by Todd Friedman
Dirt under your fingernails, backbone straight,
you would be the New Jew.
Clearing the swamp, rifle ready,
no more lambs to the slaughter.
The world was with you, Israel,
Buchenwald’s emaciated ghosts still searing.
My grandmother shouted through tears for you
in a jam-packed Madison Square Garden.
You were our Samson fighting
the entire Philistine army.
When you captured Jerusalem, shofars blowing,
it was the Red Sea parting anew.
Who can forget that photo of your “crying paratroopers”
standing in front of the Wailing Wall?
But now every day your settlers descend the hills masked:
smashing cars, bashing heads, burning villages.
And like Joshua’s sun your army stands still—
or even aids in the slaughter.
This is what my grandfather fled from in Russia—
only there it was called a pogrom.
So here you are, the New Jew,
with ancient real estate “deed” and a different kind of kosher.
We now know that Samson
was blind to begin with—
and so were we.
Todd Friedman is a retired NYC high school English teacher who now revels in having time to write. His poems have been published in Tikkun, The Reform Jewish Quarterly, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Blue Collar Review, and Vox Populi.
