Once, one could be the invisible Jew. No longer.

I am writing this piece from our “sukkah” or, in the English translation, tabernacle. This week is the holiday of Sukkot or Feast of the Tabernacle. Our sukkah is 2 x 7 meters and is covered in bamboo mats made specifically for the Jewish holiday. We eat, sleep, sit around, shmooze, and do everything we normally do in our home out here in the sukkah. I tried to grab an afternoon nap, but our neighbors decided to clean their car. Their vacuum made a noise that can only be described as a root canal being performed on a gorilla. So much for sleeping out in the wilds of nature.

When my parents met, they had to make a critical decision. Both had grown up in orthodox Jewish homes in southern Germany. My mother left the Fatherland in 1938 and continued her religious life in Washington Heights in New York. My father left in 1939 and moved in with a nonreligious uncle who had sponsored their arrival in Sydney. When my folks met in Chicago, one was still religious while the other was nominally anti-religious. What to do? The solution was to join a Conservative synagogue. And sure enough, we went to Hebrew School and had bar mitzvahs. But it all seemed strange. One could drive to synagogue on the Sabbath, only to hear the weekly Torah portion thunder about the dire punishment for one who violates the Sabbath. We could go to McDonalds to break the Yom Kippur fast and then read about the requirement to keep kosher dietary laws. There seemed to be great contradictions between the actual practice as accepted in the community and what Torah law expected from a Jew.

I was born 20 years after the end of World War II. My generation of not-so-religious Jews still generally kept some connection to the faith: matzah on Passover, fasting on Yom Kippur, going to services on Rosh Hashanah and some other select days of the year. When I went off to Harvard, my mother gave me a gold star of David which I wore around my neck for most of my time at college. I am Jewish. I will not deny it. But don’t expect me to do too much that Jewish law expects of its adherents.

In those days, one could opt out of Judaism. He could eat what he wanted, marry a non-Jew and show no outward signs of being Jewish. The previous generation was similar but would not have married out for two reasons: there was still enough of a connection that Jews tended to marry Jews. Additionally, many groups looked down on marrying Jews. Remember those country clubs where Jews were not allowed? The fact that one was born of a Jewish mother did not require one to do very much Jewish. One might choose to listen to the shofar blast or light a Chanukah menorah. But if one wanted to disconnect, he could and maybe live a life in which nobody would ever know that he was Jewish.

Oct. 7 was the second anniversary of the mass slaughter of Jews and others in southern Israel. I saw online that many places held celebratory events like marches and speeches. Let’s think about what they are celebrating. They will invent new language to claim that the pogrom was an act of “resistance,” that a “colonial power” was attacked by people it had been “occupying.” They have many word and mental gymnastic tricks to convince themselves that the appearance of 6,000 Gazans in the towns and fields of Israel was a great military victory of the oppressed over the oppressors. Letting reality interrupt for a moment, let’s see what really happened. While several hundred soldiers were killed on that day, the vast majority of victims and kidnapped Israelis were civilians. There was mass rape, mass murder, torture, and killing in the most grotesque manners possible. Children killed before their parents and vice versa. People were incinerated in their cars and homes. Women were raped and murdered by the dozens. These are the events that college students and others are celebrating. Imagine a group of your friends running into town to murder, rape, pillage and destroy. And every year you raise a glass to your intrepid success. You would be sick and those who celebrate the mass murder of Jews for no real reason other than their being Jews are no less sick in the head.

The facts were known to all: Israel had fully left Gaza nearly 20 years earlier. Israel and Egypt kept borders on the enclave, so Israel could not be considered to be occupying or imprisoning its population. Most of those killed were unarmed civilians. If I push someone and he pushes back, then he is resisting. If I push someone over a cliff, I am not resisting him over the cliff. The joy felt then and now by many in the West was that the Jews got a good beating. They can couch it in “Israel,” “settlers,” “occupation,” and whatever mumbo-jumbo comes out of their mouths. Their happiness is in seeing Jews get tortured, killed and kidnapped. They won’t admit it, but one can see through their empty claims and vacuous arguments.

And one of the outcomes of the attack is that one can no longer be a Jew on the sidelines. Someone will identify you as a Jew and harass you, break the windows of your restaurant, spray paint swastikas on your home, or threaten you with bodily harm. Maybe at the beginning, they pretended to go after Israelis or “Zionists” but they quickly turned their hatred and attention to all Jews everywhere. Jews on campus could be chased down or harassed without any knowledge of their feelings or views on Israel, Gaza, the war, or the original attack. “Globalize the intifada” is simply code for: kill all of the Jews. Just as some morons like to say “unlive” when they mean “kill,” the left and its Muslim buddies thrill in all evil that befalls Jews everywhere. They whooped it up as TVs in bars showed Iranian missiles landing in Tel Aviv. They went out to celebrate last week the murder of Jews in Manchester on Yom Kippur. The Palestinians and their demented supporters in the West do not want to build a state; no, they just want to destroy Israel and kill Jews. Remember when a certain NFL coach put bounties on opposing players? If I played for him, my goal would switch from winning the game to putting as many guys on the other side into the local ICU. The murders in Manchester did not help the Palestinian cause in any way, but it gave the Jew haters a great feeling: we got rid of some Jews! And with that, they are the same as their Nazi predecessors of the last century.

Israel takes great pride in warning Gazans to move from areas of active fighting. But by doing so, Israel has lengthened the war considerably and given Jew haters two years to justify their hatred. Israel did not create the antisemitism as some kooky people on the right suggest. The continued war has allowed these people to justify their actions, which were from the start based on the mass murder of Jews.

One does not have to put a sign over his head stating that he is a Jew. But if one thinks that he can hide his Judaism, he should know that his neighbors, coworkers, and soon-to-be former friends will find it out somehow. And then they will blame him for every action taken by Bibi Netanyahu and the IDF. And then he will find out that he is a Jew, whether he wants to be or not.

Editor’s Note: The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.

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