Even the British colonies were not a safe bet for Jews. England had expelled her Jews in 1290 and would not begin allowing them back, and only unofficially, until the mid-1650s. The Dutch were the only safe venue in the New World — as they were at the time in the Old World. They alone allowed Jews entry and freedom to worship safely.

So there is always that uncertain status we Jews feel. Don’t believe for one minute that Steven Spielberg believes in his innermost soul that he, too, cannot be expelled from here. All American Jews feel that way.  That is why so many support Israel, even the leftists, even the G-dless. I support Israel because I am a proud MAGA American who also lives by the Torah and recognizes that G-d Almighty gave the Land of Israel not only to Abraham but thereafter to his specific line of Isaac (Gen. 25:5 at al.) and then to the line of Jacob. That leads to me. So, for me, Israel is about my religious heritage. There are certain Torah laws that can be fulfilled only there, such as the agricultural law governing the Seventh Year when the Land must rest. It is about family I have there. It also is a thing like what Italian-Americans feel about Italy, Irish-Americans feel about Ireland, and what Ilhan Omar feels about Somalia. They are my Peeps.

But for the Speilbergs, the Schumers, and the others with that bare smidgeon of Jewish identity, it is also something unspoken: a life insurance policy. Whole life, not term life. You pay quarterly premiums. And if the Nazis ever really take over this place, Israel will be there to take them in. There is plenty of open land in Judea and Samaria (what Arabs call the “West Bank”).

Here at The American Spectator, I have been blessed these past eight years with a world of Christian readers who see in me an American just as they are, a MAGA American at that. They like that I learned English and grammar before woke schooling, so they can follow my words, even if my thinking is screwy. The shrewdest like the puns. They like the ideas, thoughts, and arguments they can throw at their neighbors, their coworkers — and especially at their Kool-Aided college kids. Yes, my readers see me as a Jew, but only as I see black people as black because — if we may be honest for a moment — black people are, uh, black. So how can you miss it?

Black people are black. So you notice it. But that doesn’t tell you about the content of their character. I notice blonde people, and men also because that is different from the American norm. I notice blue-eyed people. I notice red-headed people.

So of course my readers notice that I am Jewish. I am, after all, not only a law professor, attorney, and columnist but also an Orthodox rabbi. And I put it out there.

I have experienced enormous acceptance in America, albeit amid blips of Jew-hatred. At each of the two major law firms where I practiced, I encountered one anti-Semitic law partner, in a setting of approximately one hundred attorneys. I did not confront either; I just avoided them as much as possible. My job and career were too important to me at that moment. The money I earned then would make it possible for me to be a full-time rabbi and columnist now. It was a price I paid, keeping my mouth shut then.

And they got theirs.

I have met my share of Jew-haters, but I have been amazed, all the more so, by the outpouring of support, encouragement, and just plain equal treatment Jews like me get in America. I am standing on/in line (regional preposition) at the Department of Motor Vehicles in Newport Beach, minding my own business, expecting soon to have my license renewed as soon as the lady finishes taking an awful mugshot of me for my license, the way the DMV trains people to make portraits look as bad as possible. And suddenly a lady behind me, seeing my kipah (yarmulka), says “Excuse me, are you Jewish?”

It is a phatic question. She knows the answer, of course. And then she continues: “G-d bless you, sir. G-d bless your people. G-d bless Israel. I pray for your people and bless you all the time.”

Comments like that used to leave me breathless, even before I needed a lung transplant. It happens often. I am at the supermarket and someone stops me: “G-d bless you!”

Did I sneeze?

“G-d bless you and your people. My church supports Israel. My husband and I have been to Israel fourteen times.” Yikes, that’s more than I.

The media tell us we now are amid America’s worst wave of anti-Semitism since Biden made the two idiotic decisions to name the useless Deborah Lipstadt his “Anti-Semitism Ambassador” and to declare the Jew-hating CAIR (Council on Arab-Islamic Relations) a resource for fighting anti-Semitism. And, yes, I have encountered my share of anti-Semites throughout my American life. But I have found they have been few and far between — fewer than 30 or 40 in a lifetime. Everyone else either has been kind or just plain fair. And that is all any person should expect without earning more: just plain fair. I have experienced far better than that. Can you blame me for being an American patriot and loving this place? When I am watching a sports event, and the “Star Spangled Banner” is played, I stand up, even in the privacy of my family room, with no one else in the room, not even my wife, only G-d and me. I stand up.

Look, the Washington Post and Joe Scarboro and MSNBC may be right, and we may be on the brink of becoming Nazi Germany, but someone better tell that woman at the DMV and her church who love and pray for The Jews and for Israel. And they better tell TAS reader Beverly Gunn (Hi, East Texas Rancher!) and so many scores of you. If the Nazis are only eleven months away, someone better warn Melissa Mackenzie and Prof. Paul Kengor and Wlady Pleszczynski and R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., and all the other Catholics (and Protestants) running this operation. Someone better tell all the non-Jewish people who wrote me in breathless excitement on Sunday, December 3, to tell me that Mark Levin began his weekly Sunday show on Fox News by devoting the first six minutes exclusively to reading from an article I published here about President Trump.

(And, yes, if the Nuremberg Laws are only a year off, they better tell Mark, too, because deep in the bowels of a hidden bunker, somewhere under the brick and steel of a nondescript building, is a boychik.)

So I don’t know what the future holds for Jews in America. But I feel secure enough, at least today, to demand and expect that universities understand that, despite all the Jews on the campuses who spend all their time passively whining and moaning about anti-Semitism, there are still some Jews out there now on the warpath, in war paint. There are some billionaires on the boards of some of these universities who keep their politics to themselves because they prefer not to have their corporations be associated with going woke and then going broke, but they now are coming out of the apolitical closet. Some are even Closet Jews, with names changed so no one ever would suspect. They have had enough.

And there are non-Jewish politicians — almost universally Republican, except for Democrat Ritchie Torres of New York — who also are gunning now for the anti-Semites.

It is war. We are on the warpath. Collecting scalps. (Is my indigenous American spirit showing?)

And the first one to go down is this Liz Magill, recently president of the University of Pennsylvania, who told Congress that it is a matter of “context” whether it is OK to call publicly for another Holocaust of the Jewish People.

Originally published in The American Spectator

Photo Credit: Billy Wilson on Flickr