Claiming Jewishness and truly defending it are two very different things.
The first time I heard then-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York deliver his favorite line was on a cloudless November day in 2023 in Washington, D.C. Some hundred thousand people had gathered at the National Mall to … well, I’m not sure what we were there to do. Perhaps show support, or something like that, for Israel and world Jewry in the aftermath of a very difficult month. Hamas and some other Gazans had inflicted wounds on our collective psyche in their attack a month prior. Lowlifes and agitators salted those wounds by organizing on campuses and city streets to chant and wave and vandalize and remind the Jews that we had not completely escaped history. Apparently some people, many more than we realized, still thrilled to Jewish suffering. So we rallied.
Sen. Schumer vowed that he would not stand idly by as such forces of evil grew emboldened. He told us in the crowd that, true to his name, he considered being our shomer, Hebrew for “guardian,” his highest obligation. I knew this was his go-to quip for Jewish audiences. Still, I joined the tepid applause.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Dispatch (paywall)
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Tal Fortgang is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He was a 2023 Sapir Fellow
Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images