Romanian births fell to just 155,390 in 2023. That is the lowest number in ~145 years. The Romanian fertility rate fell to below 1.5 for the first time in a decade. https://insse.ro/cms/ro/tags/comunicat-miscarea-naturala-populatiei

✡️ Jews Must Be Feared Rather than Loved

A short column like this doesn’t allow me to engage in the reasons for 2000 years of antisemitism. And even if it did, we might never figure it out. But it does allow me to dwell on a question that is nearly as important. Whatever the reason for antisemitism, why are we Jews so bad at fighting it?

The answer is simple. Jews prefer to be loved rather than feared. No, that doesn’t go far enough. They are desperate to be loved. And all desperation betrays weakness and is easily detected by our enemies.

In his outstanding 1992 movie “Malcolm X,” director Spike Lee accurately portrays how the same need to fit in, to be accepted, to assimilate into the mainstream, affected and influenced the life of a young and criminal Malcolm Little. He straightened his afro hair, dated white women, and despised his blackness. But what the Nation of Islam gave him in prison was pride in being a black man. He would become one of the transformational figures of the 20th century and today our family is friendly with this daughter, Malaak Shabazz, who has been to our home for Shabbat dinner many times.

Unfortunately, what the Nation also gave him was a hatred of white people and especially Jews, something that he ultimately rejected once he saw through the hypocrisy of Elijah Muhammad, about a year before his tragic assassination on 21 February, 1965. He was murdered just as he was becoming a great man.

No one is suggesting that Jewish pride be accompanied by — God forbid — hatred of gentiles in general or our Muslim brothers and sisters in particular. If there is one great teaching that the Torah brought the world, articulated in the very first chapter of Genesis, is that we are all — Jew and Gentile alike — equal children of God.

What I am suggesting, however, is that unlike the black community that finally began to purge the self-hatred that comes from 300 years of slavery and Jim Crow, we Jews have never fully expunged the self-loathing that almost inevitably becomes internalized after 2000 years of antisemitism and the Holocaust.

Here I am not referring to the obvious attempt at assimilation that was characteristic of many Jews prior to the Holocaust: Changing one’s name, trying to marry a Gentile spouse, converting to Christianity, or trying to be more German than the Germans.

No, I’m speaking of right now, in the year 2024, how even as we try and fight antisemitism, we do it without ever taking the gloves off.

Contrast that to how weakly we Jews fight antisemitism. A classic example was the well-meaning but absolutely pathetic $7 million Super Bowl ad against antisemitism financed by Robert Kraft’s foundation #StandUptoJewishHate which featured Clarence Jones, the former lawyer and adviser to the great Martin Luther King, Jr. Rather than directly focus on the issue at hand, the tsunami of antisemitism and Jew-hatred that is engulfing America, the ad became a form of watered-down gibberish against Islamophobia and all other forms of hatred. Instead of punching the antisemites in the gut, the ad basically said, “You see, for all of you who hate us Jews, we’re not such bad people. We are loving and kind. Please, won’t you like us?”

🔗 https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/368952/jews-must-be-feared-rather-than-loved/

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