Daily Alert Archives

The Jews Represent Freedom

(Substack) Bari Weiss - The barbarians that murdered Daniel Pearl believed that being a Jew was a mark of shame. But to me it is a badge of honor. When I was at the New York Times, a colleague asked if I was writing about the Jews again. The answer was yes, and it's not just because I am a Jew. It's because if you study history and if you look at where Jews stand, you will understand where a culture, where a country, where a civilization stands. Whether it's on the way up or on the way down. Whether it's expanding its freedoms or contracting them. That is because the Jews represent freedom. Where liberty thrives, Jews thrive. Where difference is celebrated, Jews are celebrated. Where freedom of thought and faith and speech are protected, Jews tend to be, too. One might imagine that the solution was to erase our differences, to flow with the direction of the stream. But the opposite is true. The Talmud is a 2,000-year-old record of a conversation between sages born hundreds of years apart and speaking across time. The Talmud is not just a document of the majority opinion. It's a document, also, of the minority, of the critics, of the gadflies. Right now we live in an age of groupthink, of black-and-white purity politics, the community of the righteous and the good and those who fall outside of it. This is anti-liberal. It is anti-humanist. But encoded in Judaism's DNA is the perspective we need, on hearing multiple perspectives, and on a kind of intellectual humility that understands that sometimes the minority opinion turns out to be right. From the writer's remarks accepting the Daniel Pearl Prize for Courage and Integrity in Journalism at the Los Angeles Press Club on October 16, 2021. Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl was murdered by al-Qaeda commander Khalid Shaikh Mohammed on February 1, 2002.
2021-10-28 00:00:00
Full Article