To be Jewish is to be an “other”

An excellent column by Ben Kepes on being Jewish. Some extracts:

The Jewish people have existed for thousands of years. For most of that time, they had no country of their own and hence have lived across the four corners of the earth. Every year for thousands of years during the Passover festival, Jews have been saying “next year in Jerusalem” with no real hope or expectation of that being possible.

And so, we have overwhelmingly been an “other”. Guests in other countries at the mercy of our hosts and neighbours. Maybe tolerated, maybe assimilated, maybe the butt of jokes but still, at some level, an other.

Now I absolutely get that this sounds dramatic. But there is something that non-Jews find hard to understand, and that is that, given the arc of time, our welcome wherever we are has historically always run out.

Imagine thousands of years with no country of your own, as an “other”, let alone the centuries of discrimination.

Jews have a shared memory, engrained into our DNA, that comes from the collective trauma of thousands of years of persecution. Quite literally, Jews are painfully aware that, for us, a significant proportion of the world wants to kill us. …

So every Holocaust Memorial Day, when we (and others) say “never again”, we don’t say it as a matter of fact, but rather as a matter of hope. A hope that truly feels a little naive. October 7 showed us that our paranoia isn’t naivete, but rather a reaction to our shared reality.

October 7, while sad and shocking, is the millennia-long reality for us. And it is because of this shared trauma that the pain we all feel about what happened that day isn’t some kind of dissociated and intellectual pain about suffering from distant people, rather it is the pain about suffering that our own family faced.

Just as it is (correctly) said in the US that non-blacks can’t understand the experience of racism to the same extent as black Americans, it is very difficult for non-Jews to understand how October 7 is not just a random terrorist attack for Jews, but part of thousands of years of hatred.

So it’s important for readers who don’t know much about the Middle Eastern conflict and what has led to it, to understand our reality outside of the current situation. It is absolutely right and appropriate for people to show concern about the plight of the Palestinians, and hope for peace in the region. But to do so without a parallel empathy for how we, as Jews, are suffering is ignorant at best, and cruel at worst.

We hear random liberal commentators opining that the Hamas terrorist attacks were simply an act of decolonisation and an attempt to regain autonomy. We hear that and very quickly remember that the Hamas charter suggests that until all Israel is annihilated, its job will not be done.

For Jews, that isn’t simply a charter, it is a clear message that a group wishes every single one of us dead.

And that is a wish that we’ve been facing as a people since the dawn of time.

Ben’s column should be mandatory reading in schools and universities.