In the wake of the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, the terrorist perpetrators have counted on support from the usual suspects: the United Nations, the Communist Party of America, the now-former president of Harvard University, Claudine Gay, and many others. Alarmingly, however, a tiny but vocal fringe of American Jews has been allying with the same groups that overtly or covertly want to eliminate all Jews from the map — whether we live in Israel, America, or anywhere in between.
One of the latest instances of this disturbing trend occurred in the middle of Hannukah: a fringe group of alumni from the Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School (JDS), one of the largest Jewish schools in America — and my alma mater — published a screed that repeatedly invoked the Holocaust to falsely accuse Israel of a “war fueled by genocidal intent” against its neighbors.
After paying lip service to the innocent Israelis and Americans slaughtered and kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists, the group of fewer than 150 alumni affixed their names to a document so seething with hatred towards Israel and the Jewish community that raised them that it would find a welcome home in the pages of Stormfront.
They argued that “this [pro-Israel] pedagogy, a mainstay of American Jewish institutions, is designed to funnel generations of Jewish youth toward unconditional support for Israel’s militarism and war crimes.” They continued saying, “in pulling back the curtain, we are moved to break the cycle of ‘no matter what’ support for Israel that is dangerously based in fear, Jewish essentialism, and dehumanization of the other.”
Disturbingly, attacking their community is seemingly incomplete without invoking the Holocaust. “We feel deeply to our core the indelible generational trauma of the Holocaust. Instead of approaching historical and current Jewish oppression as exceptional, however, we believe we must extend the lesson of ‘Never Again’ to oppressed communities across the globe, and especially in this moment, to Palestinians undergoing a war fueled by genocidal intent, supposedly in the name of our safety,” they wrote.
The letter makes no mention that one of our own alumni, Omer Balva, a 22-year-old Israeli-American dual citizen, was killed by an anti-tank rocket fired by Hezbollah when he was called up for army reserve duty. Instead, the signatories lament Israel’s so-called “grave violations of human rights and international law, not only since October 7th but over the last 75 years throughout Palestine.”
To say this letter felt like a gut punch to the Jewish community is an understatement. “The signers accused their former classmates — the people they have known since kindergarten, whom they had birthday parties with, whose Bar and Bat Mitzvahs they went to, whose houses they paid Shiva calls at, and whom they went to prom with — of genocide,” one furious alum said to me. “In doing so they justify Hamas’ actions. These people have chosen the new religion of the left over their heritage and their families.“
The significance goes well beyond the close-knit Jewish community in the suburbs of the nation’s capital. Long before the terrorist attacks of October 7th, liberal activists have leveraged their ties to Jewish institutions to attack Israel. When the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement came to the University of Chicago while I was a student there, one of the self-proclaimed Jews that supported it concealed the fact that normally, she identifies as a Wiccan — but "Witches Against Israel" doesn’t sound as sexy.
With the exception of a massive rally with hundreds of thousands of attendees on the National Mall in November, the organized pushback from the Jewish community in the wake of seemingly never-ending anti-Israel protests has been muted, compared to how self-proclaimed, although undocumented, Jewish groups have shut down traffic, been arrested outside the Democratic Party’s headquarters — which one Democratic member of congress said “rattled me more than January 6th,” and shrieked inside Congress alongside Linda Sarsour, an activist so anti-Semitic that the Women’s March cut ties with her.
Fortunately, the aftermath of this letter showed some glimmers of hope, which started when a vastly larger group of alumni (myself included), parents, and teachers wrote a response to this letter, which “goes against every Jewish and Zionist value ingrained in us by our school and by our religion.”
The response makes clear that the vast majority of Jews support Israel because we are Jews, not despite that — and that attempts by both our classmates and other activists to leverage Judaism to side with terrorists is as kosher as a bacon triple cheeseburger. “It is truly difficult to comprehend how Jews can become so detached from reality that they resort to using Holocaust terminology like ‘Never Again’ against their own people,” the response letter reads. In reality, “‘Never Again’ means that we as a people and in a country will never stand idly by while our people are slaughtered, like they were on October 7, 2023. It means that we will never hesitate to defend ourselves against our enemies who are the true practitioners of genocide and oppression.”
Ben Shemony, a classmate of mine, wrote and organized the response letter. He told me that he did so because he “wanted to make it crystal clear that these people do not represent Judaism as a religion and do not represent the views of Jews whatsoever.” His nay-saying classmates, to him, “are a tiny minority, and they use their Judaism to give our enemies the perfect justification for mass murder, rape, and kidnapping of Israelis and Jews.”
The significance of the response letter is twofold: both that the sheer number of signatories, which currently clocks in at around 1,000 current and former students, parents, teachers — including Omer Balva’s sister and father — dwarfs the initial letter, and that following Shemony’s letter, JDS itself issued a statement, making it clear that as a Jewish educational institution, it won’t be straying from one of its central missions: ahavat yisrael, love of Israel.
Rabbi Mitch Malkus, the head of the school, emailed all alumni making it clear that the school rejects any attempts to pressure it to stray from its Jewish values. “Our school is pro-Israel and Zionist. As a school committed to history and Jewish history, we reject terms like apartheid and colonialism being applied to Israel. We teach a dual narrative approach and expose our students to multiple perspectives in our Israel education, something that was not acknowledged by all our alumni.”
Another student who signed Shemony’s letter heaped more praise: “JDS’s response in wholly repudiating the letter is extremely heartening. The future of the Jewish people depends on both Jewish education and on the safety and security of Israel. JDS has long made ahavat Yisrael a core value of its curriculum and is enriched by the many Israeli teachers and students at the school.” Despite the claims of a one-sided, reflexively pro-Israel education, the student noted that “JDS never shied away from criticism of Israel. If anything, it makes students far more pro-Israel because they know that they aren’t being fed a one-sided account.”
At a time when tiny fringes of the Jewish community are invoking the blood libels of our enemies to attack our historic homeland, and when the Jewish Second Gentleman botches the meaning of Hannukah, it’s imperative that Jewish educational institutions like the one I attended for 13 years stand stronger than ever. In the face of absurd condemnation by a few alumni, it’s relieving to see that it did so. Mazel tov to JDS — and may its actions here be an inspiration to other Jewish institutions across the globe in the tumultuous year ahead.