The Lost Generation

On September 10 and 11, the committee tasked with reviewing submissions for and against divestment - ACURM - held two public hearings over zoom to solicit the opinions of the greater Brown community on a proposal to divest from ten companies that conduct business with Israel.

It is no great secret that I’ve been paying close attention to the divestment vote at my alma mater, Brown University. So, it should come as no great surprise that I tuned in from my hotel room in Cambridge, MA after work in order to contribute my thoughts on what I view as an amoral travesty.

Unfortunately, the real travesty was the assault on my ears the night of the first comment session. The pro-divestment crowd at Brown apparently assembled every “As a Jew…” they could muster to call in and lend their stamp of approval to the blatantly antisemitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (“BDS”) movement. These kids must have set up a phone bank table in the Ivy Room to clog the zoom lines with every self-loather they could locate.

As the evening wore on, I found myself becoming increasingly depressed listening to a lost generation of Jewish young adults who stand proudly in support of the boot on their own necks. They seem not to feel the weight of that boot crushing their lifeline and depriving their brain of the oxygen it needs to fully function. If only it would crush their larynx first so they would be forced to listen for once instead of reveling in the sound of their own rubbish.

One after another, these lost souls who willingly checked their identities at the door as the price of admission to leftist, populist circles on campus championed the cause of anti-Zionists and nonsensically railed in support of the people who seek the demise of their people.

In the past few years, I often have observed that the current climate must somewhat resemble 1930s Germany with its slow creep of institutionally condoned antisemitism. The Jews of Germany similarly elected different paths of resistance, with some fleeing, some resisting, and some seeking a road of placating in the hopes that playing nice would save the community and reverse the tide of hate.

Two clear disctinctions, however, have formed in my mind since the night of Sept. 10 as I listened to our wayward youth expressing perplexingly self-defeating perspectives.

The placaters of the 1930s lacked the benefit of hindsight we now have. No one truly, honestly could have predicted the Holocaust to come. Sure, Hitler ranted about it in his book. Sure, there was plenty of preceding violence. But the organized scale of mass murder was not something latent in the realm of human imagination at the time. Many of the Jewish communal leaders who attempted to work with the Nazis truly believed they were doing the right thing for the right reasons. In retrospect, many (at least, those who survived) carried immense guilt for their roles in cooperating with the death machine they did not foresee eating their own. Appeasement and “playing nice” were their chosen form of attempted survival.

In sharp contrast, our youth today ought to be well steeped in where the antisemitism we see today can lead. They ought to have been educated well before their arrival at college to recognize the scent of the monster birthed to eat our own. That was the job of their parents, their communal leaders, their religious leaders, their religious schools, and their secular schools.

There is absolutely no excuse for their profound ignorance of the parallels we see between today’s excuses for antisemitism and those of the Nazi era. There is absolutely no excuse for their inability to see the hapless role they are playing as pawns of their own enemies. There is absolutely no excuse for their lack of historical knowledge, self-awareness, or sense of communal belonging.

The second distinction is even more salient. While some Jews may have attempted to appease the enemy in efforts to protect themselves and their own, these modern Jewish youth appear to act out of a complete lack of any sense of survival instinct. The German Jews of the 1930s had no desire to be persecuted or to die. They cast about blindly for any method they thought might make their lives better and protect their own. In retrospect, it may have been a misguided method, but at least the intent behind was sound and logical.

These kids want to help an enemy they are unable to recognize before their very eyes eat both their own and themselves.

And they don’t even seem to know it.

They sounded naive. Ignorant. Lost.

Where did we go wrong in raising this generation? At what fork in the road did we lose them? Can we retrace their steps back to that point and avoid making the same mistakes with the children we are raising today?

For we cannot simply point the blame at them for failing in their own upbringing. That is not fair.

Our communities as a whole bear some culpability for this profound lack of pride in their personal identities. Whether we snoozed at the wheel while grade schools indoctrinated them in self-loathing for being too Jewish, too white, too wealthy, too comfortable, too safe, too smart, too successful, too American, too Zionist (all terms that have become pejoratives in the modern lexicon of progressives), or whether we were so comfortable with our acceptance in society that we simply forgot about the sleeping giant of antisemitism, we bear blame.

I hate to think it is too late. College students are not fully formed adults. There is still time to educate them and help them see the disservice they do to themselves and their own, although the task feels insurmountable. There is something about this generation of youth that seems unreachable. As if, post-lockdown, there is some loosened screw no one can find clogging the engine of their mental faculties.

If we give up on these youth, however, we will have lost a generation we cannot afford to lose for the sake of the future of American Jewry. In this current crisis, Israeli youth have proven they understand the assignment, while American Jewish youth have failed it dismally. And they failed it because we failed them.

I wish I had a magic answer for this dilemma. I do not.

What I do know, however, is that we have the monumental responsibility to raise our current youth better. I take this task very seriously. This phenomenon of Jew hate will not abate in time. Has it ever? A full generation of relative diaspora confort and resulting complacency has allowed the older generations to let down our guard and raise equally complacent youth who cannot even see seething hatred directed at them.

So what is the magic formula for raising proud Jewish children who grow into proud Jewish adults? What miraculous vitamin can we feed them to build a future cadre immune to the disease of self-loathing?

There is no magic bullet.

The answer is knowledge.

Feed them knowledge. Too many parents shield their children from the knowledge of past transgressions against our people as well as contemporary attacks all around them. They are ill equipped to respond to the child on the playground who accuses them of being murderers because they were born Jews. In time, their resistance will be worn down until they cave.

Give them the tools to recognize antisemitism and the information to push back against it when they confront it.

I recognized the assignment in 2001 when, after 9/11, my university became rife with overt antisemitism and anti-Americanism. Oxford became an institution where it was acceptable to draw swastikas on magazines and Israeli flags. People expressed sympathy for 9/11 for a total of two weeks. After that, I must have heard “you had it coming” nearly daily for an entire year. I was shocked out of complacency more than 20 years ago. I watched the ensuing creep across the Atlantic with eyes wide open.

As a result, I raised my children with a singular intentionality. They learned at home. They learned in a synagogue with a strong religious education program. They learned from books hand-fed to them. The children cannot do this for themselves. This part is on us - the parents.

When my fourth-grader was called a murderer on the playground last year, she had the facts and the knowledge to stand up for herself. She knew what happened on October 7, she understood the media manipulation and the lies, and she deflected them one-by-one like a pint-sized pundit.

Did she have the school’s backing? No. But she had mine, and I made sure she knew it. We need to equip our children to stand on their own two feet well before they leave the nest for college so they can stand up to bullies and ignoramuses not only in the future but right now.

They are not too young for these lessons, even in the fourth grade. Sheltering them from these realities will not stop those realities from slapping them in the face. We do our children a disservice when we underestimate their ability to process these harsh realities and shelter them until it is too late and they are ripe for the populists’ picking.

I can tell you that the impact on my child after repeated incidents of this nature was a sense of personal pride in her self-sufficiency in handling the problem, her capacity to stand tall in the face of hate and shut it down with facts and truth, and her understanding that she belongs to a people who will have her back even if the whole world turns against her.

She will not easily be swayed when she goes off to college. I am arming her with knowledge that has molded into a backbone of steel.

Our children are stronger than we give them credit for, and it is time we took responsibility for our own roles in ensuring we prepare them adequately for a changed world landscape.