People Love Helpless Jews (to paraphrase a book title, People Love Dead Jews) - Jews that fight back

A while ago I read People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present by Dara Horn. The book's premise is that dead Jews, i.e. Holocaust victims (Anne Frank in particular) and other similar people are a lot more popular than actual, identifiable living Jews. The author writes a lengthy chapter on a righteous Gentile, Darian Fry, The gist of that appears to be that Darian Fry was not well liked as an actual person and got little glory. What the author did tell us about him was that aside from his year engaging in rescue he was extremely unhappy and not easy to get along with.

I paraphrase the title of People Love Dead Jews to People Love Helpless Jews. During the 1950's and the first half of the 1960's Israel and the Jews were media and liberal political darlings. Jewish songs used for hora dancing were popularized by popular singers such as Arlo Guthrie.

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That changed rather suddenly after the 1967 War. Israel, blockaded by Egypt at the key port of Eilat, struck preemptively. The U.S., torn apart by Vietnam, was no help. Britain and France, their 1956 allies, had switched sides. Fast forward to today, where Jews are basically unwelcome on college campuses. People loved us when we were down and almost out. They wept copious tears for the Holocaust. However, in another context, as the companion song to We Are the World says, Tears Are Not Enough, by Northern Light.

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This theme is also well in The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel and the Fate of the Jewish People by Walter Russell Mead.

 

I've been thinking about those books too, and about how much some of the Left loves to mourn dead Jews, but fail to stand up for them when it could have made a difference.

Folks aren't happy with how some of the Left are handling this issue.

 

I'd argue that isn't unique to Jews though. Any group that is identified as victims, especially if a large number of them as dead, is very easy for people to project a very simplistic and one-sided image of, regardless of how legitimate that might be. A group that is still living, freely speaking and acting, in all the inevitable diversity and inconsistency inherent to human beings in general, is inevitably going to present and much more complex and nuanced image (probably with some accuracy).

Jews are just a clear example of that. When they were widely associated with the Holocaust, they were (largely legitimately) perceived as innocent victims, survivors and refugees. As that moves out of living memory, Jews become more associated with the state of Israel (less legitimately IMO) and therefore have the actions of Israel projected on to them, and like any state, Israel is perfectly capable of doing (or being perceived as doing) great or terrible things in equal measure.

There are plenty of other defined groups of people who have been through similar shifts in perception, albeit often regionally limited, longer ago and/or in smaller scale, so the Jewish example can be mistakenly seen as unique (which in itself can feed the imagery).

 

Why is Israel the recipient of disproportionate coverage by the media and by the United Nations? All nations are capable of good and bad things. We'll always receive breathless coverage, and usually, nowadays, for their negative actions. If they're negative actions are necessary for their survival.

 

John Kirby Says Israel Can’t Eliminate An Ideology With Force. History Disagrees.

'Why did we fight any wars, for that matter? Why did we fight al-Qaida? Surely there were Tories left in the United States after the Revolutionary War and fans of slavery left after the Civil War. There were plenty of Nazis around after World War II. (There are plenty today.) The good news was that their leaders either committed gruesome suicides, were brought to justice, or were forced to hide in the jungles of South America where they worried that Mossad agents would show up and drag them to Israel to stand trial for their crimes. Most German civilians, even one-time fervent Nazis, made their peace with reality and moved on.'

'One hopes that when Hamas is obliterated in Gaza, despite Kirby’s objections, its leaders now living it up in Qatari resorts will also wonder if they will meet their ends by accidentally falling out a 20th-story window. And one hopes that the Palestinians, like the Germans and Japanese, will finally come to terms with reality and build better lives.'

One can hope.

 

A lot of the attention is because Israel has essentially been at the centre of a civil war since it's creation, with the constant risk of that being used (not necessarily by Israel of course) to explode the entire region. Also, I don't know about US media but in across Europe you don't see a lot of news from Israel in normal circumstances. There is obviously a lot at the moment but I don't recall when it was last involved in any major news story here before October 7th.

Regardless, that doesn't counter my point. I never said the Jewish people can't ever be viewed in the manner you described, only that it isn't exclusive to Jewish people, especially in the wider world and throughout history. In the US there may well be a particular interest in Jews and Israel for socio-political reasons but there is a lot more to the world than the highly limited scope of American interests.