Nothing is going to help
Nothing is going to help

It’s no use explaining

You can lead a cow around the world, and when it comes back, it is still a cow.

So too explaining the situation in Israel to types like Richard Dreyfuss, and expecting a change of heart…or a Eureka moment of clarity.

As we say it in Yiddish…svet goornish helfen…nothing is going to help.

Sorry to be a pessimist, but experience does that to people.

So yes, I am referring to the actor Richard Dreyfuss and his most recent outburst of bitterness against the Jewish State, which I covered here, under “To be or not to be Hollywood Jewish.” This generated quite a few responses, among them the suggestion that Dreyfuss – and people like him – ought to be invited to Israel for a first-hand look-see at what the Israelis face day after day from enemies who won’t relent.

As if that would make a difference.

I don’t think so.

People who have their minds made up are a lost generation. Worse than stubborn, they consider themselves holier-than-thou perfect. You don’t have to be Jewish, though it helps, to be tolerant to the enemy and inflexibly intolerant to your own kin. Their minds are made up…finished…and to such people, you are only wasting your breath.

They saw, they heard the miracles, as Rabbi YY Jacobson explains, but none of it stopped Pharaoh and his armies from dashing into the sea, there to drown horse and rider. They were lured – itself a miracle for the Hebrews – by maintaining a steadfast ignorance and a refusal to be persuaded to face the truth. 

It’s like that when people choose to be hardheaded…to this day. We know it as “failure to communicate.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example. Holocaust survivors, and others, plead with her to please visit Auschwitz to know what a concentration camp is really like.

Then, after such a tour, it would be expected of her to be a dramatically changed person. 

No such luck. You are talking to an immovable object. First of all, she would never make such a trip. To do so would be giving in, and people like that can’t concede because it would mean they’ve been wrong about everything all their lives. You would be asking them to change what makes them tick. 

That’s like asking a Red Sox fan to switch sides and root for the Yankees. Can’t happen.

Hating Trump is a profession and to stop hating him would put them out of business. They would lose money, friends and even family if they opened their eyes and their minds, because hating of that sort, like anti-Semitism, is a cult that requires obedience.
Nor will the others in Congress who think like AOC ever sing Hatikvah, no matter how many times we implore them to sit down and talk. 

Nor will you ever convert a Trump-hater…not through facts and not through reason. Hating Trump is a profession and to stop hating him would put them out of business. They would lose money, friends and even family if they opened their eyes and their minds, because hating of that sort, like anti-Semitism, is a cult that requires obedience.

I’ve received a number of emails from well-meaning landsmen who ask me to take the next step, that is, to personally contact the slanderers to “start a dialogue.”

They intend to do so themselves.

If you watch Fox News, you will see that when two talking heads go at it, there is no dialogue. The side that is pro, remains pro, and the side that is contrary, remains contrary.

I learned this lesson years ago, and it is a lesson of futility.

This does not mean despair. To the contrary. 

It means that we know we are in a fight and it’s for each of us to answer the challenge by whatever G-d-given talents we’ve been granted. Everybody needs to chip in.

We are all geniuses at something. What’s yours?

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

He is the author of the international book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal.” His Holocaust to Montreal memoir “Escape from Mount Moriah” has been honored from page to screen at CANNES. His Inside Journalism thriller, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” is being prepared for the movies. Contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Website: www.jackengelhard.com