Purging the Jews

Jews are being pushed out of powerful institutions and they must resist.

My new book, Self Defense: A Jewish Manifesto, is now available at Amazon via Wicked Son Books and the Z3 Project.

Systemic antisemitism cannot function if Jews have the power to stop it. As a result, the presence of non-collaborationist Jews in any systemically antisemitic institution, whether Harvard University or the New York Times, can only be seen by antisemites as at best a hindrance and, at worst, a mortal threat. The result is and must be the purge. Put simply, the Jews must be pushed out.

Such purges have already occurred in many American institutions, especially the universities, and are likely to become typical of social, cultural, and political institutions like the New York City municipality under the rule of antisemitic politicians such as Mayor Zohran Mamdani. However, a recent case illustrated particularly well how the purge is done.

The case, extensively reported by JNS, involved a UN school in New York, which is not surprising, at which a teacher named Nadine Sébag was subjected to antisemitic abuse by Muslim colleague Nehad Soliman, which is not surprising either.

Sébag sought to hold Soliman accountable by accusing her of discrimination. Soliman retaliated by filing a complaint against Sébag that was entirely the work of Soliman’s imagination.

The school, however, chose to take the side of Soliman and persecute Sébag, launching an official investigation that lasted over a year, with lasting consequences for Sébag’s mental health.

Although colleagues corroborated Sébag’s accusations and revealed that Soliman had committed acts of physical violence, the school not only did not penalize Soliman but eventually granted her tenure. To the extent that it addressed Soliman’s racist behavior at all, it was to ignore and ultimately justify it.

In the end, Sébag simply couldn’t take it anymore, retired early, and filed a lawsuit against the school that is now pending.

The silent expulsion

The Sébag case is an almost perfect example of how the purge of Jews from systemically antisemitic institutions is done and will be done with ever-increasing momentum.

The purge cannot be open or official. The reason is that there are laws against racial and religious discrimination, as well as social norms that—thankfully—impede such a publicly declared policy.

As a result, the purge must be informal and accomplished slowly via “salami tactics.” The expulsion must be silent.

First, the institution subjects the victim to antisemitic abuse, both mental and, often, physical. The goal is to make the life of the victim essentially unlivable; isolating, harassing, and intimidating them to an intolerable degree.

Then, the institution refuses to address the abuse, even though it violates the institution’s supposed values and policies. This isolates the victim and leaves them feeling helpless—because they are—with grave consequences for their mental and even physical well-being.

At best, the victim will have to resort to a silent conformity, effectively surrendering to the antisemites, keeping their heads down and ultimately being beaten down to such an extent that they have neither the self-respect nor the resolution to ensure that their rights are protected.

This kind of living death is, perhaps, the worst of abuses, and it should hardly be surprising that, eventually, the victim simply seeks to escape it even at great cost to their career and reputation. The result is that the victim leaves. Thus, one more troublesome Jew has been purged, and the institution is now free to consolidate and enhance its antisemitism.

These salami tactics are not a coincidence. They are a conscious strategy in service of a larger goal, which is to push Jews to the margins of institutional life, ghettoizing them to the point that they are completely disempowered and can exercise no influence over the institutions in question, and ultimately no influence over the forces that shape and often determine their lives.

This creates a process of exponential growth, in which antisemitism, as it crushes all resistance, spreads like a virulent cancer throughout the institution and, eventually, the body politic and society as a whole. The long-term goal is obvious, which is to marginalize and ghettoize the entire Jewish community, making them ready victims for the kind of antisemitic violence we have seen in recent weeks with the attacks on a Michigan Jewish school and Israelis in San Jose.

We should not delude ourselves about what this means. Jews will eventually be purged from the United States itself. They will face the same choice as individual Jews in antisemitic institutions: total submission or unceremonious exit. Under such circumstances, mass Aliyah becomes the only alternative to surrender and, should this occur, the end would come to one of the most successful and distinguished communities in the history of the Diaspora.

Purging the purge

If these catastrophic consequences are to be headed off, then the purge itself must be purged, and this can only be accomplished by the Jewish community itself.

Obviously, lawsuits are an effective means of resistance, as the Sébag case demonstrates, though we do not know the ultimate outcome of her case. Nonetheless, legal actions have shown some success in interdicting systemic antisemitism at certain universities, and a large number of them, systematically pursued, could be extremely effective.

Another promising option is outright civil disobedience. Organized protests at offending institutions, boycotts, and non-violent disruption in general could make it clear to systemically antisemitic institutions that they will be unable to function normally until antisemitism is properly addressed, antisemitic employees fired or forcibly “retired,” and restitution paid to victims of antisemitism, whether by rehiring, promoting, or compensating them.

There could also be a demand for a kind of “affirmative action.” That is, the Jewish community should insist that the purge be reversed by hiring more Jews. The offending institutions ought to be forced to employ a certain number of non-collaborationist Jews each year and fill a certain number of leadership positions with Jewish employees, especially in human resources and other departments that deal with in-house discrimination.

Finally, there is the issue of American society as a whole. The purge cannot be dealt with on an ad hoc basis. The Jewish community must face the macro as well as the micro problem if the United States is to be prevented from becoming a systemically antisemitic country.

Resistance to the mega-purge can only come about through changing the Jewish community itself. The community must resist by, above all, resisting the kind of atomization and isolation—the wages of unchecked assimilation—that enable the purge in the first place and leave the Jews unassisted victims of informal expulsion.

There are numerous ways to do this. I have suggested that Jews band together in intentional communities with decisive Jewish majorities that will ensure mutual support, solidarity, public advocacy, and the resilience of Jewish identity in the face of persecution.

While this is my own personal recommendation, there are numerous other ways to resist atomization. Above all, they must involve reconstituting the Jewish community as a “compact minority” that can maximize its resources and power by concentrating and directing them toward specific goals, resisting the purge first among them.

There are numerous examples of successful resistance to discrimination and persecution among such “compact minorities,” perhaps most famously the black American civil rights movement. This should give us some hope, because it was due to persecution, ironically, that the black community became compact. By ghettoizing and marginalizing the black community, systemic racism created the “compact minority” that, by being compact, found the solidarity and will to effectively resist racism and fundamentally change American society.

It is entirely likely that the same thing will take place in the Jewish community, because the most ironic aspect of antisemitism is that it always makes the Jews more Jewish. By isolating the Jews, by pushing them out of mainstream society, systemic antisemitism, by definition, pushes the Jews together.

As Elie Wiesel once said, “When Jews are together, I am never afraid.” It is this lack of fear, born of solidarity and concentration, that may be key to launching the Jewish resistance that can, at long last, beat back the purge before it is too late.