This is so unjust
You fall asleep with an American Dream, and wake up with an American Nightmare.
The image that haunts me is the sight of Jewish college students who rush for safety in the school library for fear of being attacked by a mob of misfits.
That was how we closed out the year 2023, and in 2024, it starts all over again. Happy New Year.
No doubt we are in the midst of a confounding paradox. On the one hand, the rise in antisemitism, here in the USA and around the world.
But at the same time, two movies about Jewish men of distinction, J Robert Oppenheimer and Leonard Bernstein, have been enjoying buffo box office success.
So, which is it…they love us or they hate us?
My guess is that those who love us are a generation that goes. The snot-nose haters are a generation that comes, to borrow phrasing from the Book of Ecclesiastes, and to realize that as the newly minted Pharaoh “knew not Joseph,” so too the clueless generation that produced Harvard’s Claudine Gay know not Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, or Bernstein. American maestro sui generis.
Gay has finally resigned, over alleged plagiarism. But the odor of antisemitism still hangs over Harvard and the rest of the Ivy Leagues.
So, nor do they know Salk, Einstein, and certainly not Hyman Rickover, father of the nuclear submarine.
Maybe they know, but like the Pharaoh, they’d rather not know the Jewish contribution to Western Civilization…which won 214 Nobel Prizes.
The same cannot be said for those, like SJP, Students for Justice in Palestine, who do much of the instigating, bullying, and terrorizing, and who came here, and stayed here, to turn America into a separate country, a place to foster intolerance, a land to sow ancient grudges, taught in universities that were bought by Iran, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
Many have overstayed their visas, but will not be sent back. We should be so lucky.
Their contributions to our culture? Zero…or nothing much that we can find. Nor did they light up Broadway, or create Hollywood, as did the Jews.
Yet they get to run the show, from the streets, to the media, to the ivory towers.
Even Jewish students…do they know their own legacy? Surely, they do. But they have been struck mute by the lack of knowledge of what it is like in a street fight.
They have been raised to obey the rules, to be polite and well-behaved, all the Old School virtues, but so out of style in a country, and a world, that makes way for the crude and the rude, and where a snotty turn of phrase is lauded and applauded. “Nice guys finish last,” wisely spoke Leo Durocher.
From Krav Maga, we are taught that in an alley scuffle, forget Marquis of Queensbury Rules. When it is you or the other guy, all bets are off, and Dirty Fighting is permitted.
Dirty Fighting is not known to the Jews of America. Instead, what we’ve got are the traditional “Nice Jewish Boys and Girls,” an honorific which has lost its appeal.
No compliment that; not anymore in these days of mindless brutality. Here we know it on the campuses. In Israel, they know it in the caves.
Too true that our kids lack the fighting spirit. They were raised to make Mom and Dad proud, and this goes way back.
“You must know everything.” So Isaac Babel got it from his mother.
“Not good enough, Jascha,” as Heifetz heard it from his mother when he was five.
All that is good. All that is wonderful. It’s what made us tops in so many fields. But something is missing. “We’ve become soft,” says a Harvard grad who wrote to me.
He admits that he is afraid to attend class. “Pro-Palestinian” and “Pro-Hamas’’ hooligans rule the roost.
Indeed, the campus has become a war zone. So, it’s time… time to quit hiding and trembling. They will find you anyway.
Learn from your brothers and sisters in Israel. Grow a pair and become brave.
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.
He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal,” 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 that and his 1960s epic “The Days of the Bitter End,” contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Contact here.
NOW AVAILABLE: The collection of Jack Engelhard’s op-eds, Writings, here
Plus, a free sample chapter of his noir gambling thriller, Compulsive, is available from his website, here.