On the November issue:

Our ‘Inner Israeli’

To the Editor:
“If Israel Is Alone, What Do We Do About It?” goes to show that Bret Stephens always knows what to say and how to say it right (November). But whether it is articulated eloquently or not, the message of the past year is clear: October 7 revealed to the Jews that so many people around the world truly hate us.

To accept that painful fact, and to act on it, puts a new twist on our age-old gift to the world: to see the glimmer of hope in the surrounding darkness during the worst of times.

Americans Jews must convince their neighbors that little Israel is fighting for its very big American ally. To believe that it is possible to negotiate with a murderous theocracy like Iran is to ignore the fact that Iran has sworn to erase the “Zionist entity” from the face of the earth. Israeli military victory is the only road to respect and security. The fight must be kept up until, as Ze’ev Jabotinsky stated, Israel’s neighbors learn that it would be less costly to live in peace with Israel than to continue to attempt to subdue her.

The road will be long, tortuous, and uncertain. But there is no alternative for the Jewish state.
Robert S. April, M.D.
New York City

To the Editor:
I greatly appreciated Bret Stephens’s article on Israel’s isolation. Stephens asks, What, in the wake of October 7, is to be done by the Jewish people? The answer comes from biology: spore transformation. When certain organisms confront adverse conditions, they form resilient spores, enabling them to survive and flower. This is exactly what Israel and Jews of the Diaspora are doing. Israel is unapologetically attacking and destroying its genocidal enemies. And it is doing so with laser-focused purpose, while it ignores callous or anti-Semitic calls for a premature cease-fire. We Diaspora Jews are likewise marshaling our arguments against the Islamist and leftists who call for the destruction of the State of Israel.

I agree with Bernard-Henri Lévy’s characterization of the three “germs” now festering in the “sewers…of the world”: anti-Semitism, the hatred of freedom, and moral inversion. I likewise extend hearty support to Stephens’s prescriptions for turning back the “anti-Semitic incubator” of the “DEI/anti-racism complex” by defunding its institutions and supporting those institutions that stand for genuine merit.
Elliott Vizel
Crossville, Tennessee

To the Editor:
In reading Bret Stephens’s article on Israel’s standing after October 7, it occurred to me that solitary actions often yield better results for Israel than do the efforts of the “solidarity” crowd. Jews the world over need to find their inner Israeli, buckle down, and focus on what matters. Going it alone is better than going down the DEI drain with dubious company. Stephens’s article sums this up very well.

Israel needs to keep bringing the fight to its enemies—who are also the enemies of freedom. There are people in Iran, Lebanon, and Syria praying that Israel saves them from the clutches of tyranny. Once Israel does this, the campus fraudsters in the West will have no one to bankroll their folly.

Fight back, raise high the Israeli flag, and sing “Hatikvah.”
Jarod Guillette
Brewer, Maine

To the Editor:
Bret Stephens’s essay struck me as the first fully articulated expression of the possibility of Jewish hope and optimism since October 7, 2023.

This past year has been grim. But to watch Israel defend itself, as would any country in Israel’s position, makes this Zionist proud. Not only do Israeli soldiers fight to protect the Jewish state; they also fight the enemies of freedom and democracy. Shame on the rest of the free world for berating the Jewish state as it takes up their battle.

Stephens has offered concrete suggestions for the Jewish Diaspora to take charge of its future. And in these suggestions, he is absolutely right. Appeasing the enemies of the Jews hasn’t worked. Stephens’s path outlines a future for world Jewry that is assertive without being hostile. It offers a future in which Jewish life and culture can thrive. This is a vision in which we should take pride.
Naomi Z. Levine
Winnipeg, Canada

Bret Stephens writes:
One of the pleasures of writing for COMMENTARY is knowing that my essays will reach astute and attentive readers—readers such as Robert April, Elliott Vizel, Jarod Guillette, and Naomi Levine. I particularly want to underscore Mr. Guillette’s observation that “Jews the world over need to find their inner Israeli.”

What are some of the qualities of that “inner Israeli”? Intelligent contrarianism. Indifference to popularity. Tenderness encased in toughness. Go-for-it-ness. The ability to notice risk where others see hope, and opportunity where others fear danger. Knowledge of our past, imaginativeness about our future. Love for those we hold closest; contempt for those who contemn us. Courage. Pride. Wit.

These qualities need to become more pronounced among Diaspora Jews. Perhaps that will be the silver lining, per Mr. Vizel’s observation about spore transformation and resilience, of our October 8 world. But that process isn’t automatic: It will require the sustained and purposeful effort of Jewish parents and philanthropists, rabbis and educators, artists and journalists, political and cultural leaders.

It will also require a degree of unity within the Diasporic Jewish community that, historically, we have struggled to maintain. Unity is best achieved through a combin-ation of wide boundaries and clear limits; of a spirit of capaciousness when it comes to our intra-communal differences and disputes but also a clear sense that those who deploy their Jewishness to slander the Jewish people and the Jewish state are our enemies. We should teach our children to know the difference between arguments for the sake of heaven and those that are a path to hell.

My essay was intended as a corrective to our (entirely understandable) post–October 7 pessimism. I’m grateful to COMMENTARY for giving me the opportunity to make the case at length.

Today’s Liberal Jews

To the Editor:
John Podhoretz’s Editor’s Commentary, “The Liberal Jew in 2024,” is a great piece of writing (November). At a time when the Jews are vilified or outright hated for everything, one is reticent to criticizing Jews for anything. Yet it’s hard to ignore how enthusiastically liberal Jews have participated in the very institutions fostering the wokeness and lies underpinning the oppressor/oppressed anti-Semitism and pro-Palestinian narrative in the U.S. The anti-Semitism of the American elite is repulsive. COMMENTARY makes things seem less hopeless—less doomed.
Stuart Dykstra
Kalamazoo, Michigan

To the Editor:
John Podhoretz’s piece on today’s liberal Jews is spot-on and very relevant to the moment. He is correct not only about liberal Jews but about liberal Westerners in general.

The thinking of the supposedly “open-minded” liberal is so steeped in self-righteousness and absolutism that he must avert his eyes from the plain and simple facts that conflict with his complex relativism. In numbers, they form a confederacy of useful idiots and scholarly fools.
Eric Perbet
Paris, France

The Berkeley Nightmare

To the Editor:
I have read Irina Velitskaya’s article “The Gulag Academia” with great interest, and with great sadness (November). Sadness, of course, at being reminded of what has happened to our country and its educational institutions. Velitskaya’s writing is extraordinarily eloquent, and her story is moving indeed. I pray for the day when she, and others in like circumstances, will no longer need to live in fear.
Stephen A. Bergquist
Needham, Massachusetts

To the Editor:
I am a Stanford graduate, and it is for that reason alone that I hold the Berkeley administrators, the Board of Regents, Governor Gavin Newsom, and the Democrats in California’s legislature in utter contempt for the situation that Irina Velitskaya describes. These parties are worse than herd animals. They’re like pack animals—brutish, cowardly, bloodthirsty, and ignorant. They are directly and indirectly funded by radical-chic Palestinian sympathizers and billionaire activists like George Soros. They have dominated Berkeley ever since the draft-avoiders of the late 1960s started polluting the campus, extending their student deferments into graduate degrees and toxic tenured professorships nationwide. And I extend my sincere sympathies to the millions of decent Californians suffering under the dominance of radicals. All praise to Irina Velitskaya and all prayers, too, that she will prevail over the trendy bigots infringing on her virtuous pursuit of academic achievement.
Robert H. Pilpel
Silver Spring, Maryland