Saving Their Lives With A Story: Combating Antisemitism With the Power of Narrative

Shortly after the mass pro-Palestinian protests broke out on university campuses all over the United States, an insightful post by an anonymous Twitter/X user caught my attention and captured my imagination. The user commented, “Those students never had bedtime stories read to them as children.” The line struck me as one of the saddest lines I had ever read. Those student protesters are some of the most privileged individuals in history, and amongst the most intellectually gifted, and yet they fell prey to the Hamas propaganda sold to them by the Iranian Ayatollah who praised them. 

What possible difference could it have made to those students if they had been read to as children? The opening poem of Ceremony, by Leslie Silko,  is spoken in the voice of an old Lakota wise man who sang of the salvific power of story to save the spirit of a people. Many many civilizations down the sweep of centuries have fallen, and yet they are not forgotten because we still tell their stories. And this is what Tim O’Brien was writing of in the closing paragraph of his great Vietnam novel, the line that never fails to bring me to tears: “And I’m just Tim, trying to save Timmy’s life with a story.” 

When I was about five, I was obsessed with the soundtrack of  Fiddler on the Roof. I mean obsessed. My grandmother had a cassette tape player in her car, and I made her play that cassette every time I rode with her. I memorized every song, every line of dialogue, every tradition that was so unlike my own family traditions. I became enchanted with the culture of the Jewish people at a very young age, and I felt terrible grief and sorrow when those people whom I had come to know and love were driven from their homes. As much as I was able, I took into my heart the pain of the Jewish diaspora. 

When I was twelve, I found They Looked for a City, by Lydia Buksbazen, on the bookshelf at a friend’s house and read that gripping account of Jewish people in Eastern Europe in the dark days just before the Holocaust. I also read The Hiding Place, by Corrie Ten Boom, and the triumph of faith and hope over the unimaginable suffering left an indelible mark on my soul. I felt the suffering of the Jewish people chronicled in those pages as though it were my own pain. 

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At twelve, I knew I was a writer. In seeking guidance for my writing life, I came across Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. Not only did I read advice about writing that I have carried with me for a lifetime, I met through those pages a Jewish Buddhist bisexual New York woman who had learned not to turn her back on the pain of her own people, not just the Holocaust, but two thousand years of exile. 

I was eleven when Star Trek: Deep Space Nine originally aired. I immediately fell in love with the character of Kira Nerys, a strong and beautiful woman who was seeking to reconcile her terrible past with her deeply held spiritual beliefs. I did not know until years later that Kira’s people, the Bajorans, were based on Jewish culture. But when I did learn, I felt a deeper appreciation for the show that was so formative to me as a writer. 

I was eleven when I first met the enigmatic and iconic character of Mr. Spock. I mean the original Mr. Spock as portrayed by Leonard Nimoy. Of all the original Trek characters, he was the one I loved best. It would be many years later that I would learn that Leonard Nimoy was Jewish, and that much of the inspiration for the original Mr. Spock came from Jewish culture. Most notably is the Vulcan salute that every Trekkie knows; this gesture is a rabbinic blessing. 

In my adulthood search for the representation of a literary agent for my first novel, I came to have a professional correspondence with American-Israeli agent, writer, and former Jerusalem Post journalist Rena Rossner. I discovered her historical fantasy novels, Sisters of the Winter Wood and The Light of the Midnight Stars. I was enchanted by the way Rena took the strands of her family history, Jewish mythology, English literature, and regional fairy tales and braided them together, like a loaf of challah, to create powerful stories that drew me into the same skin as the Jewish people who suffered devastating losses in the pogroms. I could not distance myself from the pain; the characters were people I had come to know and love through Rena’s novels. And I came to care very deeply about Rena herself through correspondence immediately following October 7. 

But where I have been steeped from a very young age in the stories of the Jewish people in the King James Bible, in the books I read and the shows I watched, it would seem that the college campus protesters were completely blank slates that Iranian proxies could write the most vile antisemitic slogans upon. How much greater the evil of the terrorists who carried out the October 7th massacre, because they had been indoctrinated from their earliest years that it was a sweet and fitting thing to kill and torture Jews. 

Antisemitism is the oldest hatred in the world. For anyone familiar with the Bible, I would suggest reading Psalm 83, a Psalm of Asaph penned centuries before Christ, and see if you can differentiate the language from the Hamas charter. I would also suggest reading the book of Esther and contemplating the fate of the wicked Haman. 

The hatred of anti-Semitism is ineradicable, but it can be fought against. And it certainly must be, because a world without any Jews in it is quite simply not a world anyone would ever want to live in. But we do have a powerful weapon in this fight, and that weapon is story. Antisemites indoctrinate their children to hate the Jewish people through blood libels, falsehoods and slanderous stories. But we can counter those lies with the truth. We can save those Jewish lives with a story. 

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