Uncomfortable Conversations with a Jew

by Emmanuel Acho

Stop what you’re doing and check on your Jewish friends.

“Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.”

Seeing all people as worthy of our compassion expands our capacity to create lasting change. And then suddenly the world is a

much kinder, more tolerant, more beautiful place.

Jews are just over 2 percent of the US population, but they are the target of 63 percent of religion-based attacks.

“God doesn’t choose the prepared, he prepares the chosen.”

it’s an ethno-religion.

Meaning being Jewish is not solely about being observant or practicing daily rituals.

It’s about a shared story and history, a shared culture, and a shared...

Judaism is a religion, a culture, and an ethnicity; it’s a belief system, a tradition, and a bloodline.

Meaning you don’t really need a single designated place, such as a synagogue,

community the center of the sacred, as well as the individual—meaning

After the Hamas attack of Israelis on October 7th, 2023, antisemitic events increased by 388 percent. In October 2023, FBI director Christopher Wray testified to a Senate panel that antisemitism terror threats were reaching “historic levels.” Communities were advised against keeping up their mezuzahs (small cases containing traditional prayer scrolls) on their doorways during Halloween; the Israeli government issued an international travel advisory suggesting that Jewish travelers avoid displaying any sign of their Jewish or Israeli identity for their own safety; synagogues and religious schools have had to hire extra security to guard the entrances and students have been advised not to play

outside; Jews everywhere have been making sure their passports are up to date; and I’ve been asked by far too many friends: “Where will we go if we have to leave again?”

And while it’s true that Jewish people do earn more income relative to people of other religions and ethnic groups, it doesn’t stack up to some glaring disparity—Jews do not control huge amounts of global wealth. A private global wealth firm has estimated the figure at about 1.1 percent.

the wealthiest people on this planet by religion are overwhelmingly Christian, controlling about 55 percent of worldwide wealth.

Overrepresentation is not control. In any industry.

Jews are just shy of 0.2 percent of the world’s population and yet they are the recipients of 22 percent of Nobel Prizes, plus we have left our mark in finance, law, medicine, media, literature, music, and the arts. I mean,

The word Semitic was first used in the late 1700s to describe all the languages of the Middle East and Africa that have linguistic similarities, such as Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic (historically spoken in Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Iraq, and Iran), and Amharic (spoken in Ethiopia). But the speakers of those

I am not suggesting that the Israeli government is beyond reproach and not to be criticized. But the criticism of a government is

not the same as denying a country’s right to exist, and it is certainly not the same as extending equal vitriol for a government’s actions to an entire group of people, many of whom do not reside there. And that of course also goes for Palestinians, who are not all responsible for the actions of their government, Hamas.

Israel became the Jew of the world.

there’s only 15 million Jews in the world.

There is a pattern, and that pattern has never changed.

the Holocaust was the result of years of persecuting Jews in Germany and other parts of Europe in a slowly escalating way. There

was a subtle shift in language,

don’t believe that the next Holocaust will look exactly the same as it did in the 1930s and ’40s. There won’t necessarily be

cattle cars and gas chambers.

But the run-up has looked exactly the same—the dehumanization and demonization of Jews. And now that there is a Jewish state that has been conflated wit...

Words turn to violence.

The insidiousness lies in the stepping stones. The dominoes. Because if we don’t put an end to the spread of anti-Jewish hate on the internet; if we don’t put an end to people chanting “From the river to the sea”; if we don’t put an end to people spitting “Zionist bitch” at Jews (okay, at me); if we don’t put an end to people tearing down posters of children kidnapped by a terrorist organization; if we don’t put an end to people romanticizing another intifada; if we don’t put an end to university presidents allowing the call for our genocide in the name of free speech, it will all happen again.

“The Holocaust happened because of millions of individual choices.”

But show me a massacre of any other group of people that made you think, “I wonder if they deserved it.”

But here we are, litigating history and whether these people had it coming. That lack of consensus, that need to question, that tiny voice that’s compelled you—and many others—to wonder whether there is more to this story other than it just being a tragedy, is—to a T—the product of antisemitism.

Zionism is the Jewish people’s right to have self-determination and self-governance on parts of their ancestral land. That’s it. It’s Israel’s right to exist.

167 BCE to 33 CE: The Jews reestablish the Jewish state and their national sovereignty—at least for a couple hundred years.

particularly noteworthy individual from Bethlehem to roam the land preaching peace, love, and humility. So:

Jesus, not Palestinian. Jews, indigen...

third and final Jewish–Roman war between 132 and 136 CE, the Romans wanted to punish them beyond laying waste to Judea (which they also did). So they changed the administrative name of Judea to “Palaestina” in order to sever the Jews in name from their historical homeland—possibly

But there was no distinct ethnic group known as Palestinians at that time. That’s

The term Palestinian was used to describe anyone who lived in the area—Arabs of Palestine, Jews of Palestine, Christians of Palestine.

The first person to self-describe Palestine’s Arabs as “Palestinians” was Khalil Beidas in 1898, and Palestinian as a national identity emerged in the late nineteenth century.

The United Nations Partition Plan (Resolution 181) parceled out the land to create a Jewish state and an Arab state.

Israel means: “One who wrestles with God and prevails.”

The Arab world said no. And not only did they say no, but many Arab countries promised that should Israel be created, they would go to war in order to wipe the new Jewish state off the map.

why the War of Independence actually started before Israel declared its statehood. It happened in two phases:

The first phase was in 1947, the day after the UN resolution passed and local Arab militias started a civil war. The second phase came the minute Israel was officially established on May 14, 1948, when Israel got a surprise housewarming and was attacked by all of her neighbors and a few of their friends: Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq, with the help of Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, the Arab Liberation Army

After a little over a year of fighting, the people of Israel, resolute to not be decimated again, won this war they didn’t want or start. The Arabs signed a temporary truce, and Israel now controlled not only the area that the UN had set aside for them but also even more of the land that would have originally gone to the Arabs, including West Jerusalem, the Galilee, and more of the Negev desert.

Then the Arab countries surrounding Israel took advantage of the unrest and snapped up what could have been part of that new Arab state: the Gaza Strip went to Egypt, and the West Bank and much of Jerusalem—including the Old City—went to Jordan, and a thin strip on the Sea of Galilee was seized by Syria.

While Israel refers to this first war as the War of Independence, the Arabs call it the Nakba, Arabic for “the Catastrophe” and a reference to the 700,000 to 750,000 Arabs forced to vacate their homes.