An essay about a new movie and a Facebook post perfectly exemplify why leftist Jews in America and Israel are finding it impossible to defend against genocidal antisemitism.
“Guns & Moses” tells the story of a rabbi who discovers that the Second Amendment exists to save innocent lives. As the rabbi investigates a deadly attack against his congregation, he discovers that a gun is his best friend against a murderous antisemitic enemy.
Image made using AI.
The movie is based on the deadly attack against Chabad of Poway in San Diego in 2019. At the film’s end, as the credits roll, writer and director Salvador Litvak has a message: With violence against Jews rising (by 63% in 2023 alone), Jews “will not be a soft target” anymore. The movie’s audience should live out “the values you’ve just seen.”
Trailer for the new independent action/thriller film Guns & Moses! I got a preview of this movie and it is INCREDIBLE, with a major plot twist! ????
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) July 6, 2025
- Pro 2A
- Pro religious liberty
- Pro truth
So you know Hollywood will hate it…
Coming to theaters July 18th! ????#GAMPartner pic.twitter.com/jF3nsyhgqr
Haaretz, a leftist Israeli publication, does not agree. It published an essay by Rachel Burnett (a “master’s student of politics at New York University studying the politics of contemporary antisemitism and the diaspora politics of Israel/Palestine in the U.S. and Europe”) who argues that the movie’s fundamental premise is fatally flawed. She contends that self-defense with guns doesn’t work and, more importantly, individual Jews can’t be trusted with guns.
As Burnett notes, 70% of American Jews supported gun control in 2018, unlike 52% of the general population. However, she sorrowfully admits that Jews are becoming a bit more supportive of their Second Amendment rights.
Also, seemingly with sorrow, she concedes that Israel defends itself with arms. That, however, is acceptable because it’s a nation with its battles constrained by “realpolitik” and “the standards of international law in warfare.”
The same, however, cannot be said for individually armed Jews, who have no constraints. Thus, the danger in the movie is that “The rogue sensationalism it depicts suggests and perhaps even obliges its viewer to believe that antisemitism must be quite literally combatted [sic] by any means necessary.” She apparently believes that to be in America is to be in a land without laws.
Burnett then runs through the usual gun control talking points about school shootings, the ineffectiveness of armed civilians in the case of mass shootings (in fact, all those events end when the shooter is shot), and the fact that bullets won’t stop antisemitism. Regarding that last point, bullets may not stop the idea of antisemitism, but they will stop an antisemite on a murderous rampage...and deter others, too.
The article’s core stupidity, though, comes from this statement: “According to Jewish teaching, there is no deed more destructive and immoral than taking someone else's life. That of course should include an antisemite.”
This is just wrong. Leftists hide behind a mistranslation of the Sixth Commandment: “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” In fact, the Hebrew word isn’t “kill”; it’s “murder.”
A murder is the unjustified taking of someone’s life. Killing, however, can be justified, especially when it’s done in self-defense, as would be the case if a Jew were on the receiving end of an imminent threat of physical harm from an antisemite. Put another way, self-defense is not vigilanteism.
And while the Old Testament venerates life (Deuteronomy 30:19), it does not require Jews to die to spare the lives of their deadly enemies. Instead, part of choosing life is defending helpless individuals and the Jewish nation. Or as the Talmud (Midrash) said, “If you are kind to the cruel, you will end up being cruel to the kind.”
In other words, the Bible does not decry killing when it’s done morally and justly, to preserve innocent lives.
Another manifestation of this unwillingness to name and destroy evil comes from a little poster that Rabbi Menachem Creditor (a hard left rabbi) published on Facebook:
There are those who urge me—urge us—to mention Gaza every time we speak of Israel’s pain. I do pray for the people of Gaza. I truly do. May their hunger end. May their suffering cease.
But I refuse the erasure of particular grief.
I will not apologize for mourning my family.
Jewish prayer teaches nuance. We have a blessing for healing. A blessing for protection. A blessing for peace. They are not the same. Each deserves its own amen. So let me be clear: I want all suffering to end. But I will not compress the pain of my children to make space for the pain of the world.
That’s not how love works.
And that’s why and how I fight for my family’s dignity.
For their freedom - and mine - to live without fear, without apology.
Do you see what he did there? He issued a groveling apology to the world at large for caring about Jewish deaths—and prefaced it by saying that the people truly in his heart are the Gazans, for whom he wishes all good things.
These are the same Gazans who have kept Hamas in power since 2005, even though it’s used every bit of its political capital and foreign money, not to improve their lives, but to turn Gaza into a giant war machine to kill Jews. These are the Gazans who sent thousands of their men into Israel in Hamas’s wake on October 7, 2023, to inflict gruesome, torturous slaughter on Jews. And these are the Gazans who haven’t done a single thing to help the hostages imprisoned among them.
To the extent Gazans are suffering in a zone (with the caveat that the “famine” is propaganda hogwash), this is something they have willingly brought on themselves. They are a death cult. It is not the act of a good man to feel sorry for death cultists. And to the extent there are children being trained up in that death cult, real compassion demands that we destroy the institutions that have trapped them.
I wonder if Rabbi Creditor would have felt the same compassion for civilians in Nazi Germany. That is, can Rabbi Creditor distinguish between stupid, anti-Biblical, suicidal “compassion” and the Bible’s actual demand for moral justice?
The worst thing of all, though, is that both Burnett and Creditor aren’t anomalies. They represent mainstream Jewish thinking in America and amongst a large cohort of Israelis. And if they keep thinking this way, we’ll all end up dead.