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Source: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/luckiest-jews-ever
We Are the Luckiest Jews Who Have Ever Lived
(Tablet) Ben Freeman - For three years we have watched Jew-hatred erupt on campus, online, inside political movements, and among people we once called friends. Institutions we helped build, funded, and sat on the boards of have turned away from us and showed us exactly what they were made of. But we should recognize that these betrayals provide us with information. Something in these institutions changed over the last decade: Principle was traded for donor comfort, standards for slogans, scrutiny for the easier feeling of being on the right side of a hashtag. Thank God they threw us overboard. It may have been the only way for us to have avoided going down with them. For years, many of us worked to earn a permanent berth - a faculty appointment, a board seat, a spot at the table - on the theory that enough usefulness would eventually purchase real belonging. Losing our place on board returned us to a vessel we already owned, one we had spent 2,000 years building in exile and then, against every reasonable expectation, actually finished building in our own land. No earlier generation of Jews had a country of their own to run to. We are the first generation who already have somewhere of our own to go. That is the shape of our fortune: not that no one throws Jews overboard anymore. That when they do, there is a shore now, and there wasn't one then. Most Jews alive today have never known a world without Israel, never known a world in which Jewish self-determination existed only in prayers, songs, and distant hope. Jew-hatred has shaped our history, but it does not define our civilization. The Jewish story is a record of what we built, preserved, and carried forward in spite of what others have done to us. The writer is the author of Jewish Pride: Rebuilding a People, Reclaiming Our Story, and The Jews: An Indigenous People.