I’m done feeling like a hostage in my own country

I had the honor on Friday to bear witness to the testimonies of family members of hostages who remain in the clutches of Hamas in Gaza. The Los Angeles event took place a few weeks after the screening of “Bearing Witness,” the 43 minutes of footage filmed mostly by those same barbarians that depict their evil in sickening detail. Maybe you read about it.

Make no mistake: What civilized people would call “unspeakable” atrocities must be spoken about and publicized far and wide. Hamas continues to hold at least 130 hostages, including eight Americans. Hamas terrorists took old women. They took babies. A State Department spokesman on Monday said Hamas refuses to release 17 women because “they don’t want those women to talk about what happened to them” during their captivity.

Since October 7, I have not stopped watching and reading the news from Israel. My emotions have whipsawed from rage and sadness to grief and fear and, finally, isolation, malaise, numbness. As I’ve internalized the pain and suffering of the victims and their families, I realized what I and many other Jews have been feeling since that horrific day.

We all feel like hostages.

I am an American Jew. I am a Zionist Jew. And, no, I will not qualify my political beliefs. This is not about right, left, or center — or it shouldn’t be. It certainly isn’t right now in Israel, where the people are unified in ways I never dreamed possible.

And yet, as a Jew living in America, a country I love with all my heart, I have never felt so unsafe or so fearful. I’m not fearful for myself so much as I’m fearful for my friends and family who once again are “moving targets, with stars on their sleeves.”

The loneliness and isolation many American Jews are experiencing right now is heartrending. We see the videos of Jewish students and teachers and shopkeepers left to fend for themselves against howling anti-Semitic mobs. Then we see the pathetic response and the lip service from politicians and we think: Never again? It’s already happening.

Yes, I’m keenly aware that American Jews often vote against their own self-interest. Who cares? When did it become acceptable to “victim-shame” again? Liberals and leftists who rushed to support Black Lives Matter during the 2020 “summer of love” and who proudly embraced the #MeToo hashtag and insisted we must “believe all women” suddenly have nothing to say about the rape and murder of hundreds of women and children.

What do they suppose “happened” to those 17 women hostages — all between the ages of 19 and 30, by the way — whom Hamas refuses to set free?

They’ve gone from “believe all women” to essentially blaming the women for wearing too short a skirt in the blink of an eye. Except the “skirt” is the mere fact that they were Jews in Israel. Or worse, they’ve remained silent. Whatever happened to “silence is violence”? Silence is also complicity. Silence is collaboration.

I live in the shadow of Hollywood. I know many conservatives despise Hollywood and the entertainment industry with good reason. They’ve helped poison the culture and helped indoctrinate a generation of latter-day Hitler Youth into not just hating America but also hating Jews and Christians, too.

But I’ve seen firsthand a small but significant shift in Hollywood. Several outspokenly liberal Jews, including Bill Maher, Debra Messing, and Michael Rapaport, have denounced Hamas’ atrocities and called out the hypocrisy and the silence of their comrades on the left.

Maybe more important is the shift under way behind the scenes, which I’ve also witnessed up close. Hundreds of powerful people are risking their social and financial status not only to help the cause but also to change the narrative.

Under the circumstances, I don’t care what gets these folks to the party or how late they arrive, just as long as they show up. That’s really all that matters.

October 7 was an epoch-making event. And in the weeks since, we’ve learned who our friends are and who our enemies are. We discovered friends we never knew we had — and enemies we thought were our friends.

And as I listened to the testimonies of mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles who are living through the horror of not knowing the fates of their loved ones, I thought: Enough. No one in America should ever feel like a hostage or feel like they're living in 1930s Germany. I’m done feeling like a hostage in my own country.

We’ve seen the face of evil, and we’ve seen many of our countrymen remain silent in the face of it. But there is a great silent majority of Americans who reject the evil of Hamas and Jew-hatred. The silent majority is not just left, right, or center. It is the majority. So let’s stop being silent.