My formal Jewish education — heavy on the Holocaust — mostly chased me from Reform Judaism. Too many grainy black-and-white films of emaciated survivors and piles of non-survivors, which were meant to message “never again,” instead let me know little more than that my people were victims.

I couldn’t countenance that concept taught in temple. So I left.

Still, I embrace my born ethnicity and certain social and spiritual elements of Judaism, so I react to recent events in Israel. Not by watching incessant images of cruelty or entering either of the prevailing online echo chambers of opinion. That would only return me to victim mentality.

However, I read direct messages from non-Jewish friends that brought comfort, and I made a choice while skimming this morning’s e-newsletter from The New York Times that provided the perspective to write this piece (as I write so many other pieces) as a way to make my own internal sense of the senseless.

My choice was to avoid reading I Hope Someone Somewhere Is Being Kind to My Boy by Rachel Goldberg and to thoroughly read The Retired Israeli General Who Grabbed His Pistol and Took On Hamas by Jeffrey Gettleman.

Combined with that choice, my friends’ notes of empathy raised my spirits and gave me the impetus to articulate a response. Which is this: Far from being victims, many Jews have a toughness within them that preserves inner peace even as Israel is at war and even as Jews of the diaspora are also assailed. And enough of us (excluding myself) possess the physical courage and capacity to defend ourselves.

In addition to the survivor stories of emotional/intellectual giants, such as Victor Frankl and Elie Wiesel, my bookshelf of Jewish badassery (pictured above) contains stories of physical courage: David, who slew Goliath; Esther, who risked her life for her people; Barney Ross, the Chicago-based boxer nicknamed “The Pride of the Ghetto”; the agents of Mossad, known as Gideon’s Spies; and even the gangsters in Rich Cohen’s Tough Jews.

They are not all heroes. Warfare of any type is abhorrent. But to the extent that war remains our reality, it helps to see examples of our people not as victims but as victors.

Shabbat Shalom.