On Mourning, Dancing, and the Jewish Refusal to Choose Between Them

Many have written about us. Twain. Churchill. Lincoln. Hitler. Each found us worth the words, which is itself remarkable. We are fifteen million people (sixteen at most), a rounding error in the arithmetic of civilizations. And yet we keep demanding to be noticed.

We are a people fractured in almost every conceivable direction. Language: English, Hebrew, Spanish, Amharic, Russian, French. Geography: North America, Israel, Europe, the rest of the world scattered like seeds from a burst pomegranate. Colour: white, brown, black and every shade between. Religiosity: Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Masorti, Reconstructionist, cultural, atheist, and a hundred gradations within each. Politics, economics, sociology; I haven’t even started. Within each division, further subdivisions. The taxonomy of Jewish disagreement is essentially infinite.

To our enemies, historic and present, none of that matters. Not a single jot. We are simply Jews. Theirs is a terrible gift: the flattening of our complexity into a single target. Hitler did not ask whether you davened three times a day or hadn’t set foot in a shul in thirty years. To him, you were a Jew, and that was sufficient.

Here is what I have come to understand: to me, it doesn’t matter either. Not the divisions, not the denominations, not the geography. We are simply Jews. The enemy’s reductionism and my love arrive at the same word through very different doors.

By every logic available to us, we should not exist.

We are a people who have been ghettoised, tortured, expelled, and murdered across a span of history that begins long before the word “antisemitism” was coined to describe it. Since Solomon’s unified kingdom, brief, glorious, unrepeatable, we have been scattered; for most of that time we have been despised wherever we landed. In 1948, for the first time in roughly three thousand years, we were again a nation. That nation sits on a strip of land smaller than Lake Michigan, surrounded by neighbours whose hatred is not........

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