flourishing. And by an elite culture that has so lost all sense of right and wrong, good and bad, or has so cunningly transformed those categories, that it can call a massacre “resistance.” A genocidal chant, a call for “freedom.” And a just war of self-defense “genocide.”

“Human nature is full of riddles,” wrote the famous Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn. “One of those riddles is: how is it that the people who have been crushed by the sheer weight of slavery and cast to the bottom of the pit can nevertheless find strength in themselves to rise up and free themselves first in spirit and then in body, while those who soar unhampered over the peaks of freedom suddenly lose the taste for it, lose the will to defend it, and, hopelessly confused and lost, almost begin to crave slavery?”

—

Where liberty thrives, Jews thrive. Where difference is celebrated, Jews are celebrated. Where freedom of thought and faith and speech are protected, Jews are safest. And when such virtues are regarded as threats, Jews will be regarded as the same.

In other words: when people turn against freedom, they turn against us.

So it should not surprise us that our safety—as well as our freedom—are contracting right now in real time. And not just for Jews, of course, but anyone who refuses to surrender truth.

—

There’s been willful ignorance on the part of our Jewish elders to what’s happened here, in part because they have supported and funded so many of these institutions. But I promise you: if your child wants to go into the arts or music or publishing or higher education and is a proud supporter of Israel, they will face an uphill battle. At this point I’m not even sure they’ll get through the door at the Jewish Museum, whose own curator now likes “From the river to the Sea” posts on Instagram.

I mention that last one because it’s important to notice that it’s not only that other institutions have turned against us. It’s that we have turned against ourselves.

She concludes: To be free is to tell the truth even in a world awash with lies. Weiss writes, “It’s time to go to war for our values. To be free is to be courageous even when we are scared.”

I do not know what will come next for America or for the Jewish people any more than the Israelites who left Egypt and stood beneath the fire at Sinai.

Things are uncertain.

What I know is that our tradition teaches us that the seal of God is truth.

What I know is that the story of the Jewish people is the story of freedom.

And what I know is that story rings out across space and time in a common struggle against tyranny.