By now we’ve all seen the nauseating Hannah Einbinder use her growing platform for her “Free Palestine” shtick, not once mentioning the violence against Jews perpetrated by her pro-Palestinian friends around the world or the fact that Israel is fighting a war against terrorists who threaten our right to freely practice Judaism or indeed to freely live and breathe in the land of Israel.
There are many think pieces and articles online about Hannah’s speeches and what people think she is or isn’t correct about. I’m not going to dissect her nonsense line by line but what I want to address is the issue of people like Hannah who insist on prefacing their anti-Jewish-laden activism with the words, ‘As a Jew’.
With those three words, Hannah is self-appointing the role of lead spokesperson for the entire Jewish people in the eyes of the masses watching from their television and phone screens. With those three words she claims to have a “responsibility to distinguish Judaism and Jewish culture from the ethno-nationalist project of the Israeli state”. In other words, she wants to completely erase the land that has been explicitly and unequivocally woven into Judaism for thousands of years so she can continue calling herself a Jew “on the right side of history”.
In my article on who gets to define antisemitism, I wrote about Hannah and her fellow antizionist Jews like Ben Platt and Ilana Glazer who have enjoyed successful careers off their Jewish identities yet jump at every opportunity to denounce the Jewish state in their desperation to be seen by their liberal comrades as ‘good Jews’. Meanwhile, visibly Jewish couples are gunned down in the streets, synagogues in London are defaced with faeces, Holocaust survivors are firebombed and Jewish families on holiday are mauled by dogs, all whilst hearing the chants of “Free Palestine” as the underscore to the horror and violence unleashed on them.
Predictably, following the backlash from Hannah’s Emmy speech, she posted a photo of some pickles on Instagram with the caption, “something ACTUALLY Jewish to cleanse the stories”. To quote the brilliant author Ben Freeman, “American reflections of Jewish identity have reduced 3,200 years of Jewish civilisation to a smoked salmon bagel and a punchline”. As the “as a Jew” Jews like Hannah live their Jewish identities through pickles, it seems as though the rest of us who recite thousand-year-old prayers for the land of Israel in shul, wear kippot and send our children to Jewish schools are left on our own to deal with the violent and antisemitic actions of the pro-Palestine movement.
I want to send an open and clear message to the Jewish people around Hannah, to encourage her to stop speaking on behalf of a community that she is happy to profit off and endanger in equal measure, but I would imagine that if she has any Jews around her at all they will be of the same pickled mindset, only affirming their Jewish identities through jars of Mrs Elswood.
When I walk to shul this Rosh Hashanah, greeting the extra security we have outside the synagogue gates to stop the lunatics from massacring us all in the name of peace and liberation, I’ll think of Hannah munching on a kosher dill pickle, looking out of her million dollar apartment and wondering why the bearded man across the street has a ram’s horn in his mouth.
I should finish by saying that all of the words in this article are from me. Not on behalf of an entire diverse multifaceted community but on behalf of one Jewish person who will not remove his Magen David necklace or his kippah when he walks to shul on a Friday night, even if that means being attacked in the name of peace.
Josh Rose is a writer from Manchester.
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