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Thank you sir, call me a Jew
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I’d rather be writing more about biblical characters who should be elected to Congress. However, somebody wrote me a nasty letter recently after something I published in this paper. “You wrote that because you’re a Jew,” spouted my critic.
To this branding, I say, Thank you! Thank you!
Thank you for attributing to me the greatest possible ethnic compliment. Call me a Jew, and I shall be satisfied and grateful. I am so proud to be of a lineage and a people who have survived and even transcended the greatest and most unrelenting challenges ever known to any cultural group in the history of human life.
We survived Hitler, and we will survive Hamas, Hizbollah, Bin Laden and that crazy fellow in Iran. On the other hand, and in the category of hope, we produced Jesus, the greatest beacon-hero for more people of all time.
Against religious oppression, we lit the lights of Chanukah and outshone Greek Hellenism. We wrote the texts of rabbinic Judaism and outwitted the Roman Empire. Rome is archaeology, Israel has a space program. We made Judaism portable and sprung from the clutches of the Inquisition of Spain, the pogroms of Russia and Poland, the massacres of England, the genocides of Germany, France, Latvia, and the Pale. We have always defeated brutality with the power of ideas.
We created a national Jewish homeland after Europe devoured six million of us—including nearly two million children—in fire, gas, starvation, and unimaginable bestiality. To this day, we plant trees for, and honor the Righteous Gentiles who hid, protected, and died for us.
To rescue our beleaguered brethren elsewhere, we sent “magic carpets” to Yemen, Ethiopia, caravans of relief to the Arab lands, prayer books and matzos to the old Soviet Union. In a daring mission to retrieve skyjacked hostages—a rescue operation that electrified the United States on July 4, 1976—we airlifted the Star of David to Entebbe and stymied the archetypal tyrant Idi Amin.
Overcoming ingrained bigotry, we now send the stars of our American Jewish youth to every university and into every corporate hall in this country and we send our bright and ambitious former youth group presidents to Congress.
We marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., in numbers out of proportion to our actual demographics. We spilled blood in the Civil Rights Movement and some of our rabbis will not stand quiet now when they see economic and social injustice even in the state of Israel.
Call me a Jew. I like living in a people who see wrong and try to right it, see trouble and figure out how to relieve it, see life and choose to live it.
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