An Open Letter to Brookline Progressives

Here is what some of your Jewish, Brookline neighbors aren’t telling you because they are afraid...

Here is what some of your Jewish, Brookline neighbors aren’t telling you because they are afraid of ostracism, retaliation, and backlash….

I am afraid to speak out for these same reasons; I am just more afraid not to, and I hope I can reach some of the thousands who read but choose not to comment for their own mental health preservation.

So I’ll say these things that others tell me they are also thinking but afraid to say publicly:

You have never spoken out against antisemitism. Never.

You have spoken up in defense of every conceivable minority, except the one that is 0.2% of the world and has been hated for the entirety of our existence.

You leave no room for Jews to speak out against antisemitism.

If we do, we are accused of being apologists for the horrific bombing of Gaza and the Netanyahu government.

You do not allow for the belief that the State of Israel has the right to exist to be held along with the belief that the current Israeli government is horrendous.

But during the Trump years, you never called for the destruction of the United States nor held every American in the world responsible for the actions of the Trump government.

You have not advocated for Palestinians during the last 17 years of the brutal Hamas dictatorship.

NOW you suddenly find compassion for Palestinians due to the horrific Israeli assault on Gaza.

But where have you been while Hamas refused elections, shut down freedom of expression, and summarily executed queers?

Many of you are doctors.

Do you understand that many Jews now wonder whether you will neglect proper care for them or even let them die on your operating table intentionally?

When you embrace the viral meme that “the students always turn out to be right,” you get angry at the reminder that the Nazis systematically engaged students, teachers, professors, and other intellectuals in their priming of the population to go along with the Holocaust.

You get angry because this history is a bold reminder of the major fallacy of “the students are always right.”

Yes, the students are often right. But not always.

You buy into and promote conspiracy theories of Jewish power, not seeing the irony that as you are believing this, essentially the entire world is turning harshly against all Jews globally.

If Jews have so much power, wouldn’t we use our conspiracy to stifle all antisemitism and all denial of the Jewish state’s right to exist?

You tokenize Jews by citing Jews who happen to share your opinions about Jews and Israel, as if their Jewishness validates their opinions.

You would never do this for any group.

You do not cite Clarence Thomas’ opinion as justification for canceling of affirmative action.

You do not cite Amy Coney Barrett’s opinion as justification for overturning Roe v Wade.

But you gleefully cite Jews’ expression of opinions against the Jewish people and against the Jewish state’s right to exist.

You have not deplored Hamas’ systematic rape and mutilation of Israeli women.

We all supposedly agree that rape is bad, misogyny is bad, homophobia is bad, and bigotry is bad.

But when Jews are the targets of perpetrators of these horrors, you not only do not decry them, you pile on.

You invoke opinion numbers and percentages to defend all of this.

This is tyranny of the majority.

Of course by any metric of “popular opinion,” whether that be as expressed by the UN or by any other standard, a 0.2% minority of the world will always lose by a landslide.

You refuse to accept that we have profound compassion for the death and suffering of Gazans — unless we simultaneously declare that the State of Israel is a white, settler, colonialist, apartheid, genocidal entity that should be destroyed.

You read “land acknowledgements” about Native Americans, and somehow that precludes any need to call for return of Native American lands and dismantling of the United States.

But never do you suggest that reading of Palestinian land acknowledgements would be sufficient to allow the State of Israel to exist.

You point out correctly that hundreds of thousands of Arabs were displaced from their homes during the 1948 war, or “Nakba.”

But you do not acknowledge that simultaneously, hundreds of thousands of Jews were displaced from their homes in Arab states in North Africa and the Middle East.

What some Jewish Brookline residents think but don’t want to say to you is: You are stabbing us in the back. We have been advocates and allies for every progressive movement for decades.

And now because of a war and military actions over which we have zero control, you have turned against us viciously.

And in so doing, in betraying and hating your Jewish neighbors and peers, you have become precisely the extreme right wing that you claim to abhor.

Take this to your Jewish friends and ask them to be honest with you about whether any of the above resonates with them.

I promise you, it does.

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