Sunday, May 28, 2023 | 2 a.m.
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There is no longer the fantasy that there are “good people” on both sides of this argument.
Thursday, the Biden administration released the “White House National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism.”
It represents both a failure of American society that it had to be done and the resilience of the American spirit that it will be done.
Antisemitism is the oldest form of hate. But it isn’t the only hate that we experience on a daily basis. Pick a group by its color, ethnicity, religion, place of origin or any number of other qualifiers, and there will be hate directed toward them. Worse, there will be hate acted upon them.
But we can’t fix all of the rest of that small-minded, hurtful and un-American bigotry until we put the hateful elephant in the room in its place. And that is back under the rock from where it came.
The lengthy and well thought out strategy to combat antisemitism was led by the second gentleman, Doug Emhoff, together with domestic policy adviser Susan Rice, Homeland Security adviser Liz Sherwood-Randall and Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, the president’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism. These are each extremely serious people who have worked hard and are committed to working much harder to execute this strategy to rid America of this scourge that eats away at our national psyche from within.
Yes, there has always been antisemitism in America, at the highest levels of government and in the lowest levels of life, lurking behind the corners of irrational thought where conspiracies live free from facts and away from the bright lights of understanding.
But, not until 2017 when a U.S. president proclaimed that there were “good people” on both sides of a hate-driven Nazi march in Charlottesville, Va., had there ever been an “all-clear” signal sent to the haters that it was OK to come out into the mainstream of American life.
From that time forward, antisemitic incidents have grown by orders of magnitude and murders of innocent Jews around the country have become just another part of our lives.
And the difference between the recent past and all the other times in our history when such hatred was present but shunned by both polite and political society is that now there has nary been a voice raised in dissent. In fact, the opposite has happened.
From the highest offices in the land and the whitest houses in the country, there was barely a word of rebuke to be heard — only silence.
It has been this code of silence from our leaders coupled with the complicity of a Congress refusing to hold accountable the social media platforms that spread the hate without recourse that has allowed antisemitism to grow like a cancer on the body politic.
The country needed good people to do something, to act. No longer to stay silent.
That is why what President Joe Biden has done by forging and executing on this strategy to combat antisemitism is so significant in the lives of American Jewry.
For a number of years now, it has not been safe for Jewish people to live and work and pray and play in the United States of America. And, history has taught us that if it is not safe for Jews it cannot be safe for others.
Biden has acted. He will not be silent. And he will not be complicit in this continued co-conspiracy between those who hate Jews and those who will not condemn those haters.
That is not the American way.
The Biden way is to confront antisemitism, educate the newest generations and encourage them to reject the ugliness of bigotry. He sees an America that has the knowledge and the understanding to see our differences as our strength.
Our job has to be to put antisemitism in its place.
And that means that as a country, united against antisemitism, we must speak out. We can no longer stay silent. And when we do speak, it is with one voice that is indivisible, under God, and cognizant that liberty and justice hang in the balance.
America now has a strategy to combat antisemitism. As a Jew and the father and grandfather of other Jews, I am grateful to President Biden for speaking out and for acting against hate.
We can all join him on this road by admitting the obvious. Where Nazis and other haters are involved there simply cannot ever be good people on both sides.
