None can dispute author Sarah Hurwitz is well educated, well credentialed. A graduate of Harvard Law School, a White House political speechwriter, initially for Hilary Clinton, recently for First Lady Michelle Obama, she’s also trained as a hospital chaplain volunteering in an oncology unit. Although highly accomplished, Hurwitz has been “a lapsed Jew” until her recent “rediscovery of Judaism.” She castigates herself for being a “highly edited Jew” and fiercely derides the atmosphere of antisemitism, which led to her “spiritual erasure.” Her new book As A Jew is an panegyric to her rediscovered Judaism.
Honest to a fault, Hurwitz admits she hadn’t “done anything remotely Jewish since her bat mitzvah ceremony in seventh grade.” Neither of her parents were “all that” into Judaism. “If there was anything we worshipped, it was education.” Her friends were somewhat “Jewish adjacent.” Some identified as “cultural Jews, ethnic Jews, social justice Jews, Holocaust remembrance Jews or simply good-person Jews.” Most had never read Jewish history. Hurwitz had not visited Israel. She ranked, “ultra-religious Judaism nitpicky, oppressive.”
At age thirty-six Hurwitz took a course in Introductory Judaism. Ashamed, it has taken so long “to reclaim” her Jewish identity she ponders, “To what extent my own thoughts and feelings about Judaism have been shaped by the overwhelmingly Christian country in which I live.” Hurwitz turns her shame into a piercing condemnation on an old trope: the gospels in The New Testament. She examines centuries of lies and fraud therein which “blame shame and try to erase” Jews and accelerate Jewish hatred.
She repeatedly turns to Christian biblical history that influence her own “highly edited…spiritual lockout.” She examines categories of race, ethnicity, chosenness within a “culture in which I have been raised that distorts and demeans Jews.” Hurwitz unapologetically quotes selected Christian gospels that falsely define Jews as treacherous, detestable, heartless, dangerous, diabolically depraved, disproportionately powerful, guilty of deicide. She spares no ink chronicling the “antipathy” toward Jews, which spread during the Roman Empire, its slander spiraling with the crusades, massacres, forced conversions, and expulsions from many European countries. Hurwitz writes, “The hatred traveled and expanded.” Martin Luther, founder of Protestantism slanderously decried Jews were “children of the devil.” Hurwitz claims that long history of antisemitsm adversely affected her Jewish spiritual life.
By the 17th century, Hurwitz continues, religious and social antisemitism were “upgraded” to racial antisemitsm---a condition you cannot change—even through conversion. Hurwitz contends these ancient writings were potent, pervasive and persisted for centuries. Hurwitz contends, the vilification of Jews infected the anti-Israel, Soviet campaign to discredit Israel’s triumphant 1967 war victory with its resultant uptick racial antisemitsm to a politically driven variant--anti-Zionism, which claims “The Jews aren’t the problem, it’s the Zionists”.
Unrelenting, Hurwitz connects fundamentalist Islamic Jew-hatred to the identical source. Highly recommended by distinguished University professor, Ambassador (ret) Deborah E. Lipstadt and Dara Horn, author of People Love Dead Jews Horowitz’s book left me flummoxed and a bit apprehensive. Given the high degree of antisemitsm in contemporary times, does its insidious presence signal the start of the vanishing diasporic Jew?