Blame the Jews?

For those slogging their way through that multi-box package of matzah you purchased for Passover, I am with you. I expect to be eating matzah brei well into May.

Next year’s first seder will be the evening of April 21, 2027. That date is easily remembered, for me anyway.

Our wedding anniversary (41, thank you) is April 20.

April 21 is the anniversary of my 2023 “widowmaker” heart attack. As that anniversary nears, memories of that day arise frequently. There are moments when I marvel that I am still here. Let’s just say that I was fortunate and leave aside the details.

Passover this year fell a little more than four weeks into the ongoing American and Israeli war with Iran.

As we prepared for our seder in Atlanta, I messaged a friend in Tel Aviv, with a remembrance of a seder 40 years ago at his in-laws’ home in Jerusalem.

“We did not have a seder this year, as we thought it was too risky considering the situation to drive up to Jerusalem,” he replied. “But between multiple sirens (seven this evening, alone, after three this morning) and trips to the bomb shelter we were able to sit down in our actual dining room for a tremendously good dinner cooked by [his daughter].”

In early March, in an Atlanta tavern full of people trying to be heard over the music as a band played, a Jewish acquaintance asked, just loud enough so that I could hear, whether I thought Jewish Americans would be blamed for the U.S. going to war with Israel against Iran.

I since have been asked the question several times more. I wonder whether, for each of those who have spoken to me — in relatively hushed tones, as if taking care not to be overheard — how many more Jewish Americans have had the same thoughts.

They worry that, the longer the war goes on, and the higher gasoline prices climb, and the more that shipping constraints impact the prices of other goods — and particularly if U.S. casualties rise — blame directed toward Israel could, by extension, affect Jewish communities in this country.

“Operation Epic Fury,” as it is named, began Feb. 28. As of this writing, U.S. casualties total some 380 wounded and 13 killed.

Several thousand U.S. Marines and Army soldiers remain in the region for potential “boots on the ground” action.

Voices on social media promote the idea that the president of the United States, commander-in-chief of the most potent military in the history of the world, has been played and deployed U.S. forces at the bidding of the prime minister of Israel.

(The New York Times recent account of the Feb. 11 White House meeting between President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, at which the Israeli reportedly made a persuasive case to the American for war, does little to tamp down such thinking.)

I offer this, from one of those voices: “You’re either for Israel or for America. They’re not an ally. They’re a foreign country bleeding us dry. They’ve taken hundreds of billions from us, they’ve driven us into disastrous wars, including this one. They want to use our military and treasure until we have nothing left.”

By this reasoning, Jewish Americans own a share of the blame for the war unless they renounce any affiliation, affinity, or affection for Israel (never mind how much or how vociferously they oppose the current Israeli government).

Historian Dominic Green sounded an alarm about this rhetoric in a March 31 article written for the Jewish Chronicle, the leading Jewish newspaper in the United Kingdom, headlined, “The ‘stab in the back’ myth to blame Jews if the war goes badly.”

Green wrote: “A global influence campaign, emanating from America’s enemies and exploited for partisan motives, is being used to split the U.S.-Israel alliance, and shove Trump aside.”

He raised the specter of “an American ‘Dolchstosslegende’, the myth that claimed Germany lost the First World War through a ‘stab in the back.’” The accusation was that Germany was betrayed by communists, socialists, and . . . yes, Jews.

I was struck by two sentences from an article that Erik Ward published on his Substack in mid-March, about Zionism, Israel, and antisemitism, primarily as related to Israel’s war in Gaza after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led terror attacks in kibbutzim, towns, and an outdoor music festival in southern Israel.

“We do not hold entire peoples responsible for the actions of states. We do not collapse identities into governments,” Ward wrote.

Jewish Americans are familiar with this phenomenon. During the war in Gaza, anti-Israel protests in this country saw Jewish individuals threatened and assaulted, and businesses and institutions the victims of mob violence. More recently, quick thinking by security personnel averted a potential tragedy when a man, angered by Israeli airstrikes against Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy in Lebanon, drove a car into a Michigan synagogue where 140 children were in daycare.

As the U.S. and Israel remain at war against Iran, such expressions of anti-Israel sentiment are what worry the Jewish Americans who spoke to me in hushed tones.