Jewish Lives Matter

There it is, now I’ve said it. I’ve said the thing that many Jews say in their hearts but never say out loud. Naturally, every ethnic group will say the same thing in their hearts. We don’t express these things out loud because it is not polite, and because we do not publicly want to admit that our particular group deserves some priority in the public mind.

Of course, the Black Lives mantra is a reaction to the unjustified treatment Blacks have been exposed to historically. But isn’t that true for Jews as well? Don’t we know that Jews are the ones that suffer to the greatest extent from reported incidents of all kinds of attacks? And that’s not counting all the incidents that are not labelled for what they really are. And how many Holocausts have Jews suffered over the centuries of their dispersion? But when was the time that there were public demonstrations with signs proclaiming Jewish lives matter?

NEVER!

But to the distress of my Jewish co-religionists, I will go even further. Jewish lives not only matter, but they matter more. Why? They matter more because their existence contributes more to the public good than the lives of other ethnic groups. Wow! That statement will set the cat loose among the pigeons!

First let me say that millions of Jews, perhaps hundreds of millions of Jews, (if we count their descendants,) have been integrated into the general populations in the Middle East and what we might call the West. Through assimilation and forced conversion, Jews have been integrated into the general population in incalculable numbers. We could prove that through generalized DNA testing. We cannot identify what contributions they have made to the public good without great difficulty. But, where Jews have retained their identity, such things can be better evaluated.

We all know the story about the presence of Jewish principals among the Nobel laureates out of all proportion to Jewish numbers in the world. We need only examine the rise of Jews to positions of prominence in the West when they began to leave the ghettoes as Middle Age restrictions began to disappear. We have heard stories of Jews rising to positions of importance even in the Middle East in spite of religious intolerance in that region. We can examine the public record in America and even in Europe, particularly in pre-Hitler Europe. It is no secret that even before these times Jews were valued as immigrants to help stimulate business activity in moribund economies.

There are plenty of nay-sayers, and some of them are Jews.*And rising antisemitism and Islamic revanchism signal their own response.  But the facts speak for themselves.

We can look around us in North America, where there was less opposition to Jewish integration than in Europe, and count the record of Jews in business, the sciences, education, medicine, (need I mention polio,) and even entertainment. They are there out of all proportion to Jewish numbers in the population. We have made less of a splash among the criminal elements, but even there we have a few stars. Is it a coincidence that the leader of Pfizer, the company that rapidly produced the most widely used, and the most effective vaccine for COVID-19, was a Jew?

What shall we make of what we have seen come out of the national rebirth of a sovereign Jewish state? Beginning its life almost stillborn as the armies of seven Arab countries massed on its borders, Israel didn’t have any country rally round, (as the Ukrainians have had in their struggle with Russia.) It stood alone and paid the bloody price of victory. And it more than tripled its population, taking in Holocaust remnants and homeless refugees, at great cost, in the midst of its battle for survival.

Casting off stultifying socialism, and in spite of a strangling bureaucracy, deep divisions on religious grounds, one-third of its population denying its existence, and a constant terrorist threat, it has achieved a per capita domestic product which is among the highest in the world. Lacking natural resources, it has built its economy on the technological achievements of its best and brightest. And latterly it has shown it is a people that will bitterly fight to retain its democracy, as so many have not.

It invests the world’s highest percentage of its budget every year in research and development. Few countries exceed it in the number of new patents registered each year. Its research has permitted the crippled to walk, the deaf to hear and the blind to see. It provides devices that produce water out of the air for those without water. It has invented devices that conserve water for dry country irrigation. It produces drinking water from sea water on a grand scale and exports it to its neighbors. There are unheard of innovations in the medical field that can rescue the lives of untold numbers of people.

Constantly threatened militarily, it has produced effective anti-missile defense systems for population centers, for airplanes, ships, and for military vehicles. It is constantly upgrading the quality of its military engines and its intelligence capabilities. Its company start-ups are launched on the world’s exchanges and are being purchased by corporate buyers every month. The U.S. invests billions in its technology and receives many times its investment back as savings to the U.S. taxpayer every year.

We do not know exactly what it is that is the origin of this comparative out-performance. Maybe there is an element of survival of the fittest at work. Maybe it is the cultural imperative to strive for educational attainment that yields benefits. Maybe it comes from centuries of belief in a common destiny that has driven Jews to a sense of responsibility for the well-being of their fellows. That has metamorphosed into an interest in service to humanity as a whole. That might explain the emphasis in career choices that speak to this. Maybe it is the tradition of persistence in the face of obstacles knowing that we often have not had a choice but to keep trying when we faced obstacles to our survival? Who knows?

What I know, is that humanity benefits from a precious resource that may be a necessity for the world’s common good, the existence of the Jews. The dynamism of this tiny fraction of the world population deserves to be recognized for what it is, and what it could be, if properly appreciated. It has been interesting to note that a number of Arab countries, formerly sworn enemies, have signed the Abraham Accords so they can draw some benefits from this resource. A word to the wise!

*Y.N. Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21^st Century