A Letter to a Future Historian: How Will You Write Our Story?

Dear future historian,

One day you will be compelled to answer why, in just one day, 10,000 Jews in the Diaspora demanded the reinstatement of Eylon Levy, the official Israeli spokesperson, during one of the darkest moments in Israel’s history. If you, dear historian, channel the likes of Wilhelm Marr, Henry Ford or Fyodor Dostoevsky, men who feverishly answered the ‘Jewish Question’ by calling Jews a “foreign tribe” intent on taking over “Germandom” or the “Russian soul,” the answer would seamlessly yield a geriatric cliché that Jews are agents of another nation, a fifth column.          

If, however, you should be stirred to look at what was happening to Diaspora Jews in the months after Oct. 7, 2023, you will find some disturbing data. Indeed, after the largest massacre committed against the Jewish people since the Holocaust — a massacre of Jews on their own soil! — antisemitism in the United States is up 337%. And if you want to examine closer where this virulent antisemitism resides, the weigh station of American campuses will await you — with more than 700 percent increase in antisemitic incidents on campus since the Hamas attack, including physical assault, death threats, intimidation, bullying, and vandalism — along the road of antisemitism in America.

Undeniably, you will also come across some impassioned testimonies from Jewish students who experience antisemitism while walking to class or even in the classroom, where their professors call Israel illegitimate by labeling the country a settler-colonial state. You will examine countless testimonies to U.S. congressmen and -women delivered by Jewish students who attended elite American universities. From Harvard University, you will come across the testimony of Shabbos Kestenbaum, who shared “two years of personal experiences with a racial ideology … that views Jews as an annoyance at best.” From Noah Rubin of the University of Pennsylvania, you will learn that “the antisemitism we are seeing at UPenn did not start on Oct. 7, but since Oct. 7, it has certainly accelerated. Jewish students continue to experience harassment, threats, and even violence on our campus.” From Rubin’s testimony, you will also sense the terror that Jewish students feel when they walk across campus to the chants of “[T]here is only one solution, Intifada revolution! Intifada! Intifada! Long live the Intifada!”

And if you follow the trail of these cries, you will come upon Jewish high school students who are experiencing unprecedented levels of Jew-hatred in their schools. Teachers cancel classes in solidarity with Hamas, a terrorist organization, for a Gaza walk-out. And if you listen, historian, closer, you will hear the broken heart of a Jewish high school student who decided to remain in the classroom alone and not partake in the demonization of his people. There he sits, his heart pounding, wondering whether his sitting out will affect his grade and chances to get into the college where he will face the same alienation and demonization.

And if you will look to the streets of the United States and Europe, you will find chants of “Gas the Jews” and “F— the Jews, rape their daughters, and free Palestine.” You will find that while there are many Jews who chose to boldly double down on their Jewishness, there are thousands of others who chose to tuck their Star of David necklaces inside their shirts or graver yet, take them off.

And in the halls of countless city council meetings, historian, you will find pro-Hamas groups mobilizing, at times even coming to these meetings with dolls drenched in red paint to signify babies’ blood, urging city council members to pass resolutions demanding a ceasefire. I would hope, dear historian, that you will be able to see this for what it is: blood libel, one of the oldest accusations waged against the Jewish people. For this lie, the Jewish people paid with their lives.

In fending off lies and brutal accusations of being baby killers and enacting a genocide on a people who set off the war by breaking into a sovereign country and murdering, raping, and kidnapping innocent civilians, Levy took on the behemoth role of fighting the latest variant of antisemitism: anti-Zionism.

But if you are aware that this age-old hatred is one of the most durable hatred precisely because it has the ability to evolve and mutate, then you will understand that the Jewish people’s insistence on reinstating Eylon Levy is because, in being the spokesperson for the Israeli government during a trying time for the Jewish people, Levy became the spokesperson for us Jews in the Diaspora. In fending off lies and brutal accusations of being baby killers and enacting a genocide on a people who set off the war by breaking into a sovereign country and murdering, raping, and kidnapping innocent civilians, Levy took on the behemoth role of fighting the latest variant of antisemitism: anti-Zionism.

And so, historian, when one day you will be presented with the many testimonies, letters from beleaguered parents begging the school administrators to stop using the classroom to spread anti-Jewish bigotry by comparing Israel to Nazi Germany or accusing Jews of stealing land in their classrooms, and photos of a record number of American Jews, nearly 300,000, who attended an Israel solidarity rally in Washington, D.C., in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 massacre, please read these actions of the Jewish people in the Diaspora in the context of what it means to be a Jew. 

Please understand that by standing with Israel, we Jews in the Diaspora stand for our Jewish selves. Please understand that by extending our steadfast support for Levy, we inadvertently signal that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, for why else would we care so much to have a spokesperson who, with such passion and determination, staves off invectives hurled our way?

One day, as you sit to write about this moment, dear historian, think about how you will tell our story, for our story is inextricably linked to the story of humanity. To borrow from the late luminary Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, “in our uniqueness lies our universality.” Further still, though we are a particular people and antisemitism is a particular form of hatred, its existence is an alarm bell that goes off to signal a moral decay in a civilization. Or as Arthur Miller voiced through his character Phillip Gellburg in his 1994 play, “Broken Glass,” “Don’t you understand, when the last Jew dies, the light of the world will go out!” 

Do write about us fairly, do render our light with verisimilitude, and perhaps most importantly, describe those who wish to extinguish us accurately for in extinguishing us, they destroy humanity.

Naya Lekht received her Ph.D. in Russian Literature and wrote her dissertation on Holocaust literature in the Soviet Union. Naya is currently the Education Editor for White Rose Magazine and a Research Fellow for the Institute for Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy.