Jewish Lives Don’t Matter:

What A.O.C., the Iron Dome, and the Sabbath Queen Taught Me in the Bomb Shelter

(An Israeli bomb shelter)

As I sat inside the bomb shelter, listening to the percussive duet of ballistic missile and Iron Dome interceptor battling overhead, I remembered something from years ago.

When a slew of antisemitic violence erupted in her neighborhood in 2020, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez refused to meet with Jewish leaders in her district.

The following year, she wept over congressional funding for the Iron Dome.

The very same Iron Dome that was protecting me as I sat inside that shelter.

A month ago, after two Jews were killed in an antisemitic attack in D.C., she gave a mealy-mouthed condemnation, but she refused to call the attacks “antisemitic.”

As I sat inside the bomb shelter, listening to the Iron Dome of Jewish Safety flying into action, I realized a very simple truth.

Jewish Lives Don’t Matter.

I am old enough to remember the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I remember the question they asked Hillary Clinton – “Madame Secretary, do black lives matter, or do all lives matter?”

The backlash to her and other politicians saying “All Lives Matter” in 2015 was so swift and severe that no one has uttered the phrase since.

Except when Jewish lives are in question.

When Jewish lives are in question, suddenly everything else matters except the lives of the Jews.

That is why Islamophobia is invoked every time antisemitism is.

Invoking Islamophobia after every antisemitic attack is like invoking blue lives matter every time there is an instance of police brutality – which is something that someone like A.O.C. would never do.

Yet, when it comes to Jews, that is exactly what she and every other progressive do.

Had it not been for the Iron Dome, analysts predict that over 1 million Israelis could have been killed by Iran this week.

As it stands, 25 Israelis have already been killed, and massive damage has been done to our cities.

But no one cares. ‘

If 1 million Jews had died, I am sure the progressives would have found a way to build a memorial, condemn the violence, say something about the Holocaust, take a moment of silence, and move on.

Because then the question would not be about Jewish lives – it would be about Jewish deaths, something that the progressive wing seems to care about much more.

Which, I now realize, is probably why the Iron Dome draws so much ire from the progressives.

The Iron Dome is the greatest protector of Jewish life.

It is like a visual representation of the wings of HaShem sheltering His people from harm.

The threat from these missile attacks is not that they will end our lives, but that they will darken them.

Most Israelis will not be seriously affected by these attacks, but every Israeli is sleep deprived because of them.

Every Israeli has had the peace and sanctity of their Sabbath taken from them.

Every Israeli has had to make serious lifestyle changes in the past two weeks to deal with the situation.

Our lives have been upended by this war. No one is complaining because we all know what is at stake.

For 40 years, Iran has made clear that it is singularly interested in destroying the Jewish people.

In those same 40 years, the Nations of the World, the very same nations that failed to take Hitler at his word, kept telling the Jewish people that Iran was just playing around.

On Friday, when the siren went off, and the ten minutes of waiting had passed, my nextdoor neighbor invited me over for Shabbat dinner.

I tried to explain to her that I had already eaten dinner and thank her for the invitation and politely refuse.

But she looked at me with the scolding intensity of 3000 years of Jewish motherhood and told me, in so many words, that coming to her Shabbos table and eating her cooking was not a question.

She invited the whole building.

We sat down at her table, drank wine, ate delicious food, talked and laughed as we would at any Shabbos meal.

She was so happy we were there that she thanked the Iranians for giving her the opportunity to host such a beautiful Shabbat.

It had every element of a regular Shabbat meal, with the occasional explosion overhead.

I was sitting there, smiling, thinking about the beauty of Shabbos, when my reverie was broken by a particularly loud BOOM.

The Iron Dome had intercepted a missile not far from us.

We all looked at each other for a moment, and then we continued with our conversations.

But I didn’t.

I couldn’t stop thinking about that Iron Dome interceptor, the one that just saved all of our lives, the one that I helped with my American tax dollars.

The one that A.O.C. didn’t want Israel to have.

When Jews were attacked in her district, she did nothing – she left us unprotected.

When Jews are attacked in Israel, she does more than nothing – she fights against our protection.

If there is one thing that Progressives have taught me, it is that Jewish Lives Don’t Matter.

And I learned the same thing from Sivan, my Shabbos host, and all of the Jews of Israel.

Jewish lives don’t mean anything – they mean everything.

The State of Israel is the social contract between the Jewish individual and the Jewish people; it is the promise that no Jew ever feels like their life doesn’t matter ever again.

We say “Never Again” to talk about the greatest destruction of Jewish life ever, but maybe we shouldn’t.

Maybe we shouldn’t focus on how much death the rest of the world has given us – maybe we should focus on how much life we have given ourselves.

Instead of “Never Again,” we should say, “for the first time.”

For the first time, Jews can live their lives away from the humiliation of institutional antisemitism.

For the first time, Jews do not have to hide their Shabbos candles from their neighbors.

For the first time, the value of Jewish lives is not appraised by our enemies, but by ourselves.

Life is a beautiful thing.

I learned that from the Jews.

But you don’t know how beautiful life is until you have played hide-and-go-seek with a 5 year old in a bomb shelter.

Israel is not the promise that the Holocaust will never happened again; Israel is the promise that Jewish Lives will matter for the first time ever.

They might not matter to A.O.C. and her progressive caucus.

They might not matter to my former friends and the Ivory Tower intellectuals who groomed and seduced them with the intellectual sedative of antisemitism.

But they matter to me.

They matter to my neighbor Sivan.

They matter to the millions of Jews who walk out of the bomb shelter and into broken buildings to clean up a stranger’s apartment, to look after a neighbor’s child, to hug a grieving friend.

So what if Jewish lives don’t matter to the rest of the world?

They matter to me; they matter to us.

And that is what we mean when we say,

Spread Love, Spread Light,

Am Yisrael Chai

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