Can American Jews shake off their defensive posture rooted in fear and a distorted conception of Jewish values to begin acting to both deter those who attack them and to convince them that the Jews are not easy prey for antisemitic thugs? According to JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin, that’s the question the Jewish community must confront of an unprecedented surge in Jew-hared in the two years since the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
He’s joined in this week’s episode of Think Twice by Benjamin Kerstein, author of the new book, Self-Defense: A Jewish Manifesto. He says it’s time for Diaspora Jews to shake off the constraints of what he calls “learned helplessness,” a mindset that conditions victims to believe they have no recourse but to endure violence without seeking to take action to defend themselves. Historically, this was overcome by the Zionist movement and the founding of the modern state of Israel. But in America, most Jews react to the post-Oct. 7 assault on their rights and safety with passivity. As we saw on college campuses where pro-Hamas mobs terrorized Jewish kids, they were told to shelter in place and to not confront their tormentors.
Kerstein argues that what happened at UCLA in 2024 was a model of how to end the harassment of Jews. There, a group of Jewish students responded to a pro-Hamas encampment by aggressively making it clear that Jews would not be intimidated. Though the action was flawed by violence, this forced the university administration to act to end the encampment. A better idea would have been non-violent action in which Jews confronted the antisemites wherever they sought to block access to campus sites.
He says the model not to follow was that of the Jewish Defense League and its leader Rabbi Meir Kahane. It descended to illegality and violence that not only led to the government shutting it down but also in discrediting the whole idea of Jewish self-defense for generations. Rather, what is needed is a Jewish version of the civil rights era group the Students Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) that confronted racism around the United States and helped usher in an era of equality.
What is also clear, says Kerstein, is that the Jewish establishment and those organizations like the Anti-Defamation League, whose task it is to defend Jews are not doing their job. Their policies are a product of politics in which they have long preferred to focus on lesser threats like that of neo-Nazis rather than on the greater peril posed by progressives who have effectively imposed their antisemitic beliefs on the education system and much of American culture.
Above all, Jews must, he argues, embrace the anger they feel about what has happened in the last two years and start to make “good trouble”—the phrase coined by civil rights hero Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) who urged African Americans to non-violently stand up to discrimination. Jews must now do the same when it comes to the broad array of antisemitic threats posed by forces on both the political left and right.
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