Ich bin ein Juden

In 1963, during the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and five months before his assassination, John F. Kennedy went to West Berlin, Germany to say something in response to the recent erection of the Berlin Wall. The wall severed Berlin’s access to the West with barbed wire, machine gun mounted watch towers and guards under orders to shoot anybody who tried to cross the new border. Many died trying to flee to freedom. We faced off against Communists on every continent amid a threat of nuclear war. Kennedy’s objective was to tell the residents of West Berlin and the world that the US stood in solidarity with them and against Soviet oppression.

He said, “Two thousand years ago the proudest boast was to say, ‘I am a citizen of Rome.’ Today, I believe, the proudest boast is to say, ‘I am a citizen of the United States.’ And it is not enough to merely say it; we must live it.” But the words that are most remembered and made this speech go down as one of the greatest of all time were, “Ich bin ein Berliner,” which in English says, “I am a Berliner.” It means: we stand for freedom.

Today, it seems, not so many Americans are proud to boast about citizenship in the United States. And that is too bad because we face another even more profound threat – from within – that strikes at the heart of what it means to be a free people.

Bari Weiss, a former writer for the New York Times and current publisher of The Free Press spoke on the State of World Jewry at the 92^nd Street Y in New York City on February 25, 2024. Like many of us, she was stricken to the core by what happened in Israel on October 7, and the subsequent explosion of Jew hatred in our cities and universities poured salt on the wound. Her words were as powerful and meaningful as President Kennedy’s sixty years ago.

Weiss began her talk with a passage from George Washington’s 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island where he said the Jews of this country would “possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.” And while prejudice against Jews was evident in many places, including Ivy League schools still, the trend toward equal rights for all lulled us.  She said, “I thought we were immune.” Comparing the pursuit of money, status and prestige to Biblical Aaron’s Golden Calf, she thought, perhaps naively, what made us immune were our ideas:  “The rule of law and equality under it. A God who made us all equal. Rights not granted to us by a king or a government but rights that were self-evident and endowed by our creator.”

She said, “but if there is a lesson of these past few years—and especially these past 142 days—it is that the state of world Jewry depends on the state of the free world. And right now, its condition is in jeopardy.” 

Her words are a clarion call.

“Where liberty thrives, Jews thrive. Where difference is celebrated, Jews are celebrated. Where freedom of thought and faith and speech are protected, Jews are safest. And when such virtues are regarded as threats, Jews will be regarded as the same. In other words: when people turn against freedom, they turn against us.”

This turn against freedom is all around us.

She warned that those “allies” who subdivide people by racial category, fixing inherited qualities to one group or another, counting the representation of each group to see if it exceeded the distribution in the population are not well intentioned.

She said, “To be free is to be willing to stand apart. The story of the Jewish people is the story of freedom.”

My people are not Jewish, but I share her concerns. Her words make me want to follow John F. Kennedy’s example and shout from the rooftops, Ich bin ein Juden!