By L. Matthew Meyers
Since October 7th, I have watched with grim astonishment as some of my kindest, most demonstrably compassionate friends -- who speak passionately about every global injustice -- have met the suffering of Jews with silence, abstraction, or moral equivocation.
This is not a matter of political disagreement or media framing, but something deeper and more disquieting: a selective empathy that consistently fails to include Jews, especially in our moments of greatest vulnerability.
In human relationships, feelings reveal what facts alone cannot: who we grieve for, and who we don’t. And at this moment, my feelings are terribly wounded – a deep, sharp, unrelenting wound.
What follows is not an accusation, but a reckoning. It is a personal and psychological exploration of how such blindness emerges, what sustains it, and why it wounds so deeply.
A Chilling Silence
One friend confessed that they hadn’t heard of the Boulder terrorist who turned a flamethrower on a Jewish crowd praying for peace, severely burning 88-year-old Holocaust survivor Barbara Steinmetz, among others. This mirrored the country’s response, which was not one of unified horror, but utter indifference.
This individual blamed the ignorance on “noise...the news cycle being crushed daily by the endless Washington freak show.” Proof that in today’s America, even the immolation of Jews can be metabolized as a “news blip”.
I assume this individual heard about the young Israeli couple named Yaron Lischinsky, a Jew, and Sarah Lynn Milgram, a Christian, gunned down by a terrorist outside the Israeli embassy in Washington on May 22. There was, after all, no shortage of time for commentary that week. And yet, curiously, not a word. Not then. Not now. Just an eloquent silence from this friend, and too many others.
This past week, friends expended considerable energy denouncing the execution of search warrants by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Los Angeles, yet couldn’t spare a word in response to the near-simultaneous elevated threat alert from the FBI directed at Israeli and Jewish communities across the United States.
Instead, these friends remain fixated on every urgent cause which nevertheless eclipses 19,000 antisemitic incidents that unfolded in plain view over the past two years, an 893% increase since 2014, not that you'd know it from their timelines. Evidently, some hatreds remain too inconvenient to acknowledge and only some identities merit allies.
Indeed, the most damaging wound is the silence of those who have known the weight of prejudice themselves. It has been left to Van Jones to speak unequivocally about Black–Jewish solidarity. His moral leadership partially fills one void, while A Wider Bridge fills another -- particularly during Pride Month, a time supposedly intended to honor visibility, solidarity, and the shared struggle for dignity.
Worst of all are my fellow Jews who, despite knowing our shared history of exile and erasure, have raised their voices for every injustice but fallen silent as their own people are savaged.
So how can otherwise kind, intelligent, and demonstrably compassionate people, who have shown me great warmth in other contexts, somehow develop a peculiar blind spot about Jews?
A Jungian Reading of Moral Blindness
There are endless theories that prove strangely insufficient to explain why this selective empathy emerges at precisely the wrong moment, and in some cases, inverts and champions the cause of those who commit the very atrocities being ignored.
The most compelling explanation I’ve found comes from the Austrian analytical psychologist Carl Jung. I’m not psychoanalyzing anyone, nor claim to know what lives in another’s heart. It is only in Jungian terms that I can begin to comprehend this untenable morality that I’ve observed.
Jung describes a “complex” as a fragment of the psyche, emotionally charged and buried in the unconscious, that seizes control of perception when activated. These complexes are not chosen. They emerge unsolicited, often from unexamined pain, fear, or inherited narratives.
No one escapes them. I certainly haven’t. They explain how otherwise decent people can behave in baffling and morally catastrophic ways. It is the transformation of the beloved into the stranger, of Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde, or Walter White into Heisenberg. We all live in tension between who we hope to be and what stirs beneath.
If I were to hazard a careful speculation (not an indictment), it would be that two powerful complexes have been activated in those I once trusted to see clearly. Their convergence has created a kind of moral short-circuit, the fallout of which I experience as abandonment disguised as principle.
The first complex is ancient. Antisemitism has sedimented over three millennia, shaping instinct, imagination, and judgment long before reason arrived. The Jew has always been the collective scapegoat, so naturally, we appear as “oppressor” in the false binary of modern moral imagination.
The second complex emerges from my peers’ self-image which is empathic, righteous, and principled, upon which their sense of meaning and virtue depends. Anything that threatens one’s self-image (regardless of construction) doesn’t just feel like criticism, but annihilation.
Their empathy flows to suffering, but more keenly to the symbolic innocent. Gazans are framed as the archetypal oppressed (stateless, brown, and grievable) while Jews, especially Israelis, are cast as hardened white-passing survivors-turned-state-builders. In a reductionist culture that equates power with guilt, Jewish strength not only erases Jewish pain, but is recast as villainous.
Thus, my friends preach empathy while refusing to look directly at us, and see us as we are, not as this complex projects onto us, lest their self-image implode.
To this Jungian theory, my friends may reply, “You don’t know what’s in my heart. I care about everyone.” I don’t pretend to see the contents of anyone’s soul, but I do know that if one’s heart carries empathy, it must eventually make its way from heart to fingers to social media, where one has made either a conscious or unconscious choice to exclude us.
Alas, complexes are not visible from within. Their very nature is to remain unconscious until brought, often painfully, into awareness. In doing so, one ideally recognizes that the forces that drive one may not align with one’s claimed values. That process requires courage: to confront shame, re-examine certainty, and consider that what one condemns in others may live, in shadowed form, within oneself.
If one cannot summon the courage to even privately stand with a single Jewish friend, while fifty-five of our people are held as trophies in the sanctified hellmouth of a death cult that barters agony for propaganda, how likely is it one will find the still greater courage required for true introspection?
A Few Small Candles
Within the silent darkness, a few small candles remain lit. One friend I’ve known since high school, an Egyptian immigrant who eschews social media, reached out directly to offer his sorrow and support.
A few weeks after October 7, a complete stranger asked if I was Jewish. When I said yes, she said: “I’m so very sorry about what’s happening.”
Imagine, one Arab friend and one stranger have offered more kind words than all of these other friends combined.
And yet… I recall, perhaps bitterly, that Pharaoh’s heart was hardened so that God might deliver him a lesson he would never forget; that we are commanded not to hate the Egyptian, for we were strangers in his land; and that Christ, in his agony, still prayed: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
It is not my job to bring friends or enemies to consciousness. But for their sake and for mine, I can no longer remain silent. The Torah commands: “You shall surely rebuke your neighbor, and not bear sin because of him.” (Leviticus 19:17)
This rebuke is not vengeance. It is an act of spiritual hygiene. A way to prevent my conscience from curdling into complicity.
Empathy that never reaches the particular is not empathy, but abstraction. Jews, if nothing else, are particular. We are not asking for guilt or allegiance. We are not asking to be centered. We are simply asking to be seen.
For those who insist they carry empathy for us, I say now: Show it to me. Show me when it costs you something. When it is unpopular. When your peer group will disapprove. When you are humbled by an epiphany, and act anyway. Because that’s when it matters.
Jung wrote, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” A reckoning may come to my friends, as it often does, and often with great cost.
I pray it brings not ruin, but reflection. Not shame, but conscience. Not performative solidarity, but the real thing.
And perhaps, in time, a repair to what has been all too quietly broken.
L. Matthew Meyers is a veteran communications professional and policy analyst.
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