Video: Josh's October 7 Speech
Resilience, unity, and the biggest reason for hope
Hi all,
This week I gave a keynote address at a ceremony marking one year since the October 7 massacres by Hamas in Israel. People of different faiths and backgrounds were there. This speech is for everyone with an open heart and mind.
I discussed the fight for truth, which requires facts plus context; crucial history that almost no one knows; living for all those lost; the biggest reason for hope, and more. Thank you to Beth Shalom Synagogue and other organizations that put this event together. (You’ll hear why the location is significant.) Some organizers wanted to limit the size in the room for security reasons, and fortunately there was a video feed.
I don't script, but here’s auto-transcript, slightly cleaned up.
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It is an honor to be here tonight, this evening, on this solemn occasion. It's an honor to specifically be here too. This site has served our little community, and others in the community for generations. And I know that there are people here tonight of different faiths and backgrounds, and there are people watching tonight and listening online as well. And I want you all to know, no matter what your background is, those of you who are standing with us as Jewish people, it means so much. It means more than you know. I'll get to that.
I also want to thank the people who are providing security for us here tonight, who are helping make sure that we can stay alive. And we should never lose sight of how insane it is that we need security. But when you're a Jewish person, you get used to it. It's just part of the deal. We've had this throughout history. You know, in the 1950s and 60s, when Jewish people — of all skin colors — were flocking to this area, those who didn't already live here and fighting alongside our Black brothers and sisters of all religions, including Black Jewish people, for civil rights. There were threats against synagogues. There was in one year, two synagogues and at least one Jewish community center that were bombed. Why? Because Jewish people and Jewish leaders were standing for civil rights. We know what it is to need security.
I also want to acknowledge a couple more things about where we are tonight. First of all, we are in the city that the Anne Frank House chose as its North American partner, at the university. I'll be going there tomorrow. And the university showed leadership after October 7th saying the right things, showing actual moral clarity. Unlike the allegedly elite universities, like the one I went to, that basically handed the keys of power over to the loudest antisemitic groups they could find on campus. Those schools are not elite, they're just expensive.
And we are in a state in which the Jewish history goes back much further than many of us realize, not just through the European chain, but statistically it is definite that among the people who were brought here to this country, enslaved in shackles, were members of our community. Because for centuries, Jewish people across Africa were enslaved by various empires.
Now, you might think, where's he going with this? How do we get to October 7th? Trust me, I got you. This is our history. People slaughtered people kidnapped, people taken into enslavement, and that ended up feeding into later slave trade. So there's no question some were.
And some people think the history, the Jewish history in this land goes back even further, because in the 1600s, there were people who came here who wanted to do right by the native inhabitants. There are always good people in every group. And some of them swore when they got back to Europe that they had met people here among the Indians who were saying the Shema, a common Jewish prayer, and referring to God as Yahweh. And then there was temporarily this theory about a lost tribe that was pretty much debunked. But the possibility is still very much there that some of us were here long ago. This is what happens when your peoplehood has existed for thousands of years, and you have to flee everywhere. You end up with a few of you everywhere.
All of that is what we have to understand in order to understand October 7th. On my new podcast They Stand Corrected I say this all the time. To have truth, you need two things: facts plus context. We cannot understand October 7th without understanding all of that, which is context. We pay a price, always, for who we are. Why is that? What is it about us that makes this keep happening?
When I tell people the story of who we are, I don't start with Torah or biblical stories. I say we are a tiny group of people from a little strip of land that successive empires wanted and took over and managed to kick out a lot of us, but not all of us. And kill a lot, but not all of us. And we're known by different names around the world. The Hebrews — to this day, that's the word for us in Italian, ebrai. We’re known as the Israelites. President Lincoln used to talk about how his part of his belief in emancipation he wanted to help the Israelites return to Israel and have self-determination and not have to live under an empire. We're known as The People of, also based on geography, The People of Zion, hence Zionists. The People of Judea, Jewish.
And I tell people we have an extremely unusual and beautiful and amazing and crucial belief. And that boils down to: You do you. We do not believe in forcing people to be like us. We don't believe in threatening or scaring people into being like us.
In fact, there's a pretty widespread opposition to even proselytizing. Someone wants to become Jewish, anyone who does is just as Jewish as the rest of us which is just another way to puncture the mythology out there. But we are required to discourage them three times if they want that. Why? Because it's hard and they need to know it's hard.
Why is it hard? Because that belief that we should not be forcing people to be like us, that belief makes us and keeps us a minority, a tiny minority. And by existing, we show the world that a minority can exist without doing what these other movements -— these days, often, some of which are referred to as religions -- what these other movements in history did, which was using those tactics to gain power in numbers.
We don't have that belief. So we remain a minority. And humans scapegoat minorities. And there are different ways to get scapegoated. One is to blame us for something specific. You don't like the distribution of resources in your society? Nah, don't rise up against your corrupt leaders. Imagine instead that there's a secret cabal of Jews who are taking all your money. Or a world war or a plague or a virus. Literally anything, blame the Jews. That's one form.
But there's another form that's just as insidious and evil and dangerous. And that is teaching people from birth, take all your negative feelings, all your frustrations, all your anger, everything you don't like, and layer it on to this mythical being the evil Jew. And we saw on October 7th that there are people who have that belief.
My focus has long been on the media. And what I've seen for a long time is the media getting this so wrong. People didn't learn what happened in the 20th century. Empires fell and all these new nations were born. And some people know about the Holocaust. Not enough, our Holocaust education is pathetic and dangerously bad. But even fewer people know about other things we faced.
Some people call it a second Holocaust, this widespread series of pogroms inspired by Nazis throughout the Middle East and North Africa, throughout these Arab and Muslim nations that turned on Jewish people for the crime of being Jewish. And they had to flee. They were attacked, raped, pillaged. We've seen all this before.
They had to flee and they lost everything. And where did they go? The only place that they could. Israel. And they became by far the biggest population in Israel. Some people call them Mizrahim. Part of our diaspora that's always been trying to get back.
You know, like ten years ago, the news was showing all these protests in Tahrir Square in Cairo. Did literally anyone know that homes surrounding Tahrir Square, these beautiful homes, used to be owned by these hardworking Jewish families and they had to flee and leave everything? And now ambassadors live there. One of them was turned into a library. This is our story. We have to flee. So some of us end up everywhere. But those of us who can, get home to Eretz Israel because we are the People of Israel, also known as Judea or Zion.
And in 1948, the year after Jewish leaders accepted a partition plan and nations were being born, and India and Pakistan were created along religious and cultural lines. Arab nations tried to kill us there (in Israel). This is history. This is not one way of seeing things. It's just facts. This is what happens. And let me make clear, there are wonderful, awesome Muslim people who stand with us and are part of the Israeli army right now and are standing with us in America. This is not about Muslim people. This is just what happened. These armies tried to kill us there and miraculously we survived.
And the decision that the founders of Israel made at that point is incredible and historic and totally underappreciated. They chose something that almost no one was doing. When they founded Israel they chose democracy. That wasn't a thing like it is today. No one else in the region was doing it. Israel is, to this day, one of the oldest democracies in the world.
You see these crazy people on college campuses screaming, Your country is so young, my grandmother's older than your country. They don't know what they're talking about. Dozens of countries are younger than your grandmother.
Israel was founded on a belief in democracy. These folks could easily have said, hey, this area that we are in right now, let's model this government based on all the other countries around us. Let’s — we were second, third, fourth class citizens in these countries. Let's simulate that, except give ourselves that level of citizenship and everyone else is lower. They didn't do that because they know what it's like because as Jews we know what it's like and we don't believe in doing that to minority people. So they chose a democracy in which every citizen has a vote and gets to choose their leaders. And all those votes are completely equal.
But people who want to create an empire play the very long game. And the world did what it always did. It helped them. Because in that war in 1948, it is also absolutely the case that there were Arab people living under British mandated Palestine who lost their homes and property as happened in every war. There are way, way, way more Jewish people who lost everything in Arab nations, but no one cares.
All over the world, there were hundreds of millions of people who lost everything in the 20th century, hundreds of millions. Most likely your grandparents, no matter where you're from. Because we here are a nation of native people, enslaved people, immigrants and refugees. That's everybody. Chances are, your grandparents had to restart from scratch somewhere. That happened all over the world.
But the world has special rules for us. In this one case, the fact that anybody got dispossessed in 1948 automatically means big, bad Jew. And that became the latest incarnation of what so many people love to have: the Jewish entity to scapegoat. So who cares where every nation came from? Who cares what all of history shows? Who cares what happened in the 20th century? Who cares about any of those things? No, no, no, big bad Jew. How dare they? And with that scapegoating in mind, we saw on October 7th people raised to believe the most evil, horrific things about us. The fact that it's also unoriginal is yet another sign of how pathetic it is.
I have never seen such a clarifying event in my entire life. October 7th was the closest thing to good versus evil that I've ever seen, and I've covered it so much from all over the world. So much.
We have to take a moment to understand who these people were. These people at the kibbutz, these were peaceniks, these are current hippies. They’re trying to do agricultural projects with the people of Gaza. They're like, let's grow organic vegetables together. That's who they are.
And it turned out that people who have been asking them, could you send me more pictures of those crops, more pictures, those crops? They were actually using the background of those pictures to map out the kibbutz so they could figure out how to get there, smoke people out of the safe rooms and slaughter them by hand. That is the reality of what happened. That's a fact that you cannot hear in the media because the media is so lost in anti-Israel narratives.
The festival, it wasn't just a festival. It was a peace festival in which people of all religions and backgrounds were there dancing together and celebrating what it is to be in a democracy in which you can do that and dress how you want and listen to the music you want and enjoy together.
And they chose -- Hamas, this proxy of Iran, Hamas is an acronym, this Islamist movement -- chose that site for mass rape and mass slaughter. For the most evil things you can do. The things that were done on October 7th are not depicted in horror movies. I watch a lot of TV mysteries where there's bad guys. No one does what happened that day. We don't allow ourselves to imagine it because sane, non-radicalized people wouldn't even want to think of what they did.
And what did the world do? Well, you know, it's confusing. Where do we stand on this? We’ll stand with Israel for a couple of hours, but then as soon as the haters go after us, we'll prevaricate, and then we'll hide. And then we'll regret that we ever did anything. And go right back to big bad Israel.
There's been a war since. I want you all to know something. As part of my journalism, I spent time in Nuremberg and I stood where the allied bombs fell. And when I was standing there, I imagined a beautiful Aryan child, three years old maybe, looking to the sky and seeing bombs fall, and that being the last thing this Aryan child ever saw. It is sick and depraved what humanity does. It's so awful. And none of that makes what the Allied Forces did anything less than heroic because they were fighting against Nazism. They were responding to this horror.
In my work as a journalist, I have covered death tolls and tried to fact check death tolls in wars all over the world, wars with hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths in just the past five years and some of them still raging right now. You don't hear about it. But what do you hear? Big bad Israel, big, bad Jew.
It's literally the only place in which previous places that I’ve worked at NPR and CNN source a terrorist group’s figures as fact and just start treating as though it's fact. The deaths of people who identify as Palestinian in Gaza who are not part of Hamas that is tragic. And it's what happens in war and it's happening in other wars right now that you never hear about because of this addiction to big bad us.
So. What do we do given this reality? I've had people say to me, Why not just give up? Why even try to pierce through all that noise with facts about history and truth? That's what I do these days. I launched my podcast entirely on my own because mainstream media is so deeply biased by people who infiltrated it, who chose to, who support the creation of a new empire. They realized go after four groups, progressive groups, NGOs, mainstream media and elite universities.
And sometimes it's our own people who turn on us, a tiny fraction of Jewish people join the haters. That always happens. Again, not new. Why do we keep fighting? Why do we do this? Why not give up?
Well, that is answered by the best part of the context, and that is that we always win. Every time. We win. Every empire falls. Every group of people who tries to vanquish us fails. And we always pay a price and the lives lost that day, they are the latest price — no, they are the biggest price that we have paid in recent years. The latest would be those killed in a terrorist attack just days ago. And they were people of all backgrounds, races, too, and religions, people who stand with us.
So given all these horrors, why keep going? Because we always win in the end. And we pay a huge price and we have to live for them. We have to live for the millions of people killed in the Holocaust. We have to live for the more than 1,000 people killed in Israel. We live to carry on this beautiful legacy of showing that we continue to exist.
The theme tonight is resilience and unity. Our resilience runs so much deeper than people realize. Despite everything that's happened to us as a people, I was never taught to take on a victim mentality or spend my life blaming people. The opposite. In Jewish culture -- those of you who are Jewish probably know this. -- we are so like you've been through hell, unimaginable hell, got it. Get up and work. Learn. You're left with nothing. Get something. Build. You have no food. Find a seed plant it. Get water. Get sunlight. Get going. Work. Learn. Build. Work. Learn, build. How do you think this little, tiny stretch of land Israel became such a jewel of the Middle East with all these life saving technologies with no oil? They did this because this is what you do. You work. You learn. You build.
This is across all the Jewish cultures that I know of. This is why I don't like the term culturally Jewish really, because people are usually referring to like gefilte fish, which like, no. Our culture is about this. Standing for the right to be a minority and survive and keep going. You keep going. Our resilience is our superpower, and our strength comes from our unity and that unity is not just about Jewish people. That unity is about everyone who stands with us and everyone among us who stands up.
We do take risks for being who we are, for continuing to exist. I get death threats. We all do whatever. I speak out. I'm called all the worst things. I'll tell you right now. I would much rather live a shorter life as a part of, alongside and with the people of Israel, the Jewish people, than live a much longer life as one of the hateful masses or one of the people who is just too afraid to say things that are true.
And I know that that was the case for some of the people that day. Probably all of them. There's one young man who was born here in South Carolina. His name is Jonathan Rom. He was killed that day. He was at the festival and his friend said his last few moments were spent helping someone else in need. He didn't think to run as fast as he could on his own. That would have saved him. He wanted to help someone. He was a hero.
That's us. We stand for life. We stand for our right to continue to exist. And the unity that you show by standing with us and as a part of us that's the most beautiful, ethical, good versus evil thing you can do on this.
I'll end with this. There is this phrase that we say, Am Yisrael chai. That's not just a phrase. It's not just a saying. It means Am Israel, people of Israel, as in Jewish people, live. It's not just a chant. It's something so much bigger than that. Am Yisrael chai is the most beautiful thing it can be. It's a fact. We live on. Knowing that we still have people who are being held captive right now, knowing that we have people who are being slaughtered, who have been slaughtered. We live for them.
Energy doesn't die. It only changes forms. And all of the lost, their energy is with us. We keep going. This is our gift. It's our opportunity. It's this beautiful thing. We keep showing the world that you can exist as a minority and not be extinguished and not force people to be like you. You can live that way, and that means fighting back when you're attacked. And it means the rest of the time reaching out and shaking hands and trying to build. It's beautiful what we stand for.
We just began a new year in Judaism. My wish for all of us and for everyone is that in the next year, more people who are not radicalized but just don't know who we are, don't know our story, don't know the richness of what we stand for, get to discover the beauty of who we really are and get to discover why it is such a beautiful thing for the world that Am Yisrael chai. Thank you.
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The responses to this talk have been amazing. Thank you to everyone reaching out. If this talk inspires you, please share it with everyone you’ve ever met and everyone they’ve ever met. (For starters.)
As always, there are two ways to reach me. Paid subscribers can comment or message me here. Others can use a form via my website. Both systems keep out haters and spammers while allowing you a safe space to share your thoughts, questions, ideas, etc.
Thanks and big love,
JL
P.S. As I send this out, some people are about to celebrate Yom Kippur. If you’re among them, wishing you a meaningful day/fast.