6 | APRIL 27 • 2023 

1942 - 2023

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opinion

All Jews Are Responsible 
for One Another
J

ew-haters see evil as a 
Jewish phenomenon. This 
is why, although they have 
their “good” or “token” Jews, 
they can still hate the Jews as a 
whole. Their “good Jew” is an 
exception. The 
Jew-hater’s loath-
ing of Jewishness 
and Judaism 
manifests itself 
in hatred for the 
Jews as a collec-
tive. Thus, the hat-
ers hold the vast 
majority of Jews responsible for 
perceived “Jewish” crimes.
In the Jewish world, one 
of the responses to this has 
been the attempt to diminish 
Jewish collective responsibility. 
As I described in my second 
book Reclaiming Our Story: The 
Pursuit of Jewish Pride, this was 

a factor in the “Jewish-American 
Cold War,
” an ideological strug-
gle fought in the 1940s and ’50s 
over the future of American 
Jews.
On one side were Jews who 
did not want to be defined as 
Jewish because they did not 
want to be perceived as respon-
sible for other Jews. They want-
ed to be seen as Americans first. 
From a psychological perspec-
tive, this response made sense, 
but it also belied a certain truth: 
Jews are responsible for one 
another.
This is not to say that the 
crimes of one Jew are the 
responsibility of all Jews. It is 
to say that Jews everywhere are 
connected to one another, and 
the experience of one Jew in one 
part of the world should matter 
to Jews everywhere.

The attempt to distance 
ourselves from this collective 
responsibility is tragically 
understandable as an attempt 
to overcome overt Jew-hatred. 
But it is also an attempt to 
diminish the specificity of the 
Jewish experience, to remake us 
into something universal. If we 
aren’t defined by our Jewishness, 
it holds, then we are just like 
everyone else.
Certainly, Jews are part of the 
human race like anyone else, 
but we are also a specific group 
of people with unique connec-
tions. We must remember this, 
and not allow Jew-hatred and 
the trauma it inflicts upon us 
to cause us to warp ourselves. 
Warping ourselves is something 
we have already tried to do, and 
it didn’t work.
The Western Jewish world 

underwent extreme changes in 
the 19th century following the 
Enlightenment. We began to 
define ourselves via non-Jewish 
expectations of Jewish identity. 
We shed our nationhood and 
remade Judaism to bring it more 
into line with Christianity. All of 
these attempts failed, and they 
betrayed thousands of years of 
Jewish civilization. They were 
not natural cultural evolution. 
They were a specific attempt to 
change Jewishness and Judaism 
so that Jews might finally be 
accepted. We were not.
Pride, however, does work. 
Jews must be proud of ourselves. 
We must take pride in our civili-
zation and understand the con-
nection that exists between Jews 
all over the world.
When an Orthodox Jew is 
beaten on the streets of Brooklyn 

PURELY COMMENTARY

Ben 
Freeman
JNS.org

continued on page 9

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