I wrote a column a couple months ago discussing an academic union’s embargo and divestment resolution against Israel, which contained distorted casualty statistics and inflammatory language falsely portraying Israel as an apartheid state guilty of genocide in Gaza. Aside from regurgitating easily disprovable anti-Israel canards that sounded more like propaganda than objective fact, its recitals echoed tropes reminiscent of classical blood libels (claiming the Jewish killing of innocents) employed throughout Christian and Islamic history to demonize and justify the persecution of Jews, when the truth is exactly the oppoite).
Though such calumnies have instigated real genocide, they are now part of a progressive political canon that seems to have influenced the resolution's thematic essence. Indeed, nowhere did it mention the depraved acts of rape, torture, and murder committed by Hamas terrorists against Israeli men, women, and children that precipitated the war, or Hamas’s insidious goal (stated in its charter) of exterminating all Jews.
Unfortunately, this hostile resolution was not a silent cry in a deaf forest but rather mirrored the radicalism of academic organizations across North America that dabble in politics with a virtue-signaling dilettantism that is intellectually shallow and morally vacuous. As a Jewish writer, my observations are influenced by religious, ethnic, and historical sensibilities that compel the defense of Jewish cultural integrity and national legitimacy against the hateful mendacity of antisemites - whether they are left, right, religious, or secular.
What happens, however, when Gentiles with no personal stake are angered by anti-Israel agendas they perceive as antisemitic, and what happens when they belong to unions that use organizational resources to support political causes irrelevant to or opposed by rank and file?
I spoke to one such person, Earl Ormond, a professor of legal studies who did not choose the union but was assigned to it. During a Zoom meeting where the resolution was discussed before being put to vote, Professor Ormond opposed it and demanded to know why it falsely accused Israel of genocide but failed to mention the horrific atrocities committed by Hamas terrorists on October 7th. Though some attempted to shout him into silence, he stood his ground and claimed his time to speak. In addition to objecting to the resolution itself, he wanted to know why his dues were being used to shill for a political cause he opposed.
When I asked the good professor - an Italian Catholic - why the resolution offended him, he said it was morally wrong and seemed motivated by disdain for the Jewish state rather than facts on the ground. And it was clear from our discussion that his feelings were not predicated on a surreptitious faith-based agenda (e.g., the dispensationalist propensity for supporting Israel in order to evangelize Jews). They instead reflected a moral compass that distinguished right from wrong irrespective of faith. That is, he was motivated by a pragmatic sense of good and evil, not some furtive parochial imperative.
And his opposition did not go unnoticed. Someone in the meeting connected him with a former Connecticut firefighters union president and labor analyst, who referred him to the Fairness Center, a nonprofit, public interest law firm that agreed to represent him in a lawsuit against his and another union. The lawsuit, “Ryan Bilodeau and Earl Ormond v. Connecticut State Prison Employees Local Number 391 of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees AFL CIO and Congress of Connecticut Community Colleges," alleges violations of a statute requiring unions with at least twenty-five members to file annual financial reports with the state labor commissioner and make those reports available to membership. (Ormond belongs to the second-named defendant-union.) The statute’s purpose is to provide members oversight over the utilization of their dues.
The gravamen of the complaint is not about antisemitism or Israel (the first-named union was not party to the offending resolution), but rather the failure to comply with state reporting and disclosure requirements. Professor Ormond in particular wanted to ascertain how much his union was spending on political activities extraneous to traditional labor interests (e.g., employee benefits and working conditions); and his initial concern was the use of his dues to promote a resolution he found morally objectionable. And though it might seem unusual for Gentiles to care about hostile attacks against Jewish interests - whether expressed as outright antisemitism or disguised as political criticism of Israel - it is not unusual for some to react out of moral conviction.
Such was the case with novelist Émile Zola, who staunchly defended the innocence of Alfred Dreyfus, the French army captain falsely accused of treason in 1894 for allegedly delivering military secrets to German contacts in Paris, and who was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island in French Guiana. Despite the lack of evidence against him, Dreyfus was targeted for being Jewish in a case that unleashed a groundswell of antisemitism not seen in France since the Crusades, with rabid mobs demonizing him and screaming “death to the Jews."
With the disclosure of new evidence two years after Dreyfus’s conviction, it became clear that Major Ferdinand Esterhazy - a French officer with no Jewish ancestry - was the source of the leaks to Germany. However, the evidence was suppressed by a military tribunal that instead used forged documents to level new charges against Dreyfus, who was again convicted amidst a cacophony of antisemitic public unrest.
This miscarriage of justice prompted Zola to publish an open letter entitled “J’Accuse" in the newspaper L’Aurore, in which he passionately defended Dreyfus and accused the French military of Jew-hatred in fabricating evidence against him. As a result, Zola himself was convicted of “criminal libel," prompting him to flee to England to avoid imprisonment. Though safely beyond French juridical reach, Zola’s literary relationships suffered while the Dreyfus affair continued to roil French society.
Clearly, it would have been easier for Zola to retract J’Accuse and abandon Dreyfus, but he refused to ignore what he considered a stain on French society; and the rectitude of his position was confirmed in 1906 when the case was reopened, Dreyfus was exonerated, and Esterhazy fled to England - where he admitted the case against Dreyfus was a sham. After his release from prison, Dreyfus was reinstated to full rank, later retired as a Lieutenant-Colonel, and was posthumously conferred the rank of Brigadier-General.
Zola risked both career and reputation to advocate for someone he did not know personally because he believed the targeting of an innocent man - motivated by an ancient hatred ingrained in the common culture - had brought shame to France and disgrace to its cultural integrity.
American humorist Mark Twain was also moved by the vicissitudes of Jewish life in Europe; and after living in Austria for two years, he concluded that Jew-hatred there was used politically to unite diverse ethnic, cultural, and religious groups against a common scapegoat. But Twain viewed the Jews’ otherness positively, prompting him to extol their virtue in an essay entitled, “Concerning the Jews," which celebrated their ability to survive and remain vital compared to historical contemporaries who disappeared after periods of great ascendancy. His essay concludes with the following paean:
“The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?"
Twain praised the Jews for their resilience, historical continuity, and refusal to fade into the sands of time. The reality, however, is that individual Jews who traded their faith traditions for alien values and strange worship did disappear, while those who clung to their ancestral birthright, grew in Torah, and embraced their distinctiveness not only survived, but ultimately thrived as an organic collective.
Perhaps that’s what Gentiles who feel genuine affinity with us are responding to - maybe they respect Jews who remain true to their traditions and reject “the ways of the nations." And maybe they understand that when G-d chose the Jewish nation, He made a covenant to preserve those who remained faithful to His Torah. Indeed, that is precisely what the Shomer Yisrael prayer recited during Tachanun suggests when it says: “Guardian of Israel, guard the remnant of Israel, and let not Israel perish, [those] who say, ‘Hear, O Israel.’"
To answer Twain's question, that's the secret of Jewish immortality.