Though somewhat incoherent in the controversial remarks he made after receiving his Oscar at the 2024 Academy Awards in Hollywood, British film director Jonathan Glazer represented a warning signal – a red alert – of what can be expected from the “New Jews.”
“Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many innocent people,” declared Glazer, who was born in London in 1965 to a Jewish family who fled the Kishinev pogrom in the early 1900s.
In response, an open letter signed by 1,200 Jewish executives and others in Hollywood denounced Glazer’s speech, saying: “We refute our Jewishness being hijacked for the purpose of drawing a moral equivalence between a Nazi regime that sought to exterminate a race of people and an Israeli nation that seeks to avert its own extermination.” However, another 150 Jewish filmmakers, writers, and actors signed an open letter in support of Glazer.
The term “New Jews” does not refer to converts but to a syndrome sea change. From a “my country right or wrong” brand of loyalty, the current generation of young Jewish adults feels sufficiently liberated to publicly criticize its ancestral Jewish homeland and its policies. That goes for Israeli Jews and Jews in the Diaspora.
New Jews in the Israel-Hamas War
Unlike the two, three, and even four generations before it, this generation does not cling to the narrative to which Israel aspires but does not necessarily practice. Although Israel is fighting sexual violence, for example, unfortunately there is a need for rape crisis centers in many parts of the country, and there is a roof body called the Association of Rape Crisis Centers. No nation is perfect, no matter how hard it tries to give the impression that it is.
Israel wants to have a moral army, and in most respects it succeeds. Palestinians are raised on the narrative that Israelis are cruel occupiers. When Israeli nationalist extremists attack Palestinians, the bulk of the Israeli population either remains silent or declares that the extremists do not represent the bulk of Israeli society. But they do very little to stop them or to punish them.
Too many Israelis are raised in the belief that every Palestinian is a terrorist or prospective terrorist. This narrative has been enhanced by the quantities of arms, antisemitic literature, and secret tunnels found under Gazan apartments. But people who are neither-nor might be able to see beyond these narratives and go back to the era of the Holocaust. War and fear bring out the most noble and the bestial characteristics in human beings. Many of the cruelest of Nazi officers and soldiers had been civilized and cultured human beings before the war and reclaimed those characteristics after the war; so much so that when their children and grandchildren learned what they had done, they were horrified that in carrying the DNA of a forebear they were capable of the same cruelties.
Jews who were kapos during the war were appointed as such by the Nazis in charge of the various ghettos. Before the war, some of these kapos had been kind, gentle, and cultured people. But in trying to save the lives of relatives and close friends and afraid of what the Nazis would do if the kapos did not deliver sufficient quotas for deportation and the gas chambers, they temporarily lost their humanity and sacrificed the lives of others. After the war, they reconstructed their pre-war selves, but in some cases were hunted down and assassinated by surviving relatives of the sacrificial lambs whom they had sent to their deaths.
Today, because of the magnitude of the death toll in Gaza, where thousands of innocent people, including children and newborns have been killed in Israel’s quest to hunt down the leaders and members of Hamas, young Israelis and Diaspora Jews are in some cases joining forces with young Palestinians. Neither wants to be an accessory after the fact to senseless killings.
This is happening a lot in Europe, particularly Germany, which is home to thousands of Israeli and Palestinian expatriates. It was seen and heard during President Isaac Herzog’s recent visit to Amsterdam, where a mass protest calling for a ceasefire had Israelis and Palestinians working together. If this cooperation could only result in a sustainable peace, that would be wonderful. But while there are people on both sides in this part of the world who continue to sow and export hatred, chances of peace are minimal.
It is generally accepted that without dialogue, there is no diplomacy; and without diplomacy and dialogue, there can be no peace. It is time for the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships to call a truce and to emulate countries like the UAE and Kazakhstan which host conferences at which participants include leading religious, cultural, and political figures from countries around the world, including much of the Middle East. Once we actually start talking to each other at all levels and put destruction on hold in the hope that it can never be resurrected, we may have the future that both sides want for their children.
But if the current hostilities persist, Israel and the Jewish people will lose a major part of a generation that puts its humanity and its conscience ahead of national and religious loyalties.■