If Jamaal Bowman loses his primary on Tuesday, and if other anti-Israel progressive candidates continue to struggle against more mainstream candidates, the Jewish community will be singled out as the reason. It will supposedly confirm all the left’s fears of Jewish voters and organizations.
Good.
Some eye-opening data is coming out of the Westchester and Bronx district over which Bowman and George Latimer are battling. Organizer Dan Mitzner “estimated that 700 volunteers are campaigning by canvassing neighborhoods, sending out text messages and emails, and making phone calls,” according to JTA. “Organizers said the group had made more than 17,000 phone calls and knocked on more than 5,000 doors.”
The success of this unprecedented get-out-the-Jewish-vote effort is undeniable: “As of June 17, it estimates that the Jewish community has accounted for more than 40% of all early votes in Westchester, despite making up 9% of eligible voters. At one synagogue, it says, 62% of members have already voted.”
Forty percent of the early vote is incredible. And we can assume most of this is for Latimer (or against Bowman, however you want to put it). Volunteers have been door-knocking and delivering the following message, as worded by 77-year-old retiree Steven Epstein: “We’re here because antisemitism is on the ballot and voting has started. We don’t care who you vote for for president, we care about this election. We care that the Jewish vote is heard.”
This should make the American Jewish community beam with pride. This campaign is an expression of self-respect, of Jews walking with their shoulders back and their eyes straight ahead instead of looking at the ground. Respect is earned, not given. There are no charities that redistribute a society’s excess respect.
The reason anti-Semitism has been spiraling out of control is because there is no penalty to pay for it. A new report on anti-Semitism at Stanford University, prepared by a university committee that had been set up to study the epidemic of Jew-hatred on campus, is titled “In the Air.” It has simply become an unavoidable element in an increasingly large part of the country: “Some of this bias is expressed in overt and occasionally shocking ways.”
Perhaps what’s even more aggravating than the fact that anti-Semites see no need to hide their malign intent is the fact that when Jew-hatred rears its ugly head, society’s instinctive response is to apologize… to the Jew-hater. To give one very recent example: An anti-Semitic subway mob in New York included an employee of Weill Cornell Medicine. When this was pointed out to Weill Cornell, it released the following statement: “Today we became aware of a recent antisemitic incident on the NYC subway. We condemn antisemitism in the strongest possible terms. Hate speech or actions of any kind, whether antisemitic or Islamophobic, are not tolerated by our community.”
First sentence: fine. Second sentence: fine. Third sentence: what? With apologies to Meat Loaf, two out of three is bad. There was no “Islamophobic” incident or accusation. The only ones threatened were Jews. So why even mention “Islamophobia”? The answer is Weill Cornell is terrified of condemning anti-Semitism alone and therefore must also apologize, in the same breath, for condemning it. Anti-Semitism does not offend people; calling out anti-Semitism does.
Nothing changes unless this dynamic changes first. Meanwhile, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman and others pretend this dynamic doesn’t exist. They pretend to fear us so their supporters will hate us. Nothing would be more poetically just than for the Squad to have made their own rhetoric a self-fulfilling prophecy—for them to have had no reason to fear Jewish voters until they lied about fearing Jewish voters.
A country that mainstreams the kind of ethnic incitement the Squad specializes in eventually turns into Radko Mladic’s Yugoslav hell. America, meanwhile, is pretty good at casting out such villains before they can become dangerous. Here, there is usually a price to pay for even attempting to become a monster. The ground of American democracy tends to open up and swallow such demagoguery.
If anti-Semitism costs Bowman his seat, he’ll only have himself to blame. But he’ll have given his anti-Zionist colleagues something to fear: the ballot.
