‘My German quality and my Jewish quality do not get in the way of each other, but do each other a lot of good. . . . I experience this strange and intimate duality in unity as something precious.”
This is the voice of Gustav Landauer, socialist, pacifist, believer in “the unity of humanity,” disciple of Martin Buber, translator of Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, grandfather of Mike Nichols, and a philosopher murdered by the fascist Freikorps in 1919.
To read these words now, knowing how such widespread sentiments were massively betrayed, is to succumb to pathos. But replace “German” with “American,” and they spring into living truth. Intimate, precious duality in unity has long been the premise and promise of America for its Jewish citizens.
Until Oct. 8, 2023, the day after the hellish massacre of peacenik families in Israeli communes and young people at a music festival, when this healthy confidence fell apart and turned into something close to panic. Have we come to the end of a Golden Age? Has it all been delusionary? The formerly open doors of synagogues, schools, community centers, libraries, museums and auditoriums now have guards, entry codes or both. These extremist measures came about seemingly overnight.
With them we see streets, highways, bridges, public and private spaces, and most notoriously university campuses flooded with hundreds of marchers with bull horns, Hamas flags and commercially printed slogans on sticks.
That these phalanxes wear a uniform emblematic of the will to assert crushing force is not without precedent—the Roman helmet, the white hood, the ranting radio priest’s collar, the arm band with its swastika. And now the kaffiyeh. Clearly a recognizable social movement, these bristling stalwarts rise as another menacing ism to add to the last century’s fascism and communism. Call it pro-Palestinianism, anti-Zionism, antisemitism. Or in plain English, Jew-hate.
Yet despite its historical longevity, and in contradiction to its increasing familiarity, this ritualized organism of disruption bursts into novelty. Where so much is stale—the hijacking of human-rights vocabulary, crude denials of verifiable fact, schooling as propaganda—something new is in the air. Musical, catchy, rhythmic, rhyming, mesmerizing, a powerful beat frequently intensified by drums.
As he was led away in handcuffs, Elias Rodriguez, the alleged shooter of the two young Israeli Embassy aides at Washington’s Capital Jewish Museum, sang out almost mechanically, as if turned on by a key: “Free, free Palestine!” The syllables sing themselves. So do “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free” and “globalize the intifada” and “resistance is justified when people are occupied” and “there is only one solution, intifada revolution” and “say it loud, say it clear, we don’t want no Zionists here.” And on and on.
Multiplied by a thousand throats, these rumbles and roars let out a crashing thunder, a delirium of dervishlike self-intoxication, rushing on in oceanic waves, undermining reason and drowning thought. Here there is no history, no honest journalism, no honorable discourse, no argument, no analytic engagement. Not so much as a coherent sentence. What we are hearing is the cruel zeal of an up-to-date hypnotic cultism: the politics of chant.
A new sound in the wind.
Ms. Ozick is author of “In a Yellow Wood: Selected Stories and Essays.”