Erez Levin to Mijal Bitton: Is developing a “thicker skin” the right answer?

In “The Future Is Sephardic,” Mijal Bitton offers a compelling vision for Jewish communal resilience, yet her fourth reform—the call for Jews to develop a “thicker skin” in the face of hostility—deserves a critical second look. While the intent is to foster a sobered psychological toughness and reduce our reliance on external validation, this approach risks granting a moral hall pass to behavior that should be socially and intellectually disqualified.

I agree that we must become less reactive to good-faith criticism without impulsively labeling every detractor an antisemite. However, the call for a “thicker skin” stems from the idea that we can only control our own reaction to an increasingly illiberal environment. By focusing solely on our internal resilience, we inadvertently sanitize the bigotry of the agitators. This becomes a form of context stripping, where we ignore the harmful and immutable realities of the ideologies directed at us in favor of a stoic silence.

We do not ask any other minority group to simply toughen up when their identity is treated as an ontological stain or when their history is erased by academic pseudoscience. To do so incurs a kind of moral guilt by association; it suggests that the dehumanization of Jews is a manageable weather pattern we must endure rather than a red line that must be defended.

To achieve the “extreme ownership,” to use the words of Bret Stephens, which this issue of SAPIR advocates, we should prioritize the restoration of moral taboos over the hardening of our own skin. True resilience isn’t found in learning to tolerate lawful but awful rhetoric, but in the courage to re-establish the boundaries of civil discourse. We don’t need thicker skin; we need a thicker infrastructure of moral clarity that refuses to normalize the unacceptable.