Joan Swirsky is a prolific author and writer. She was a dutifully liberal/left until a few years ago, and events/actions by supposedly liberal/left leaders moved her from that political stance.
In September of 2024, Ms. Swirsky wrote a commentary on why her politics had been transformed – a commentary I just read this morning. Here is how it starts:
When individuals kill themselves, we look for answers in their DNA, their environments, their personal reactions to feelings of impotent rage, rejection, disappointment, heartbreak, and mental illness.
But how to explain group suicide? There are numerous examples, going back to 206 B.C., and these relatively recent cases:
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- In 1943, in the final phase of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, many of the Jewish fighters besieged in the “bunker” at Miła 18 committed mass suicide by ingesting poison rather than surrender to the Nazis.
- In 1945, about 1,000 residents of Demmin, Germany, committed mass suicide after the Red Army had sacked the town.
- In 1978, 918 Americans — including 276 children — ingested cyanide in the Peoples Temple, after being exhorted and compelled to do so by their cult leader, Jim Jones, in Jonestown, Guyana.
- In 1997, 39 followers of the Heaven’s Gate cult in California died in a mass suicide, believing they would travel on a spaceship that followed comet Hale — Bopp.
Clearly, some groups took their lives en masse for ideological reasons, whereas others — particularly vulnerable people in dire need of a “leader” — simply followed orders. In all the mass suicides in recorded history, dozens, hundreds, and up to one thousand people took their own lives.
But today, when looking at suicidal Jews, the numbers could be in the millions!
Currently, out of a worldwide population of eight billion people, there are about 15 million Jews — approximately seven million in Israel, almost seven million in the United States, and one million throughout the world. This is, by any measure, a few grains of sand compared to the massive total population of the world.
According to U.S. voting patterns, Jews are overwhelmingly liberal — up to 80 percent — which means they vote in huge numbers for leftists like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden. These people’s staffs have comprised, almost exclusively, career antisemites, who have done everything in their power to effect anti-Israel policies like the Iran nuclear deal, knowing that the fanatical mission of the mullahs in Teheran was — and is to this day — to wipe Israel off the map and exterminate every Jew in existence.
As Karin McQuillan explained in “Leftist Jew Hatred Has Come to America,” “the Left began with blacklisting and boycotting conservatives. Now American Jews are in the crosshairs, no matter how liberal their politics.”
But they won’t jump off the bandwagon, she wrote, because that would mean “losing your friends, being shunned at synagogue, and stunting your career[.] … [C]hanging party affiliation is such a tall cliff, it feels suicidal, that is the loss of their entire identity.”
The commentary continues, and every word is well worth reading. Please used the link I provided above (here it is again) and read it all.
In my opinion, events over the year and a half have shown that Ms. Swirsky was dead-on correct in her assessment – not only in her assessment of the burgeoning anti-Semitism that we are (again) experiencing, but of the aversion so many Jews have to recognizing it.
When do more of us wake up, allow ourselves to see what is in front of our eyes, and act accoringly?
