.

Jewish Detractors of Israel

Israel’s Jewish detractors,
do you experience remorse?
How does it feel to be traitors?
Low’s the price of your voice.

Jewish self-hatred runs rampant
when Israel’s under attack,
Israel emerges triumphant,
breaking her enemies’ back.

Jewish detractors, can Israel
manage without your brain cells?
Yes. Undeniably. Easily…

You, who so openly, eagerly
side with the enemies of Israel,
how can you live with yourselves?

.

.

Maxim D. Shrayer is a bilingual author and a professor at Boston College. He was born in Moscow and emigrated in 1987. His recent books include A Russian Immigrant: Three Novellas and Immigrant Baggage, a memoir. Shrayer’s new collection of poetry, Kinship, is forthcoming.

NOTE TO READERS: If you enjoyed this poem or other content, please consider making a donation to the Society of Classical Poets.

The Society of Classical Poets does not endorse any views expressed in individual poems or commentary.


Trending now:

25 Responses

  1. Margaret Coats

    Well done, Maxim. Deft and easy rhythm for content that could seem like prose. Not so with the feeling meter you supply, and the unexpected but rationally fitting final line.

    Reply
  2. Joshua C. Frank

    I have to second Margaret’s comment. It could pass as free verse, but it isn’t, which somehow increases the impact.

    I’m shocked that so many Jews are betraying their own people like this, but I guess I shouldn’t be, since Jews are white and Western. North Americans and Europeans are doing the same thing; the Great Replacement is a documented reality.

    Reply
    • Maxim D. Shrayer

      Joshua C. Frank, I’m replying to your second comment, which for some reason did not allow comments. You stated: “Maxim, while I agree that the stakes are much lower for modern Jewish detractors of Israel, and that this leaves them with less of a case, I don’t agree with you about the Kapo Jews. The Christian view is that people for whom death and grave sin are the only two choices must choose to die rather than commit a grave sin. Granted, they weren’t Christian, but that example is covered under the natural moral law written on every human heart.”

      According to your own logic, the vast majority of German and Austrian Christians during the Nazi period should have chosen death over supporting Nazism. Surely you don’t expect separate standards of morality for Jews and Christians, and especially when it comes to what is written on every human heart.

      So let’s stop here.

      Reply
      • Joshua C. Frank

        No, not separate standards for Jews and Christians. Separate standards naturally exist for direct and remote cooperation.

  3. Sally Cook

    Maxim, you are right – they are wrong. Ask yourself what our own government is doing and why. Thank you for writing this.

    Reply
  4. Brian A. Yapko

    Maxim, this is a much-needed poem on a subject which is both important and infuriating. For at least the last 200 years (earlier than this I don’t know) there has been a type of Jew who is self-loathing, contemptuous of religion, obsessively intellectual, desperate to assimilate. Bernie Sanders is the perfect modern example but such types have existed since before Karl Marx decided that “religion is the opiate of the masses.” Not to mention types like Julius and Ethel Rosenberg or even Henry Kissinger. These are Jews to be deeply ashamed of. They are the exception rather than the rule, but they loom large in culture and history. They are kapos — the concentration camp Jews who agreed to act as cruel overseers to the other Jews cynically hoping that it would buy them time and favor with their Nazi overlords. There’s a special place in hell for such people.

    Better to recall someone like Albert Einstein who was a refugee from Nazi Germany. A proud and tireless Zionist, he was offered the presidency of Israel shortly after it was founded. He’d be turning over in his grave today.

    Reply
    • Maxim D. Shrayer

      Thanks, Brian. I would respectfully disagree about Kapo Jews as I don’t think we can sit in judgment of what went on the the hells of death camps. And also because the Kapo Jews you referred to feared for their lives, whereas these Jewish detractors of Israel do it under no duress. So they have a choice and they choose to be political apostates.

      Reply
      • Brian A. Yapko

        Maxim, you are right and I stand corrected. I know the kapos in the death camps were much despised for seeming to be traiters but they were governed by fear and desire for self-preservation rather than ideology. People are capable of the most heinous things under such compulsion. As you point out, modern detractors of Israel have no such excuse other than ideology and — at least in my experience — such shame at being Jewish that they will go out of their way to bash Israel and believing Jews just to burnish their secular, assimilated credentials.

      • Joshua C. Frank

        Maxim, while I agree that the stakes are much lower for modern Jewish detractors of Israel, and that this leaves them with less of a case, I don’t agree with you about the Kapo Jews. The Christian view is that people for whom death and grave sin are the only two choices must choose to die rather than commit a grave sin. Granted, they weren’t Christian, but that example is covered under the natural moral law written on every human heart.

  5. Joseph S. Salemi

    I think that Jews who are anti-Israeli and anti-Zionist are Jews by accident of birth only. Their real loyalty is to the fanatical religion of left-liberal wokeness, not to the cultural and religious inheritance of their ancestors.

    This is true for many persons of Western genetic and cultural heritage today, as Joshua points out. They have been indoctrinated to hate and despise their racial and cultural heritage because it is Western, which for them is the source of all evil. This is why the agnostic author James Burnham, who wrote an absolutely devastating book titled “Suicide of the West,” spoke of a pathological self-hatred and guilt-ridden paralysis among the Western peoples. This self-hate and paralysis govern Western politics today.

    I spoke with a friend earlier today about the current Israeli-Hamas war. We agreed that it was absolutely absurd that in all the tidal wave of reporting and commentary which has engulfed us since October 7, no one has brought up the only important fact about the conflict.

    What is that fact? It is this — the Israeli-Hamas war is NOT about politics, NOT about religion, NOT about human rights, NOT about combat tactics, NOT about the hostages, NOT about humanitarianism, and NOT about arguments over a one-state or a two-state settlement. All of that is just bullshit for talking heads in Mainstream Media to squawk about.

    The war is about RACE and CULTURE. It about whether the small Western outpost of Israel will survive as an outpost of the West, or whether it will be swallowed up in Levantine backwardness and fanaticism.

    Jews who oppose this conflict, and who demonstrate in favor of a cease-fire that would only allow Hamas to regroup, are simply anti-Western traitors. They would rather see their own nation lose its identity and be submerged in barbarism than watch one of their precious little Third-World terror groups be annihilated.

    If the West had any backbone left, we would send in planes to leave the Houthi missile sites in Yemen a smoking mass of rubble, and we would sink the entire Iranian navy in a massive attack.

    The Israelis still have a backbone. That is what enrages left-liberals.

    Reply
    • C.B. Anderson

      Yes, Joseph, true Israelis have the heart of a Sicilian, which is a very good thing. Iran and Yemen better watch out, and I don’t mean for Santa Claus.

      Reply
    • Brian A. Yapko

      This is a great comment, Joe, with a complete clarity of vision concerning what is happening in Israel and the greater Middle East. I agree with 95% of it, but cannot say that religion has nothing to do with it. My reasoning is this: if Israel suddenly became a Muslim and all Israelis suddenly converted to Islam but Israel otherwise conducted its foreign and internal policies identically (Western values, democratic politics), I think the hatred of Israel in the West would abruptly end. Wars might well continue in the Middle East but no one would give a damn because Jews would be out of the equation. So it would just be another Yemen or Syria. I think Israel as an island of persistent Jewishness in an otherwise Judenfrei sea of Muslim-Arab lands that annoys the hell out of Israel’s haters. It was actually quite the same during the Crusades when Western European Christians created outposts of European culture and religion in this vast expanse of Islamic hegemony. From the Muslim standpoint, they had to go. As I reflect on these ideas, I think they tie in nicely with your view on this being about Race and Culture. It’s just that race and culture “depending on the context” may necessarily include religion.

      Reply
      • Joseph S. Salemi

        Race and Culture do not include religion, and certainly not universalist religions. Many of the persons fighting and being killed in Gaza today are not necessarily religious. Many IDF members might well be agnostics or atheists, and many Hamas terrorists might not be fervent Moslems. What they are fighting for is to preserve a genetic and cultural identity, with all of the habits and attitudes and predispositions that such an identity contains.

        It is precisely because of these truths that I mentioned, in a different thread here, that in the coming war we need to send the religionists to the rear, out of the line of fire. They are simply not dependable as soldiers.

        If every Jew in Israel were to convert to Islam, Hamas would still insist on driving them into the sea, because a universalist religion is not a cultural or racial marker. But attitudes and practices and predispositions are, so if the Jews converted and maintained their Western habits of thought, they would still be hated. The best they could hope for would be to be treated as dhimmis.

        This point is crucial to remember, because our lives depend on it. Religionists of the universalist type frequently forget it or dismiss it, and as a result they are liable to be inundated by alien cultures.

      • Brian A. Yapko

        I agree, Joe, that if every Jew converted to Islam then Hamas would still want them out. And now I understand far better why you distinguish race and culture from religion. Now let me ask you: in my mass-conversion hypothetical, how would this affect hostile attitudes towards Israel in the West? I’m straying past the question of Jewish Destractors of Israel raised by Maxim’s fine poem, simply because the hostile Gaza-supporting wokesters act without morals, history or coherence as they give full-throated support to antisemitism. These “Free Palestine” protestors who block access to airports and scream at random Jews on the streets of Los Angeles, New York and London. What would they do if the Jews of Israel converted en masse to Islam? Would they still consider them racist colonizers because the Palestinians would still be affected? Or would they shrug their shoulders, say “meh” and move on to some other DEI-inspired travesty?

      • Joseph S. Salemi

        Did the Nazis like individual Jews better when they converted to a Christian faith? No, those “converted” Jews were sent to the gas chambers just like all the rest. The Nazis had no interest whatsoever in anyone’s individual religious choices.

        All the hypothetically converted Jews in Israel would still be hated by left-liberal wokesters in the West, because traditional religion is not a matter of concern for persons whose worldview is essentially based on Enlightenment secularism. The left-liberal woke religion depends on a deep, visceral hatred of Western culture in all of its aspects, not just traditional Western religions.

        The Jews would be hated because they are Western in culture, attitudes, habits, and predispositions. They would be hated for their Western genes, their Western looks, their superior Western intelligence, their Western inventiveness, and their sheer Western success and affluence. And this hatred would be emanating not just from Palestinians and other Arabs, but ALSO FROM VAST NUMBERS OF WESTERNERS, who have internalized self-hate and guilt and “historical remorse” for the so-called sins of their ancestors. Those are the imbeciles marching in protest parades, and calling for a cease-fire.

        I stand by what I said. Religion is a very minor factor in the current conflict in the Middle East. Religion may be used as a source of slogans and symbols, it may provide both sides with some useful dogwhistle words, and may crank up enthusiasm now and then with rituals and songs. But the real war is about race and culture. The fact that no one wants to discuss this question in public is a sign of how hot the issue is.

        I’ll end by saying this: the Israelis are showing the rest of the Western world how we need to react to the massive hatred of aliens. Religionists, please head to the rear.

      • Joshua C. Frank

        I don’t think it’s all one or all the other. Leftists hate white people, men, straight people, conservatives, Christians, etc., but the more of the hated categories you are, the more they hate you. If I weren’t Christian, they’d hate me for the other things, but not as much as they do in reality.

        Sometimes I think Western inventiveness has been a curse rather than a blessing, an evolutionary dead end if the world should survive the next hundred years (which is increasingly doubtful).

    • Brian A. Yapko

      Thank you for explaining this, Joe. Your analysis is very persuasive — especially your mention of Nazi indifference to religious choices — and gives me a much better grasp of a very difficult, anxiety-inducing subject.

      Reply
  6. Daniel Kemper

    Long ago, a friend with a pet dog provided us with a great deal of amusement. I forget the dog’s given name, but we (not his owner) always called him Libby. He was small and yappy and vicious in a peculiar way. We would get him stirred up to some degree of anger by messing with his owner, but the dog was a coward at heart and wouldn’t venture to bite anyone. If we got him stirred up enough, you could almost see his thought process.
    1. He had to bite someone.
    2. The “enemies” were scary.
    3. His owner was not scary.
    4. The solution: bite his owner.

    So, if we messed with his owner enough, his own dog would bite him. We found it hilarious.

    When I look at self-haters, I guess it’s not that funny anymore.

    Anyway, a needed poem to bring an important topic to light.

    Reply
    • Mia

      This is such an interesting story. Please don’t misunderstand I am not alluding to Israel, this comment is purely about the dog.

      Do you think the dog was upset with his owner. Dogs look up to their owners, think them amazing and the fact that this owner was allowing you to make his dog suffer was a bit cowardly. So his dog bit him, a kind of
      snap out of it coward.

      Reply
      • Mia

        Apologies, I meant to include how much I like this poem.

  7. Michael Vanyukov

    Maxim, I will attempt a thankless task of answering the question you end your poem with – even though it must be rhetorical (we likely share our background to a degree, so I can guess). Before the enlightened XX century, a Jew who would today be called a self-hater, of the Chomsky-Sanders-Finkelstein-Soros variety, would apostatize and likely become a denouncer of his former brethren – no longer considered a Jew by them. Since then, Bolsheviks and Nazis adopted a purely “biological” classification, with the exception that the Nazis considered conversion out of Judaism irrelevant but conversion into Judaism as making one a Jew. At the same time, for the progressive Jews, who are in fact Bolsheviks’ successors, it became unnecessary to deny their Jewishness, which they disregarded anyway – and inverted into Israel-hate. They live with it quite comfortably. With no pangs of conscience, as they don’t have it.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.