October 31, 2023

When Palestinians raided Israel on October 7, most of the civilized world shuddered. Alas, in a flash, many who were long in denial finally noticed the moral rot that has degraded America’s universities. Some — not enough — students are furious, denouncing their professors and peers who celebrate or deny or minimize this massacre by “contextualizing” it. Some — not enough — donors have started cutting funds to stop subsidizing such moral idiocy. But where, o where, are the parents? It’s time for parents to break their addiction to careerist credentialism and show their kids they stand for something more meaningful than getting ahead. At Columbia, at Harvard, at Cooper Union, at UCLA and elsewhere, including in elite high schools parroting similar evils, parents must confront this epidemic of educational malpractice — which prefers propagandizing over teaching – and demand that every student feels safe, even if they, support Israel or — God forbid — are conservative.

For American Jewish parents, this moment must be unbearably painful. An impressive 84% of voters favor Israel over Hamas. Yet that consensus of concern collapses in academia, the American institution Jews most worship, and have over-invested in psychologically, financially, existentially. Cold-blooded academics and their fanatic minions at those career-making factories toast this bloodbath as “exhilarating,” “awesome,” and well-deserved payback.

Although American Jews feel it particularly — this abomination is not a Jewish issue. The moral abdication should concern every thinking parent. The October 7 perversions transcended any political battle or culture war. There’s much room to debate Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians or Israel’s options in fighting Hamas. These terrorists and their apologists challenge core moral values and civilizational norms. We’re not debating “Heather Has Two Mommies,” but warning: “Heather’s being brainwashed to celebrate evil.”

In an academy targeting microaggressions, which can include looking at a student in the wrong way, when we cannot say the “n-word,” who could tolerate “members of our community” celebrating ethnically-targeted mass murder, maiming, and gendered violence?

Anyone who cannot recognize that it’s never acceptable to gleefully slaughter civilians, to rape, to behead, to murder families en masse, is not qualified to teach students – at any level. Parents must become consumer activists, asking what kind of perverse ideologies are imposed on their children.

What happened was purposeful, cultivated, years in the making, only surprising to those asleep at the ideological wheel. Central to this brutal insensitivity, approving assaults on civilians and civilized norms is the trendy anti-colonialist ideology bewitching intellectuals today. Deeming Israelis “settler-colonials,” ranting that “this is what decolonization looks like,” these Ivy League jihadis dehumanize certain people for not fitting into the right category they artificially created.

Parents take note. Many high schools now push this anti-colonialist orthodoxy, embedded in anti-racist curricula, imposed after the justifiable disgust surrounding George Floyd’s murder. If one man’s killing challenged so many of us to reckon with America’s past — shouldn’t the mass killing of 1,400 (and counting) challenge us to reckon with its educational present – and our kids’ future?

Since October 7, we keep reading about those grade-grubbing radicals, crying for more blood, cowering behind their masks, shouting “Israel, Israel, you can’t hide, We want Jewish genocide.” Too many of us didn’t take seriously the genocidal intentions of the Hamas charter. In the aftermath, let’s take such cries literally, calling out the Israel-erasing slogan “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free.”

In her illuminating, depressing, Free Press essay, “Why My Generation Hates Jews,” Julia Steinberg, a 21-year-old Californian, describes an exercise in her Los Angeles high school “where we made a T-chart dividing various ethnicities, religions, and other identities into the categories of ‘oppressor’ and ‘oppressed.’ Women: oppressed. Straight people: oppressor. Black people: oppressed.” Naturally, Steinberg also learned “that every white person is racist, and all men are evil.”

Many long warned that the self-esteem movement, which discouraged teachers from correct students’ misspelling, needed a course correction — but this is ridiculous. It’s child abuse, psychological warfare eviscerating kids’ natural identities. What parents want their sons being told they are inherently evil or that their whiteness is a crime? Fill in the blanks. There would be mass protests if others’ daughters were told they were inherently weak as girls or their blackness was a crime.

This categorical fascism must end. Admittedly, it’s hard for liberal parents to fight these illiberal grievance junkies and race baiters who flank them from their left. But liberals cannot allow their disgust for how Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis launched a “war on woke” to tolerate a war against their kids’ souls — and America’s founding ideals.

Marx distinguished between the blameless, virtuous, “oppressed,” and their evil “oppressors.” When anti-colonial theory weaponizes this divide, justifying “resistance” against oppressors by “any means necessary,” that Marxist brew becomes even more toxic. Beyond indoctrinating Steinberg’s peers “to believe that Jews are oppressors,” making “even our mass slaughter … justifiable revenge,” her teachers’ reductionism becomes homicidal — or at least mass-murder-positive.

From 1939 to 1945, Nazis pushed this kind of categorical fascism to its logical but evil limits — some lived, millions died. On October 7, Islamic fundamentalists once again showed how they treat dar al-harb — infidels who only deserve the sword — unlike those in dar al-Islam – those who voluntarily submit to Allah. Since that orgy of war crimes in Israel, anti-colonialists have shown a sadistic ability to relish the suffering of those they brand “settler-colonialists.”

The arc of history has been blown off-course. In the 1950s and 1960s, mass revulsion against the Holocaust boosted movements of people essentially saying: “stop imprisoning us in essentialist categories.” Auschwitz taught humanity not to dehumanize people based on race, color, or creed — or overly romanticize any people so much as to excuse every crime any of them committed.  The civilized world saw the harm a “selektzia” could do: Reducing people to those worthy of living — and those deserving death.

Oozing egalitarianism, the civil rights movement succeeded by demanding equal rights for all, including blacks. Women’s liberation promised to liberate men too from their own sexual straitjackets. Gay marriage became legal and acceptable so quickly because activists didn’t want special treatment, only equal rights.

Thanks to Affirmative Action — and its resulting Diversity, Equity, Inclusivity Industrial Complex — being deemed one of the politically-correct oppressed now has cachet. Too many read Black Lives Matter as exclusive not inclusive – some academics had to apologize for saying “All Lives Matter.” Institutionalized gender-studies feminism often indulges in man-hating and man-bashing. And more traditionally-minded people are often ostracized for publicly uttering their thoughts about gender or sexuality.

Just as Israelis are on a wartime footing, American parents must mobilize immediately. Parents should go on a tuition strike — before the spring semester. They should put any further payments for this academic year into escrow accounts, gathering interest but inaccessible to their children’s institution until universities start fighting malpractice in the classroom and harassment on campus.

No parents should pay for their children to feel endangered or diminished. Parents must stop subsidizing institutions selling education but actually propagandizing, bullying and demeaning instead. Tuition strikes only work when dozens join on. And if the universities fight back, penalizing the students for their parents’ principles, it’s a win-win too. Academia will look terrible and the parents will look good — showing their children that there are more important things in life than getting good grades.

Those professors who hijack their podiums to serve as political platforms should be boycotted by students and prevented by administrators from teaching required courses. At this point, there are too many bigoted brainwashers to fire en masse, but it’s time to start marginalizing them. Parents should out and confront anyone who commits educational malpractice, pushing political theories rather than cultivating critical thought — or shaming students for deviating from the teacher’s thoughts. Administrators must monitor how students answer questions on course evaluations assessing how open the professors were to different opinions and how welcoming a classroom environment teachers create.

By standing up for their kids, parents will start showing their kids the value of standing up. I feel sorry for the various students reporting how unsafe, how bullied, how intimidated they have been. I don’t mean to embarrass anyone from the infamous Cooper Union video showing a handful of religious Jews barricaded in a library as pro-Palestinian protestors menace them, but why couldn’t those students learn something from their Israeli peers who run toward danger rather than away from it? Bullied students should get angry, not scared. In the 1960s, radicals shamed America. Defying police to beat them, they chanted “the whole world is watching.”

These students bullied by Jew-haters should have huddled together, whipped out their cellphones, exited proudly through the front door, started recording these laptop bullies, these careerist snowflakes, while shouting: “Your future bosses are watching!”

Never forget: These grade-grubbing radicals are as credential-addicted as their Jewish peers. Naming them, shaming them, should become routine. Let them speak freely but let them live with the consequences of endorsing violence and Jew-hatred on the new morally-recalibrated campus. As Harvard University’s Dean of Students creates a perverse task force “supporting” students who claimed to have been “Doxxed” (internet speak for being outed), let the Campus Kapos start losing precious jobs because of their heinous positions. It’s not “Doxxing.” It’s called accountability.

Many mock modern parents as helicopters, forever hovering too close; as bulldozers, clearing the way for their kids; and as security cameras, monitoring them 24/7. Parents must become liberal lions and lionesses, fighting fiercely to make liberal arts liberal again – and inspiring their kids to roar along and, when necessary, fight fiercely too.

Professor Gil Troy, a Senior Fellow in Zionist Thought at the JPPI, the Global Think Tank of the Jewish People, is an American presidential historian, and, most recently, the editor of the three-volume set, Theodor Herzl: Zionist Writings, the inaugural publication of The Library of the Jewish People.

We arrived early Thursday morning in Tel Aviv for our son Yosef’s wedding. He is a soldier in an elite combat unit, but he has been given a short leave of absence for his wedding. He is not on the Gaza border, thank God. His older brother, who had been called up immediately while the October 7^th massacre was ongoing, is not as lucky and is stationed right by Israel’s worst enemies.

I get off the plane and, foregoing my usual practice of always kissing the land of Israel when I exit the terminal, I do it right there in the airport. I’m in a big rush and nothing can wait. Thankfully, no one looks at me as a weirdo as Ben Gurion Airport is completely empty. Much emptier even than when I arrived several times during COVID. Almost no one is coming into Israel. Everyone is at the departures terminal going out.

I quickly get our bags, and by our, I mean our entire family. Nine of our children are now in Israel for the wedding, and all our 10 grandchildren and our four sons-in-law. People told us we were insane bringing babies into a war zone. But how could we miss our son’s wedding?

I go through customs. The guy sees a truckload of stuff. “Anything to declare?” he asks in Hebrew. “Only my unconditional love for Israel,” I answer. He doesn’t smile or respond. “Why so much stuff,” he wants to know? Because we’re a huge family I tell him, and my daughters, who live in Teaneck, are angels who have brought tons of gear for the soldiers.

He lets us through.

I rush to a waiting car and, together with my social media influencer daughter Rochel Leah (@thethirstysouls) and son-in-law Rabbi Itamar Taktuk, who are the Rebbe’s emissaries in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, we are on our way south, to the killing fields around Gaza.

Rochel Leah and Itamar were visiting his parents on 7 October, Simchat Torah, in Ashkelon. They woke up to a terror hellscape of rockets, bombs, and marauding terrorist savages and barely survived. Now they join me in going to see the places of the carnage, courtesy of my friend Amichai Eliyahu, Israel’s Minister of Heritage, who will be meeting with survivors and local leaders in the south to see how the government can help.

We arrive at a junction that marks the closed military area in the south. We are surrounded by thousands of soldiers and endless military hardware. The men are all sporting mustaches. “Clark Gable look,” I say to them, as I snap photos of men going into war. “No,” they tell me, “it’s a thing now in the IDF. We’re trying to look like the soldiers who turned the tide in the Yom Kippur War after Israel was surprised 50 years ago.”

God, how I hate the ‘70’s, I think to myself, as we transfer into a police vehicle and head further south into the belly of the beast.

With the Minister, now clad in tactical bullet proof vest and surrounded by a phalanx of ferocious looking Israeli security armed to the teeth, we arrive in Beeri, the Kibbutz where a quarter of the residents were slaughtered. The lead soldier gives us instructions. “Walk in single file on the path I show you. Do not touch anything. You can take pictures. If there is siren or red alert, follow our instructions to the letter.”

We walk through. The kibbutz is completely decimated. The sickening stench of death is all around us. The bodies of the victims have been removed. But the blood is everywhere, as are bodies of the terrorists that are covered in plastic.

We walk into one house. The blood of the murdered victims has congealed all over the floor and the walls. The knife the terrorists used is still there. You can see it on my Instagram page. I try not gag and throw up.

We go into the infirmary where the medical staff was slaughtered. Bullet holes, broken glass, blood – everywhere. The houses all around us are heaps of rubble. The terrorist used not just Kalashnikovs but high explosives, rocket propelled grenades, and bombs to murder the innocent. The enormous bullet casings are everywhere.

We travel to the Alumim agricultural farm not far away. The leaders are waiting for us. They grow mangoes and avocadoes. Many of their workers are Thai. Fourteen of them were murdered and about 20 taken hostage. One of the Thai workers was beheaded with a pickaxe. The leaders tell the minister that if the IDF does not destroy Hamas utterly than there is no hope of Israelis every living in the south again.

It is the same message we hear from the Mayor of Sderot whose police station was taken over and whose senior officers were all murdered. Out of 37,000 residents, ninety percent are now war refugees spread throughout Israel. He remains with a tiny remnant.

I ponder the words I heard earlier: Israel will lose the south? But this is not really the south. Like much of the language in the Middle East, this is deceptive. We are only an hour and a quarter by car from Tel Aviv. It takes longer from me to drive into Manhattan with traffic from Englewood, New Jersey, then from Tel Aviv to Ashkelon. What I am really hearing is that if Israel does not destroy Hamas, then the country itself has no future.

We travel to the Chabad House of Sderot. The heroes of Chabad have not left and are running the only supermarket in the town so that the remaining residents don’t starve. They do not charge a shekel for food. They get me a minyan to say afternoon Kaddish for my mother. Then the sirens start. Rockets are headed right for us. Whereas in Tel Aviv you have a minute and a half to dodge the rockets, here in Sderot you have only 20 seconds. The security people around the minister freak out and push us all into the secure area. All clear, we begin to leave. We’re outside and now it’s even worse. A terrorist has breached the gate from Gaza and is roaming around Sderot. We hear the rat-tat-tat of machine guns as the IDF engages him. The security freak out even more and push us all back into the Chabad House.

Strangely, I am not afraid. Mostly because I have confidence in Israel’s security and because I see the kind of faith in God that the Chabad emissaries have.

A few hours later we are back to the relative safety of Jerusalem. It is Friday and I am preparing for my son’s Shabbat Chatan, wedding Sabbath. We have rented an apartment in the Old City of Jerusalem but we have not been informed that it has faulty pipes. There is a flood on the floor. I walk down the stairs, slip and fly up in the air, and feel a bang on the back of my head that is the worst of my life. I am stunned and in shock. I feel the back of my head and my hand is covered in blood. Soon my whole chest is red with blood. I have a huge gash from the slip brought about by the faulty plumbing and now I am in an ambulance being rushed to Shaarei Tzedek hospital. As I try and collect myself amidst the concussion, I note the irony of having been in the most dangerous place on earth the day before and emerged unscathed, only to have almost died in a Jerusalem apartment that was not fit to be rented.

I get a CAT scan that shows for now I don’t have internal hemorrhaging, thank God. They give me seven staples in the back of my head and release me to rejoice with my soldier son Yosef at the Kotel. The IDF also releases Mendy from the border for just one Shabbat.

Finally, bliss at last. Nearly all our family is there for the Sabbath which is truly joyous. Being joyous on Shabbat is not just a good idea; it’s an obligation. Yosef gets called up to the Torah and we sing and dance the entire day. I wonder: Is this really possible as Israel fights an existential war for its survival? Is this the power of Shabbat?

The Sabbath ends. Mendy rushes back to his base. I visit various hotels around Israel where the war refugees are being housed, including one where my friend Uri Geller is entertaining children from a Kibbutz where 20 members were slaughtered. Many of the children are orphans.

I decided, amid a healing broken arm, and the terrible gash and staples on the back of my neck, to ride a bike along the Tel Aviv seashore. I need to feel that there is still all the natural beauty in Israel that I so love and not just consumed by war and terror. The streets are empty. The beaches, amid the most glorious weather, are empty too. Tel Aviv is a ghost town. The Tel Aviv port, normally a huge hub of activity, is a deserted waste land with one corn on the cob place open. I give him business and buy the corn.

I arrive at a hotel. I take a shower. The sirens begin. Deafening alerts that Qassams are headed right where I am. Where the hell do I run? I forgot to ask where the bomb shelter is. I run out of my room in nothing but a towel (sorry for that painful image). The entire hotel floor is empty. I am alone. Boom, boom, and then, SHATTERING BOOM. Now, for the first time in my adult life in Israel, I am shaking. The first two explosions, I knew, were Iron Dome. The last one made all the earth shake and could not have been Israel’s defense system. I run back in the room, put on some clothes, and race to the lobby. “A Qassam hit a building 200 meters from here,” I’m told. “Three are reportedly injured. You can still see the smoke from the fires.”

I collect myself and now it’s time for the reason we came, which was not just to be with my Jewish brothers and sisters when Israel is at war, as we have done with our family in previous conflicts, but to see my soldier son married. He is marrying a wonderful young woman named Dalia. She is also an IDF soldier that works in a unit that arranged 70 funerals of murdered soldiers in the south in the week before her wedding.

We all forget the war and put on our finest garb. The wedding has been moved from Jerusalem to Raanana because we found a hotel that has a large enough bomb shelter for all the guests. The wedding is joyous and immaculate, almost as if the 300 or so guests needed some sort of release from all the pain, blood, and murder of the last weeks. The prayer for the IDF is read by Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, the IDF’s Chief Global Spokesperson, who has taken a break from his constant appearances on CNN, Fox, ABC, and NBC to honor our soldier son at his wedding. The witness to the wedding vows is Doron Spielman, deputy Global Spokesman for the IDF who is also on all the world’s airwaves defending the Jewish State against constant attack.

My friend Bret Stephens of the New York Times is there as well, covering the war for his publication, and I thank him publicly for being the only voice of morality at a publication that a few days earlier had falsely reported that Israel bombed a Gaza hospital and murdered 500 Palestinians, something directly contradicted by American intelligence and President Biden himself.

As I speak at the Chuppah as the Rabbi honored with conducting the ceremony, the familiar “Boom, Boom, Boom,” is heard and plumes of smoke are all around us. Iron Dome is stopping the Qassams from murdering us.

But is the Iron Dome, a blessing, I suddenly wonder at my own son’s wedding? “I want you, Yosef and Dalia, to have a normal life. Herzl did not conjure up Israel merely as a Jewish state but as a place where Jews would no longer be afraid. Who among us today is not afraid?” Perhaps the relative security of Iron Dome allowed Israel to accept the unacceptable and to live with the unlivable. Is it normal to live with a genocidal enemy on your doorstep and rely for your survival on a battery of missiles? Did JFK allow Cuba to keep nuclear weapons on America’s doorstep, even amid America’s ballistic deterrence?

No, he was not that stupid. And in the greatest moment of his presidency, he got the USSR to remove the missiles. But not Israel, who allowed the cancer of Hamas and Hezbollah to metastasize until so many innocents were murdered by the Hamas savages.

The Chuppah ends, the reception begins, and, just as I expected, it is the most celebratory wedding I’ve ever been at. The crowd is on fire with joy and excitement for two IDF soldiers who are getting married. I see the celebrations – almost all Israelis, most with children serving on the front lines – and I think to myself that this is a giant “F-You” to Hamas.

You will never stop Jewish weddings. You will never stop Jewish babies from being born. You will never make us afraid. And you will never push us out of our ancient homeland.

Despite all your savagery. Despite all your barbarism.

We, the eternal people, are here in Israel forever and ever and ever.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, “America’s Rabbi” whom the Washington Post and “Newsweek” call “the most famous Rabbi in America,” is the author of “Judaism for Everyone” and “The Israel Warrior.” Follow him on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @RabbiShmuley.