Thursday, June 19, 2025
From Ian:
Meir Y. Soloveichik: Having Faith While in Hell
Meir Y. Soloveichik: Having Faith While in Hell
This column is about faith and miracles, and it begins with an event wondrous to behold: the New York Times publishing a thoughtful, balanced, and inspiring article pertaining to the current moment in Israel.John Podhoretz: We Are Awesome: A Rant
The article features an interview with Omer Shem Tov, who until recently was held in cruel captivity by Hamas. Omer, the Times tells us, “had grown up in a largely secular home, and was living a relatively carefree existence after completing his compulsory military service.” Then, on October 7, 2023, he was suddenly snatched and subjected to torture in cramped surroundings for a year and a half. It was as a hostage that Shem Tov embraced the faith of his fathers:
A few days into his captivity, he said, he began to speak to God. He made vows. He began to bless whatever food he was given. And he had requests—some of which he believes were answered. “You are looking for something to lean on, to hold onto,” Mr. Shem Tov said in a recent interview at his family home in Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv. “The first place I went to was God. I would feel a power enter me,” he said.
“Faith kept me going,” he said, adding, “I always believed I would get home, though I didn’t know how or when.”
Shem Tov’s embrace of Jewish observance was not limited to prayer. We are further informed that he “decided to keep kosher as much as he could, eating either the cheese or the canned meat when they were given both, in line with Jewish dietary laws that prohibit mixing meat and dairy products.” The Times concludes by describing how Shem Tov “promised God that if he got home, he would pray daily with ‘tefillin’—the small leather boxes containing scriptures that worshipers tie onto their heads and one of their arms for morning prayers.” The article features a photo depicting Omer Shem Tov doing just that.
At this point, we must pause to ponder what might appear paradoxical. A young man has lived a largely secular life. Many in his circle, it is safe to say, would welcome an age in which Jews were “normalized,” in which they would be a people like any other, in which they would be left alone to create the Silicon Valley of the Middle East. Yet suddenly, at the very moment when he is being tortured for his Jewish identity, and when many of his fellow concert attendees at the Nova festival were murdered for the very same reason, his reaction is to embrace Judaism.
In this, Omer Shem Tov captures, in a certain sense, the story of Zionism itself. In 1897, a secular Jew, Theodore Herzl, had promised the possibility of normalization in his pamphlet The Jewish State. Living among Europeans, he argued, Jews would continue to be hated, but if a separate Jewish state could be created elsewhere, anti-Semitism would cease. The state Herzl originally described had little that was Jewish in its civic character. But not long after, as the Zionist movement suddenly and mysteriously, began to spread, the assimilated Austrian journalist began the ponder with wonder the history of which he was a part.
Why am I praising us? I’m not, actually. I’m actually enraged at a great many of my fellow Jews, who promote cultural ideas I revile and vote for politicians and causes I believe are injurious to America, to civil society, to the world, and to the Jews, both here and in Israel.No, Trump Is Not ‘Weaponizing’ Anti-Semitism
No, what I am praising is our birthright—and the good fortune we have been granted because of it. This is something worthy of celebration, and we must give thanks for our forebears for being forbearing. Throughout Jewish history, being a Jew was not something you could say granted you worldly good fortune. But each Jew in history lived and bore children and kept the flame alive to bring us here today, to this moment. It would be a sin against the difficulties they faced, far worse than anything we’ve faced, not to connect ourselves to the thing that connects us deeper than blood.
They said the same prayers we say. They followed the same rules the more rigorous among us follow. If we met them across centuries, if we time-traveled to a Saturday morning in the Alteneuschul in Prague in the 13th century when it was first constructed, one or another of us would be able to say, Hey, that was my bar mitzvah parashah. And depending on how good our memory is, and how good our reading is, and how solidly we know trop, we could go up and take an aliyah and read.
These are all the reasons that being proud of being a Jew, teaching our kids why they should be proud to be Jews, and feeling that transcendent connection across time and space is everything.
No reason to apologize.
And yet so many do. The question is why.
Some of it is a natural occurrence of being a small band conscious of our differences and conscious that others feel we are different, such that we are hyper-aware of the way bad actors might reflect on us. Who among us hasn’t breathed a sigh of relief to discover that, say, some lunatic or evil killer or other—the guy in Idaho, or Luigi Mangione, or the Menendezes—are not members of the tribe? We feel this way because we feel it so keenly when one is. Madoff. Weinstein. Epstein. Whose heart has not sunk to the bottom of his or her chest at the sound of their names?
So we feel responsible for each other, and worry about blame affixing to us, because we are so few.
Now consider the condition of Jews in 2025. Worldwide. Israel was attacked in October 2023. It was invaded. Thousands were killed and injured. And that attack and those killings and casualties ignited an old-fashioned blood lust—a lust for Jewish blood, or at least Jewish humiliation, or capitulation.
That was surprising. I know because we were all surprised. And shocked. And dismayed. And depressed. And filled full of rage. And sorrow. And a sense that for the first time in our lives as American Jews, we were at some form of risk in the land that had been very nearly a paradise for us after 1,800 years in the Diaspora.
What was not surprising, alas, was the presence among those with that blood lust of Jews themselves—or what Eli Lake has called the “as-a-Jews.” The type that says, “As a Jew, I am horrified by the images on my television,” or “As a Jew, I believe in tikkun olam, and Israel is not healing the world the way it should.” I say this was not surprising because these people have been present in our public life since I was a kid. More recently, I think of the example of a 2021 letter issued by rabbinical students condemning what they called Israeli apartheid.
If “a liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel,” as Robert Frost put it, then a Jewish liberal must be someone who begs for his nation to take anti-Semitism seriously—and then condemns the president of the United States for obliging.Branding the Jew: From Medieval France to Modern Times
American Jews have sounded the alarm on rising anti-Semitism for years, and the case was made when the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks spurred terrorist sympathizers in the West to take their bigotry to the streets. Campuses revealed themselves as hotbeds of sympathy for the attackers. Universities did nothing to punish flagrant violations of civil rights laws committed by those sympathetic to Hamas, and the culprits remained undeterred. As reports from Harvard, Columbia, and other universities attest, faculty, students, and even administrators continued to bait Jews and Israel in class, on the quad, and everywhere in between. Student groups revealed themselves as unabashed collaborators with terrorist organizations, raising funds for them and promoting their propaganda.
Yet when the federal government finally took upon itself the cause of ridding our campuses (and, where possible, our nation) of these malignities, Jewish public figures rushed to condemn the deployment of state power on the Jews’ behalf. For perhaps the first time in history, a non-Jewish polity has decided that the fate of its Jews is intertwined with the fate of the nation as a whole and acts accordingly. And some Jews have chosen to stand athwart our defenders, yelling “Stop!”
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibits universities from tolerating environments that are hostile to individuals because of their national origin. If schools do not do enough to crack down on discrimination against Jews and Israelis—both are considered “national origins” under federal law—they can lose their federal support. And under long-established immigration law, noncitizens who take up the cause of terrorist organizations may be deported.
These tributaries of antidiscrimination and immigration law have blended on elite campuses, where foreign students and faculty have spearheaded a campaign of discriminatory harassment in service of terrorist organizations. Joined by young American leftists, they have used bullhorns, cement, spray paint, and just about any other instrument at hand to turn campuses into platforms for radical views. They have repeatedly forced the cancellation of classes, disrupted study sessions, destroyed libraries, pulled fire alarms on guest speakers, and blocked off campus thorough-fares. As if to demonstrate the subordination of edu-cation to activism with crystalline precision, some professors held classes within encampments—those “Zionist-free zones”—or offered extra credit for participation in demonstrations.
Is this the system of higher education the American people want to support to the tune of billions per year? Clearly not. Enter the Trump 2 administration, which has made no secret of its antipathy toward higher education in its current state. “Too many Universities and School Systems are about Radical Left Indoctrination, not Education,” he tweeted in July 2020. “Our children must be Educated, not Indoctrinated!” Conservatives have long lamented the corruption of the university, manifesting in ideological uniformity, stifling speech codes, and the proliferation of thoughtless activism. It was a matter of time before a Republican administration would use its legal leverage and threaten to revoke universities’ federal funding and even tax-exempt status.
And pervasive anti-Semitism, which had exploded but met little pushback from the Biden administration, provided an opening. A newly formed federal task force nominally focused on anti-Semitism first targeted Columbia University, which had been wracked by building occupations, vandalism, and a vacuum of leadership. “We’re going to bankrupt these universities,” said its chair, Leo Terrell. “We’re going to take away every single federal dollar.” The task force first froze some discretionary grants while threatening that the worst was yet to come. Mimicking one part of the Title VI enforcement process—during which universities must be allowed to come into “voluntary compliance” with government-determined remedial measures—the administration made its demands. If Columbia did not expel or suspend students who had broken into and occupied Hamilton Hall, ban masks on campus, treat anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism, place the Middle Eastern Studies Department under academic receivership, begin reforming admissions procedures, and more, it would lose billions in federal support. Columbia’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, agreed publicly to cooperate with the demands while privately vowing not to. She resigned a few weeks later. As of now, the extent of Columbia’s acquiescence remains unclear.
But just as the badge has been used for humiliation, it has also been transformed into defiance.
On October 30, 2023, Israel’s Ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, while speaking to the Security Council chamber he decided to wear a yellow Star of David emblazoned with the words “Never Again.”
This wasn’t submission. It wasn’t shame. It was an accusation. It was a statement of anger toward a world that, once again, was showing itself too comfortable with ignoring Jewish suffering—this time after the October 7 Hamas massacre.
Erdan declared:
“From this day on, my team and I will wear yellow stars…”
Some criticized the move, others, like me, saw it for what it was: the reclaiming of a symbol once used to mark Jews for death, now worn by a sovereign representative of a Jewish state at the heart of global diplomacy making a bold and clear statement, NEVER AGAIN. What was once imposed by kings, popes, and Nazis was now worn by choice, in defiance.
And look at where we are now. Today it’s not medieval kings or inquisitors—it’s the United Nations itself leading the inquisition. Just yesterday, they released a report accusing Israel of “exterminating” the Palestinian people, not only a complete distortion and lie, it completely ignored the crimes of Hamas. Complete reality inversion. Last year, on Holocaust Remembrance Day 2024, it was revealed that UN employees actively took part in the October 7 massacre—murdering, raping, kidnapping—while others helped conceal hostages or praised the slaughter online. Today, 622 days later, 53 hostages are still in Gaza in the hands of those who truly carried out acts of extermination.
Today is also the 23rd of Sivan, the day Queen Esther gave the Jewish people the legal right to fight back. A day to remember that survival, liberation and victory starts with that right. That is what Israel is doing against the Islamic Republic of Iran, a regime racing to get nuclear weapons, a regime who will do anything in its power to wipe Israel out of the map.
History echoes. It rhymes. And sometimes, if we’re not careful, it repeats. That’s why it shouldn’t just sit in books; it should be remembered and analyzed.
Always remember: It always starts with the Jews. But it never ends there.
Never again not just a promise, it is also recognizing the signs. And never again is not a slogan—it’s now.
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