This morning (Wednesday) two articles appeared in the newspaper La Nación (electronic edition) regarding the Jews: one talks about the escalation of violence in the Gaza Strip (click to read it). The other discusses the relationship between anti-Israeli sentiment in Europe and antisemitism (click to read it).
It is not my intention to comment on the newspaper La Nación itself, but it is interesting to note that there are two articles written in a contradictory manner.
The first one has phrases like "Armored vehicles surrounded the hospital in this town, preventing the wounded from getting in, according to a witness" and "The casualties from the recent attack bring the number of people killed since the Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation of their territories in September 2000 (Intifada) to 5469.".
On the other hand, the second one says, "But for anti-Semites, attacking Israel became a very useful mask to cover up their prejudices," and "Hezbollah is an explicitly anti-Semitic organization. The clearest example is Hezbollah's attack on the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994... The demonstrators carried banners that said, 'We are all Hezbollah,' which seems more pro-war than anti-war.".
While there's much to discuss regarding antisemitism, I believe there's a very basic and simple lesson we can learn from events like this Wednesday's: we are news. In other words, no matter what we do, we make the news.
To put it another way: there are (approximately) 5 billion people in the world. They say there are (approximately) 14 million Jews. This represents 0.281% of the world's population, and yet we make the news!
What do we learn from this? Very simply: the idea of assimilation is to be like everyone else. But there's a problem with this idea (which some Jews may share and live by): everyone else doesn't want us to be like them! They constantly remind us, in one way or another, that we are the chosen people, that we have a mission on earth (defined in the Torah), and that, unfortunately, in many cases, we are not fulfilling it.
It is time to accept who we are and learn to live who we are, highlighting our Jewish identity intrinsically connected to the Torah and in this way also making headlines, but in a different way, announcing the coming of Messiah NOW!.