The events of the past year, noted Eric Cohen in his speech to the Jewish Leadership Conference last week, have given the Jews ample reason to indulge their well-known penchant for worrying. Surveying some of these causes for concern, he reflected on the best way to respond:
Around the world—from the Poway synagogue shooting, to the Holocaust-haunted streets of Berlin, to the Orthodox neighborhoods of Borough Park—the number of physical assaults on Jews, simply for being Jews, is on the rise. To the mad white supremacist, the Jew is vermin. To the radical “woke” activist, the Jew is a fascist. And to the Islamic fundamentalist, the Jew is an infidel.
Yet stand up to them all we will.
Around the world—even in America—a campaign has begun to treat the rituals, rites, and beliefs of traditional Jews as backward and bigoted. Bans on kosher food. Bans on circumcision. Efforts to shut down Jewish schools for focusing too much on the transmission of Jewish identity. Efforts to ostracize traditional Jews who do not acquiesce in progressive dogmas about gender and marriage.
Amid these many concerns, we also face the slow but steady withering of Jewish identity here at home. The tragic reality is that too many Jews in America have only a fading attachment to the miracle and majesty, the wisdom and weight, the rites and responsibilities, of being a Jew. In the end, we cannot control the perverted ideologies of our enemies. But the transmission of Jewish civilization falls solely upon us: committed Jews, awed by the Jewish past, sober about the Jewish present, and hopeful about the Jewish future.
Read more on JNS: https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-conservative-defense-of-jewish-civilization/