Jews Who Make a Difference

There are times when we feel surrounded. When it seems like the most powerful forces in the country, in the world, and in our own communities are lining up against us. Every day, there are more headlines and video clips of growing and spreading antizionism and casual and cruel antisemitism.

But this isn’t new for us.

As we look beyond our unsettled present to an uncertain future, we must remind ourselves that we are a people of improbable heroes.

Esther and Mordecai. Mattathias and Judas Maccabee. Nachshon and David and Ruth the Moabite. Even Moses’ deeply ingrained self-doubts are an integral part of our lore.

The same dynamic holds as true in the modern era as in biblical times. David Ben-Gurion and Benjamin Disraeli were outsiders who lacked traditional credentials and who found unlikely paths to power. Mickey Marcus was a Brooklyn-born U.S. Army colonel who became modern Israel’s first general. Golda Meir defied the United Nations, stared down the Soviet Union and defeated Egypt to win the Yom Kippur War.

We are not structured, as a religion or as a culture, to look to other humans to show us the path to follow. We have no Pope or Dalai Lama or Grand Mufti. We are a non-hierarchical, decentralized faith that relies on study, debate and individual responsibility. We lead ourselves and set examples of courage and determination and perseverance for each other.

When the walls feel like they’re closing in, it’s tempting to shrink away, to hide or to assimilate. But instead, let’s learn from those among us, ordinary people who do extraordinary things.

Let’s learn from Jay Sures, the entertainment executive who used his platform as a University of California Regent to condemn UCLA student government leaders for opposing an on-campus event featuring former Israeli hostage Omer Shem Tov. Sures, whose home has been vandalized in the past as a result of his pro-Israel advocacy, said that he was “disgusted and appalled” by the hostility toward Shem Tov’s visit to campus.

“You claim you want balance in programming and more than ‘a single narrative’ from speakers at UCLA. Balance, by definition, inherently involves equal consideration of more than one point of view. By condemning this speaker’s public appearance on our campus, your words and actions make clear you have no interest in balance at all,” he wrote. “That is the biggest double standard of all.”

In reaction to Sures’ pushback, both the UCLA administration and the student body president expressed regret for the provocation and promised investigations into the approval and release of the opponents’ statement. While this will not eliminate antisemitism on college campuses, Sures’ courage sends an important message to UCLA’s Jewish students that they are not alone.

Let’s also learn from activist Noa Tishby and Los Angeles School Board member Nick Melvoin. Upon finding out that L.A. Unified did not recognize Jewish American Heritage Month and undeterred by a local teachers union that has long taken ardent anti-Israel stances, Tishby and Melvoin not only successfully convinced the district to commemorate the month but to implement a video-based curriculum focusing on Israel, Judaism and the Holocaust.

“There is a profound gap in how Jewish history and identity are taught, or not taught, in American schools,” Tishby told The Jewish Journal last week. “… When kids show up on college campuses, it doesn’t come out of nowhere that they get radicalized. It happens before – ideas are already in the system, often without parents even realizing it.”

And finally, let us learn from our just-departed hero Abe Foxman, who began his career at what was then the Anti-Defamation League as a legal assistant and rose to become one of the world’s most admired and most effective crusaders against antisemitism. Much has been written about his immeasurable legacy elsewhere and does not need to be repeated here. But Foxman, like Sures, Tishby and Melvoin, reminds us that every one of us has a vital role to play as we work toward our ultimate victories.

So has it always been. So can it continue to be, if we are still willing.