Antisemitism has become a raging problem in the West. You can see it online, where there is an abundance of conspiracy theories about Jewish people. It’s at protest rallies and in our elite institutions.
In July, Claire Shipman, Columbia University’s acting president, announced that the university would take steps to combat antisemitism on campus. In a message to the community, Shipman promised that Columbia would make reforms.
“In a recent discussion, a faculty member and I agreed that anti-Semitism at this institution has existed, perhaps less overtly, for a long while, and the work of dismantling it, especially through education and understanding, will take time,” she wrote.
One book that Shipman can put on the syllabus is Sarah Hurwitz’s new release, As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story from Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us, a timely and important book.
Hurwitz is known publicly as a speechwriter for both of the Obamas. Hurwitz grew up in a “culturally Jewish” home in Massachusetts, but her parents weren’t religious, even if they sent Sarah to Hebrew school. Hurwitz maintained this loose relationship with her faith until, at 36 and the height of her career, she attended an Introduction to Judaism class. That course changed her life. She found in Judaism a wisdom and a tradition that she had never appreciated. Hurwitz’s first book, Here All Along: Finding Meaning, Spirituality, and a Deeper Connection to Life – in Judaism (After Finally Choosing to Look There), about her rediscovery of Judaism, was published in 2013.
As a Jew is the follow-up. It is a much more intense book than its predecessor. Hurwitz is angry about the antisemitism that has risen in recent years. In 2021, during “yet another iteration of the Israel–Gaza conflict” and with “Hamas launching rockets at Israel and Israel responding with air strikes,” Hurwitz was appalled by what she read online: “As I scrolled through social media posts declaring that Israelis are Nazis and ‘Zionism = Racism,’ I was struck by how many of these posts were coming from progressive voices, people I thought of as being on my ‘side.’ None of this was new. It had been bubbling beneath the surface for years.”
As one would expect from a book written by a speechwriter, Hurwitz has a way with words. Here she is describing how modern liberalism can’t compare to religious tradition: “Severed from my roots, the closest I came to meaning and spirituality was a collection of social justice slogans and self-help clichés, a convenient mash-up of Democratic politics and ‘being a good person’ filtered through the ‘you do you’ creed of modern life. Knowing much about how to be accomplished, but little about how to be good, I skimmed the surface of my life while building my résumé.”
Hurwitz traces modern antisemitism back not only to Adolf Hitler but to the Soviet Union. Communists didn’t like the fact that Jews had a tradition going back thousands of years, a threat to communism’s “Year Zero” plans to start history anew. Hurwitz quotes historian Izabella Tabarovsky, who observed that Soviet propaganda denouncing “Zionism” reached people across the Muslim world and in Africa. The result, Tabarovsky concludes, was a rebrand of Zionism from a movement for national self-determination to “a racist, fascist, Nazi-like, genocidal, imperialist, colonialist, militarist and apartheid-promoting conspiratorial ideology.”
Today, antisemitism can be found on the Right and the Left, and particularly on college campuses. For a Democrat such as Hurwitz, seeing students at America’s elite institutions rage against Jewish people is heartbreaking. “I now understood how the story of Zionism has been stolen and rewritten by others such that it is no longer about a people who rejected their role as history’s scapegoats and rose up to claim safety, autonomy, and power in a state of their own,” she writes. “Instead, it has been turned into a story about a people who epitomize the worst evils of humankind, all of which are embodied in their state, the very founding of which was a sin.”
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If I have any criticism of As a Jew, it’s that Hurwitz doesn’t address the ways that Jews in America have profoundly enriched our culture. From Bob Dylan to Superman, Annie Leibovitz to Mel Brooks, Mad magazine to Philip Glass, Jews have helped create modern America.
In the end, Hurwitz laments that many Jewish people let others write their history. Hurwitz now reflects that her early detachment from her faith “was the product of two thousand years of antisemitism and two hundred years of efforts by Jews to erase parts of ourselves and our tradition in the hope of being accepted and safe. My Jewish identity back then was not empowering. It was humiliating. As I came to understand the various forces that had turned me against my own tradition, I came to see the ways in which I have been complicit in this process. And in addition to grief, shame, and anger, I feel something else: compassion. Compassion for my ancestors.”