The Jews Lied to Me at Summer Camp!
There’s a new line of thinking going around within the American Jewish circles I find myself in (young, urban, mostly progressive). It’s memeified, infographic-heavy, and shared in viral Twitter threads. It goes like this: Young Jews have been lied to about Israel by our families and our communities.
It says that our Jewish day schools, our summer camps, our synagogues, and our youth groups intentionally told us something untrue: that the state of Israel is beyond reproach; that when the country was established it was on barren, empty land; that the Palestinian people are nothing but a band of bloodthirsty terrorists. This line of thought maintains that, while we were raised to think Israel is good and gentle, a Jewish safe space, in truth the country is actually evil and committing myriad war crimes, and it’s, like, totally apartheid. In this new telling, our Jewish day schools, our summer camps, our synagogues, and youth groups were all well-oiled lie and propaganda machines covering up the dark truth about the Jewish nation: namely, that Israel is a villainous colonial project that is barbarous toward its true natives and probably the worst abuser of human rights in the world.
Maybe I was goofing off in the bathroom during that lecture. But to the left-wing Jews who own the most powerful microphones in the culture, you’d think our Camp Ramah counselors held our eyes open Clockwork Orange-style and forced us to watch Palmach propaganda on a continuous loop.
Seth Rogen said he was “fed a huge amount of lies” when it came to the Jewish state on a podcast with Marc Maron last summer. Jeremy Slevin, Ilhan Omar’s comms director, opened up on Twitter about the unending trauma of receiving a Hebrew school education: “This conflation of religious/communal identity with a faraway nation-state is reinforced constantly and repeatedly,” he said. “I grew up in a Jewish American school system that was explicitly Zionist,” announced one brave victim of private education at a recent Jewish Voice for Peace rally in New York. Imagine. What horror.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-jews-lied-to-me-at-summer-camp