A Letter To My Non-Jewish Friends

Jonah Platt (0:03)

Hi, I hope this message finds you well. As your friend, there's some stuff I really need you to hear, and I want to make sure I say everything that needs to be said, so I've written it all down in this letter, in hopes it will reach you.

In the aftermath of Gaza's horrific October 7th attack on Israel, I received words of support from many of you. It meant so much to me, and I'll never forget it. At that time, I posted on social media that those of you who were uninformed or confused or disconnected shouldn't have felt obligated to weigh in. I saw your hesitation for what it was. Not cowardice or lack of care, but feeling out of your depth in the midst of a polarizing conflict playing out thousands of miles away.

But here we are, three years later, and I'm afraid I have a very different message for you now.

I, my family, and my beloved Jewish brothers and sisters can no longer afford to let you sit this one out. We need you desperately to understand what is happening to us, here, in the West, in real time. And I need you to hear it from me, not from the news or social media or some movie star or politician or an anti-Zionist, but from the mouth of a run-of-the-mill, traditional establishment American Jew who also happens to be decently tapped into the broader Jewish experience.

My dear friends, there is just so much I need you to understand.

I need you to understand that October 7th absolutely shattered and traumatized the entire Jewish world, that we all still carry that ongoing trauma and conflict presently in a big way. And for those of us here in the West, the world's response to October 7th has been even worse, shattering not just our hearts, but our understanding of this world and our place in it. It was the cataclysmic event of our lifetimes. For us, there was life before October 7th and life after it.

I need you to understand that overnight I went from being a person who had never experienced bigotry in my life to someone who experiences it multiple times a day, every day. That we are being absolutely pummeled with anti-Jew bigotry from the right and the left, at work, at school, in public spaces, on social media, and much of it appears in forms you've not been trained to recognize. Believe us.

I need you to understand that Jews have been cut off by our best friends, colleagues, family members. Not for anything we did, but for simply continuing to be the same Jews we've always been, the same Jews we've been for thousands of years, Jews with a connection to the people and land of Israel. It's everybody around us who's suddenly decided it's no longer permissible to be that kind of Jew.

I need you to understand that we are being pushed out of entire industries, academia, art, medicine, publishing, psychology, yoga, to name just a few. And that we once again find ourselves having to create our own enterprises in order to feel safe. Often that ostracization comes not from outright hate, but from a chilling effect of people being afraid to even associate with us. Not because of any specific stance necessarily, but because we are Jewish and that feels risky right now. I need you to understand how ubiquitous and messed up that sentiment is.

I need you to understand that being a Jew today means watching in dismay as your friends and family and respected public figures are swept into a manipulated unreality without realizing it. Swept by a carefully seeded, decades-long, billion-dollar jihadist propaganda campaign along the tide of public consensus with no resistance, as millions have been likewise manipulated by the hidden hand of authoritarian regimes in every age. Definitions no longer matter, data doesn't matter, evidence doesn't matter. Only the narrative, the repetition, the slogans, the purity tests, the self-righteousness. I need you to understand that even many Western liberal Jews have fallen prey to this propaganda. The line isn't so much Jew and non-Jew as it is those who are awake to the scheme and its machinery and those who remain ignorant.

I need you to understand the pain Jews are carrying around every day from all this hostility, from the erosion of social norms, from the fear that being publicly identified as Jewish might result in our physical harm or death, and that as rare as that might be, it's not rational because it has happened repeatedly and continues to happen with increasing frequency all over the world. And I need you to understand, I'm not being hyperbolic.

I need you to understand that once a Jew is identified as a Jew, they are treated as a Jew regardless of their skin color, and that Jews are victims of more hate crimes in this country by percentage than any other minority group. To assert that a white presenting Jew cannot be the target of bigotry as it is as preposterous and hurtful as saying a white presenting gay person cannot be the target of bigotry either.