Dear Candace,
You have long been one of my heroes. A fearless warrior for truth. I admired so much your take-no-prisoners approach to calling out corruption and injustice wherever you saw it, in any community, even your own. I religiously watched you at Prager University, and asked for your excellent autobiography, Blackout, for a birthday present. Yet I lost track of you when your program on Daily Wire required membership, and having no social media, was never privy to your conversations there.
Thanks to my local favorite news source, Israel National News, I became informed about your heated exchanges with Ben Shapiro and read a resounding rebuke written by your one-time friends at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
In truth, I feel a bit bad for you, Candace. I want to reach out as a Jew, in the way I would have liked the David Horowitz Freedom Center to reach out to you, rather than to attack you so viciously. (Maybe they tried, but you weren’t receptive; I don’t know.)
Don’t get me wrong. I believe you were utterly misguided in your recent comments about Israel. It was not to your credit to comment—promoting lies about “the Muslim Quarter” and invoking the outrageous word “genocide” in relation to Israel’s self-defense against a Hamas massacre, for example—before you had studied the facts. But I believe you may be given the benefit of the doubt, and a chance to acquit yourself, for the following reasons:
1) There is a veritable tsunami of disinformation about Israel peddled by establishment news sources in the US and worldwide, let alone the malevolent lies and anti-Israel propaganda spouted by jihadists wearing business suits in the halls of Congress and elsewhere. How is an honest person to know the truth about Israel amidst all this?
2) There do seem to be an inordinate number of politically high-ranking Jews supporting all kinds of policies that have destabilized the US: Merrick Garland, Alejandro Mayorkas, Randi Weingarten, Rachel Levine, Adam Schiff, Chuck Shumer, Anthony Blinken, as well as Jewish donors such as George Soros, who massively fund their causes. What’s an honest conservative non-Jew to think about all this? Am I excusing antisemitism? I hope not!
I am saying, I wish that two of the Jewish commentators I admire, Ben Shapiro and Daniel Greenfield of the DH Freedom Center, had reached out to you in the way a Jew is obligated to by Jewish law—with courtesy, dignity, and respect, i.e. derech eretz. I wish they had kindly invited you to sit down and study together the facts about Israel.
However, the histories and politics of our two nations, America and Israel, have little to do with one another. In fact, most of the Jews who support open-border policies in the US are anti-Israel, too! (Both our nations have problems with influential leftist Jews; that we have in common.)
So how does one make sense of all this?
Let me try. It involves slaying a few sacred cows.
Jews have particularly idealistic souls, given them by God. We acquired those special souls when we declared at Mount Sinai 3,336 years ago, “We will do and we will obey,” as God revealed Himself to us and gave us His Torah (Exodus 24:7). Jewish tradition teaches that all Jewish souls participated in that declaration and are bound by it forever. (Jewish tradition also teaches that the Torah was offered to other nations, yet only the Jews accepted it [Babylonian Talmud Avoda Zara 2b]).
However, when Jews are torn away from their obligation to study and keep the Torah gifted them by God, their visionary souls drive them to create a man-made utopia in their own image, which is doomed to failure. This is what Jews do when they are deprived of the necessary diet for their souls—the Torah’s commandments, their bread and butter.
How did the Jews lose their connection to the Torah? Well, the foundation was sown by brutal persecution by the Christian (and later, the Islamic) world ever since Christianity became the dominant Western faith. Up until the mid-1800s, European Jews surviving pogroms were barred from higher education, owning land, and most trades and professions if they clung to their faith.
European Jewish emancipation, spurred by the Enlightenment, repealed many anti-Jewish laws. However, nineteenth-century Jews permitted to attend European universities for the first time encountered Christian Bible critics like Julius Wellhausen attacking the foundation of Hebrew Scripture (with bogus Documentary Hypotheses). Reading Kant and Hegel, they found these influential Christian philosophers deriding obedience to the Torah as befitting the “immature child” compared to the enlightened, faith-filled Christian. They faced much Christian anti-Judaism dressed up in academic garb.
Yet many young Jews were so overjoyed at finally being admitted to wider European Christian society from which they’d always been barred, they fled their ghettos, leaving their Torah observance behind, and cooperated with the Christian world’s agenda to rob them of their Divine distinction. Surely you are familiar with the concept of Replacement Theology, the reigning Christian doctrine of almost two thousand years, stating that believers in Christ, by virtue of their faith, have inherited the original biblical covenant God struck with the Jews? Surely you know that Christians—through the Crusades, to the Inquisitions, expulsions, pogroms, the Holocaust, right up until present-day missionaries—have pressured Jews to abandon Torah observance and embrace Christ.
So, how do we heal the consequences of centuries of Christian disinformation and coercion vis-à-vis the Jews while neutralizing the influence of left-wing Jews ignorant of their own heritage (casualties of the European “Enlightenment”), who are bent on creating an unholy Paradise in the US and Israel? Help us help the Jews come back to their own tradition, not yours. Christ may be King for you, but not for us. Urge your Jewish friends and the Jews whom you can influence through social media to return to their own Bible and start studying it and keeping it. Suggest they connect to authentic observant teachers within the Jewish faith who can explain the Hebrew Bible to them, which is unintelligible without age-old traditional commentaries. After its publication, you can recommend to them the riveting new memoir Crimson to White: A Memoir of Jewish Rebirth. It may open their eyes to the joy and glory waiting for them when they return to God.
Use your social media influence to encourage the Jews to come back to God. Not your God, our God. That will simultaneously quell toxic antisemitism, which is partly a divine decree to prevent Jewish assimilation, and defeat Islamism, which is, at least in part, a refutation of secular Judaism and the secular State of Israel. If you do these things, you will be a veritable interfaith heroine. You will be helping to save the world for everyone.
With prayers for your wellbeing and the judicious, responsible, revolutionary use of your platform,
Amanda Chaitt
Amanda Chaitt is the author of the upcoming story of Jewish spiritual return, Crimson to White: A Memoir of Jewish Rebirth.