Every workday morning we walk into our workplaces and don’t feel like targets. Each day, we sit at our desks, write our stories, meet with colleagues and community members, and don’t feel like targets.
Last Friday in Seattle, however, our community again fell under the hateful gaze of an anti-Semite. An apparently unstable Muslim American, Naveed Afzal Haq, pushed through security at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle building and shot six women, one of them fatally.
Seattle may be some 2,000 miles from here, but that shooting happened to us.
Campaign director Pam Waechter, 58, who died at the scene, and the five women who were wounded are our mothers/daughters/sisters and friends and colleagues.
Let us feel their pain, mourn with them and take to heart the lessons from this incident. But what are those lessons?
First, be alert. Apparently acting on his own, Haq was a loose cannon. Reportedly unemployed and dependent on psychiatric medication, he did what many bigots and madmen have done throughout history — he blamed the Jews.
That may explain why so many Jews and Israel-lovers read daily newspapers with apprehension. We are keenly aware of public opinion. What will be the backlash in public opinion about Jews to the Jack Abramoff scandal? Is Israel’s vulnerability properly conveyed? Do we come off as Samson or Goliath?
Beneath all that concern is a constant level of tension about our role as Jews and Americans. Are we really safe? America has been good to us, but we still find ourselves discerning Jewish last names of public officials and politicians. We still read carefully into speeches and legislation to ensure our safety.
On the whole, things are good for Jews in America. (That’s not to say that America has been good for Judaism, but that’s a different discussion.)
But still, Jews are prime targets for terrorists and their organizations. There is no lack of bigots and Jew-haters among us. We must be awake to our vulnerability.
The second lesson from Seattle may be found in the reaction of Arabs and Muslims nationwide. As reported by JTA, the president of the Arab American Institute, said Saturday, “There is no room for the kind of despicable action that occurred in Seattle…. The tragic conflict raging in the Middle East cannot be used as justification for any criminal act of hate in this country. It is wrong and we reject it.”
That sentiment was echoed in a statement by the Council on American-Islamic Relations. In Seattle, two Muslim women helped lay flowers at Waechter’s synagogue.
This reaction is heartening and it should direct us to remember who we are and who we want to be. We must not react with bigotry or prejudice. Haq certainly reflects a certain anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist sentiment, but he is not a fair representative of American Muslims.
As we Jews increase our security and care for our well-being, let us undertake the important duty of living our normal daily lives. In his most recent column, American-born Teddy Weinberger reflects on his national duty as an Israeli.
He and his family are traveling to New York in August to celebrate a family bar mitzvah. He feels uneasy about leaving Israel during this war, as though he’s shirking his patriotic duty.
When Weinberger arrived in Israel, he was too old to serve in the Israel Defense Force. As he sees it, his duty as one living out of Hezbollah’s current line-of-fire is to lead his normal life: go to work, play tennis, go to the movies, take the kids to the beach, etc.
This is one way of winning. Weinberger writes, “I give our soldiers support by demonstrating to them that the Israeli people is not running scared and by actualizing for the soldiers what they are defending: the right of Jews to live normal lives of their own.”
So, too, for Jews in America. We cannot bow to the madness of one unstable shooter or, for that matter, the anti-Semitic ravings of one drunken movie actor like Mel Gibson. Instead, we must stay on the path of kindness, strength and justice.
We must continue to seek opportunities for relationships, for bridge building. We must continue to enter our Jewish institutions — schools, synagogues and community centers — with both eyes open and heads held high.
Crisis is test of U.S.
Jews’ connection to Israel
By Steven Windmueller
Los Angeles (JTA) — Israel’s military operations in Lebanon may represent a greater test of American Jewry’s resolve and engagement with the Jewish state than of Israel’s military capacity.
For more than two decades, observers of the Jewish scene have commented on the decline of American Jewish support for Israel. Studies in part confirm this shift away from the special attachment and commitment American Jews once felt for Israel’s cause.
The 1982 Peace for Galilee Campaign waged in Lebanon, the first Palestinian intifada that began in 1987 and subsequent events over the past 20 years were seen as dividing American Jews and undermining their support for the Jewish state.
Some in the ranks of Jewish leadership countered this notion. They argued that engagement with Israel represented a cyclical phenomenon and that our communal apparatus would ratchet up its advocacy and fund-raising infrastructures whenever there was a pressing need for American Jewish participation.
Others suggested that due to controversial Israeli policy decisions in the human-rights sphere and concerning territorial concessions, support for the Jewish state had evaporated in many liberal circles.
More directly, many Jews dispirited by Israeli actions had stepped away, while younger Jews seemed uninterested and uneducated in the realities of Middle Eastern politics, specifically the dramatic and complex story of Israel’s creation.
Shoah vs. Israel?
Correspondingly, much of the debate over Jewish identity has centered on the measure of support that Israel enjoys today among American Jews. An American Jewish Committee study released in April 2006 included a number of interesting observations.
One was the across-the-board, high level of resonance of the Holocaust in shaping Jewish identification. For most American Jews born before 1965, the major Jewish shaping experiences were the Holocaust and the birth of the State of Israel.
Many scholars have argued that the effect of these events should decrease with time, yet there appears to be a divergent response: The Holocaust continues to be profoundly important to a broad spectrum of young Jews, while Israel appears much less important in positively affecting Jewish identity.
In no small measure, birthright israel was designed and introduced as a countermeasure to these identity trends. Similarly, a broad array of Israel advocacy programs on college campuses have appeared, driven by the concern to engage younger Jews in promoting the case for Israel.
If Jewish connections to Israel had weakened over time, that most likely would be reflected in general American public opinion.
On the contrary, however, recent polls show that, by a four-to-one ratio, Israel is seen both as a special friend to the United States and as representing anti-terrorism policies that align with America’s interests.
Similarly, as one peruses the letters-to-the-editor pages of U.S. newspapers, it’s hard not to be struck by the voices of American Jews anguishing over Israel’s right to defend itself or calling on the U.S. government to pressure Israel to make concessions as a way to leverage peace at this moment.
Many younger American Jews face an absence of information and rootedness regarding Israel and its story.
In part, this disconnect is tied to the politics of disregard that seemed to define American Jewish institutional disengagement from Israel during the first intifada and beyond. Many in the community seemed to remove themselves from conscious involvement with Israel.
The price of this political and cultural disconnect is a generation of younger Jews less equipped to reflect on the dimensions of Israel’s historic struggle for normalcy or on its geopolitical environment. This may be the single greatest tragedy of American Jewish indifference.
As media reports and Web postings about Israeli military operations grab our attention, one of the primary questions we may need to ask is: Where will American Jews be in this latest challenge facing Israel?
Will we witness something like the period after the 1967 Six-Day War, a renaissance of Jewish commitment?
Or far more troubling, will there be silence during these critical hours and days, an absence of American Jewish voices in offering statements of support or engaging in solidarity events?
Steven Windmueller is dean of Hebrew Union College’s Los Angeles campus.
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