JRV1326

We All Live on Our Grassroots American Jewish Street; Don’t Hide Inside, Come Out and Stroll, Listen and Speak

#1326 June 14, 2026

This week, I cite four readers’ website comments to last week’s emailed and posted blog on grassroots recognition of Israel-bashing to beguile you into joining in website commenting.  Come speak on our Street.

We All Live on Our Grassroots American Jewish Street; Don’t Hide Inside, Come Out and Stroll, Listen and Speak

For the first twenty-three years of these weekly emails of mine to fellow grassroots American Jews, you’ve engaged with me one-on-one in email exchanges.  We’ve exchanged views on Israel, antisemitism and other issues affecting us all. I’ve profited from them and hope you have too.  Indeed, it’s your two decade-plus stream of email responses that have kept me going lo these twenty-five years. So when it came time in 2024 for me to put “the best” of these weekly emails, organized by subject, into a book, Here & Now: U.S. Jews and the Issues Confronting Us, I dedicated it to You-Who-Put-Up-With-Me-Weekly.

You’re still sending me emails, which I continue to appreciate, but there are two solid reasons now for you to redirect your responses on line.  My publisher has created a website “for my book,” but I’ve enhanced it with an always current section advancing the book’s basic aim – grassroots U.S. Jews coming to grips amongst ourselves with matters affecting our homeland and peoplehood. 

Indeed, the site’s name is confrontingjewishissues.com, and the main menu includes “Grassroots American Jewish Street.”  This is a grassroots American Jews’ own place on the web, unaffiliated with any organization.  If you click that top menu selection, you’ll find a choice to click “Blogs,” and among them a page listing mine, latest on top (i.e., this week this #1326, “We All Live on Our Grassroots American Jewish Street; Don’t Hide Inside, Come Out and Stroll, Listen and Speak.”  Click that, go to the reader comment box at the bottom and comment away.  (You can still send me an email, but as I say at my weekly email’s bottom, I’ll post your reply as a comment by you unless you preface it “Private.”)

Your online comment, of course, is open to all and can start a thread of replies to it by other site visitors, you and me.  (I “moderate” comments – i.e., preview them before they go live, for abuse, not point of view.) 

How I’d like to beguile you this week is to show you four reader responses to my last week’s #1325, 89.66% of Jewish Exponent Poll Participants Call MSM Israel Coverage “Unfair/Imbalanced,” But What Can We Grassroots Do About It?, and my responses to them.  Hopefully, these will encourage you to join in the fun.

#1: Have I Ever Changed Anyone’s Mind?

A reader asked me not long ago, “Jerry, have you ever changed anyone’s mind towards your point of view?”  I like to think so, but a reader’s comment to my endorsement last week of Steve Feldman’s Facebook plea

“Our role in the information war is serious, and we have the potential to open minds and eyes … or reaffirm the lies of our many enemies. Choose — and write/speak — wisely.”

specifically on we ourselves saying “Judea-Samaria,” not “West Bank,” elicited this comment exchange between a subscriber named Stu and me that’s some evidence if not final proof in the pudding.

SUBSCRIBER STU: For what it’s worth, your arguments have led make to at least qualify the “West Bank” as so-called, or, depending on context, the Biblical Judea and Samaria.

ME: Hi, Stu. What’s it worth? Coming from one with whom I at times respectfully disagree about Israel, it’s worth a great deal. But nudger I am, I’d push this further. “Depending on context” in unarguable cases went out of style in Philadelphia with championing genocide-of-Jews. And indeed “Judea and Samaria” are biblical names, but hung around for 3000 years, including by UN [!] in 1947.

#2: Can a Jew Rightly Call Jordan’s Renaming “Judea-Samaria” as “West Bank” a “Rechristening”?

Last week, I wrote

“In 1950, invader [Trans-]Jordan rechristened as ‘West Bank’ what had been known throughout history (including by the UN in 1947) as Judea-Samaria.”

This elicited a comment exchange between U.S. armed services veteran subscriber Henry and me.

HENRY: Jerry, Hi. I have a running response whenever the US Navy “christens” a new ship. There are official, non-denominational names for the ceremony when launching a ship. It’s down to about 50/50 of misusing “christen.” So, e.g.: “In 1950, invader [Trans-]Jordan re[named] as ‘West Bank.’” Progress!

ME: Hi, Henry, you touch on a subtle point. As I quoted Steve Feldman this week, “Each word conveys a thought or a concept.” Truth to tell, I used “rechristened … Holy Land holy places … resurrected” in this week’s email to hint to Christians that their heritage along with ours is being hijacked by Muslims renaming and claiming it. Jerry

#3: When have the Jewish people just been accepted, welcomed, and appreciated by non-Jews in this world?

Christian subscriber Jeff made the point that criticism of Israel runs deeper than issues of history and geography but a Christian hostility to Israel and Jews that Christianity must reject.  I replied, citing Jews’ millennial mistreatment in Europe, that we Jews must see our three-millennia homeland of Israel with its Ingathering of Our Exiles from everywhere as national embodiment of Never Again.  

JEFF: Excellent points throughout including those made by Steve Feldman. However, much of the criticism of Israel is not, I think, based on distortions of interpretations of geography or history, but at a deeper level anti-Israelism and anti-Semitism is a spiritual problem. When have the Jewish people just been accepted, welcomed, and appreciated by non-Jews in this world?

Christianity originated with the Jews, and the understanding that there is a God-given moral law that is the underpinning of all blessed civilization drives the Evil One crazy. He is the snake of Genesis; he is Pontius Pilate of the New Testament who sends Jesus to be crucified. Romans chapters 9, 10, 11 in the New Testament reminds the Christian believers that Gentile followers of Y’shua Hamaschiach (Jesus Christ) are branches that have been grafted into the tree of Judaism and thus should never have disdain for the Yehudim. Many Christians often talk about God’s love love love, but deny that sinful thoughts and desires still live in their own beings. They would have to admit that according to their own Bible writings, hostility towards Jews is sinful, that hostility towards Israel is a marker of that sinfulness, and that repentance is needed before they can properly understand the role of Jews and Israel in history.

Again, thank you for another penetrating issue of Here and Now!!

ME: Hi, Jeff. Thanks very much for these insights. I fully agree today’s Israel-bashing frenzy has deeper roots than history and geography-grounded claims. So alas I’d answer your rhetorical question “When have the Jewish people just been accepted, welcomed, and appreciated by non-Jews in this world?” with “Nowhere, never.”

Take Europe for example, Over the centuries EVERY device of ethnic cleansing – Pale of Settlement, Ghetto, Holocaust, Inquisition, forced removal from place to place, Pogrom – was devised in good old Christian Europe expressly for Jews, the ultimate irony being that on the Holocaust’s eve when the Germans were willing to let the Jews out, the British then and continuing through and even after the Holocaust, with antisemitism still rampant in Europe, vehemently strove to keep the Jews in.

Today’s State of Israel wasn’t “created because of the Holocaust,” but every self-respecting Jew in the world rightly and rightfully sees our homeland’s Ingathering of Our Exiles as national embodiment of Never Again.

JEFF: The never-ending Jew-bashing throughout history and Jewish survival despite the never-ending hostility is really amazing! I recall discussing this very theme with my friends on our front porch in SW Philly when we were growing up (age ten or twelve as I recall). And I’m just as amazed today —perhaps more so— than I was then. Thanks for your response, and have a great week.

Baruchas and shalom, Jeff.

#4: Am I Right that It Has and Does Happen Here?

Forwarded reader Nelson takes us grassroots U.S. Jews to task for not recognizing the danger we face.  I agreed that it has and does happen here.

READER NELSON: Jerome: About time to stop wringing your hands and do something. The American Jews are like the German Jews of the 1930s…it couldn’t happen to us…

You have to keep making more and more “Germany of the 1930s” comparisons for the dunderheaded American Jews who don’t think anything can happen to them. How can 3,000,000 Jews in New York let Mamdami get elected to anything?

The Arabs have a great expression…don’t let the nose of the camel under the tent, or pretty soon you will have the whole camel inside.

By our naive behavior, we have let racists, anti-Semites hold public office.

Everything is about money. Boycott any news media who is anti-Israel or any business. Don’t send a penny to the Democratic party or Black Lives Matter, or Southern Poverty Law. Don’t support a university who allows propaganda to be taught on campus. Become as vocal as the Moslem and black groups…. get media attention. And get training in firearms. not alarmist…only realistic.

Keep up the good work.

ME: Hi, Nelson. Thanks very much for these warnings, with which I agree.

We “dunderheaded American Jews” as you call us have to grasp not just that “it can happen here” but that it has and DOES happen here.

*** Wyman’s “Abandonment of the Jews” lays out how the U.S. joined Britain during the Holocaust NOT to save the Jews.

*** If not for Eddie Jacobson and Dr. Weizmann, a Jew that he liked and one he respected, Truman might well not have bucked the State Dept. and supported partition in the UN in 1947, without which it would not have happened.

*** And having so supported it, the US embargoed arms to Israel in 1948, with the British arming the Arabs while blocking arms to the Jews all the way until May 15, and then silently watching the Egyptian army approach Tel Aviv but instantly threatening to intervene for the Arabs the day Israel late in the war set foot in Sinai to evict the Egyptian army from Gaza and the Negev, causing the IDF to retreat.

*** When I read in Bibi’s book that the U,S. had not just abstained on UNSC 2334 calling historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria “occupied Palestinian territory” and for reversal of the Six Day War, rendering our Jewish national home a Jewish national ghetto, but that Obama had FOMENTED it on his way out the door, I swore I’d voted for my last Dem. Re your camel nose warning, I voted in 2024 that easier a Kamala will go through the eye of a needle than the Dems will reverse their anti-Jewish homeland stand on 2334.

Bottom Line

Hopefully, I’ve piqued your interest in joining these weekly conversations i.e., on our Grassroots American Jewish Street through comment/reply.  Join in.