You probably heard about Dave Portnoy, the Jewish owner of Barstool Sports, and the antisemitic sign at one of his bars. His solution was to send the hateful young men (but not the “bottle girls,” who he fired)  to Auschwitz as a “learning experience.” He since rescinded the offer to at least one of the people because he “is no longer taking responsibility” for the sign.

As a fellow Jew, I think a trip to Auschwitz is the worst way to educate people about our community. That’s because we’re more than Auschwitz. I learned this lesson 50 years ago when I was called to the Torah as a bar mitzvah.

Before I could be called to the Torah, I had to learn how to read Hebrew, which was unlike any language I had seen before. It has a different alphabet with some letters that change shape at the end of the word. Sometimes, it shows the vowels. More often, especially in modern Hebrew, it doesn’t. It’s read from right-to-left. Even books open differently. When you learn a new language, you also learn the culture, perspective, and history of the people who speak it. Hebrew adds the bonus of introducing you to other Jewish languages, including Yiddish and Ladino. These languages show how we found ways to adapt and thrive in societies where we weren’t always welcome.

I was also introduced to the mitzvot—all 613 of them. These are not merely “thou shalt nots” that prevent you from eating bacon cheeseburgers. There are reasons behind all of them. Some, quite frankly, were designed to separate us from other peoples in the region at the time. (“We don’t do that because we’re not like them.”) Others were based on the practical realities of the time. (Some meats could kill you in the days before proper preparation and refrigeration.) But behind most of them are the ideas of justice and compassion. (You don’t cook a slain baby calf in its mother’s milk because it is just cruel.) I learned the most important mitzvah of all is to love your neighbor as yourself.

These mitzvot are possible because of our belief in only one God. Other cultures had multiple gods you can buy off with sacrifices and temples. We believe in a single deity with rules that apply to everyone and consequences to anyone who break them, no matter how powerful and devout they are. That’s why our Bible is filled with stories of people like King David, great people who do terrible things and pay the price for them. There are no saints in Judaism. There are humans with human frailties who also have the chance for redemption.

Which leads me to Israel. It’s hard right now to square the idea of a Jewish state our people yearned for after 2,000 years of exile and persecution with the carnage taking place in Gaza. It reminds us that our responsibility as Jews is to demand justice, whether it is in the homeland we live in or the ancestral homeland of our people.

And our demand for justice may be behind the reason why people hate us so much that it led to Auschwitz. We’ve always been “the other,” the convenient scapegoat corrupt leaders use to divert attention from their failures and misdeeds. But we’ve also served as a conscience to societies who are trying to act against theirs. As Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote in To Life: A Celebration of Jewish Being and Thinking:

Some historians of the phenomenon of antisemitism see the Jew as the source of conscience, and see the world as resenting us for that…Because our tradition teaches us to identify with the oppressed and to take the well-being of this world seriously, and because the status quo was often unfair and painful one for us, Jews have often been attracted to movements for social change…We put the principle of freedom ahead of our own feelings, even ahead of our own self-interest.

We’re more than Auschwitz. In fact, only focusing on Auschwitz reduces us to victims. We don’t need any more victims these days. Go on social media and GoFundMe, and you’ll find plenty of people who want to label themselves as victims and use that as an excuse to harm others. We as Jews are a people of principle and conscience, and that has enabled us to survive Auschwitz and all the other persecutions we’ve endured over the centuries. We need more people who are willing to stand on business and do what’s right regardless of the cost.

If Dave Portnoy wants to educate people on the Jewish community, don’t just send them to Auschwitz. Teach them all about Judaism. Teach them about our language, our history, our culture, and more importantly, our values. If a 13-year-old boy can learn all about that, bros with a 13-year-old’s mentality can learn it too.

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