Dear Friends,
The reverberations and fallout from the October 7 massacre persist. Of course within Israel—victims and hostages and their families, soldiers and their families, and really every citizen of Israel experiencing their world turned upside down; for residents of the West Bank and Gaza, increased violence all around them, the death toll rising in this war initiated by Hamas; and here in the United States—to a far lesser degree, but still intensifying levels of antisemitism and anti-Arab and Muslim expressions.
Philadelphia has become something of an epicenter for expressions of antisemitism in particular.
Three incidents from this past week are worth noting.
1) Chants of “Goldie, Goldie, you can’t hide; we charge you with genocide” outside of the Israeli-style falafel shop Goldie, owned by Israeli chef Michael Solomonov and partner Steve Cook, at 1911 Sansom.
There are a number of incendiary components of this. For starters is the use of the term “genocide,” which is worthy of an entire article on its own, but in short we can say that Jews have been victims to one of the greatest genocides in human history. genocide is defined by the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” As the date of the convention signals, the Nazi Holocaust was, in fact, the catalyzing experience for the creation of the term genocide, coined as it was by the Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in his book “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.”
To hurl the term “genocide” at Jews, victims of the foundational experience of genocide, a memory whose embers still burn—survivors of the experience still live—is of the gravest, most incendiary order.
To hurl such accusations at a falafel restaurant shows the cavalier and, frankly unserious nature with which these protestors approach their cause, and their disconnection from the fundamental roots of history and the conflict.
Thousands of Palestinians are dying in Gaza. It is tragic and something to be mourned. As I have said before, while I do not support a ceasefire now, because I believe Hamas holds genuinely homicidal aims towards the Jewish people, as they have expressed in their founding documents, the cost of this war in civilian lives and quality of life is extremely high, and so I understand and respect the conclusion drawn by those who say it is simply too high to continue to prosecute this war.
But to direct this level of agression and hatefulness—because it is hateful to direct the term genocide at Jews when considering the origins of the term and when considering, while recognizing the tragedy of the experience of Palestinians, that genocide requires intent to destroy a group, a group whose population under Israeli authority has been numerically burgeoning for decades, and, where, flawed though its been, Israel has been giving advanced warning to Palestinian civilians of military strikes as Israel undertakes an effort to defend itself—towards a restaurant, is worthy of the condemnation it received from both the governor and the president.
Some protestors will point out that CookNSolo, the restaurant group owners of Goldie and Zahav, among others, raised money in the aftermath of October 7 for an Israeli organization called United Hatzalah, a volunteer-based emergency medical services (EMS) organization, whose mission is to provide the fastest medical response to emergencies across Israel even prior to the arrival of ambulances and completely free of charge. Therefore, so the argument goes, because, this organization, which provides support to anyone who needs it, Jew or Muslim, Arab or Israeli, also provides ancillary support services, like packing supplies, to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), Goldie was worthy of protest and boycott.
A restaurant with deep Jewish ties, responding to an inhumane massacre in the owners’ home country, raised a modest amount of funds for an EMS service in that country, and was therefore “charged with genocide.” This is wrong, and needs to be called out by the broader community.
2) Graffiti and vandalism towards Makom Community, a Jewish enrichment center that creates family-centered Jewish experiences.
In an incident that received far less attention in the press, perhaps because there was no video to go viral, the staff of Makom Community, a Jewish enrichment center that provides daily after-school Jewish education programming, arrived Monday morning (the night after the demonstration that landed at Goldie) at their Sansom Street location to graffitied storefront windows with the words Free Palestine.
To be clear, unlike the thin veneer of Goldie’s connections to Israel as an Israeli-style restaurant which raised money for an Israeli nonprofit (which is not a legitimate basis for the hate it received anyway, as discussed above), Makom has no formal connection to Israel. It is simply a Jewish enrichment program.
There are multiple issues to address here:
Vandalism is always wrong.
As discussed above, it’s ridiculous to protest small private establishments halfway around the world even if they do have subtle connections to a country whose policies you disagree with, especially with the charge genocide.
It becomes, yes, downright antisemitic to do so to a Jewish institution that has no formal ties to Israel.