A Review of The Armed Jew by Adam Fuller
Professor Adam Fuller’s book, The Armed Jew couldn’t be timelier. As Hamas seeks to find accommodation with Israel through Trump’s peace plan, it is a reminder of their butchery of October 7th, 2023, with the massacre of over 1000, many of them young people, and most of them Jews. Innocents were shot, raped, tortured, burned alive— men, women, and babies. Those communities in the terrorists’ way fought bravely. Some were also armed, and offered stiff resistance, until timely overwhelmed. As is so often the case with our modern-day police, the Israel Defensed Force soldiers arrived, but not in time.
If the case for Fuller’s book is to be made even more current, there is the Yom Kippur killing of two Jews heading into services in Manchester England, the site of a hostile and vituperous Muslim community. To state this is not Islamophobia, but simply true. Hours after the murder of said Jews, an already planned illegal demonstration took place in London against “UK complicity in genocide.” That there is no genocide (see its definition) and that the UK just recognized a Palestinian state is apparently beside the point.
Antisemitism is a 2000-year-old disease. It has existed in autocratic, totalitarian, socialist, capitalist, and aristocratic societies. Fuller therefore asks us to assume that the problem of its existence is not to be solved anytime soon. What should the Jewish response be? This is, he says, straightforward: Jews who have the opportunity should arm themselves. In the aftermath of October 7, with the approval of the government, many Israelis did just this. In the aftermath of two recent mass murders of Jews, including the shootings at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in October 2018, and the Chabad congregation in Poway, California, in April 2019, would it not make sense for Jews to arm themselves, particularly in a society that accepts, and indeed makes it a constitutional right, to do just this. Why doesn’t this happen?
Fuller tells us that “Jews have a deep aversion to guns and tend to support disarmament of themselves and their fellow citizens… When… tragedies occur, the response from American Jewish organizations and communal leaders is often to blame the guns, not the people who used them. The last thing they want is for more guns to be added into their communities.” Additionally, “Many Jewish figures and organizations have opposed Second Amendment rights for decades.”
It is safe to assume that most Jews have never held or fired a gun. It is not part of Jewish culture of the European past, or of the American present. This is even after the historical events of the Crusades, the Dreyfus Affair, and the Holocaust, in which Nazi Germany forbade gun ownership by the citizenry, thus leaving its opponents weaponless in the atmosphere defined by Nazism.
Many Israelis become proficient at using guns in the army on defense of the state. They think them necessary for the survival of their country. “There is evidence from October 7 that NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre’s proposition is correct—that bad guys with guns can only be stopped by good guys with guns. There were several cases of armed Israelis in the villages who killed the Hamas terrorists who were coming to murder them.”
Fuller is asking simple questions with simple answers. When will American Jews wake up and realize that as Israel makes the case that it lives in a dangerous neighborhood, so do American Jews and the world’s Jewry? When will Jews conclude that they must take the initiative, and arm themselves, to protect themselves, their families, and their communities?
As the great Jewish sage Hillel said: If not now, when?
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