My concern is that Claudine Gay has become not a person, but a prop. Dr. Gay is, of course, the former president of Harvard University who resigned under pressure in early January after, among other things, she and her colleagues at UPenn and MIT failed to conclusively state that calls for the genocide of Jewish people would violate their respective schools’ codes of conduct. While I don’t feel qualified to speak to the question of plagiarism and whether her actions in that regard should be disqualifying, I’m deeply unsettled by the circumstances that led to Gay’s resignation. The most insidious claim surrounding these tragic events is that “the Jews” wielded money and power to destroy Claudine Gay. For the haters this is an explicit claim. For Jews expressing a similar sentiment, it’s more like anticipatory anxiety: “you know what they’re going to say….”

I don’t have a position on the resignation itself – I was appalled both by the cowardice and knee-jerk contextualization displayed by these venerable leaders as well as by right-wing politicians’ invidious use of congressional hearings to entrap the academic leaders. The result, of course, is that Claudine Gay, the first Black president of Harvard, now holds the dubious distinction of also being the shortest serving one. That, to my mind, is tragic. Can we be concerned about and disappointed in someone at once? In this very challenging post-Oct. 7 era, how do we carry multiple truths and resist platitudinous and reductive assumptions – including self-destructive ones?

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s book The Insecurity of Freedom contains an essay, “Confusion of Good and Evil” that I find helpful here. Heschel begins the essay with a parable from Rabbi Nachman of Breslov: Once upon a time a King received a shocking report about the new harvest: Whoever eats of the crop becomes mad. So, he called together his counselors. Since no other food was available, the alternative was clear. Not to eat of the new harvest would be to die of starvation, to eat would be to become mad. The decision reached by the king was this: We will all have to eat, but let at least a few of us continue to keep in mind that we are mad.

The essay isn’t about antisemitism per se, but Heschel certainly understood the connection between that particular evil and more general human immorality. “It may have been possible prior to 1914,” he wrote in 1956, “to believe with Herbert Spencer…that ‘evil perpetually tends to disappear’…. But the horrors through which we have lived in the past forty years have totally discredited such simple, easy-going optimism.” “Antisemitism is a light sleeper,” Irish scholar and statesman Conor Cruise O’Brien once said, and it has recently awakened with a vengeance, antisemitic incidents rising over 300% in the US since October 7; ancient tropes making for excellent cannon fodder as Hamas weaponized hate and gained sympathizers across the globe.

How is it so many can justify such atrocities? Heschel says, “More frustrating than the fact that evil is real, mighty, and tempting is the fact that it thrives so well in the disguise of the good…. In this world, it seems, the holy and the unholy do not exist apart but are mixed, interrelated, and confounded….” This tendency animates those who tend to blame so-called bad Jewish actors for Jewish suffering. How often have we heard someone say (or maybe said ourselves), that person is increasing antisemitism? – Bibi Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bernie Madoff, Sally Kornbluth, Stephen Miller, George Soros, Bernie Sanders, Miriam Adelson, AIPAC, Jewish Voice for Peace – pick your bad Jew, your bad Jewish family, your bad Jewish organization. The through-line is the claim that they are a shanda fur di goyim, an embarrassment to us in front of our non-Jewish neighbors.

This tendency for us to blame ourselves for hatred of us and violence against us is nothing new, but it’s self-defeating. Of course, there are Jews out there doing and saying things that are ill-informed, sometimes even hateful; we don’t have to pretend otherwise. But when we Jews fall into the trap of self-blame, we only exacerbate the problem. “We all have to eat,” taught Rebbe Nachman in his parable, but the crop is poisoned, and we are always at risk of forgetting antisemitism is a madness that infects civilizations like a virus. Sometimes it rises to pandemic levels. Nevertheless, we must talk less about who among us is bad for the Jews and more about who is behaving badly, interpreting Torah poorly or dangerously.

If some Jews are wielding power or money or influence in dangerous ways, if others are making unsubstantiated claims on social media or using inflammatory rhetoric in Op-eds, we should say so. But let’s be careful not to flatten any people, including our own people, into one facet of their identity. Who someone is is so much more expansive than what someone is. The best way to temper the haters’ tendency to point to “good Jews” or “bad Jews” as cover for their own bigotry is to remind them there is no such thing, just Jews behaving well or behaving badly.

Having reminded ourselves of our own humanity, it should follow that we ought to hold others to the same standard. No more. No less.

This essay is based on the author’s sermon of January 6, 2024. A version of this post will appear in the next issue of Jmore.