You know Larry, don’t you? I’ve written about him plenty, but maybe not enough. Anyway, he came knocking at my door, so very upset, asking why I hadn’t written about the anti-Semitic murders in Jersey City, whereas usually I would jump on a story like this. Had I given up, run out of steam?

Maybe he had a point. Maybe there comes a moment when you say, I’ve written so much about this, what more is there to say?

It’s that “what’s the use” moment.

You’ve written a thousand columns about it, and books, and still nothing…nothing has changed. You have made no difference, not even a dent.

It is the same world as when your parents packed up quickly from Toulouse, and found themselves up in the Pyrenees with the Gestapo at their heels. 

As it turns out, they are still at our heels…and for them, Jews are prey to be hunted and shot on sight.

Did all that I have written stop a single bullet? 

There is also this, that when you keep to the same subject, people tend to tune out. Never, though, the killers. 

But then, is silence the answer? Of course not. Because it is a fight to the finish, and because Jews must never be patsies again, I took my kids to Krav Maga, for 10 years, to learn the art of self-defense, Israeli style. Then as for me, I was lucky to hook up with the IDF to learn what Never Again really means, in action.

But oh brother…it gets tiresome. Each day, another provocation, and again we are tasked to sharpen our pens and our swords.

A quick word about Larry. He is Jewish and Israel has no better friend, but, blond hair, blue eyes, he looks like Robert Redford. 

So he mingles in the best of circles…the world of Arts, Sports and Real Estate…and they do not know he is Jewish, and so to his face they talk that talk, until he lowers the boom. 

“Oh…we didn’t know you were Jewish. We were only joking.”

Words fail. Not for Donald Trump, thank goodness. The president has signed an executive order aimed at curbing the tide, particularly on campus. G-d bless him.
Larry doesn’t get the joke; never when it’s against Israel, or Jewish people anywhere, lately in Jersey City, upon which some people blamed the victims, and others, like Joy Behar of “The View” blamed it on “White Nationalists,” who happened to be black. So you see how hopeless this feels.

The situation feels so terribly, utterly hopeless, and a thousand more columns from me and from other Jewish literary warriors – and then what?

Words fail. Not for Donald Trump, thank goodness. The president has signed an executive order aimed at curbing the tide, particularly on campus. G-d bless him.

Do I have a choice but to carry on? Do we? No, there is no choice. Who knows. Maybe somewhere, someone read something, and it made a difference. G-d only knows.

Let’s use that to keep us from despairing and to invigorate us back into the battle.

“Strength,” we say from one weekly Torah reading to the next. Why that, I always wondered. Now I understand.

New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.

He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal,” and the authoritative newsroom epic, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” followed by his coming-of-age classics, “The Girls of Cincinnati,” and, the Holocaust-to-Montreal memoir, “Escape from Mount Moriah,” for which contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Website: www.jackengelhard.com