What Would It Take to Make the World Care?

As another school year approaches, I find myself wondering what it would actually take to make gentiles care about the plight of the Jewish people. 

In the twilight hours of August, with the sleepy heat still loitering about, I have found myself reflecting on my high school days. 

It was 2013. My cross country team took a trip up to Mammoth Lakes to do some altitude training (not that I really needed the additional difficulty). That was just over 10 years ago. 

And when I was in high school, believe it or not, I was pretty critical of Israel and her policies. 

I think, like every idealistic Jewish teenager, I wanted our country to be perfect. I wanted Israel to be the city on a hill that America was supposed to be, to be a country unlike other countries – to be a light unto the nations. 

Antisemitism was something I read about in history textbooks, not something I had ever experienced in my day-to-day life. 

Despite how much we talked about oppression and discrimination in those days, very few of us experienced it. 

We wanted to solve all of the world’s problems.

We were like kids trying to solve their parents’ marital disputes with reasons and logic – we were naive. 

We were children who lacked any experience with the rough edges of the real world, and we could not fathom that those rough edges could not simply be sanded down and made smooth. 

The naivete of children wishing to solve the adult world’s problems is as perennial as the changing of the seasons. 

But children usually grow out of it when they are confronted with the slings and arrows of the real world.

On October 7th, 2023, the Jewish children of the world grew up. 

For the first time in our lifetimes, the ugly truth of the antisemitic world was on full display for us all to see. 

And yet, ten months later, and the world has still done nothing to acknowledge our anguish. 

Democrats at the DNC told Hersh’s parents that they had no idea their son was in such a horrible situation. 

Meanwhile, the kosher shawarma shop near me put these bumper stickers in my to-go bag. 

(Stickers containing the names of two American hostages — Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a close friend of a very close friend of mine, and Edan Alexander, a 19-year-old from New Jersey, who is the same age as all of my past students who are living in Israel attending Yeshiva this year.)

In the past, before globalized media, when such clear acts of Jew-hatred happened, well-meaning gentiles could have hid behind ignorance. 

Of course, this was always a shaky defense as, even as early as 1903, things like the Kichinev Pogrom were worldwide headlines, but, in the past, at least, they could have hid behind this narrative. 

But, in 2024, to claim that you had no idea American citizens were being held in Gazan captivity is absurd. 

It implies a level of willful ignorance unfathomable to me. 

And yet, I find myself once again thinking about that cross country trip to Mammoth Lakes. 

At the time, I would not have said any of my teammates were antisemitic. 

At the time, I would not have imagined that any of them could one day say something like “October 7th was justified.” 

At the time, I was naive. 

But now that time has passed and the world has roughed me up a bit, I have become more wise and cynical.

Yet even in my wizened cynicism, I am still baffled by this question.

It has been over 10 months since October 7th. Over 100 people are still held hostage, over 500,000 Israelis have been displaced from their homes, and Jewish community centers are being burned and bombed across the world. 

We are living through an antisemitic crisis, and the jury of our non-Jewish peers is in – they do not care.  

If they did, they would have done something by now. 

Although I have become more wise and cynical over the years, I have not become wise or cynical enough to understand this. 

Israelis, Holocaust Survivors, and Mizrahi Jews all understand this in their bones – the idea that any Jew would be naive enough to look at history and imagine otherwise is, to them, absurd. 

But still I wonder, is there no decency left in the world of gentiles? Is there no sense of human dignity that cries out when confronted with such evil? Is there no yearning for justice left in their souls? 

After everything that we have seen in the past 10 months, I find myself asking the gentiles of the world – if this has not moved you to care about antisemitism, what would?  

Derek Chauvin held his knee down on George Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, and the entire world erupted in anger about the state of racial issues in America. 

Hersh Goldberg-Polin has been in a Gazan dungeon for over 320 days, and the majority of the world erupted in joy to celebrate his kidnapping. 

If that injustice alone is not enough to make the world care, what would it take?

I shudder to even consider it. 

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