Viral videos circulating on social media are rarely good sources of profound political insight, but a clip making the rounds online this week is the rare exception. It was taken during a stand-up performance by Lucas Zelnick, a New York City-based comedian. As Zelnick is yakking it up, a member of the audience decides to heckle him.
“I’m against Jews!” she shouts.
Zelnick looks genuinely surprised. He asks her to clarify what she means by her statement, and the woman doubles down. “You guys are evil!” she shouts again, explaining that her belief is predicated on “what’s happening in Palestine”.
At the mention of the P Word, Zelnick springs into action.
Leaning forward and making direct eye contact with his heckler, he states his credo. “I’m pro-Palestine,” he says proudly, before making a bad joke about Jews being cheap and, finally, coming in for the landing: “There are a lot of Jews being naughty in Israel right now, but it’s not all Jews, and it’s not because they’re Jews.”
The Jew hater, however, is far from moved by Zelnick’s mea culpa. She barks at the comic, demanding he apologise further and do more to distance himself from the rest of the Jews. It’s a step too far even for the pliant Zelnick, who, visibly stung, asks the heckler to explain why she’s asking him to prove to her not all Jews are murderous maniacs.
It’s such an asinine conversation, and Zelnick’s mewling is so grating, that the rest of the audience loses its patience, demanding that the comedian kick the noxious antisemite out. Zelnick, naturally, refuses, muttering something about wanting to connect with people and understand their points of view. Finally, when he realises the heckler had already gotten up and left, presumably too bored with the comedian’s scolded puppy act, Zelnick puts his hands together, makes a comically evil face, and says, “now that she’s gone, can we plan another drone strike against Gaza?”
And there you have it: everything that’s deeply sad, profoundly stupid, and irreparably broken about so much of liberal Judaism these days in one two-and-a-half minute video.
You would think that, by now, even the fiercest Jewish critics of Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies would realise that there is absolutely no one on the other side interested in an honest, thoughtful exchange. The people bellowing about “genocide” while brushing off all evidence to the contrary aren’t here to chat. The savages terrorising Jews on college campuses while waving the banners of Hamas and Hezbollah aren’t secretly waiting for some kind-hearted Yid to offer them a nice cuppa and an invitation to a conversation. As the “pro-Palestine” brigades have made very clear these past three years, they’re here to hurt us.
Anyone who needed yet another reminder got it this week in the form of another viral video, this one showing a young supporter of Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed violently attacking a Jewish woman at a University of Michigan free speech event.
And yet, we still have Zelnicks in our midst, taking care to make it clear that they’re not like those other Jews, the bad ones, the ones fighting for their survival over there in the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland. We still have snivelling fools who think that if they only dialled up the empathy and fired off a few self-deprecating remarks, they could finally melt the hearts of the murderous jihadis.
That’s a shame, of course – there’s nothing more dispiriting than a dumb Jew. But it’s also, increasingly, a real threat to the Jewish community. How so? Simple: the people attacking Jews, in New York and in London and in Paris and elsewhere, are, to put it bluntly but accurately, vile and violent. They are here to intimidate, not negotiate. And the only way to deter these marauders is to project great strength and resolve. Zelnick’s heckler only allowed herself to be so openly and brazenly antisemitic because she guessed, correctly, that there’s very little chance she’ll face any real consequences. The same is true of the Michigan maniac, and of every other Jew-hating creep: they aggress because they realise the worst that could happen to them is some limp-wristed liberal Jew rushing to offer apologies and understanding.
In a 2021 essay in Tablet magazine, Gil Troy and Natan Sharansky called such apologists by a harsh yet apt name. “We call these critics ‘un-Jews’ because they believe the only way to fulfil the Jewish mission of saving the world with Jewish values is to undo the ways most actual Jews do Jewishness,” they wrote. Had the un-Jews learnt their history, they would’ve realised that attempts to curry favour with Jew-hating movements or regimes never succeed, and that the colluders themselves always end up on the same side of the barbed wire fence as the rest of the Yids.
But don’t bother Lucas Zelnick with such inconvenient truths. The son of multimillionaire business executive and former chairman of CBS Strauss Zelnick, the comic took to his own podcast a few days after his video went viral to talk about his feelings. He was very upset, he said, because many Jews who watched the video wrote him nasty notes telling him he acted like a spineless, servile dolt. Didn’t they understand, he whined, that he was the victim?
No, they did not. Because most sane and smart Jews these days realise that we can no longer afford to continue and be victimised while pleading for the mercy of our attackers. These days, we no longer crack dumb jokes or engage in dialogue at any cost. These days, we fight back.
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