Escape to Jewtron

It’s way past time for the Jewish people to escape Earth.

American Jews have found themselves yet again at the center of drama on both sides of the political spectrum, and not happy to be in either place.

On the right, we’ve been accused of delivering millions of Latin Americans and other people of color directly to the addresses of various towns and cities in the U.S., because we want to destroy the dominance of the white race. On the left, Israel is considered a product of a European colonial project and genocidal murderers of Palestinians. Jews couldn’t possibly belong in the Middle East, in Israel, because we are so very white.

To their great shame, mass numbers of people protesting the Israeli response to the slaughter of innocents by Hamas October 7^th have embraced tribal hatred and the collective guilt of every Jew for a war taking place thousands of miles away, which Hamas initiated.

I was so nostalgic for the persecutions we experienced in Europe and the Middle East for centuries. Protestors’ calls to gas the Jews brings me right back. God, I’ve missed that kind of stuff.

And some protestors justifying physical harassment of Jewish students because they’re privileged, so they should be able to take it? Hilarious.

I could go with the old saying from Rabbi Hillel to refrain doing to others what is repugnant to you. But they’d say the Jews have been doing it to them for centuries.

Oh, really? The current generation of Jewish students was there when your ancestors were persecuted or oppressed because of their color? Here’s the collective guilt trope barging into the conversation, which kills the protestors’ credibility right off.

Here’s how privileged the Jews are:

For 2,000 years we’ve been blamed for killing Jesus, providing justification for slaughtering millions of Jews, from the Crusades to Russian pogroms to Nazi Germany’s execution of the six million, not that anybody needed it.

In medieval Europe, Jews were denied citizenship, not allowed to own land, work for the government, or serve in the military. We were expelled from England, France, Portugal, Germany, Provence, and the Papal States. Crusading knights cut off Jewish heads just walking around Europe. We were accused of using Christian children’s blood to make matzo.

In Italy we were put in ghettos and locked in at night. In Russia we were confined to the Pale of Settlement and not allowed to live anywhere else.

Living in Muslim lands, the Jews had to pay a poll tax and acknowledge the superiority of the true believers of Islam. Jews could not hold public office, serve in the army, or build synagogues. We had to wear a yellow badge to identify ourselves, which sounds a lot like Nazi Germany. Muslim mobs occasionally rioted against Jews, killing thousands in Moorish Spain, Morocco, Libya, and Algiers. In the nineteenth century, Jews across north Africa were placed in ghettos. (source: Jewish Virtual Library).

Do you see the privilege just oozing out of the Jews?

Here are two questions for the people who claim the Jews are colonizing Palestine.

First, where is the home country of the Jews? Colonists have a home country, such as the British in India, the French in Vietnam, and Spain in Mexico. The Jews didn’t have a home country. They were fleeing a Europe that had slaughtered them, seeking refuge in their ancient homeland.

Second, if we’re colonizing the Middle East, why are the Jews mentioned in the Koran? How did we come to live in Arabia, Persia and throughout the Ottoman Empire? Did we just spring up there like flowers in the desert?

The answer is we were kicked out of Judea/Israel after revolting twice against the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago.

On a personal level, our family told of a legend where my grandfather, Max, was drafted into the Russian Army at the tender age of 17, in the early 1900s. Now, Max, who must have seen the periodic mass murders, rapes and sacking of villages of Jews all around him, was not going to be persuaded to serve in any kind of army that was killing and persecuting his kinsmen. He also had no money. So, the story was that Max walked 300 miles out of Russia and into Poland, then got himself to America.

The story didn’t even have to be true to feel real to our family. Because it made sense.  Why would anybody want to serve the army of a nation that persecuted you at any random time, surrounded by the cretinous, vodka-swilling hordes of Mother Russia?

On the other side of the family, the story went that our great-grandfather, David, did serve in the Czar’s Army, as a lieutenant. David’s superiors liked him and wanted to promote him to captain, but only on the condition that he convert to Russian Orthodox. David, looking at the masses of Russians who generally seemed to enjoy treating the Jews as cattle and dogs, probably didn’t see conversion as a particularly moral option. He left the country with his eight or nine children, and moved to Manchester, England. There, one of his sons was beaten to death on the street by a bunch of young thugs.

Why did this happen? Our family concluded it was because he was Jewish.

They had to leave England. Why stay in a place where your child could be killed, for nothing?

Settling on the Lower East Side, David worked as a tailor. He died when my grandfather was in the eighth grade. My great-grandmother forced my grandfather, Abraham, to quit school and go to work to help support the family. Abe, the dutiful son that he was, took a job at a slaughterhouse during World War I. Abe was so incredibly privileged.

My father was called a Christ-killer on the streets of Queens where he grew up. He told me he threw a rock at the little mob taunting him on the way home from school, hitting a boy in the head.

The boys ran off and my father won that battle, but there were more many confrontations to come. For instance, I was mocked for my Hebrew name in grade school by a Christian kid walking by our house. My Jewish classmate told him my name and they thought this was the funniest thing in the world! It was an effective way for them to tell me I wasn’t really American. Which still hurts.

Continuing on with all our privilege, I was told by my father that I had to go to a state college, as were my brothers, because we didn’t have the money for a private school. My father was in the home building business and didn’t enjoy the success he wanted. My mother was a hospital dietitian, who worked too because we needed the money.

After I worked as a writer drone for corporate America for almost 20 years, I got laid off, couldn’t find another corporate job, and so became a school teacher, working in Queens, Manhattan, and the Bronx, in areas that the city seemed to want to forget.

I worked with poor immigrant kids from all over the world, to try to teach them to read and learn basic math and citizenship skills. I got to work at six thirty every morning to prepare my lessons. I taught anywhere from 25 to 32 children at a time. The school administration directed us to test the kids constantly. We were expected to raise test scores by targeted percentage points every year. It was extremely stressful and exhausting. So privileged.

I’m now a graduate student at City College, where kids from Columbia University came in early May to trash my school, literally, in the name of Palestine.  Good work, rioters! In the equation of power here, City College is a proletarian school, while Columbia is almost as privileged as it gets.

Here’s what the Columbia/Palestinian terrorists did to my school, as recounted by the CCNY president: “they smashed glass doors, vandalized offices, covered security cameras with paint and trashed files and computers as they tried to barricade themselves in the Financial Aid Office before CUNY public safety officers were able to subdue them and arrest 31 individuals. As we began surveying the damage, public safety officers found bags left behind by those arrested, which contained chains, flares, a bolt cutter, and box cutters.”

Please don’t think I’m excusing Prime Minister Netanyahu for his atrocious conduct of the war. He could have chosen targeted strikes on Hamas. Instead, he did exactly what Hamas and Iran wanted. He launched a full-scale invasion of Gaza and bombed the hell out of the place. Now, we have more than 34,000 dead, many of them women and children.

It is possible to win a war and lose it at the same time. The Israelis have done just that. They may have degraded Hamas, but it seems unlikely to me that they can eliminate it, as Netanyahu pledged to do in October 2023.

They have already lost the war on TikTok. Which is where this war is taking place today. In Vietnam, television helped turn public opinion against America’s conduct of the war. Today, in Gaza, it’s TikTok and social media. Israel is losing many of its friends. Netanyahu is delusional if he thinks he doesn’t need friends. His war strategy has alienated much of the Democratic Party and turned the left wing against Israel for the foreseeable future.

Our family is wary of the future. Is it not possible to be both Jewish and American anymore? Both the extreme right and left are making us feel very uncomfortable.

So, I propose we leave. That’s right. I want to build a rocket ship, a modern Noah’s Ark, and pile in every single Jew in the world – all 15 or 16 million of us and take off. The point is not to worry about some religious idea that God wants the Jews in Israel, but concern ourselves with physical safety and the ability to live in peace. Which we’re not going to get on Earth.

I’ve found a good planet in the far reaches of the solar system, farther than Pluto. No Palestinians or nutjob conspiracy theorists live there, no idiots like Marjorie Taylor Greene, still claiming the Jews killed Christ, that we were responsible for the slave trade, or 9/11, or that we’re secretly controlling the U.S. government, manipulating the world financial system and on and on.

So, welcome to planet Jewtron. The main advantage of Jewtron’s location is that it’s far away from Earth’s seemingly inexhaustible imagination about how to vilify and attack the Jewish people. Its three billion miles from our home planet.

But that’s good! Because I am exhausted by all the hatred directed at our tribe, as are many other Jews are.

Jewtron doesn’t get much sun. It also doesn’t rain or snow there. There’s no soil to grow food. It’s all rock and ice.

But these are not problems. They’re opportunities!

We can bring manufactured housing modules in the rocket ship. We can bring our own oxygen tanks for breathing and internal combustion automobiles to emit carbon dioxide all over our new planet, to help bathe it in warmth, so in a few hundred million years we’ll have a blanket to protect us from the freezing cold vacuum of space. We can heat up Jewtron’s ice for water.

Concerning food, not an issue! We can bring machines to make food! If we can grow chicken in a lab, which scientists recently did, we can do anything.

Just like we have modular housing, we can bring modular farms with us, bagel making equipment and indoor basketball courts.

We will be missed on Earth. What will the Jew-hating masses do without us? They’ll have no one to blame when things don’t go their way. Which will be often.

Who am I kidding? Of course, they’ll still blame the Jews.

But we won’t be around to hear them.