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This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan, a longtime journalist and commentator who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Israel’s nuclear deterrent is the worst-kept secret in international politics.

Jerusalem neither confirms or denies whether it has nuclear weapons, but everyone knows they do and quietly calculates their behavior around it.

This strategic ambiguity is intentional. Israel’s nuclear capability was never intended to be a bargaining chip, a diplomatic talking point, or a symbol of national virility. It was designed as a silent insurance policy against catastrophic scenarios in which conventional restraint, international guarantees, and moral appeals had failed. Jerusalem’s nuclear arsenal make clear that “Never Again” is not a plea to others, but a statement of intent.

Far from being a relic of paranoia or a vestige of Cold War excess, Israel’s nuclear weapons are as relevant as ever for a small, exposed state born into existential war, surrounded by enemies who have repeatedly promised its annihilation — and occasionally tried to deliver on that promise. Israel’s bomb was and still is always about survival.

Israel’s nuclear doctrine was born from a fact that Israel is a small state with almost no strategic depth. Israel’s smallness is something that much of the world still fails to grasp. It does not have oceans, or the option of losing a war and regrouping. A single decisive defeat would not mean occupation or regime change, but extinction.

This reality was obvious to the modern State of Israel’s founding generation. The country’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, understood that conventional deterrence alone was insufficient in a region where mass armies, ideological hatred, religious fanaticism, and demographic asymmetry converged around Israel.

Israel faced adversaries who did not want land or leverage, but to erase the Jewish state and its people. This matters. Deterrence against conquest is one thing. Deterrence against annihilation is another.

Thus, from the 1950s onward, Israel pursued a nuclear option as an insurance policy against the worst imaginable scenario: a coordinated Arab victory that would overwhelm Israeli defenses and leave no path to survival.

Israel quietly partnered with France — then fighting Islamist and anti-colonialist insurgencies in Algeria and sympathetic to Israel’s strategic predicament — to construct a nuclear reactor at Dimona in the Negev desert. Officially described as a textile plant, Dimona produces plutonium. There were no tests, no announcements, and no doctrinal manifestos. The program advanced under layers of secrecy, compartmentalization, and civilian oversight.

When Washington eventually discovered Dimona, Jerusalem did not deny its existence — but it did refuse to sign the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. It refused not out of contempt for arms control, but because it could not outsource its survival to international regimes that had just failed the Jewish People on an unprecedented scale.

The bomb was not meant to be used. It was meant to be known — quietly.

Israel’s policy of nuclear opacity (often described with the evasive phrase “We will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East.”) is among the most carefully constructed doctrines in modern statecraft. It allows Israel to reap the benefits of deterrence without triggering the costs of open declaration. No tests, parades, threats, or speeches about sacred missions or civilizational destiny, just silence.

This ambiguity deters existential attack by adversaries who cannot be certain how far Israel would go if cornered. It also reassures allies who prefer not to confront uncomfortable realities. It avoids provoking formal nuclear arms races or international sanctions regimes that might have followed an explicit declaration.

Most importantly, it keeps the bomb out of domestic politics. While some Far-Right Israeli politicians make stupid comments from time to time, Israel is generally very disciplined about not mythologizing its nuclear capability. It is not a nationalist fetish or symbol of pride. It is a last resort and treated with the seriousness and restraint such a weapon demands. Contrast this with regimes that announce their nuclear ambitions precisely because they crave status, legitimacy, and intimidation capacity.

There was one moment — just one — when Israel’s nuclear deterrent moved from abstraction to terrifying proximity. It came in October 1973. That year, on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, Egyptian and Syrian forces launched a coordinated surprise attack designed break Israel. The timing was deliberate, the scale unprecedented, and the intent was unmistakable. This was not another round of border skirmishes but an attempt, by force, to reverse Israel’s victory in the 1948 First Arab–Israeli War.

In the Yom Kippur War’s opening days, Israel reeled. The Bar-Lev Line, a chain of Israeli fortifications along the Suez Canal that was considered impenetrable by the Israeli military, collapsed with shocking speed. Egyptian forces crossed the canal in strength. Syrian armor surged across the Golan Heights in Israel’s north and came dangerously close to the Galilee. Israeli aircraft were lost at rates not seen before or since. Ammunition stocks dwindled. Reserves mobilized in chaos. Casualty lists lengthened hourly.

For a brief and terrifying window, Israel’s leaders confronted the scenario the nuclear program had been built to address: the possibility of decisive conventional defeat. Declassified accounts and credible historical research indicate that Israel assembled nuclear weapons and placed delivery systems on alert. The initial plan was to explode one over the ocean as a display of deterrent force. It was a desperate signal that Israel was approaching the end of its conventional options.

This was not nuclear brinkmanship in the Cold War sense, but true desperation. Israel was staring into the abyss it had always feared: an overwhelming conventional defeat. The signaling worked. The U.S. caught wind of these conversations within hours and launched a huge resupply effort that helped Israel turn the war’s tide. The nuclear weapons were never used and Israel quietly returned them to storage.

Given Israel does not even acknowledge having nuclear weapons, it does not publish numbers, issue fact sheets, or correct estimates. Yet decades of intelligence assessments, fissile material calculations, and delivery system analysis converge on a reasonably stable picture.

Israel is believed to possess between 80 and 200 nuclear warheads, with lower figure generally deemed more accurate. Israel is also believed to possess sufficient fissile material to produce as many as 400 nuclear warheads. These are not city-busting megaton weapons designed for Cold War saturation bombing, but smaller tactical nuclear weapons designed to strike targets uncomfortably close to home or decimate opposition battlefields.

As for delivery systems, Israel has quietly built a robust, redundant triad, meaning it can launch from air, land, or sea, which all but guarantee Israel can respond no matter how hard it is hit, including in the event of a nuclear attack.

Aircraft provide flexibility and signaling. Medium- and long-range ballistic missiles (most notably the Jericho series) provide reach and survivability. Most critically, submarine-launched cruise missiles provide a second-strike capability that ensures no adversary could eliminate Israel’s deterrent in a first blow.

Israel does not subscribe to classic Cold War doctrines of mutually assured destruction, although it might integrate such thinking into its doctrine if a regional rival such as Iran acquired nuclear weapons. The Jewish state does not seek parity with other powers. Its nuclear posture is fundamentally asymmetric, which is why it works so hard to prevent its enemies from attaining nuclear weapons with attacks on countries such as Iraq in 1981 and, more recently, Iran.

The doctrine is simple: Israel will never initiate nuclear war, but it will never allow itself to be destroyed.

Israel’s deterrent is not about deterring limited conflict, proxy warfare, or fighting terrorism. It is a doomsday failsafe aimed at deterring scenarios in which multiple conventional defeats, chemical or biological weapons, or overwhelming assaults threaten national survival. It exists precisely because Israel has no margin for catastrophic error.

It is fashionable for Israel’s many critics to argue that Israel’s nuclear capability destabilizes the region, but these people have no idea what they are talking about. What makes the Middle East is unstable is ideological regimes, zero-sum politics, honor cultures, and many states’ persistent refusal to accept Jewish sovereignty in any form. Israel’s bomb did not create these conditions; it is a response to them.

Consider the counterfactual: Without a nuclear deterrent, Israel would have faced repeated attempts at total war well into the 1980s and 1990s. Arab states have greater manpower, decent equipment and, at various moments, the political will to try again to destroy Israel. Israel’s military superiority is greater now than it was then as we have seen over the past two years.

Israel’s nuclear deterrence froze the conflict at lower levels of intensity. It forced Israel’s enemies to recalibrate — from annihilation to attrition, from invasion to proxy warfare, from armies to terrorists.

Jerusalem has one of the most moral nuclear postures ever constructed, which is why it has never resorted to them despite being in constant conflict. It is defensive, restrained, and non-proliferative. Israel has the bomb because it lives in a world where threats of genocide are not metaphorical and annihilationist rhetoric is mainstream among its foes.

Israel’s nuclear deterrent is not a threat to humanity, as 50-plus years of non-use proves. It is a stark warning to those who dream of finishing what history failed to accomplish.

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This is a guest essay by Bob Goldberg, who writes the newsletter, “The New Zionist Times.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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There is a special kind of Washington, D.C. genius that looks at the Middle East, sees Iran sitting on a mountain of near-weapons-grade uranium, firing missiles through its proxies, hiding nuclear work from inspectors, and chanting death threats like it’s karaoke night at the apocalypse — and says:

You know who we really need to worry about?

Israel.

That is much of the current Democratic Party’s foreign policy brain trust at work, a contradiction in terms so perfect it makes “Michael Jackson’s child-care advisors” sound like a blue-ribbon commission.

Thirty Democrats in the House of Representatives, led by Representative Joaquin Castro, sent Secretary of State Marco Rubio a letter demanding that the United States publicly cough up the details of Israel’s nuclear capabilities — warheads, launchers, fissile-material production, Dimona, doctrine, red lines, use thresholds, the works.

In other words, while Iran is the country that built secret enrichment facilities, blew past civilian enrichment needs, armed and trained Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, and turned the enire region into a missile petting zoo, these Democrats want to subpoena the Jewish state’s deterrent.

If your nonproliferation policy on Iran begins with “First, expose Israel,” you’re not doing arms control. You’re part of what should be called “The Ayatollah’s Congressional Caucus.”

Castro letter’s theory is not subtle. It says Iran and Saudi Arabia make nuclear decisions based on the “perceived capabilities” of their neighbors and argues that U.S. silence about Israel’s arsenal makes coherent Middle East nonproliferation impossible.

The letter even invokes the 2006 testimony of Robert Gates, during his Senate Armed Services Committee confirmation hearing to become Secretary of Defense, that Iran is surrounded by nuclear powers — Pakistan, Russia, Israel, and the United States in the Gulf. The implication is not exactly hidden under a Persian rug: Iran’s nuclear ambitions are, at least partly, a “rational response” to Israel.

That is how we got from “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon” to “Israel made them do it.” It is nonproliferation as couples therapy: “I only enriched uranium to 60 percent because Israel wouldn’t be emotionally available about Dimona1.”

And the congressional letter is only the elected-politician version of a much broader Democratic Party catechism. Israel attacked before diplomacy was exhausted and “without credible evidence” that the attack was necessary at that precise moment. So that explains why Iran, which signatories claimed was not a nuclear threat, has become one.

Ilan Goldenberg, J Street’s senior policy chief and a veteran of Democratic Party foreign policy circles, made the argument more explicitly. After Israel’s strike, Iran would “almost certainly” conclude that its only real deterrent is a nuclear weapons arsenal. In the long run, Iran is “almost certainly going for a nuclear weapon” unless diplomacy somehow changes the equation.

So, according to these Democrats, Iran does not pursue nuclear weapons because it is an expansionist theocracy which has spent 45 years exporting Islamist revolution, sponsoring terrorism, and threatening to wipe out and trying to dominate the region. No, of course not. Iran pursues nuclear weapons because Israel fought back too convincingly. In Democratic Party foreign policy, deterrence is provocative when Jews do it and understandable when mullahs do it.

Their argument has three parts. First, Iran was not actively building a bomb this minute. Second, Israeli and U.S. attacks were therefore unnecessary and provocative. Third, those attacks may now cause Iran to build the bomb.

According to them, Iran is some misunderstood Quaker study group with centrifuges. The International Atomic Energy Agency reported that, as of June 2025, Iran had 440.9 kilograms of uranium enriched up to 60 percent — a short technical step from weapons-grade — and inspectors had not been able to verify the stockpile after the June attacks.

Furthermore, the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation noted that going from that 60 percent stockpile to 90 percent weapons-grade material requires only about one percent of the separative work Iran had already done.

But yes, by all means, let’s spend the afternoon asking whether Israel’s ambiguity is making the mullahs feel insecure.

Iran gets to stand at the edge of weaponization forever, because any attempt to stop it will allegedly justify the very weaponization you are trying to prevent. All the more reason to once again trust Iran not to secretly rebuild its nuclear weapons program and use the billions in unfrozen assets to rebuild its air defenses and ballistic missile systems while amping up drone production.

Israel’s policy of ambiguity has done what deterrence is supposed to do. Israel has not tested a nuclear weapon. Israel has not transferred nuclear designs to rogue states and other actors. Israel has not built a global nuclear bazaar like Pakistan’s A.Q. Khan network. Israel has not signed the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and has spent decades playing hide-and-seek with inspectors. Israel has not threatened to erase another country from the map while enriching uranium deep under a mountain.

But in an increasing part of the Democratic Party’s moral imagination, Israel’s restraint becomes sinister because it is Israeli (i.e., Jewish), and Iran’s aggression becomes contextual because it is anti-Israeli (i.e., anti-Jewish). Israel’s deterrent is destabilizing. Iran’s deterrent would be understandable. Israel’s secrecy is the problem. Iran’s secrecy is a negotiating challenge. Israel must be transparent. Iran must be engaged. Israel gets congressional interrogation, embargos, and stipulations. Iran gets another “round of talks.”

The most dangerous part is the message this sends to Tehran: Keep enriching, keep threatening, keep rebuilding, keep hiding what survives the strikes. The American Left — and, really, much of the Western Left — will eventually explain that your nuclear ambitions are a reaction to Israeli arrogance, Israeli ambiguity, Israeli escalation, and Israeli existence. And if Israel hits you again, all the better! Now your bomb becomes “defensive.”

If I were the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, I would want exactly this faction running U.S. policy — not because they love Iran (they do not), but because they reliably deliver what Tehran needs: American division, pressure on Israel, endless process, and a vocabulary in which Iranian nuclear ambition is always a response to someone else’s provocation.

The regime in Tehran understands the West very well. It knows which politicians will blame Israel first. It knows which think tanks will convert Iranian escalation into Israeli fault. It knows which former officials will confuse “not building a bomb today” with “not preparing the option for tomorrow.”

And it knows which party faction can look at the Middle East and conclude that the nuclear power we really need to worry about is the one that has never used the bomb, never sold the bomb, and never made “Death to America!” a governing slogan.

And here’s the punchline: These visionaries really believe the way to deter Iran is to expose Israel’s deterrent, blame Israel for Iran’s nuclear ambitions, cut off weapons to Israel, and revive the deal that gave Tehran time, money, and diplomatic cover while it funded and trained Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, not to mention expediting its ballistic missiles and nuclear programs.

“Useful idiots” doesn’t begin to cover it. Useful idiots are amateurs. This is lethal credentialed stupidity — the kind that looks at a genocidal regime racing toward the bomb and decides the real problem is the country trying to stop it.

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This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.

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This is a deliberately uncomfortable exercise.

Not because the conclusions are comfortable, but because the thinking patterns we’re about to examine are not unique to any one group. They are human defaults.

And if we don’t recognize them in ourselves, we are almost certainly overestimating our own clarity.

The point here is not to soften antisemitism or excuse it. It is also not to put all antisemites and Jew-haters into one box; some of them are absolutely malicious, both in intention and outcome.

But many people who hold antisemitic beliefs today believe they have all the right intentions, so the point here is to understand how some of them arrive there — because if we misunderstand the mechanism, we will keep misdiagnosing the problem and fighting the wrong battle.

1) The Mental Shortcut Problem: Believing Before Verifying

Most people do not form beliefs through careful investigation. They form them through exposure.

In today’s day and age, a post appears on social media. It’s a video showing chaos around an aid convoy in Gaza. The caption reads: “Israel is starving civilians.”

It is emotionally charged, visually compelling, and confidently written. There is no source, no context, no friction. The brain does what it is designed to do: It accepts, categorizes, and moves on.

Now imagine that pattern repeated thousands of times over years. Eventually, a narrative forms — because repetition felt like truth. A person who is already exposed to repeated negative content about Israel will likely accept it as confirmation, not question it as a data point.

This is not unique to antisemitism. It’s how misinformation spreads about everything: politics, medicine, wars, corporations, countries, religions, ethnic groups. This is the same mechanism that drives antisemitic belief formation: not research, but repetition plus emotional intensity.

2) Pattern Recognition Gone Wrong: False Connections.

Humans are pattern-seeking machines. That is a strength in survival contexts, but a liability in complex social systems.

If X is true and X is associated with Y in a visible moment, the brain quietly upgrades that to: “Y is probably responsible for X.” No evidence required, just proximity.

Someone notices that Jewish individuals are visible in finance, media, or academia. Separately, they hear that “money influences politics” or that “media shapes public opinion.” The brain shortcuts visible group + powerful system = intentional control. So the conclusion forms: Jews must “control” financial systems or media narratives.

This is a classic category error: Visibility does not equal coordination, success does not equal collective strategy, and representation does not equal control.

Yet, when people encounter fragments, they can mistakenly assemble them into a causal story. Not because the story is correct, but because it is coherent enough to feel like an explanation.

This is the same cognitive failure that fuels conspiracy thinking more broadly. Replace Jews with any group and the mechanism still works. That’s the uncomfortable truth: In some cases, antisemitism is a uniquely constructed ideology, but in other cases, it is often a format.

3) Emotional Reasoning Disguised as Analysis

A widely shared image shows destruction in the West Bank — a fire engulfing farmland, injured civilians. No context, no timeline, no distinctions. The emotional response is immediate: “This is evil. Someone must be responsible.”

From there, moral compression happens: Suffering exists, Israel is involved, and therefore Israel is uniquely or intentionally cruel.

People don’t just think; they feel first and rationalize second.

If someone is anxious about inequality, instability, or loss of control, they will subconsciously search for a stabilizing explanation. The explanation that “sticks” is usually the one that is simple, human-centered (someone to blame), and already circulating in their information environment.

Once that emotional anchor is set, evidence becomes secondary. Contrary data doesn’t dislodge the belief; it gets interpreted as manipulation, denial, or conspiracy.

This is why “just show them the facts” rarely works. The belief is not primarily factual; it is emotional architecture built on top of selective perception.

4) The Social Reinforcement Loop

A user engages with a few posts critical of Israel. The algorithm responds with more extreme versions: “apartheid state,” “settler colonial project,” “genocide framing.”

Over time the feed becomes internally consistent. In that environment, rejecting the narrative feels like rejecting the entire social circle. So people don’t independently verify; they conform.

Hence, beliefs don’t live in isolation. They live in groups.

Online or offline, once a narrative is socially reinforced — liked, shared, echoed — it becomes harder to dislodge. Not because it’s more true, but because it becomes socially costly to reject.

At that point, disagreement feels like betrayal of the group identity rather than a conversation about evidence.

This dynamic is not unique to antisemitism. It appears in political polarization, subcultures, sports teams, and even professional environments. Humans outsource truth validation to social belonging more than we like to admit.

5) The Mirror Principle: What We Do in Other Domains

A politician supports strong ties with the local or national Jewish community. A donor is Jewish and also active in civic causes. A media figure comments on Israeli policy.

The brain connects dots: shared identity plus political alignment equals hidden agenda. So the belief emerges: Jews have “dual loyalty” or coordinated political influence.

The same cognitive patterns that produce antisemitic thinking also show up in “respectable” contexts:

• We see a headline and assume we understand a topic without reading beyond the first framing.

• We hear a statistic and treat it as universal truth without checking methodology.

• We associate one bad actor from a group with the group’s defining trait.

• We confuse visibility with power, and power with intent.

In other words, many people criticize antisemitic reasoning while regularly using the same mental shortcuts elsewhere. The difference is not the mechanism; it’s the target.

If we treat antisemitism as purely moral failure, we miss its cognitive and emotional infrastructure. And if we miss the infrastructure, we cannot reliably counter it — we can only react to it.

Understanding how people arrive at distorted conclusions does not validate those conclusions; it increases precision in responding to them. Because the real question is not: “Why do they believe something wrong?” It is: “What system produces that belief so consistently across different people, contexts, and eras?”

And once we see the system, we stop treating it as an isolated pathology and start treating it as a general vulnerability in human cognition.

That said, the goal is not empathy in the sense of agreement or emotional validation. It is clarity. Because once we recognize how easily our own minds can assemble convincing but incomplete narratives, we stop treating these beliefs as foreign or inexplicable — and start seeing them as familiar cognitive failures, just pointed in the wrong direction.

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.

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This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan, a longtime journalist and commentator who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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The fight against antisemitism in the West has failed.

It has failed not because the threat was misunderstood, but because it was treated as something it is not.

For too long, it has been conducted like a boring university seminar. The tone is calm, the language careful, and it is infused with an almost religious faith in education, dialogue, and shared humanity.

For a long time it looked like it was working. Now it is clear that it has failed miserably.

Antisemitism is spreading at a pace unseen in most people’s living memory. It is mutating, expanding, and gaining legitimacy in real-time thanks to the digital horror show we have created under the banner of progress. It has moved from the fringe to the mainstream and from the conspiratorial whisper to the confident chant.

Yet the Jewish response has followed yesteryear’s same tired script: expressing outrage, issuing statements, joining panel discussions, appealing to conscience, and demanding that authorities act. These well-intentioned responses are remnants of a strategy built for a world that no longer exists — one in which antisemitism carried social cost, institutions enforced norms, and people feared the antisemite label.

The problem is that nothing fails like success. The conventional response worked for so long that many find it difficult to accept that it is now obsolete.

None of those assumptions hold anymore. We are not facing a lack of education or misunderstanding; we are facing a malignant and malevolent movement. Education campaigns, despite their virtues, do not defeat ideological movements. Power, pressure, narrative, and cultural dominance now crush facts and, increasingly, everything tethered to them.

The old model begins with the misconception that people hate Jews because they do not know enough about them, or what terrible events antisemitism can lead to, so if we can educate them, the hatred will dissolve.

This is dangerously wrong.

If you are my age or older, you will remember the great hopes we had about the internet. With the sum of human knowledge just a click away, people would have access to facts, history, and understanding like never before. An educational utopia loomed. That whole hypothesis sounds absurd now. Cat videos and porn dominate in internet, social media has rotted everyone’s brains, lies and conspiracy theories abound, and attention spans have shrunk to the size of hair pins.

Modern antisemitism is also often highly literate. It speaks the language of human rights, quotes international law, and wraps itself in the vocabulary of justice while reviving ancient conspiracies in new forms. Far from being a lack of information, the problem is a surplus of ideology. You cannot educate someone out of a belief from which they derive identity, status, and moral certainty. You cannot correct what is not experienced as an error.

We must stop treating antisemitism as a misunderstanding. It is an adversarial force of highly committed people. Once we accept this, everything changes.

Jews also need to stop being so boringly decent. For years, Jewish organizations have been terrified of stating obvious facts clearly, always softening language, qualifying statements, and searching for formulations that will offend the fewest people. This approach has lowered antisemitism’s profile rather than exposing it, making it harder to see. Nuance has its place, but if everything is nuanced, nothing is clear. If every statement comes with caveats, every accusation becomes debatable.

As former U.S. President Ronald Reagan once said: “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”

Meanwhile, the Jew-haters have no such hesitation. They speak in terrifying absolutes. That makes them effective at PR but also exposes them as moral lunatics. Forget politeness; we need to be offending and humiliating as many of our foes as possible.

An effective campaign requires lines that cannot be blurred. “Anti-Zionism” is antisemitism. Period. Never to be discussed again. Double standards applied to Jews or Israel are antisemitism and must not be allowed to pass as sophisticated analysis. Conspiracy narratives about Jewish power are antisemitism, and those holding them should be tarred and feathered. These are not discussion points; they are definitions, which, when repeated enough, become reality.

Today’s model must expose, not teach. Teaching assumes goodwill and a willing audience. Exposure reveals patterns and forces recognition — if not among antisemites, then among everyone else.

In a digital world, nothing shapes perception more than repetition: clips, screenshots, statements, patterns. We should spotlight the activist who calls for justice everywhere except when Jews are involved. We should show the academic who applies one standard to every country and another to Israel. We should bombard the internet with memes of institutions that enforce rules selectively.

And we should do it relentlessly. The aim is not to educate or even argue; it is to demonstrate, repeatedly, that these people are deranged scum. When people see the same pattern enough times, they stop asking whether something is happening and start asking why. That is the moment when narratives shift.

There was a time when antisemitism carried social and professional costs. That price has been heavily discounted. In some environments, it has even inverted, becoming a source of status and belonging. As long as that remains true, nothing else matters, so the aim of any serious campaign must be to raise the cost.

We should track repeat offenders, document patterns, publicize institutional failures, and apply pressure where it matters, including employers, universities, sponsors, boards, and political parties. We should do it systematically, not randomly. Behavior changes when incentives change, not when people are asked nicely. Consequences are not a side effect; they are the mechanism.

We should also do away with interminably irritating interfaith dialogues. They rest on the hopeful premise that, if everyone sits down together and finds common ground, unity will follow. This is nonsense. Only the willing attend, which means the extremists stay away. It also pretends that fundamentally incompatible worldviews can be reconciled through polite conversation. More often, these forums become a tithe that the minority pays for temporary quiet.

They also grant legitimacy to people who deserve none. I will not break bread with a demented jihadist Nazi. Doing so would make me as crazy as them. The loudest voices in modern antisemitism do not want dialogue; they want dominance.

So, Jews should stop searching for perfect allies and build coalitions of interest. Those alliances endure because each party remains for its own reasons. Natural allies include those who oppose extremism, value consistent standards, care about institutional integrity, or defend free speech — even selectively. We do not need alignment on everything; wou need alignment on something.

And this is not about friendship; it is about leverage.

Antisemitism survives by turning Jews into abstractions — symbols of power rather than people. Too often, the Jewish response has been solemn, careful, and overly serious, as though facts alone might land like a punch. We are not in a boxing ring with Queensbury rules; we are in a battlefield of attention, where narratives win not because they are true, but because they are compelling, repeatable, and emotionally resonant.

So our response must evolve.

We should not just talk about antisemitism; we should show it. We should tell stories that cannot be abstracted away. We should highlight individuals, families, consequences, and contradictions. We should expose the gap between image and reality. And we should use ridicule. Bad ideas often survive because they are treated seriously. When mocked effectively, they collapse faster than under polite critique.

While there is constant talk about Jews needing to present a united front, that is true only to a point. We need as many Jews and allies as possible in the fight — that is the united part — but they do not need to speak with a monotone voice or be one voice repeated.

One of the great strategic errors has been the belief that everyone must be convinced before action is taken. This is a waste of time and energy. In any conflict, there are committed opponents, a persuadable middle, and silent observers. The first must be isolated, the second must be given clarity, and the third must be given confidence. People do not join movements unless they feel safe doing so. If we change that, and we change everything.

For too long, the model has been protective and passive. An effective campaign equips. We should give people language, confidence, and backing. People act when they feel capable. They remain silent when they feel exposed. They do not lack courage; they lack support.

Ultimately, this is a contest of power. That makes some uncomfortable, as though acknowledging it somehow undermines moral standing. It does not. Every successful campaign combines moral argument with structural pressure — legal, political, and institutional. Without that, we are not a campaign, just commentary.

Lines must be drawn not just socially, but legally. Institutions must be held accountable not just rhetorically, but materially. Moral clarity without deployed power is noise.

The hardest shift may be abandoning the need to be liked. The desire to appear reasonable and balanced has shaped Jewish advocacy for too long. It has been a survival strategy for centuries in Europe and the Middle East. These are virtues in a person, but weaknesses in a fight. If one side distorts, accuses, and repeats without hesitation while the other responds with careful disclaimers, the outcome is predictable.

Another fear is that clarity will be labeled aggression, defense will be deemed provocation, and that truth will be called bias. So be it. Who cares? What sort of madman requires their enemy’s approval? The goal is to establish reality for those still deciding what to believe. Impact matters more than approval, and consistency matters more than tone.

An effective modern campaign against antisemitism will not resemble what came before. It will be faster, sharper, and unapologetic. It will function as a media engine, a legal strategy, and a political campaign combined. It will expose rather than explain, pressure rather than plead, and define rather than debate. It will accept that some bridges cannot be built and focus instead on strengthening what remains.

We are facing a deadly threat that must be confronted and defeated, not rehabilitated, so the age of polite failure is over. What replaces it will determine the cost of what comes next.

My name is Joshua Hoffman, and I’m reaching out on behalf of Future of Jewish — a publication dedicated to helping people better understand, think critically about, and feel more connected to Judaism, Israel, and the Jewish world.

Since October 7th, we’ve made Future of Jewish completely free — no paywalls, no ads — so that everyone, no matter their background or circumstance, can access meaningful insight, education, and inspiration.

Our work goes far beyond headlines and soundbites. We bring context, depth, and nuance to the stories and conversations that shape Jewish life today — the kind of perspective mainstream media too often overlooks.

In just the past week, here are the top essays and podcasts:

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This is a guest essay by Adam Hummel, a lawyer in Toronto.

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I stayed up late one night this week reading the book, “When We See You Again,” published last month and written by Rachel Goldberg-Polin — the mother of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, one of the Israeli hostages kidnapped on October 7th.

It is the most tragically beautiful book I’ve ever read.

Somewhere in the middle of the book, Rachel writes that she wants to parcel out the pain — to shove some of it under the bed in a pile. She describes how, when she went to summer camp as a child, her mom and family members used to write her so many letters that she started to give them out to other kids who had less, so that they also had something to read from home. She talked about parceling out her pain the same way she distributed her her mother’s letters at camp, for others to help her carry.

That is what the book is. She wrote it because she couldn’t hold all of it inside one body. The book is the parcel. To pick it up is to accept what she could not carry alone.

As we all now know, Rachel’s son Hersh was taken from the Nova festival on the morning of October 7, 2023. His left arm was blown off in the attack. He was murdered in Hamas captivity in late August 2024, in a tunnel beneath Rafah, alongside five other hostages, who became known as the “Beautiful Six” (Hersh, Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi, Ori Danino, Alexander Lobanov, and Almog Sarusi).

Hersh was 23 years old.

For all those days, Rachel wore a strip of masking tape across her chest with a number on it. Each day the number rose by one. Each day it was a count of how long her son had been gone. She started doing it so people would stop asking her how long it’s been.

The book moves between different times. Rachel calls the first “The Before.” Inside “The Before,” she could think about other things. She loved her children, she loved her husband Jon, but at work, at the gym, in line at the grocery store, there were stretches when she was simply doing the thing in front of her.

After October 7th — “The After” — that ability was gone. After the cruel hours from August 31st to September 1st, when Hersh’s body was recovered, it wasn’t just gone; it was broken. There is not one second she and Jon are not thinking of him. She has a name for the condition: Hershsickness.

Near the middle of the book, she writes about how she gets through each day. I read the page perhaps 10 times. I don’t understand it, and I don’t think I am meant to. She describes herself as a tightrope walker: arms wide for balance, eyes forward, neither down nor up, blocking out the cars and the people and the static and the glare of the sun. She is trying, she says, to get through the day — the hour, the minute, the second.

And then this:

“I want to believe that whatever I have to do, I will master the ability to figure it out. But I have to keep walking even if it’s just only millimeter by millimeter. I think just being stuck in the molasses and not moving will choke me.”1

The first time I read that line, I took it as a line about endurance. The second time, I noticed what she doesn’t say. She doesn’t say she has hope. She doesn’t say she’ll get through it. She doesn’t say time heals, or that she’ll be okay, or that any of it means anything. She says only that stillness will choke her — so she moves, not toward anything, just away from being choked.

This is not coping, per se. Coping assumes a future self who has integrated the loss and walked back into her life. Rachel does not write like someone reaching for that future. It’s too soon. She writes like someone who has discovered that motion itself, at any speed, even infinitesimal, is what the body has when nothing else is left.

Jewish mourning is built on a prescription of motion: Shiva for the first seven days after a Jewish person’s death, then Shloshim (the 30-day Jewish mourning period that begins on the day of burial and includes the seven days of Shiva), then the yahrzeit (the annual commemoration of the anniversary of the person’s death). We sit, then we stand, then we walk back into the world.

The structures assume a body that finishes grieving and walks into life with its grief tucked inside it. But what Rachel describes in her book is not in that structure. She’s in the one she is inventing, with no religious scaffold telling her how long. There is no end in sight. The loss doesn’t stop being a loss. Hersh does not slowly become someone she used to know. He is, every second, the boy she is missing — her first of three children.

My grandmother Fay would have turned 100 this week. She died in 2019 at 92, full of years, children, and grandchildren. She was a great-granddaughter, a life that gathered into something a family could hold. Hersh got 23. The two numbers don’t make a sentence together. They sit beside each other on the page and refuse to resolve — 92 versus 23. A long life lets you mourn the way the tradition asks. A short one is what the tradition breaks against.

In the book, Rachel quotes Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, a major American Orthodox rabbi, Talmudist, and modern Jewish philosopher who died in 1993. Writing a decade after the Holocaust, Soloveitchik asked what obligation suffering imposes on a person. His answer is severe:

“The sufferer commits a grave sin if he allows his troubles to go to waste and remain without meaning or purpose … From out of its midst the sufferer must arise ennobled and refined.”2

Rachel contrasts this with a similar sentiment from Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth from 1991 to 2013), who said that the real test of society is “whether we come out of [suffering] cynical and disillusioned, or strengthened by our rededication to high ideals.”3

This is heavier than the therapeutic frame, not lighter. Soloveitchik isn’t promising healing. He is saying you owe something to your suffering. You owe it the labour of not letting it be wasted.

At first, this seems to argue against the millimeter. The millimeter is not elevation. Moving that millimeter each day is simply about trying not to choke. But notice what Rachel has done: Her book is the parcel. Her book is what has emerged from the midst. Whether or not she’d ever use Soloveitchik’s words about herself, she has done what he asked. She has refused to let the suffering go to waste. She has shaped it into something and handed it to us, to be read in an evening.

Perhaps the millimeter and the demand are the same thing seen from different angles. Soloveitchik names what suffering owes. The millimeter is what paying the debt looks like from inside the body. It doesn’t feel like elevation or ennoblement when you’re doing it. It just feels like walking.

Which brings us to the question of what we are doing when we read her.

There’s a default posture toward books like this, even sympathetic ones: We extract, we mine the grief for insight, we take the lesson, we set the book down, we feel that we have done something by reading, maybe we cry afterwards. I certainly did. It was actually Jon Polin’s epilogue that pushed me over the edge, as he recalled now having to sit alone in shul, his son’s head no longer on his shoulder or under his tallit when they bless the Kohanim. That is consumption, not carrying. Rachel asked for carrying.

To carry is to let the reading change the day; to let the passage about the millimeter return on the subway, in line at the grocery store, the moment you are tempted to feel sorry for yourself about something smaller or less consequential, the moment you’re tempted not to do the small disciplined thing in front of you; to carry is to take Hersh’s name with you; to say it; to remember that Hersh was 23, and that his mother is walking the millimeter, the matriarch of a family of four-no-longer-five, and that the book in our hands is a parcel she’s asked us to hold.

The book doesn’t teach us how to grieve. It’s not about any one of our griefs. It teaches us what walking looks like when walking is the only thing left. Rachel parcelled out what she could not carry alone, and asked us to help.

Reading her is how the parcel arrives. It’s how her suffering doesn’t go to waste. It’s how Hersh, 23 years old, taken from Nova, murdered in a tunnel beneath Gaza, becomes a name we will never let go.

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This is a guest essay by Mitch Schneider, who writes from Israel.

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“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”

You’ve seen the videos. Someone walks up to a protester, chanting along with the crowd, and asks a simple question: Which river? Which sea?

The blank stare that follows is more honest than anything else in that crowd. Because it tells you exactly what this is. Not a political position. Not a historical claim. A feeling, borrowed from a chant, carried through a megaphone, aimed at a people whose home it describes, by someone who couldn’t find that home on a map.

So let’s answer the question they couldn’t.

The river is the Jordan. The sea is the Mediterranean. Nine miles at its narrowest. Between them, nearly 8 million Jews.

Ask anyone chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” what they mean by free. They’ll say occupation. They’ll say apartheid. But the land between the river and the sea isn’t occupied territory. It’s Israel. The nearly 8 million Jews who live there aren’t an occupying force. They’re the population. So when the chant says free, and the geography says Israel, and the population says Jews, the sentence completes itself.

They know how it sounds.

Some will tell you this started in 1967, when the Israelis captured the West Bank and Gaza in a war launched against Israel. Others will say 1948, when the modern State of Israel was born and the first war began.

Both are wrong.

Not because the dates are incorrect, but because the violence, the sustained effort to ensure there would be no Jewish state in this land, predates both of them by decades. It predates the state. It predates the war. It predates, in fact, the very grievance that is now offered as its cause.

Next time someone tells you this started in 1967 or 1948, ask them about April 4, 1920. On this date, a crowd gathered outside the Jaffa Gate during the Nebi Musa festival in Jerusalem. The speeches began, the chants followed: “Palestine is our land and the Jews are our dogs!” Jewish homes and synagogues were attacked. Jews were beaten and murdered in the streets. Local British forces, as part of British Mandate Palestine, largely stood aside.

There was no Israeli state. No army. No occupation. No settlements. Not a single one. Just Jews living in the land their ancestors had never entirely left, and people who had decided that their presence was the problem.

A year later, on May 1, 1921, Arab rioters attacked the Jews of Jaffa. 47 Jews were killed. The attacks spread to Petah Tikvah, Rehovot, and Hadera. Same pattern: no Jewish state, no Israeli army, no occupation, just Jews.

Then came August 24, 1929, a Saturday morning in Hebron. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, had spent weeks telling Muslims that Jews were planning to seize the Al-Aqsa Mosque — the same lie, told the same way, for the same purpose. Hundreds of men with swords and axes went house to house through the Jewish quarter. In two hours, 67 Jews were dead, including infants killed in their mothers’ arms. The British police commander walked the main street, where it was quiet, and didn’t go to where the killing was.

The Jewish community of Hebron had lived in that city since biblical times. They weren’t “Zionists,” and they weren’t “settlers.” They were a community with roots reaching back further than anyone now chanting about “Palestine.” They were evacuated by the British. They didn’t return for 38 years.

The Grand Mufti who incited that massacre spent World War II in Berlin. He met with Hitler. He recruited Bosnian Muslims for the Waffen-SS (the combat branch of the Nazi Party’s SS paramilitary organization during World War II). He broadcast Nazi propaganda in Arabic across the Middle East. He was wanted for war crimes after the war but escaped to Egypt, where he continued his work. He died in 1974, never tried by a court of law, never convicted. A founding father, by some accounts.

The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in Cairo in 1964 — not in Jerusalem, not in Hebron, not in Gaza City, but in Cairo, at an Arab League summit convened at the initiative of Egypt’s president. Its first chairman, Ahmad al-Shukeiri, was born in Lebanon to a Turkish mother and had most recently served as Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United Nations. The organization created to speak for the Palestinian people was built in Egypt, by the Arab League, chaired by a man who was Lebanese by birth and Saudi by employment.

That was three years before the West Bank was even under Israeli administration, and three years before the grievance that’s now offered as the movement’s reason for being.

The Palestine Liberation Organization’s own founding charter, Article 24, stated explicitly that the organization made no territorial claim over the West Bank (which was then under Jordanian control) or Gaza (which was under Egyptian control). The territories the movement now claims to be liberating were not part of its original demand. The point, stated plainly in the same charter, was the elimination of Israel. All of it, from the river to the sea. Article 9 named the method: Armed struggle was the only way to liberate “Palestine” — not negotiation, not coexistence, armed struggle.

Then, in 1969, Yasser Arafat became chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Born in Cairo. Educated in Cairo. A lieutenant in the Egyptian army. His family had moved to Cairo in 1927, 21 years before 1948, and two years before the Hebron massacre. They didn’t leave because of Israel. They left far before the State of Israel was born.

In 1967, Israel won the Six-Day War, started by a coalition of Arab states, primarily Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. The West Bank, previously occupied by Jordan since 1948, came under Israeli administration. Gaza, previously held by Egypt, did the same. The charter was revised: The West Bank and Gaza were added to the claim. The goal didn’t change. Only the justification did. Convenient timing, right?

The next time someone tells you this is about land, “occupation,” or 1967, remember what happened the day after Israel declared independence in 1948: Five Arab armies invaded (Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon). The Arab League’s secretary general, Azzam Pasha, had declared the previous October, in an interview published in the Egyptian newspaper Akhbar al-Yom, that the coming war would be “a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Tartar massacre or the Crusader wars.”

They lost.

Their own leaders told them to leave — not forever, just for a few days, a few weeks at most, while the armies finished the job. Cars with megaphones drove through Jaffa encouraging people leave so the fighting can succeed. The Arab Salvation Army told villages: We’re here to exterminate the Zionists. Leave your houses. You’ll return safely in a few days.

One refugee, speaking decades later on Palestinian Authority television, said he left with only the clothes on his back. “We were supposed to return in two hours,” he said. “Why carry anything? We’re still waiting for those two hours.”

Mahmoud Abbas wrote it himself, in the official Palestine Liberation Organization journal, in 1976: Arab armies “abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland.”

The Jordanian daily Falastin had already said the same thing in February 1949. The Arab states had encouraged Palestinians to leave temporarily “in order to be out of the way of the Arab invasion armies” and had “failed to keep their promise.”

Their own words, in 1949 and 1976, before anyone else could have planted them.

By May 1967, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser had massed troops on Israel’s border, expelled United Nations peacekeepers from the Sinai, and blockaded the Straits of Tiran. On May 27th, he said it plainly: “Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel.” Israel struck preemptively and won in six days. The West Bank came from Jordan. Gaza came from Egypt. No Palestinian state had existed in either territory. Nobody called it occupation when Jordan held the West Bank. The word arrived with Israel, and only with Israel.

In 1973, Egypt and Syria attacked on Yom Kippur, the one day when Israel’s soldiers would be fasting and in synagogue. Israel survived. Every war has been launched at Israel to answer the chant. Every war lost. But the same demand arrives each time: Call the outcome “occupation,” start again.

In 1937, the Peel Commission offered the Arabs a state. They rejected it and launched the Arab Revolt. In 1947, the UN voted to partition the land into two states. The Arab League rejected that and sent five armies. The pattern was established long before Camp David.

In July 2000, at Camp David, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians a state on approximately 95 percent of the West Bank (plus equivalent land swaps), a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, and sovereignty over the Temple Mount. According to Dennis Ross, who led the American negotiating team, Yasser Arafat said no and walked away without making a counteroffer.

In 2008, Ehud Olmert went further still: 94 percent of the West Bank plus land swaps, East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital, and international administration of the Old City of Jerusalem — the most generous offer any Israeli prime minister had ever put on the table.

The Palestinian leadership rejected that too.

Two states offered twice in a generation, on top of two offers rejected in the previous generation — not because the terms were impossible, but because the goal was never a state alongside Israel.

Then, in 1967, after winning a war that five Arab armies launched against them, Israel offered to return the Sinai and the Golan Heights in exchange for peace. The Arab League met in Khartoum and issued its answer: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel — what became known as “the three no’s” — after losing a war they started. That’s the receipt nobody frames and hangs on the wall.

The chant didn’t stop in 1967; it found new sponsors. The Grand Mufti incited from Jerusalem and then from Berlin. Today Qatar hosts Hamas’ political leadership in Doha and Iran funds Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Houthis from Beirut to Sanaa. The missile and the protest sign have the same return address. The goal hasn’t changed since 1920. Only the budget has.

Next time someone tells you “Palestine” is an ancient nation with a prior claim to this land, ask them one question, just one: Name the country. Not the people, not the land, not the cause. The country, the sovereign state with a government and a currency and a prime minister and borders recognized by other nations.

Name the president of “Palestine” before 1948. Name the currency. And I’m not talking about the Palestinian pound, which was the British Mandate currency, administered by Britain, bearing the image of the British crown. Name a Palestinian currency. Name the capital city, not a city someone claims should be a capital, but the actual seat of government where a Palestinian parliament met and passed laws.

Name the year “Palestine” declared independence. Name the prime minister who signed the declaration.

The silence that follows these questions isn’t ignorance; it’s the answer. There was no sovereign Arab state called “Palestine” — not for a year, not for a month, not for a day. The land between the river and the sea has been governed by Judean kings, Hasmonean rulers, Roman emperors, Byzantine basileis, Arab caliphs, Crusader lords, Mamluk sultans, Ottoman pashas, and British high commissioners.

Never once by a sovereign Arab state called “Palestine.” The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 1964 to “liberate” a country that had never existed from a people who had held sovereignty here twice in recorded history.

Nobody is demanding America give the land back to the Cherokee. Nobody is organizing boycotts of Canada over the Cree. Every country on earth sits on land that was won in a war somebody lost, and the world has made its peace with that.

Except, somehow, here in Israel.

Here, the losing side gets to demand that the winning side justify its existence in perpetuity, backed by founding documents that still call for its elimination, and the international community nods along and calls it a “peace process.”

And when that argument runs dry, there’s one more thing worth saying: The Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and exiled the Judean leadership in 586 BCE. The Babylonians are gone. The Romans destroyed the Temple, renamed the land, banned Jews from their own capital on pain of death. The Roman Empire is a ruin you can visit on a package holiday.

The Spanish Inquisition expelled every Jew from Spain in 1492. Spain spent the following century in decline. And then the Nazis, who brought the full industrial capacity of a modern European state to bear on the question, with meticulous paperwork and industrial efficiency.

The Third Reich lasted 12 years. The Jews have been around for 3,500.

Every empire that made the elimination of the Jewish People a central project is now either gone or a cautionary tale. And the Jewish state, the one the Grand Mufti tried to prevent in 1920, that five Arab armies tried to destroy in 1948, that Nasser promised to finish in 1967, is 78 years young. The people are 3,500 years old, the language older still, the coins in the ground 2,000 years old.

The modern state is the newest chapter of the oldest story on earth. It has Arab judges on its Supreme Court, a philharmonic, more patents per capita than almost any country on earth, and a habit of flying lost tribes home from places the world forgot they existed.

Every empire that tried to end this story is now a chapter in a history book. This one is still being written.

From the river to the sea.

They’ve been trying since before there was a river or a sea to chant about.

Jews, go back where you came from.

We did. It’s called Israel. And we’re not going anywhere.

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This is a guest essay by Gary Rosenblatt, a Pulitzer Prize finalist who has been covering the Jewish world for more than five decades.

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I had a reckoning of sorts the other night that drove home a harsh reality: American Jews are more vulnerable in our own country today than ever in our lifetime.

What prompted this observation was an incident not that unusual these days, which is part of what makes it so troubling.

My wife and I were among the nearly 900 people who attended a lively debate at The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Cultural Center in New York City, dealing with “The Great Divide” among Jews on the topic of Israel. On our way out of the building, we were urgently directed by security officials to exit toward Madison Avenue and avoid a noisy anti-Israel protest, in the other direction, on Fifth Avenue.

But when we arrived to the corner of Madison, protected by police, we saw and heard a group of protesters, some wearing keffiyehs and holding anti-Israel signs, cursing us as Jews. I realized that, even literally, wherever we turn, and despite law-enforcement protection, we can’t avoid the fact that Jews no longer can take for granted their full and equal acceptance within American society.

And the challenge for us is what to do about it.

The next morning I called Gady Levy, The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Cultural Center’s executive director, to ask about the high level of security we’d seen employed, which included having attendees show a photo ID along with our tickets, and giving up our phones in the lobby before entering the auditorium. He explained that those cautionary elements, in addition to scores of police and security officials in the area and on-site, were also to avoid unruly protests from inside the auditorium like what happened last year at a similar event — protests that were videoed by the protesters and seen around the world on social media.

“This is what it takes to be Jewish in New York these days,” Levy ruefully observed.

Of course, he’s right. And it’s not just New York. The problem is global. How sad that we’ve come to expect and rely on increasingly tight security and law-enforcement patrols in and outside synagogues, Jewish schools and other institutions across the country and around the world to protect against the dramatic spike in hate-filled, anti-Israel protests and acts of arson and violence — sometimes deadly.

Ironically, six years ago I was commissioned to write a piece for The Atlantic given the title: Is it still safe to be a Jew in America? I wrote that in more than four decades of reporting on Jewish life, I had “never encountered such a level of palpable fear, anger, and vulnerability among American Jews as I do today, with attacks — verbal, physical, and, in two tragic cases, fatal — coming from the Far-Left and the Far-Right of our own society, and from attackers whose only common denominator is hatred of Jews.

I wrote: “We had believed that such worries were relegated to our brothers and sisters in Europe, with its centuries of ugly history of Jew hatred and pogroms, culminating in the Holocaust. Now the attacks are the main topic of discussion among an American Jewish community shaken to its core.”

Sadly, in the wake of October 7th, and two and a half years of war in the Middle East, the situation is far worse today. I concluded that Jews were uncertain about whether “the new normal in the land of the free” is to “hide signs of their identity, avoid synagogues, and downplay support for Israel.”

Polls today indicate that twice as many Jews over that six-year span now hide their religious identity and say they feel unsafe. There is no need for me to elaborate here on the litany of factors that contribute to this disastrous downturn. We are too aware of the fact that on a daily basis we see how Israel has:

• Become a pariah around the world, labeled an “apartheid state” that has committed “genocide” in Gaza

• Lost the support of the majority of Americans who now sympathize more with Palestinians, according to some polls

• Been abandoned by a large majority of Democrats, including the top contenders for the 2028 presidential race, and a growing number of Republicans

• Lost a majority of voters under 40 of both parties, including, most troubling, young Jews, according to some polls

What’s more, the term “Zionism” (the right of the Jewish People to have a state in our ancient homeland, the movement the vast majority of American Jews have identified with since the creation of the modern State of Israel in 1948) has become a dirty word for many Americans. That includes some Jews on the Left who are deeply critical of Israel for its perceived unwillingness to support a two-state solution and for the perceived level of devastation wrought on Gaza and its civilians in the last two and a half years.

The gap is widening between these critics of Israel and its defenders, who assert that it is naive and self-destructive to talk of peaceful co-existence when the IDF is fighting Islamic jihadists — Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the Iranian regime — whose primary goal is not to found a Palestinian state but destroy the world’s only Jewish one.

Which brings us to the The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Cultural Center’s “Great Divide” debate, cited above, that sought to narrow the gap by exploring it and seeking common ground. The program pitted New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, a staunch supporter of Israel and its military, against Jeremy Ben-Ami, the founder and president of J Street, the so-called “pro-Israel, pro-peace” advocacy group whose dovish positions have become increasingly popular with some liberal American Jews, though frequently at odds with the great majority of Israeli Jews.

With journalist Abigail Pogrebin doing a crisp job as moderator of keeping both men on point, the participants modeled the kind of sharp but civil discourse they agreed is all too rare in the community.

Ben-Ami had the home court advantage, since the evening’s program was co-sponsored by J Street, many of whose supporters were in the audience. But Pogrebin urged the audience at the outset to “put aside your Team Bret and Team Jeremy jerseys” and take in the viewpoints they were offering with an open mind.

And, indeed, the full house crowd was attentive and respectful as Stephens and Ben-Ami made their points, parting ways most sharply on the difference between an admirable aspiration — Ben-Ami’s call for two states for two peoples — and a harsh reality, with Stephens asserting that there is no past or present evidence of a Palestinian culture willing to accept Israel as a Jewish state.

Ben-Ami said that “pro-Israel for me means having a secure Palestinian state alongside Israel.” Stephens noted that the sentiment was laudable, but “I’d sadly say that if Palestinians were offered a chance to destroy Israel, they would take it, while if Israelis were offered real peace, they’d take it.”

Stephens said anti-Zionist assertions that Israel should not exist as a state are “outright antisemitism,” adding: “I would love to see J Street say that.” Ben-Ami countered that an estimated 20-to-25 percent of American Jews are non-Zionist or anti-Zionist and that “it would be wrong to call them antisemites.” He said J Street calls for “democracy, not Jewishness over democracy.”

And so it went.

Ben-Ami said then when 40 of 47 Democrats in the Senate recently voted against legislation to provide military arms to Israel, it was “a warning shot, a symbolic vote” showing that “pursuing war over diplomacy will lose American support.” Stephens called the Democrats’ vote “shameful, a moral collapse,” observing: “When you’re in agreement with Tucker [Carlson], you’re wrong.”

Most compelling to me was the final question posed by Pogrebin and the two responses. She asked Ben-Ami and Stephens what they would say to a 25-year-old American Jew about being a Jew today.

Ben-Ami said he would promote “a relationship with values, justice, equality — not about land. That’s what it means to be a Jew in the world today. Don’t trade our values for nationalism.”

Stephens said he would say that “Israel is two things: a Jewish miracle and a human example that after 1,900 years, a state was created out of ashes through hope, will, and courage,” and that “it’s an example of what brave people can do to keep the Jewish People free, secure, and bold.”

In the end, it’s unlikely that either of the eloquent and polished participants changed many minds. Ben-Ami represents the view of a growing number of young Jews for whom Israel and its Right-wing government have become a source of embarrassment. It is J Street’s position that resonates with Democrats in Congress today while the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), long strengthened by its bipartisan support in Washington, has become anathema. As reporter Ben Sales noted in The Times of Israel, “J Street has become Main Street.”

Stephens speaks for those most engaged in Jewish life and older Jews with vivid memories of Israel’s long history of wars and futile efforts to make peace. “When Israel vacated land [leaving southern Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005], it got more war,” he noted.

The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Cultural Center program offered the kind of approach that Roberta Kwall, a law professor at DePaul College in Chicago, puts forward in a timely book coming out this fall, entitled “Polarized: Why American Jews Are Divided and What To Do About It.” With the core issues being Zionism and support for Israel, Kwall proposes bridging our communal gap by forming a consensus platform in the American Jewish community that broadens the tent without collapsing it. The key ingredients include agreement that Israel should be a Jewish, democratic state, condemning all forms of terrorism and expressing empathy for all innocent civilians.

“We can differ on defining words like ‘terrorism’ and ‘innocent civilians,’ but the point is to talk about issues without vilifying each other,” Kwall told me this week. She said that conversations within families and between organizations can “help rebuild a strong American Jewish center capable of sustaining disagreement without fragmentation. We have to learn how to communicate more effectively to avoid self-sabotage.”

It’s never too late to promote greater Jewish solidarity, but a clear and present priority is dealing with the antisemitism all around us and the internal debate over whether it’s best to fight it or concentrate on strengthening our own Jewish identities.

Of course, it is deeply unfair that American Jews have to choose between openly supporting Israel and feeling safe at home, but that is where we are. No doubt we are experiencing our own collective trauma in suddenly recognizing that the full acceptance into American society we achieved over decades has been shaken, if not shattered.

The differences among us may be more about our psyches than our politics. Either way, though, they are real. And the question now is not just whether we are safe as Jews in America — but how, together, we can reverse this treacherous trend.

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This is a guest essay by Melissa Brodsky, a writer focused on media literacy, modern antisemitism, and history.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Why Jews?

Why always Jews?

Why across every century, every continent, every political system, every religion?

I dug into religious theory, racial theory, economics, media, power structures. I’m sniffing out every trail I find. None of it fully closed the loop.

Then I was lying in bed, deep into Edward Kritzler’s book, “Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean: How a Generation of Swashbuckling Jews Carved Out an Empire in the New World in Their Quest for Treasure, Religious Freedom — and Revenge,” and something in me shifted.

First, I want to be honest about who I am. I’m not a historian. I’m not a scholar. I’m not a subject-matter expert by any stretch of the imagination. I’m a writer who worked in marketing for almost two decades. Everything I know about this subject I learned the way most people learn things they care about: I kept asking questions, I kept reading, and I didn’t stop until something started to feel true.

What started feeling true last night was this: I think we’ve been overcomplicating it.

Because when you strip away the religious theory and the racial pseudoscience and the centuries of academic scaffolding built around this question, what you’re left with is something almost embarrassingly simple — something every person alive recognizes from their own life, their own worst moments, their own darkest impulses.

When things fall apart, people don’t want to ask what they did to help break them.

That’s it. That’s the whole of it. Everything else is just the same sh*t, different century.

Kritzler’s book traces Jewish history in Spain back to around 1000 BCE. He walks through the Inquisition, the expulsions, the conversos (Spanish and Portuguese Jews who converted to Roman Catholicism, particularly during the 14th and 15th centuries, often under duress) who fled across the Atlantic and ended up running trade networks from Jamaica to Amsterdam — Jewish pirates.

It sounds like the setup to a joke until you understand what drove them there. They weren’t sailing for adventure; they were sailing because every place they built something eventually decided they were the problem.

Spain in 1492 is almost too perfect an example to be real. The same year Christopher Columbus set sail, a voyage financed in large part by conversos, the Catholic Monarchs, Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon, signed the Alhambra Decree in Granada, Spain, and expelled every Jew who wouldn’t convert. They had just purged one of the most educated, commercially sophisticated, financially capable populations in Europe from their own country. Spain never recovered its footing. The golden age cracked before the ink dried. But the Jews were gone, so Spain found other explanations. It always does.

Port Royal, Jamaica? Same story from the other direction. The city welcomed Jewish merchants fleeing the Inquisition and became the wealthiest port in the Western Hemisphere. Amsterdam extended legal protections to its Jewish population and became the financial capital of the world. Both cities grew in almost direct proportion to how well they treated the people everyone else kept expelling. That’s not a coincidence; it’s a controlled experiment running across centuries with results that aren’t complicated.

The places that did the expelling didn’t get richer. They didn’t get more stable. They got more desperate, more fractured, and they found new Jews to blame for the fractures kept fracturing.

Here’s the pattern, and I feel like that’s the only word to describe it. I’m not talking about the pattern in one country or one century, but the pattern across all of them, in every form it has ever taken, without a single exception in recorded history that I can figure out: A society starts to crack.

It doesn’t matter why, whether it’s economic collapse, political failure, military defeat, plague, famine, corruption that finally becomes too heavy to carry. The cause is almost beside the point because the response is always the same. Instead of the people inside that society stopping and looking honestly at what they built and what they did or didn’t do to contribute to the breaking of it, they look outward. They find a name to put on the problem and then assign a people to carry it.

For most of recorded history, that people has been the Jews.

A village gets taken over; blame the Jews. A child dies; blame the Jews. A government collapses; blame the Jews. A man loses his job, his money, his standing, his sense of himself; blame the Jews. Not the decisions. Not the habits. Not the years of choices that compounded into the life now lived. The Jewish boss who fired him. The Jewish banker who won’t lend to him. The Jewish media that won’t give him a fair shake. The Jewish X who didn’t Y. Always an external cause. Always someone else holding the instrument of his failure.

This didn’t stop happening. It never stopped happening.

The pull underneath all of it isn’t complicated. Every human being alive has felt it. The pull away from the mirror. That instinct to find a story about your circumstances that keeps your self-image intact. The desperate need, when your world is falling apart, to find something to blame somewhere outside yourself.

Many people resist that pull, at least some of the time. But, antisemitism is what happens when an entire society stops resisting it altogether.

Scholars have written libraries on this — religious jealousy, racial pseudoscience, economic resentment, political utility. The list goes on and on. I’ve read a lot about it, and all of it has merit. But after all of it, every single time, I come back to three words: envy, accountability, scapegoat.

They are not three separate things, but one thing with three moving parts, running in the same sequence every time — like the Ouroboros1, constantly eating its own tail, forever and all eternity.

It starts with envy. Jewish communities across wildly different countries and centuries were built. They educated their children when education wasn’t universally valued. They mastered finance and law and medicine and trade, often because those were the only fields that weren’t closed to them. And the people around them looked at what they built and, instead of asking what could be learned from it, felt something darker. The success got reframed as proof of conspiracy because conspiracy is easier to live with than envy.

Then comes the accountability failure. The resentment turns inward for one uncomfortable moment and then immediately doesn’t. It gets pushed out. A man losing his job doesn’t sit with the fact that he was late every day and produced nothing of value. A government doesn’t sit with the corruption it chose and the institutions it gutted. A civilization doesn’t sit with the decades of decisions that hollowed it out from the inside. They all find the same exit. The same door that has been standing open for 3,000 years.

The Jews were always available for that role — visible enough to point at and, for most of history, small enough to point at without much risk. That’s the scapegoat. The oldest accountability bypass in human history.

We don’t have to look far to see that exact same reflex alive and well and flexing right now. We’ve built an entire culture around it.

We give children participation trophies so nobody has to feel the pain of losing. We tell them effort is the same as achievement and then wonder why they’re unprepared for a world that disagrees. But the kids aren’t even the most telling part. Watch the parents.

A child fails a class; the teacher is incompetent. A child racks up unexcused absences; the school’s policy is unreasonable. A child can’t keep up, can’t focus, can’t follow basic instructions — certainly not because of anything happening or not happening at home, certainly not because the parent hasn’t shown up in any meaningful way. It’s the teacher, the administration, the system. Anyone and anything except the person raising that child and the choices being made inside that house every single day.

The teacher becomes the scapegoat. The school becomes the scapegoat. And the parent walks away with their self-image perfectly intact and their child completely unprepared for what’s coming.

Then we medicate the discomfort away. Difficulties become a diagnosis. Uncomfortable emotions become a disorder with a prescription attached to it. That’s not to dismiss genuine mental illness, which is real and deserves real treatment. It’s an observation about what happens when a culture becomes so allergic to sitting with hard feelings that it has industrialized the avoidance of them.

When accountability becomes optional, when self-reflection becomes something you can just medicate your way out of, when every struggle demands an external explanation, you don’t build resilience. You build a population that has never once had to ask what role they played in their own circumstances.

This is the culture that antisemitism grows in — not because bad parenting or over-medication creates antisemites. Because a society that has made the outsourcing of personal responsibility into a virtue has no defense against the oldest scapegoat in history. The machine is already running. It just needs a target.

And it always finds one.

Maybe this is a “duh” moment for some people. Maybe there are historians and lifelong students of this subject who arrived here decades before I did and are reading this thinking, welcome, we’ve been waiting. That’s fine. I’m not embarrassed to be late to a theory if the theory is honest.

Because I kept looking for something deeper. Something that justified the centuries of study and the libraries full of analysis devoted to explaining this. Surely it couldn’t be this simple. Surely there had to be more underneath it.

But the more I read, the more I write, the deeper into rabbit holes I go, the simpler it gets: a failure, deep-rooted, long-cultivated, deliberately passed down through generations of indoctrination until it stopped feeling like a choice and started feeling like inherited truth.

And at the center of that failure, feelings — hurt feelings, wounded pride, bruised ego, the unbearable human experience of coming up short and needing somewhere to put it. Whether it’s a peasant in medieval Spain or a man typing in a comment section in 2025, the raw material is the same. And when enough people are feeling it at the same time, it stops being personal. It goes collective, the blame pools and organizes and dresses itself up in ideology and religion and political theory and calls itself something legitimate.

That’s what cognitive dissonance does: It protects the self-image at any cost, even at the cost of truth.

What we are living through right now is not some ancient irrational hatred nobody can explain. It is a massive moral failure — a catastrophic, collective, generational failure of accountability playing out in real time at a scale that should make every thinking person stop and take a cold, hard look in the mirror. It isn’t complicated, it’s just ugly. And ugly things are hard to look at directly, which is exactly how they survive.

Even when the evidence shows up anyway, when it’s undeniable and documented and stacked in plain sight without room for interpretation, people still don’t change their minds. They dig in harder and double down.

The avoidance of the mirror is so total that truth becomes impervious to itself. Facts don’t land. Evidence doesn’t move anyone. The story just closes around the lie and seals it shut.

Because being wrong isn’t just an inconvenience it’s a threat to everything. To admit the Jews weren’t responsible for the plague, the financial collapse, the lost job, the fallen civilization, means admitting that one destroyed innocent people for a story they made up to protect their ego. That’s not something people absorb and move on from; that’s a mirror nobody wants to stand in front of.

So they don’t. They find new information that confirms what they already believe. They find louder voices saying the same thing. They build entire communities around a shared wrongness because wrongness with enough company becomes truth. The propaganda doesn’t survive because it’s convincing; it survives because abandoning it costs too much. It would mean taking everything they put on the Jews and putting it back where it belongs: on themselves, on their leaders, on their choices, on the society they actually built.

Almost nobody in history has been willing to pay that price. So the lie gets passed down generation to generation, repackaged for the new era. Each new generation inherits not just the prejudice but the thinking that makes it necessary — the inability to be wrong, the terror of the mirror, the comfort of a story where someone else is always to blame.

Three-thousand years of that, and counting.

The Jews have been paying for humanity’s inability to look in the mirror since before recorded history. Until the mirror stops being the scariest thing in the room, the oldest excuse in the world will remain the reflection.

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This is a guest essay by Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani, the IDF’s International Spokesperson for the past two years.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Two years ago, at the height of the war, I received a phone call from the former IDF spokesperson, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari.

I was a reservist called up for the war and a new dad. My wife and I had just welcomed our first child, and life was shifting in one direction — and then, with a single conversation, it shifted in another.

After a few thorough discussions, the decision became clear: In the aftermath of the October 7th massacre, it was yet again time to choose the country. While hundreds of innocent people were held hostage by a terror organization, young Israelis were risking everything on the battlefield, while residents in our north and south were evacuated. The situation left little room for hesitation. It was clear to me that I should say yes when my country called.

So I decided to “lace up” once again.

I stepped into the role of International Spokesperson without fully knowing what the next two years would bring. I did understand the weight of the responsibility: to represent not just the IDF, but the reality of a war that would be misunderstood, simplified, and often distorted.

Looking back on my time in the role before passing the baton onto my wonderful successor, I want to share a few lessons from a period that will stand among the most consequential in Israel’s recent history.

These the top 5 lessons that stayed with me:

1) Transparency Above Anything

Throughout this role, I always did my best to provide access to information from the source — to go to explicit lengths to understand the full picture, to seek nuance, and to share it responsibly. That included being honest about mistakes, even when it was uncomfortable.

The IDF is not a perfect army. No army is. What matters is our capacity to acknowledge and learn from missteps. To investigate, to take responsibility, and to correct.

That is not a weakness. It is a standard.

Having said that, the IDF has carried out incredible, amazing operations in the last couple of years that were grounded in precision, professionalism, and a lot of hard work.

2) In war, complexity is the constant.

During my time as International Spokesperson, the IDF operated across seven fronts: Gaza, Lebanon, Judea and Samaria, Yemen, Iran, Syria, and against Iranian proxies throughout the Middle East.

No two days were the same.

What becomes clear very quickly is that nothing is as simple as it looks from the outside. Every decision carries operational, moral, and human dimensions, and every event requires careful analysis and explanation.

While international media often compresses complex realities into a single headline, in the IDF we know that what unfolds on the ground, or in the air, can only be understood through context and detail.

3) ‘Here is what we know at this moment.’

In communications, timing is everything. And when allegations are thrown at the IDF on a daily basis (many of them not true), the pressure to respond quickly is immense. The obvious goal is to understand as soon as possible what happened.

But sometimes that isn’t possible.

If I spoke too soon, before I learnt all the details, I lost clarity and risked my credibility. If I took too long, I risked missing the opportunity to deal with a crisis at a relevant time.

What I learned was very effective: to speak of what you do know, and it’s okay to speak on an initial inquiry and provide further updates later.

4) Expect the unexpected.

In my second week on the job, in April 2024, Iran launched a surprise attack on Israel — firing hundreds of ballistic missiles at our civilian population centers, a blatant violation of the laws of armed conflict. This attack was a sharp shift in reality.

It became clear that this is not a linear war. It did not include just one escalation and one sharp ending. There were shifts, adaptations, and enemies that resurfaced in various ways. The only constant is uncertainty, and I learned quickly that we have to be ready for surprises. Always.

That requires two things. First, to be present in the planning rooms and prepare for a range of scenarios. Second, to be ready, at a moment’s notice, to shift focus entirely to the development that matters most.

5) TikTok isn’t just for kids.

The battlefield has changed, and there is another front that does not appear on maps. Platforms like TikTok and other social media are no longer just spaces for entertainment; they are arenas where narratives are shaped, where misinformation spreads faster than facts.

What began years ago as an app for innocent dances and recipes became one of the largest social media platforms in the world — and, importantly, a useful method of attack for those who wish to disseminate disinformation and misinformation against Israel and the IDF.

More often than not, the effort needed to refute lies is much greater than that required to produce them, but we have no choice. The IDF needs to adapt to the ever-evolving ways media consumption changes and be there.

Bonus Lesson: Don’t take it too personally.

It is a reporter’s job to be assertive in getting the answers to their questions. Part of my role in this position has been answering those questions as accurately as possible, and not allowing a curt or aggressive tone to throw off my confidence or drag me into an argument.

In my role, I had to operate in high-tension situations, with little or no sleep, and keep my composure. My goal was to always be professional, helpful, and friendly. You don’t have to agree with everyone all the time, but it’s usually more productive to talk it out. It wasn’t always easy, and I wasn’t perfect, but this was something I strived for and held my team to that standard.

My mantra was: “Don’t take it personally, just stay focused on the facts and speak on them.”

As a child in Israel, I was told that when I grew up, there would no longer be a need for a big army where everyone needs to serve. We would finally be safe in our state, and boys and girls fresh out of high school would continue their young adulthood and be free to pursue their passions, instead of lacing up black shoelaces and fastening green buttons.

These past two years have taught me that the necessity for the IDF is ever-prevalent, but they have also reinforced something else: the importance of holding onto the belief that, one day, our enemies will accept our existence and push forward for a better future. That they will stop building tunnels and choosing weapons over the needs of their own people.

So I will repeat to my children something similar, but different: Hopefully, when you grow up, we will no longer need a large army and mandatory service. But if we need to protect ourselves, we’ll all be there.

In the last two years, I have witnessed the birth of my two daughters, symbolizing the continued resilience of the people of Israel, and extraordinary Israeli operational successes in all arenas of conflict. This has made even the most challenging and frustrating moments worthwhile.

Each day, I feel inspired by the brilliant, strong, and hard-working men and women of the IDF. I want to thank all those with whom I worked, and those outside the military who took time to listen, to question, and to understand.

Last but certainly not least, part of my decision to return to service was the hostages. The thought of dozens of innocent people held by terrorists in horrible conditions. I told myself, “As long as they are not home, I’ll do whatever is asked of me.” Today, for the first time in over a decade, no hostages are being held in Gaza.

It has been my honor to serve.

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This is a guest essay by Lucy Tabrizi, who writes about politics, philosophy, religion, ethics, and history.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Somehow, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been repositioned as the sensible actor among “activist” civilians and organizations, as well as mainstream and alternative media outlets — which is rarely a good sign.

Since the U.S.–Israel confrontation with the Islamic Republic erupted at the end of February, the usual talking points have shown up on cue and, like a bad houseguest, have refused to leave.

You can probably recite them by heart:

• U.S.–Israeli aggression was “illegal” and “reckless.”

• The threat from Iran was not imminent.

• Diplomacy is always the superior route.

• Escalation, we are told, is the real danger because it risks repeating the Iraq War from 2003 to 2011, another war over phantom weapons, apparently orchestrated for oil, with the obligatory nod to Mossad never far behind.

These narratives rest on a simple assumption: that the Islamic Republic of Iran is acting like a normal state, telling the truth about its nuclear program and engaging in diplomacy in good faith.

These assumptions are neat, reassuring, and easy to sell. They are also wrong.

The central point such assumptions overlook is fairly straightforward: The Islamic Republic of Iran is driven primarily by theology, not reaction. American intervention, U.S. President Jimmy Carter, and the Central Intelligence Agency’s role in the 1953 coup in Iran are historically relevant, but they do not explain the regime that emerged in 1979.

In other words, while the United States helped overthrow Iran’s elected prime minister in 1953 and supported Iran’s pro-Western shah for years, the Islamic government that took power in 1979 during the Iranian Revolution was ultimately shaped by Iran’s own religious leaders, political movements, and internal social changes — not simply by American actions alone.

What followed was not a conventional government but a revolutionary system built to subordinate politics to religious authority.

Under the Islamic doctrine of Velayat-e Faqihi (“Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist”), ultimate authority belongs to a religious jurist claiming to govern under divine law. The system is rooted in Twelver Shi’a Islam, a tradition that sees history as moving toward the return of a hidden messianic figure, the Twelfth Imam, who will establish divine rule on earth. This is not just a state pursuing policy; it is an apocalyptic project that happens to run a modern state.

This worldview explains why sacrifice and martyrdom are elevated above material well-being, and why deterrence does not always deter. When leaders believe they are advancing a divine mission, the normal incentives that govern state behaviour lose much of their restraining power. Even North Korea ultimately wants to survive.

The Islamic Republic of Iran sometimes appears less concerned with avoiding catastrophe than with fulfilling what it sees as a sacred mission, albeit if the result is widespread destruction on earth. For Western observers accustomed to secular politics, this framework can be difficult to recognise, let alone take seriously. Many Westerners have an arrogant habit of projecting our own assumptions onto societies that neither share them nor pretend to.

In the Middle East, where religion remains central to public life, Western analysis doesn’t just go off the rails; it starts drawing its own map. The premise is unmistakably Western: All states are playing a rational game, weighing costs, pursuing interests, responding to incentives, avoiding catastrophe. But the Islamic Republic of Iran is not reacting to the world as it is; it is acting on a vision of how the world ought to be.

What looks to outsiders like escalation, recklessness, or even self-sabotage often registers internally as consistency. When the regime refuses to behave according to secular expectations, analysts search endlessly for grievances that might explain it in familiar terms. It is like trying to force a square peg into a round hole, except the peg is on fire and the hole is nuclear-armed.

And this is not merely a philosophical problem. Before the June 2025 12-Day War between Israel and Iran, the International Atomic Energy Agency estimated Iran had amassed enough highly enriched uranium for multiple nuclear weapons. Soon after, inspectors lost access to key facilities and could no longer verify the stockpile.

For a regime driven by apocalyptic ideology, that is what strategic imminence looks like: shrinking breakout time, fading oversight, expanding missile capability, and a political culture in which martyrdom is not an embarrassment but a virtue.

You do not gamble with that. A nuclear-armed Islamic Republic of Iran would not simply make Israel less safe; it would make the whole world less safe.

Liberal societies are fundamentally incompatible with jihadist ideology such as the one guiding the Islamic Republic of Iran. One system is built on pluralism, individual rights, and secular law. The other rests on submission to religious authority and the expansion of divine rule. These are rival civilisational visions, not competing policy preferences.

That conflict is already playing out inside Western societies through intimidation, radicalisation, propaganda, and ideological capture. Pretending it is merely a local land dispute between Israel and its neighbours blinds people to what is already happening in their own backyards.

Even if Western governments withdrew from every foreign conflict tomorrow and the United States dismantled its bases in the Middle East, the ideological hostility would not disappear, because it is not driven primarily by foreign policy resentments. It is rooted in deeper religious and moral objections to secular law, gender equality, sexual freedom, religious pluralism, and the idea that political authority flows from citizens rather than from God.

In classical Islamic doctrine, Judaism and Christianity are understood to be religions superseded by Islam as God’s final revelation. A sovereign Jewish state governing land once under Islamic rule is therefore a theological contradiction and, within that framework, intolerable. Under this logic, all non-Islamic societies — religious or secular — ultimately fall into the same category.

That belief appears in the charters of jihadist groups like Hamas and in the religious narratives embraced by Iran’s ruling clerics. It has also shaped Islamic governance in various forms across different states and empires, to varying degrees, throughout history. This is not merely the worldview of fringe militants but a recurring framework that has influenced political authority for centuries.

If we assume these actors are guided purely by secular calculations, their behaviour will look irrational. Once we recognise the religious framework driving them, their actions become entirely legible — and so does many Westerners’ own tendency to misread them.

When those of us who have only ever known secular democracies train ourselves to overlook the ideological forces shaping the conflict, we will struggle to recognise them anywhere else. If we spend years describing openly jihadist movements abroad as a simple land dispute, we should not be surprised when our own societies grow morally, politically, and intellectually hesitant to name the same force closer to home.

Groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Islamic Republic of Iran are highly adept at manipulating Western language. They understand that the vocabulary of “resistance” travels well in societies inclined to reinterpret religious fanaticism as national liberation.

The result is that movements feared across much of the Middle East can present themselves to Western audiences — through doublespeak — as heroic underdogs, while benefiting from a chorus of useful idiots who mistake ideological aggression for justice.

Western publics are often advancing positions that many Arab governments neither share nor request, while overlooking the threat those governments and their populations live with every day from Iran’s proxy networks, jihadist militias, and destabilising regional violence.

What feels like solidarity in Western capitals can look, from the Middle East, like a profound misunderstanding of the danger, or worse, a refusal to see it.

Here in Europe, North America, and Australia, we are drifting deeper into a form of moral confusion that increasingly romanticises or excuses some of the Middle East’s most authoritarian and violent actors, while blindfolding ourselves to the religious dimension of the ideology in front of us. Again and again, after deadly attacks, we see an almost total unwillingness to name the doctrine that motivates them.

Modern thinkers like Sam Harris have long argued that jihadist violence cannot be understood without confronting the religious ideas that animate it. We are not facing violence driven merely by poverty or grievance, but by doctrines that explicitly reward martyrdom and violence in the name of faith.

Our inability to recognise the threat when it is stated plainly has reached absurd levels. It is as though someone can shout “ISIS” directly into the microphone, and we respond by explaining their grievances. Hamas filmed the atrocities of October 7th, celebrated them, and promised to do it again — yet in parts of the West, the preferred explanation is that Israel somehow orchestrated or “asked for” its own massacre.

Likewise, the attack on Jews at Australia’s Bondi Beach last December was carried out by a man who had studied Islamist ideology and kept an ISIS flag in his vehicle. He was not hiding his motives. Yet in the aftermath, too many rushed to blame “Zionists,” Israel, or its prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as though the ideology declared by the attacker himself were somehow the least relevant fact in the room.

We have settled on an easier narrative, one that is suicidally dangerous: that everything is America and Israel’s fault. Their enemies could not be more delighted.

Of course, this makes no sense at all. Was it America’s fault when Jews were expelled from Medina? Was it Israel’s fault when Boko Haram kidnapped schoolgirls from their dormitories in northern Nigeria? When Islamic State West Africa Province massacres villagers and burns churches in the Sahel? When armed militants storm Christian communities in Plateau State and leave dozens dead in a single night?

When every ill is reduced to the actions of the CIA or Israel, history is rewritten and everyone else is stripped of agency. It is a profoundly patronising and self-defeating way to view the rest of the world.

These are not random acts detached from ideas. They are acts shaped by an ideology that legitimises violence in the name of religion, even when institutions struggle to say so plainly. Misreading religious fanaticism is therefore not just an intellectual error; it is a strategic one.

A movement that celebrates death, elevates martyrdom, and seeks the expansion of religious rule cannot be understood through comfortable Western binaries of oppressor and oppressed, coloniser and colonised, good and evil. The habit of projecting our own ideological frameworks onto entirely different civilisations is not merely cultural arrogance. Increasingly, it borders on outright racism: the assumption that non-Western societies lack ideological ambitions of their own and exist merely as reactions to the West.

There is a reason many states closest to these movements often understand the threat more clearly than Western activists do. Egypt keeps its border with Gaza heavily restricted. Most Arab states refuse to absorb Palestinian refugees, despite decades of rhetorical solidarity. Gulf states monitor Islamist radicalisation closely; the United Arab Emirates, for example, has even restricted funding for students studying abroad over concerns about extremist influence.

Governments across the Middle East, having lived alongside these ideologies for decades, are often far less romantic about them than Western audiences viewing the conflict through the safety of distance.

But distance and safety are temporary luxuries. The problem is no longer that these ideologies are hidden. It is that too many people in the West still insist on misreading them.

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This is a guest essay by Matthew Feinberg, who is known as the “Mayor of Jewish Twitter” and writes about Jewish identity and antisemitism.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Every Jewish family has that one phrase everyone uses and almost nobody defines correctly.

For some families, it is “I’ll be there in five minutes.” In Jewish time, that means anywhere between ten minutes and the coming of Messiah.

For modern liberal Judaism, that phrase is tikkun olam (literally “repairing the world”).

It’s a beautiful phrase, even a powerful one. And in many circles, it has become a completely hijacked one.

Somewhere along the way, tikkun olam stopped being a Jewish concept and became a “progressive” yard sign with Hebrew seasoning. It became a little glitter sprinkled on whatever cause was trending that week.

Diversity? Tikkun olam.

Equity? Tikkun olam.

Climate march? Tikkun olam.

Queers for Palestine chanting alongside people who would throw them off rooftops? Somehow, still tikkun olam.

At a certain point, words start filing abuse complaints.

Let’s be clear: Tikkun olam is not “make the world a better place” in the vague kindergarten-poster sense. It is not “be nice.” It is not “vote Left.” It is not a permission slip to abandon Jewish peoplehood while pretending you are practicing Jewish ethics.

That is not tikkun olam; it is assimilation in a tallit (the Jewish prayer shawl).

In classical Jewish sources, the phrase appears in precise legal contexts. In the Mishnah (the first written collection of the Jewish oral traditions that are known as the Oral Torah), especially Tractate Gittin, mipnei tikkun ha-olam (“for the sake of the proper ordering of society”) refers to rabbinic enactments designed to prevent legal chaos, protect the vulnerable, preserve communal stability, and close technical loopholes that could tear society apart. It is about law, structure, responsibility, and the hard work of maintaining civilization.

Then there is the Aleinu prayer, recited by Jews for centuries. It asks God l’taken olam b’malchut Shaddai — “to perfect the world under the sovereignty of the Almighty.” Notice the part that many people conveniently leaves out: b’malchut Shaddai (“under God’s kingship”), not under the sovereignty of DEI consultants, campus encampments, or Instagram rabbis who learned a few Hebrew words and now lecture Jews with the confidence of a drunk substitute teacher.

In the Aleinu prayer, tikkun olam is not about flattening Judaism into universal mush; it is about orienting the entire world toward God, truth, moral order, and human responsibility.

Traditional understandings never treat tikkun olam as a replacement for Judaism. They place it inside Judaism, mitzvot (Jewish commandments), halacha (Jewish law), Jewish continuity, and obligation to God, Torah, family, people, land, memory, and covenant.

That matters.

Because the modern abuse of the term does something deeply dishonest. It takes one phrase, surgically removes it from Torah, mitzvot, Israel, peoplehood, covenant, obligation, and Jewish survival, then sells the hollow shell back to Jews as “authentic Jewish values.”

No, bubbeleh, that is not authenticity. It is taxidermied Judaism. It looks familiar from across the room, but there is no living soul inside.

This detached version of tikkun olam has been embraced by Jews who want a sterile, “comfortable” Judaism, one stripped of the deeper, more fundamental parts like Jewish law, Jewish boundaries, and Jewish self-defense. They want Judaism reduced to klezmer, bagels, “Seinfeld” references, and moral preening — a Judaism that never demands anything and gets invited to the right dinner parties because it promises never to mention Jerusalem.

But Judaism is not a decorative accessory. It is not an accent mark on someone else’s ideology. It is a civilization, a covenant, a legal and moral inheritance, and a people whose memory stretches longer than the attention span of every fashionable movement that claims to have invented justice.

This is why the modern obsession becomes dangerous.

When Jews are taught that their highest religious calling is “repairing the world,” but they are are never taught Torah, halacha, Jewish history, Israel, or Jewish obligation, they become easy prey for every movement that flatters them with a Hebrew name tag. They are told to be good Jews by standing with everyone except Jews; to be moral Jews by condemning Israel louder than anyone else; and to be “brave” Jews by making antisemites feel comfortable.

Then, when the mobs chant for intifada, when synagogues need armed guards, when Jewish students hide their Star of David, these same Jews whisper, “But I believe in tikkun olam.”

Wonderful. Start with your own house.

Judaism does not teach us to repair the world by dismantling ourselves. It does not ask us to love humanity while neglecting our own people. It does not demand we sacrifice Jewish safety on the altar of abstract universal compassion.

Jewish justice begins with obligation: to God, Torah, family, community, Am Yisrael (the Nation of Israel), and truth. Only from that rooted place do we turn outward.

A tree with no roots does not shade the world; it becomes firewood.

There is nothing wrong with caring about justice. Jews have argued with God about it since Abraham bargained over Sodom and Moses interceded for Israel. The prophets were never known for polite feedback forms.

But Jewish justice is not whatever the New York Times’ opinion page declares this month. It is not group guilt, equity quotas, or erasing distinctions. It is not pretending all cultures and moral systems are equally life-giving. It is rooted in truth, law, restraint, dignity, and memory.

Memory is the part modern tikkun olam Jews keep trying to lose.

A Judaism without memory is easier to recruit into “anti-Zionism” (really, antisemitism). A Judaism without Israel is easier to tokenize. A Judaism without Torah is easier to repaint. A Judaism without boundaries is easier to dissolve.

Real tikkun olam does none of those things. It strengthens the Jewish People so we can contribute to the world without disappearing into it.

It starts by repairing ourselves; repairing Jewish literacy; repairing Jewish courage; repairing Jewish homes, schools, and pride; repairing the connection between diaspora Jews and Israel and Israelis; and repairing the damage done by decades of teaching Jewish children that their tradition is just “progressive” politics with candles.

Then, yes, feed the hungry, help the stranger, protect the vulnerable, pursue justice. But do it as Jews, not as ideological hostages wearing Hebrew name tags.

Tikkun olam is not a slogan. It is not a yard sign. It is not a substitute religion for Jews embarrassed by Judaism. It is the sacred work of bringing order, holiness, responsibility, and truth into a fractured world.

And the first fracture we need to repair is the lie that Judaism exists to validate whatever politics fashionable Jews already held.

The world does not need Jews who are better “progressives.” The world needs Jews who are better Jews.

That is where repair begins.

My name is Joshua Hoffman, and I’m reaching out on behalf of Future of Jewish — a publication dedicated to helping people better understand, think critically about, and feel more connected to Judaism, Israel, and the Jewish world.

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This is a guest essay by Matthew Nouriel, an Iranian and Jewish writer and activist.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Something beautiful is happening between Jews and Persians right now, and it has far less to do with modern politics than most people realize.

People who might not know any better may describe this as a new alliance — as though Persians and Jews suddenly discovered each other through the headlines of the past year.

That framing misses what’s actually happening.

What we are witnessing is the reemergence of something ancient: two peoples whose histories have been intertwined for more than 2,500 years, recognizing each other again after centuries of ideological distortion.

One of the defining moments in Jewish history came through Persia in the 6th century BCE. Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire, allowed the Jews exiled in Babylon to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple. In my view, Cyrus was one of history’s first Zionists. Long before the word existed, he understood the principle at the heart of Zionism: that the Jewish People belonged in their ancestral homeland and had the right to return, rebuild, and restore national life there.

That is why, in Jewish tradition, Cyrus holds a unique place. He is the only non-Jew referred to as God’s anointed (His messiah) in the Book of Isaiah (Isaiah 45:1). That title reflects the role he played in making Jewish return to Zion possible. Jewish history remembers him as central to one of the most important acts of national restoration in our story.

Zionism today is constantly misrepresented as though it were some colonial invention of the 20th century, detached from Jewish memory and Middle Eastern history. The history itself says otherwise. Jewish longing for Zion is ancient, woven into Jewish civilization itself, and Persia played a defining role in one of the earliest returns to Zion.

This is why Reza Pahlavi, former Crown Prince of the Pahlavi dynasty of Iran currently living in the U.S. in exile, is right when he says that Iranians and Jews are the only two nations still alive today with a biblical bond. That is not a poetic exaggeration; it is history.

Of course, history was never perfect. Antisemitism existed in Iran, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

After the 7th-century Arab conquest of Persia, Jews (like other non-Muslims) were classified as dhimmis, a protected but subordinate status under Islamic rule. Like across much of the Muslim world, conditions varied depending on the rulers; there were periods of relative stability alongside periods of restriction and upheaval.

Under the Safavid dynasty between the 16th and 18th centuries), when Shi’a Islam was established as the state religion, restrictions hardened and Jewish communities became even more vulnerable. These attitudes were embedded into Persian society through long-standing Islamic conceptions of Jews as subordinate and ritually impure. European travelers who visited Persia documented these conditions.

In the late 17th century, the French traveler Jean Chardin wrote that “the Jews are obliged to live in separate quarters … they are treated with great contempt … and are exposed to insults and injuries from the populace.”

Other observers described the same system — beliefs shaping daily life, from social interaction to participation in markets and public space. This belief system structured how Jews lived and how they were treated.

In 1839, the Jews of Mashhad (a city in northeast Iran) experienced a pogrom known as the Allahdad, characterized by the mass-killing and forced conversion of these Jews to Islam. In 1910, a blood libel in Shiraz led to a violent pogrom against the Jewish community there. Antisemitism in Iran did not begin with the Islamic Republic of Iran (established in 1979), and the way the regime uses it today is a continuation — taking older religious frameworks and turning them into explicit political doctrine.

Even during the Pahlavi era (1925 to 1979), which Iranian Jews refer to as the golden era of Jewish life in Iran — with greater freedom, visibility, opportunity, and full equal rights — antisemitism still existed. In major cities like Tehran it was often less visible, and many Jews and non-Jews lived, worked, and socialized together without issue.

But it didn’t disappear. Like anywhere else in the world, there were still instances of antisemitism — and in Iran, those attitudes were rooted in the same older Islamic frameworks. You can’t undo something embedded over centuries in the span of a few decades.

I grew up hearing stories that reflected this reality. My mother was a finalist in the National Miss Teen Iran contest in the early 1970s (she came in second place) and within our family, and more broadly within the Jewish community, it was often said that she didn’t win because her last name was Israel, and because she was visibly Jewish. Whether or not that was the deciding factor, the fact that it was believed (and repeated) says something about how people understood the boundaries of acceptance at the time.

The 1906 constitutional reforms in Iran formally expanded rights for minorities, including Jews, but like most legal reforms, they took time to show up in everyday life. It was really under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah (King) of Iran from 1941 to 1979, that those changes became more visible. Even then, older attitudes didn’t just disappear.

Under the Pahlavis, those prejudices were not the defining principle of the state. After 1979, under the Islamic Republic in Iran, they became doctrine. Anti-Zionism and, by extension, antisemitism, were elevated into a central pillar of the regime’s ideology, and hostility toward Israel (and Jews who didn’t fall into place) became something to reinforce, teach, and export. Hostility toward Israel became part of the regime’s core ideological identity, reinforced through propaganda, education, media, and violence.

Hatred was moralized. Anti-Zionism became a revolutionary virtue.

For decades, the regime worked to sever Iranians from their own deeper history and replace it with an identity built around political Islam, permanent grievance, and hostility toward Israel. It taught generations that anti-Zionism was a moral obligation and that Israel — and non-compliant, insubordinate Jews — were a civilizational enemy.

Now many Iranians are confronting what Islamism has done to their country. They are looking at the corruption, repression, humiliation, and theft of national identity and asking harder questions — not only about the regime, but about the ideological framework that justified it. This is not simply anti-regime sentiment, which has existed for a long time. What is growing is anti-Islamist consciousness: a deeper recognition that political Islam itself has been one of the great destroyers of Iranian civilization.

As many Iranians reject Islamism, they are also beginning to reexamine the inherited hostility attached to it, including hostility toward Jews and Zionism. That does not mean every anti-regime Iranian is becoming pro-Israel or pro-Zionist. What it does mean is that a visible and growing number of Iranians are beginning to see Jews and Israel outside the mythology imposed by the regime. For some, Jewish self-determination no longer looks like the villain they were taught to hate.

Ironically, it looks familiar.

After October 7th, Jews everywhere watched outsiders appoint themselves the authorities on Jewish identity. People with no stake in Jewish survival decided what Zionism meant, whether Jewish grief was legitimate, whether Jewish self-defense was acceptable, and whether Jewish sovereignty itself was morally permissible.

Many Iranians in the diaspora are now experiencing that same kind of ideological domination. The same political culture that tries to flatten Jewish identity is trying to flatten Iranian identity. The same people who oppose Jewish sovereignty often oppose genuine Iranian sovereignty as well.

They romanticize the forces that destroyed Iran. They treat anti-Islamism as a moral flaw rather than the rational response of people who have lived under Islamist rule. They decide what acceptable Iranian liberation should look like. If an Iranian dissident rejects Islamism too clearly, expresses solidarity with Israelis and/or Jews, or refuses to perform the right kind of political victimhood, they are treated as suspect.

There is also a smaller group of diaspora Iranian activists in the West who are still choosing to ignore a very obvious contradiction. They speak out against the regime in Iran, but continue to align themselves with the same anti-Israel, anti-Zionist narratives via, for example, claims of “genocide,” “apartheid,” and other accusations that are not only false, but are heavily propagated by the very regime they claim oppose, along with the groups it funds, like Hamas and Hezbollah.

Instead of confronting that inconsistency, many fall back on a kind of false equivalency: positioning themselves as both anti-regime and anti-Israel, as though those positions exist in isolation from each other. In reality, it often feels less like principle and more like preservation — holding onto a political identity and social standing that was built within circles where anti-Zionism is treated as a moral baseline.

It’s not that they don’t have access to the truth. It’s that acknowledging it would force a break with a worldview, with a community, and with a version of themselves they’re not ready to let go of. And when those same narratives begin to echo messaging that many Iranians have long criticized in groups like the National Iranian American Council, it raises real questions about judgment, consistency, and motive.

Many Jews and many Iranians are beginning to recognize each other through a shared experience of exile, propaganda, historical erasure, and the constant demand to justify their own existence. If this sounds abstract, it isn’t. You can see it at rallies where Iranians wave Israeli flags, in chants thanking Israeli leadership, and in artists and activists speaking openly about a connection that remains unthinkable to the virtue-signaling Left.

Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish People. For many Iranians fighting to reclaim their country from Islamist tyranny, the idea of Jewish self-determination becomes clear because they are fighting for their own version of national dignity — something that, in its own way, begins to resemble Zionism itself.

The Jewish People lived through close to five decades of exile before Cyrus the Great made their return possible. Today, Iranians have lived through close to five decades under a regime that has severed them from their own history and culture. The symmetry isn’t just in the timeline; it’s in the relationship. Persians made Jewish return possible then. Today, many Israelis and Jews want to see the people of Iran free from the regime that has taken their country hostage. If history ever allows that circle to close, it would be a profound echo of an ancient act.

The Islamic Republic of Iran tried to turn Iranians against Israel. It tried to turn Iranians against Jews. It tried to bury a shared history under ideology. Instead, it is forcing more and more Iranians to question everything they’ve been told. When a regime lies relentlessly about one thing, people start asking what else it’s lying about. The more it insisted that Israel and the Jews were enemies, the more many Iranians look closer and see something else: kinship.

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This is a guest essay by Hana Raviyt Schank, a writer and fourth-generation Brooklyn Jew now living in Israel.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.

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My husband and I were watching the 1984 comedy/action movie “Top Secret,” when one line had us on the floor laughing.

“Top Secret” stars the extremely not-Jewish Val Kilmer as a rock star caught in a spy ring. A scientist tells Kilmer that an evil plot is set to go down on Sunday.

“Sunday?” replies Kilmer. “That’s Simchas Torah!”

The joke works on many layers, but to really get it, you have to:

1. Know the Jewish calendar is overflowing with holidays

2. Be Jewish enough to know there are minor Jewish holidays and major holidays

3. Be secular enough to not really know what Simchas Torah is about

4. Be American enough to find it hilarious when Val Kilmer, correctly pronounces “Simchas Torah” — guttural Hebrew chet and all

The (Jewish) directors and screenplay writers of this movie, brothers David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams, came of age in America when they could be out as Jews without fear of active reprisal. The restrictions that limited their parents’ lives had eased (poverty, university quotas, restricted towns, companies that didn’t hire Jews, people who asked to see their horns). And, as third-generation Americans, they were assimilated enough — and far enough removed from the religious observance of the shtetl — to poke fun at their Jewishness.

Their movies were filled with Jewish humor and a Jewish way of viewing the world.

When I was a kid, my family had a few movies my father taped on VHS from television (“Fiddler on the Roof,” “Airplane!,” “The Music Man,” “West Side Story,” and “Casablanca”) which we watched on repeat, in the days before cable television, Blockbuster, or Netflix. Each of these movies were written and produced by Jews, seamed with Jewish humor, and occasionally threw a wink and nod to the Jews in the audience.

These movies saw us, if you could read through the lines. In other words, they were unspokenly Jewish.

Is “The Music Man” actually about a New York Jew working out how to assimilate into Marching-Band America? Sure reads that way to me.

“West Side Story,” a musical romp through the conflict between poor White people and poor Puerto Rican immigrants, was first conceived as a conflict between Jews and Catholics. When no one went for that, the four Jews shopping around the musical (Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents, Jerome Robbins, and Steven Sondheim) swapped out Jews for Puerto Ricans — and suddenly they had a hit.

Who but a Jewish immigrant would write a song with the lyrics, “I like to be in America / okay by me in America / everything free in America / for a small fee in America”? That is a Jewish perspective, grafted onto Puerto Ricans to make it more palatable for America.

Moving back in time, the erasure of Jews from “Casablanca” reflected American attitudes toward World War II, in that no one in the U.S. wanted to go to war to save a bunch of Jews. In fact, the U.S. had done everything possible to solve their so-called “Jewish Question.” They’d barred Jewish immigration in 1924, after the immigration laws accidentally admitted over 2 million Jews at the turn of the century.

During the Holocaust, the U.S. Third Assistant Secretary of State, famed antisemite Breckinridge Long, instituted quotas and slowed immigration processing, even after receiving verified reports that millions of Polish and German Jews had been exterminated by the Nazis. Ultimately, the U.S. sold Americans on the war as “saving Europe,” no mention of Jews. In keeping with the cultural ethos of the day, “Casablanca” works to gain sympathy from Americans around entering the war, no Jews needed.

Thus, you get a movie about the Holocaust which never mentions the Holocaust, and where the only Nazi concentration camp survivor in the cast is a political prisoner with a “possibly Jewish name.” Toward the end of the movie, an obviously Jewish couple practice their English. Ever the good Jews, the couple is bursting with excitement at the freedom their new home will bring. For them, like my great-grandparents, America is the promised land.

Even as a kid I understood, like many American Jews, that to be Jewish in America was to largely keep your Jewishness under wraps. As my father often said, “Who needs to know? It’s none of their business. Be Jewish, but leave it unsaid.”

Nothing served to hammer this point home as strongly as “Seinfeld,” a TV show written by Jews, starring only Jews, about Jewish life in New York, that goes out of its way to downplay the Jewishness of it all. In some scenes, the character Elaine Benes wears a cross. George Costanza is Italian because no one in America wants to watch a show about four Jews. Kramer has a Jewish last name but is mostly the oddball neighbor.

Some “Seinfeld” episodes included conversations about Christmas, where the unspoken Jewishness is basically the plot. Another episode is about marble rye bread, a Jewish bread sold in kosher bakeries to Jews. When George brings the very Jewish marble rye to his non-Jewish future in-laws, they drink heavily through the meal and don’t serve the bread, so George’s parents take the bread back and hilarity ensues. On “Seinfeld,” the Jewishness always plays as subtext.

Nothing to see here, just regular old Americans scheming about a load of bread that Jews happen to enjoy.

After October 7th, when antisemitism exploded (again) and I got cancelled by my American think tank employer for being the “wrong kind of Jew,” I began to understand the harm unspoken Jewishness had done to American Jews.

Jews in America understood the deal: Perform Americana for everyone, and maybe they won’t notice you’re a Jew. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I mean, it’s not like anyone had to make Anne Frank less Jewish in order to get her story told.

Oh wait — that’s exactly what happened.

For the first 44 years of his life, Anne Frank’s father, an assimilated, secular German Jew, performed Deutschlandlied (“Song of Germany”), a poem that became a popular song which was made for the cause of creating a unified German state, and was adopted in its entirety in 1922 by the Weimar Republic. He also served in the German military during World War I, and knew how to keep his Yiddishkeit (Jewishness) concealed.

After the war, Otto Frank worked tirelessly to bring his daughter’s story to life, as only a grieving parent can. He was already well-versed in the need to make everything less Jewish, including the Holocaust.

Frank removed references to Jewish holidays, any expressions of Jewish faith, and Anne’s descriptions of Germans seizing Jews in Amsterdam. Why were they hiding in an attic? Well, not because they were Jews, that’s for sure. Probably because they just wanted to experience the thrill of attic life, ha.

No surprise, then, that almost 80 years after the diary’s publication, the Governor of Minnesota told an audience that somewhere in the United States, a girl was hiding in an attic from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), despite the fact that Anne Frank was a German citizen whose circumstances in no way matched those of ICE targets.

By the time “The Diary of Anne Frank” hit Broadway, Anne’s story was about the enduring spark of the human spirit. The Jewish writer who’d championed turning the book into a play was replaced by the two non-Jewish playwrights who also authored “It’s a Wonderful Life” which, from a Jewish perspective, might as well be two hours of the baby Jesus eating a ham steak.

To make sure they hammered home the universalist message, the playwrights added a line that wasn’t in Anne’s diary: “We’re not the only people that’ve had to suffer ... sometimes one race, sometimes another.”

I should have been expecting what came next, but nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. In this case, nobody expected the movie “Maestro,” which is a Jewish story about a Jewish man’s struggle to assimilate into American life while also making great music and being gay. The movie was written by and starred Bradley Cooper.

To make himself look more Jewish, Cooper glued a prosthetic nose to his face, because that’s really the main thing about Jews — noses. Entirely absent from this film are the things that actually make a person Jewish: discussion of Jewish topics, observance of Jewish holidays or customs, mentions of refugee parents who fled pogroms in Russia, or even a side note that Jews in Europe were being murdered simply for being Jews.

There’s no mezuzah on Bernstein’s door, and no Shabbat candlesticks on the mantle. This, despite the fact that Bernstein’s first wife was Jewish, and that Judaism was an important part of his music.

Because, today, ahistorical literature and films are “in.” The erasure of Jews from the American tapestry is “in.” You couldn’t make a movie like “Top Secret” today — and if you did, the line about Simchas Torah would surely be cut. In our current era, the only acceptable form of Judaism is the performative tikkun-olam type that centers around Palestinians and erases 3,000 years of Jewish history.

We are only Jews today because our ancestors survived the Romans, the Babylonian exile, the Greeks, the Romans, the Spanish Inquisition, the Catholic Church, Russian pogroms, the Iraqi Farhood, the Nazis, the expulsion of Jews from Muslim lands, and so much more. Our ancestors were willing to face death rather than relinquish indigenous ancestral practices — because they knew that a life without meaning, ritual, and spirituality wasn’t worth living.

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There is something almost defiant about Lag BaOmer, the Jewish holiday that starts Monday evening and continues through tomorrow.

Lag BaOmer literally translates to “the 33rd day of the Omer.” The Hebrew word Lag comes from letters Lamed (which represents the number 30) and Gimel (3), equaling 33. BaOmer means “in the Omer,” referring to the 49-day period between Passover and Shavuot.

It sits in the Jewish calendar like a spark in the middle of a long, dim corridor — one day of fire and music and release, interrupting weeks that are otherwise quiet, restrained, even heavy. If you didn’t know better, you might think it doesn’t quite belong. And in a way, that’s exactly the point.

To understand Lag BaOmer, you have to start with a story that feels almost too fragile to survive history.

In the 2nd century, during the brutal aftermath of the Bar Kokhba Revolt — a rebellion led by Simon Bar Kokhba, a charismatic Jewish military leader many believed could restore Jewish sovereignty — the Jewish world was collapsing under Roman pressure. What began as a bold, defiant attempt to reclaim independence ended in devastation. Jerusalem was crushed. Jewish life in the Land of Israel was splintering. It was the kind of moment when civilizations don’t bend; they break.

And in that world lived Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, a mystic, a rebel, a man forced into hiding for years in a cave to escape Roman persecution. According to tradition, he emerged not just as a survivor, but as a carrier of something deeper: esoteric wisdom that would later be associated with the foundations of Jewish mysticism (a stream of thought, later developed in traditions like Kabbalah, that seeks to uncover hidden, deeper layers of meaning within the Torah and the nature of God, beyond the literal text).

Lag BaOmer marks, among other things, the day of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai’s passing — which is strange, because Judaism doesn’t usually celebrate death. But in this case, we’re not really marking an ending; Jews are marking a transmission.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Many diaspora Jews today couldn’t tell you much about Lag BaOmer, and that’s not accidental. Lag BaOmer doesn’t exist in the Torah. It’s not a major pilgrimage festival like Passover or Sukkot. It lives in the margins of the calendar, emerging from layers of rabbinic tradition, historical memory, and later mystical interpretation.

And diaspora Judaism, especially in its modern forms, tends to prioritize what is structured, text-based, and universally understood. Lag BaOmer is none of those things. It’s messy. It’s folkloric. It’s built on fragments — like the tradition that a deadly plague struck the students of Rabbi Akiva, one of the most influential sages in Jewish history, and that it ceased on this day — alongside mystical associations and scattered customs which don’t resolve into a clean narrative.

So Lag BaOmer gets lost, or more precisely — it used to.

If you want to see Lag BaOmer fully alive, you don’t go to a synagogue; you go to Israel.

On the evening of this holiday, hillsides erupt into bonfires. Children drag planks of wood through the streets like they’re building something ancient and urgent. Families gather. Teenagers linger. The air smells like smoke and something older than memory.

It’s not completely clear why bonfires are one of the core customs on Lag BaOmer. One strand links them to the idea that this is the anniversary of the death of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, who is traditionally associated with spiritual illumination and the transmission of mystical teachings. In that reading, fire becomes a symbol of his “light” — wisdom that is said to have been revealed or intensified on the day of his passing.

Another explanation connects bonfires more broadly to historical signals and celebration practices in ancient times, where fires were used to communicate news across distances or mark important communal moments. Over time, these ideas merged with local customs, especially in Israel, turning Lag BaOmer into a night where fire represents both remembrance and continuity.

And at the center of it all is Meron, a small village in northern Israel, located in the Upper Galilee region, not far from the city of Safed (Tzfat). It sits on the slopes of Mount Meron, the second-highest mountain in the country. Meron is especially significant because it’s the traditional burial site of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, making it a holy site in Israel.

Every year on Lag BaOmer, tens of thousands of Israelis travel there, turning this otherwise quiet mountain village into one of the most spiritually and culturally intense gathering points in the Jewish state. (This year, due to ongoing Hezbollah violations of the shaky ceasefire, the annual Lag BaOmer pilgrimage on Mount Meron was canceled and roads surrounding the area are shut for several days.)

But normally, Lag BaOmer is a well-known holiday in Israel, whereas it barely registers in many Jewish communities in the diaspora. I, for example, never even heard about Lag BaOmer growing up in a Jewish community in Los Angeles; it only came on my radar when I moved to Israel in 2013 at the age of 24.

Why is that? What happened?

The short answer is that Israel did something the diaspora couldn’t: It gave Lag BaOmer geography again.

In exile, Jewish holidays often become symbolic — portable, intellectual, contained. In Israel, they reattach to land, to place, to physical reality. Lag BaOmer, which had survived as a minor observance, suddenly had a home again. And once it had a home, it could breathe.

The bonfires aren’t just tradition; they are reclamation. They say: This story didn’t end in the cave. It didn’t end under Rome. It didn’t end in exile. It’s still burning.

If you strip away the layers — the plagues, the mysticism, the customs — you’re left with something surprisingly modern: Lag BaOmer is about interruption. In the middle of mourning, it inserts joy. In the middle of exile, it preserves rootedness. In the middle of historical collapse, it insists on continuity.

That’s why it matters today.

For Israelis, it’s almost instinctive. It’s a lived expression of something deeper: Jewish history isn’t a straight line of suffering, but a series of recoveries. The fires are not just symbolic; they are a kind of muscle memory of survival.

For diaspora Jews, the meaning is sharper — because Lag BaOmer exposes a gap. It asks: What happens to a people when its traditions become abstract? When its fires become metaphors instead of experiences? When its history is remembered, but not felt?

There is another reason I believe Lag BaOmer should matter for diaspora Jews now more than in recent memory.

In Israel, Jewish identity is not something that has to be carefully calibrated to fit into a broader cultural environment; it is the environment. The rhythms of the calendar, the public holidays, the sounds and symbols of days like Lag BaOmer are not negotiated expressions of identity; they are simply part of the public fabric. The holiday becomes less about explanation and more about participation.

In increasing parts of the diaspora, Jewish identity often exists alongside other identities in societies where visibility can come with pressure — social, cultural, or political — to soften, translate, or contextualize what it means to be Jewish. The result, for many, is not disappearance of identity, but its careful modulation. It is present, but often filtered through what is understood as “acceptable” in a given environment.

Seen through that lens, Lag BaOmer becomes more than a day of bonfires or historical memory. It becomes a quiet reminder of what Jewish life looks like when it is fully unguarded and fully visible — not necessarily better or more authentic, but unmediated. And that distinction is where its modern significance sits: in revealing what it feels like when one’s Jewish identity does not need to hide.

And that “unmediated” quality is not just about comfort or expression; it is about scale. In Israel, Jewish life does not need to shrink itself down to fit inside other cultural, social, or political frameworks. This is where the contrast becomes most visible.

In many diaspora settings, Jewishness often has to be translated to be legible to the surrounding society. That translation is not inherently negative — it has preserved Jewish life in countless places — but it does change its texture. Identity becomes something that is carried carefully, sometimes privately, sometimes selectively, depending on context. The same practices can feel either fully present or partially subdued depending on where they are happening.

Lag BaOmer, then, is not “proof” of anything in a rigid ideological sense; it is more subtle than that. It is a cultural signal embedded in ritual memory: a reminder that Jewish life is changing fast in the diaspora. The bonfires in Israel tonight are not only about history or mysticism; they are about scale, presence, and permission.

They reflect a reality in which Jewish identity does not need to be justified in order to be expressed. And they reflect a “light” that says: While being outwardly Jewish in the diaspora is becoming more and more uncomfortable for many Jews, Israel is the one place, the only place, where Jewish identity does not have to negotiate its visibility with the world around it, where it can exist in the open without translation, dilution, or apology, and where Judaism is not merely preserved but lived as the natural rhythm of daily life.

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This is a guest essay written by Ben Koan, who writes the newsletter, “The Thousand-Year View.”

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In a 1899 letter sent to the Chief Rabbi of France, Jerusalem mayor Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi wrote:

“I really do regard [Jews] as relatives of us Arabs; for us they are cousins; we really do have the same father, Abraham, from whom we are also descended. … Who can dispute the rights of the Jews to Palestine? My God, historically it is your country!”

Yet he went on to note that “Palestine is now an integral part of the Ottoman Empire and, what is more serious, it is inhabited by people other than only Israelites. This reality, these acquired facts, this brutal force of circumstances leaves Zionism, geographically, no hope of realization.”

Obviously, al-Khalidi was wrong that Zionism had “no hope of realization,” though he was right to point out that the “acquired fact” of other people in the land would cause issues. But what strikes a modern observer is that a Palestinian would so readily acknowledge that, yes, Jews have ancestral roots in the Holy Land and are related to Arabs.

This was indeed widely acknowledged until well into the 20th century, with 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant calling Jews “Palestinians living among us” and 19th-century British-Jewish statesman Benjamin Disraeli referring to Arabs as “Jews on horseback.”

Al-Khalidi rejected Zionism in favor of territorialism: “By God, the earth is vast enough; there are still uninhabited lands where millions of poor Israelites could be settled, where they might find happiness and one day form a nation.” But here, at least, was an argument based on reality. Today, the denial that Jews have any connection to their historic homeland and are European (or Khazar) impostors is embedded in the Palestinian and broader anti-Zionist narrative.

In the context of the Israeli–Arab conflict, “Semite denialism” goes back at least to the 1947 debate surrounding the partition of British Mandate Palestine.

As historian Derek Penslar recounted, the Syrian statesman Faris Bey el-Khouri told the United Nations General Assembly that Jews had no right to Palestine because Eastern European Jews descended from Slavs, Germans, Franks, and Khazars. In his memoirs, Muhammad Zafarullah Khan (later Pakistan’s first foreign minister) wrote of the debate over partition that:

“…the [Arab Muslim] speakers spent most of their time in a vain effort to prove that the Jews coming to settle in Palestine were not the descendants of Abraham, and belonged to a Russian tribe named Khazar whose forefathers in a distant past had converted to Judaism. The Arab cause in all its aspects was so strong and just that to support it with such irrelevant arguments amounted to weakening it.”

But such “irrelevant arguments” would go on to shape Arab and Muslim views of Israel. The 1968 Palestinian National Charter says that “Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history.”

In 2000, in the midst of peace negotiations with Israel, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat denied the existence of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. In 2001, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared that “a number of non-Jewish hooligans and ruffians from Eastern Europe who were introduced as Jews were moved to Palestine.” In 2023, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas claimed that “European Jews are not Semites” but rather descend from Khazars.

Other Khazar theorists include Syria’s blue-eyed ex-dictator Bashar al-Assad and former Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh. Among Left-wing anti-Zionists, Israelis are commonly called white European colonizers. As proof, they’ll cite false reports that Israel has unusually high melanoma rates, or the existence of Israelis with red hair — though there are plenty of ginger Syrians. These claims also permeate the conspiracist Right.

Actually, there have been plenty of genetic studies on Jewish origins. They’ve revealed that most Jewish groups share substantial common Middle Eastern ancestry, alongside varying degrees of admixture from other populations. Notable likely exceptions are Yemenite and Ethiopian Jews, who largely descend from converts.

In the case of Ashkenazi Jews (the proverbial “white Jews”), researchers trace their origins primarily to admixture between Levantine men (presumably Judeans) and Southern European women (probably Italians) in the Early Middle Ages, with later, smaller Slavic contributions. While most Ashkenazi Jews once lived in Eastern Europe, that’s a reflection of migratory patterns — particularly the welcoming policy of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which was succeeded by the less-than-welcoming Russian Empire — not their primary ancestral origins.

Sephardic Jews also combine Levantine and Southern European ancestry, but without the Slavic element. Following their 1492 expulsion from Spain, many Sephardic Jews migrated to the Ottoman Empire and ultimately blended with existing Middle Eastern Jewish communities. There are two distinct but connected main Jewish genetic clusters: Western Jews (e.g., Ashkenazi and Sephardic-related Jews), who were dispersed in Europe, and Mizrahi Jews (e.g., Iraqi and Persian Jews), who were dispersed in the Middle East or the broader Iranosphere.

However, Jews with multiple diaspora backgrounds are increasingly common in Israel, which is functionally the Jewish melting pot. Ashkenazi Jews are only around 32 percent of Israel’s Jewish population, while some 50 percent of Israeli Jews belong to ethnically mixed families. There is no evidence of a significant Khazar basis to Jewish genetics.

So, yes, many Jews are more European than their Middle Eastern ancestors. But on the other hand, Muslim Arabs are more African than their Middle Eastern ancestors, due to genetic contributions from female black slaves.

It’s ironic for leftists to side with the Palestinians because some of them have “darker” skin, as if that’s a sign of being oppressed, when it’s just as much a signal of historical oppression. There’s also a long history of Muslim migration to the Holy Land, including Bedouin peregrinations from Arabia, Kurdish settlement dating from Crusader times, and Egyptian and Algerian immigration in the late Ottoman period. The most unambiguously “indigenous” people in the Holy Land are the 900-strong Samaritans, who descend from the Israelites (albeit with ancient admixture from other Levantines) and didn’t go into exile, intermarry, keep enslaved concubines, or accept converts.

According to turn-of-the-20th-century physical anthropologists, back when such studies were conducted, six percent of Samaritans had red hair, while the “general type of physiognomy of the Samaritans is distinctly Jewish, the nose markedly so.”1

We don’t have to guess what Jews have looked like through the ages; there’s a historical record. For example, it’s clear that to the Romans, the Jews weren’t seen as racially distinct. In Roman author Petronius’ novel “Satyricon,” written in the late 1st-century CE, a member of a group of runaways suggests applying ink to disguise themselves as Ethiopians, with another replying that this would be just as useful as applying chalk to resemble Gauls or circumcising themselves “so we will be taken for Jews.”

By implication, while Northern Europeans were pale and Africans were black, the Jews were intermediate: physically like the Romans but without foreskins. Just as present-day Jews and Italians often look alike, so did their ancestors. Likewise, the Mishnah (the first written collection of the Jewish oral traditions that are known as the Oral Torah, compiled around 200 CE) records that the Israelites, by contrast with Germans and Ethiopians, are “like boxwood, neither black nor white, but in the middle.”

The murals depicting Jews in Syria’s Dura-Europos synagogue (around 244 CE) confirm that impression. Ancient Jews were a Levantine Mediterranean population, some of whom mixed with European Mediterranean groups to form what became European Jewry.

Notably, racial antisemitism first emerged in Northern Europe, where Jews physically (and culturally) stood out more from their Gentile neighbors. Long before German politician Wilhelm Marr coined the term “antisemitism” in 1879, the 13th-century German-Jewish apologetic Sefer Nizzahon Yashan records that, “The heretics [i.e., Christians] ask: ‘Why are most Gentiles fair-skinned and handsome while most Jews are dark and ugly?’” Diverse Ashkenazi phenotypes only fed into later slanders of Jews as conspiratorial shapeshifters.

The argument that Jews “aren’t real Jews” because their ancestors include converts raises an important follow-up question: Who do you think converted those ancestors? The answer: “real,” “biblical” Jews.

Presumably, back when Judean eligible bachelors married Italian bella donnas, their wives assumed a Jewish identity and passed it down to the children. Otherwise, how would Ashkenazi Jews have ended up practicing Judaism? And how else would they have no cultural memory of their Italian ancestry?

If a “full-blooded Semite” considered his “half-Semitic” son to be Jewish, as did the Jewish community and religious leadership, then isn’t that a sufficient seal of approval? Clearly, the ancient Israelites weren’t intent on maintaining racial purity, or else they wouldn’t have allowed conversions in the first place.

Indeed, King David, the model Israelite ruler, was a descendant of the convert Ruth, who says in the Hebrew Bible: “Wherever you go, I will go; wherever you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.” A mixed genealogy doesn’t mean, per the Palestinian National Charter, that “Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality.”

Certainly, diaspora Jews weren’t an “independent” nationality, but they saw each other, and were seen by neighbors, as a distinct people, as described by Ruth. During the French Revolution, Clermont-Tonnerre declared that, “We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and accord everything to Jews as individuals.” As Israeli biographer Hillel Halkin noted, that refusal wouldn’t have been necessary unless the Jews were already seen as a nation.

Semite denialism is based on a narrowly racial definition of nationhood that doesn’t accord with the historical reality of how nations form and evolve. John Stuart Mill, the liberal philosopher, provided a much more accurate and expansive view:

“A portion of mankind may be said to constitute a Nationality if they are united among themselves by common sympathies which do not exist between them and any others — which make them co-operate with each other more willingly than with other people, desire to be under the same government, and desire that it should be government by themselves or a portion of themselves exclusively.”

“This feeling of nationality may have been generated by various causes. Sometimes it is the effect of identity of race and descent. Community of language, and community of religion, greatly contribute to it. Geographical limits are one of its causes. But the strongest of all is identity of political antecedents; the possession of a national history, and consequent community of recollections; collective pride and humiliation, pleasure and regret, connected with the same incidents in the past.”

Following Mill’s definition, the Jews possess a national history and a community of recollections, which coalesced in the Land of Israel. Jews also share a community of language (historically, multiple languages like Yiddish and Ladino, though Hebrew was the common sacred tongue) and religion. As for descent, most Jews do share a common lineage that traces back to the Levant, but even those who don’t are considered children of Abraham and Sarah by virtue of conversion.

Most importantly for the context of Zionism, many Jews shared a “desire to be under the same government” based on their “common sympathies” and in response to the deprivations of statelessness.

Arguments that Jews “aren’t real Semites” are no longer just weakening the Arab cause in front of UN diplomats; they are reframing a political dispute between two national movements into a zero-sum jihad against “settler-colonialists,” which the Palestinians — by fundamentally misunderstanding their opponents — are bound to lose.

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This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan, a longtime journalist and commentator who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”

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There is a persistent temptation, especially among Israel’s critics, to explain its conduct in war as a kind of historical pathology.

The argument runs like this: A people that endured the Holocaust internalized a permanent sense of existential threat, and that trauma now expresses itself in a harsh, uncompromising approach to warfare. Israel, in this telling, fights as it does because it cannot escape its past.

It is a neat theory. It also misses a big part of the story.

It relieves its advocates of the burden of taking Israel seriously on its own terms. It allows them to reduce a coherent moral framework to a psychological aftershock. It is, in short, an argument that explains everything while understanding nothing.

Israel’s no-nonsense approach to warfare is certainly shaped in part by the Holocaust. However, it is far older, more deliberate, and more intellectually coherent than that. It is rooted in Torah thinking — a worldview that takes evil seriously, understands the fragility of civilization, and places moral responsibility on intentions and outcomes.

To understand Israel’s military doctrine, the place to begin is not in the ashes of Europe, but in the foundations of Jewish civilization. The Torah does not romanticize war; it regulates it, distinguishing between different kinds of enemies and demanding peace when possible and decisiveness when necessary. It recognizes that some conflicts can be resolved through negotiation and others cannot be resolved at all, only ended.

It begins not with denial but with recognition: “When you go out to war against your enemies…” (Deuteronomy 21:10). Not if; when. Civilizations that pretend otherwise tend not to last very long.

This is not the language of trauma, but of realism.

Modern Western thinking, by contrast, has drifted toward a very different assumption: that all conflicts are, at root, misunderstandings. That violence is a failure of communication. That if grievances were addressed, dignity affirmed, and economic conditions improved, enemies would become partners. This assumption survives only in the absence of serious enemies. It collapses at the feet of adversaries whose goals are not negotiable.

Israel has spent decades confronting precisely such adversaries — groups that do not seek compromise but elimination, movements that define victory not as coexistence but as the destruction of the Jewish state, and organizations for whom civilian death (on both sides) is not a tragedy but a tactic. In that environment, the Western model of conflict resolution is more delusional than humane. It mistakes sentiment for strategy and hopes that good intentions might one day substitute for deterrence.

They do not, so Israel fights differently.

Israelis fight with clarity about ends, urgency about threats, and a willingness to impose decisive costs on those who initiate violence. Critics describe this as excessive force. What they are reacting to is not excess, but finality. Wars, in this view, are not managed; they are ended.

The Torah contains a concept that modern discourse struggles to process: Failing to confront evil decisively is itself a moral failure. Restraint, when misapplied, does not produce peace; it prolongs suffering. Mercy toward those who weaponize mercy is not compassion; it is complicity.

The tradition is explicit in the Talmud: “If someone comes to kill you, rise early and kill him first” (Sanhedrin 72a). This is not a slogan of aggression; it is a doctrine of responsibility. The obligation is not only to avoid wrongdoing, but to prevent it. A moral system that cannot defend the innocent is not moral, only decorative.

This is where the Holocaust matters — yet not in the way critics suggest. The Holocaust did not create Jewish realism; it vindicated it. For centuries prior, Jews lived as a minority dependent on the tolerance of others. They developed ethical systems that emphasized justice, restraint, and the sanctity of life, often under conditions where they had little ability to defend themselves.

When that restraint was met not with reciprocity but with annihilation, the lesson was not that Jewish ethics had failed; it was that ethics without power are easily ignored, and eventually extinguished.

The Holocaust provided empirical confirmation of what the Torah had long assumed: that evil exists, that it is not always persuadable, and that failing to confront it decisively invites catastrophe. If Torah thinking is the theory, the Holocaust is the most devastating data point.

The State of Israel represents the reintroduction of power into a moral framework that never assumed it would remain powerless. That combination produces discomfort, especially for those who prefer a world that measures virtue by visible restraint rather than by the protection of the innocent. It is easier to admire restraint from a distance than to live with the consequences of its failure.

Consider the asymmetry embedded in much of the criticism directed at Israel. When Israel acts forcefully to neutralize threats, it is accused of disproportion. When it exercises restraint and suffers attacks, that suffering is treated as unfortunate yet expected. The underlying premise is clear: Israel, because it is stronger, must absorb violence rather than decisively end it. It demands that Israelis take risks others would never accept for themselves, in service of standards those same critics would quietly abandon the moment their own security was at stake.

Torah thinking rejects that premise outright. It does not assign moral responsibility based on relative strength, but on actions and intentions. If one side initiates violence and the other responds to stop it, the distinction is not murky. It is clear: “Justice, justice shall you pursue” (Deuteronomy 16:20). Not merely intend or proclaim. Pursue.

That clarity is deeply unfashionable in a Western culture where postmodern habits of thought have run amok. It speaks of “cycles of violence” as though causality were circular rather than directional. It obsesses over immediate outcomes while ignoring the incentives those outcomes create. It treats civilian casualties as the ultimate metric of morality without asking who placed those civilians in harm’s way — and why.

Israel’s approach cuts through that ambiguity. When Israelis target military infrastructure embedded within civilian areas, they are accused of recklessness. When they warn civilians to evacuate before striking — through leaflets, calls, and evacuation corridors — they are accused of psychological warfare or ethnic cleansing. When they refrain, Israeli civilians pay the price.

The problem is not what Israel does. It is that Israel refuses to participate in a moral game whose rules are written by those who will never have to live with the consequences.

At the same time, the caricature that post-Holocaust thinking alone drives Israeli policy collapses on contact with reality. A purely trauma-driven state would behave very differently. It would interpret every threat as existential, respond with maximal force at all times, and show little regard for proportionality, restraint, or humanitarian considerations.

That is not what Israel does.

Israelis calibrate, debate, and restrain themselves in ways that few countries facing comparable threats consistently do. They provide humanitarian aid to enemy populations, subject their military to legal scrutiny, and operate under rules of engagement that seek (often at real cost) to minimize civilian harm. These are not the behaviors of a state driven by unprocessed trauma. They are the behaviors of a state attempting to apply moral framework under increasingly amoral conditions.

Torah thinking does not eliminate moral tension; it structures it. The same tradition that commands, “Seek peace and pursue it” (Psalms 34:14), also recognizes that peace cannot be pursued at the cost of survival. The same legal framework that permits war imposes limits on its conduct. Even in siege warfare, the Torah prohibits wanton destruction: “Do not destroy its trees…” (Deuteronomy 20:19) — a striking constraint at the very moment of maximum force.

Nor does the tradition pretend that all enemies are reconcilable. Some forms of hostility are not situational; they are structural. The concept of Amalek reflects a recognition that there are adversaries whose defining characteristic is irreducible enmity. Not every conflict can be negotiated. Some must be ended.

This is a difficult framework for modern minds to accept. It denies the comforting fiction that all conflicts are solvable through dialogue and diplomacy. It insists that moral responsibility includes not only the desire for peace but the willingness to confront those who make peace impossible. It is far easier to adopt cleaner positions. Pacifism avoids the burden of force. Militarism avoids the burden of restraint. Both avoid responsibility.

Israel does neither, which is one reason it is so often misunderstood.

The other is simpler and less flattering: A world accustomed to judging morality by appearances struggles with a framework that judges it by consequences. A culture that prizes intention over outcome finds it unsettling to encounter a system that insists the two cannot be separated.

Israel’s no-nonsense approach to warfare emerges from that system. It is not about indifference to suffering; it is about refusing to normalize it. It is not about privileging force, but about ensuring that force, when necessary, is decisive enough to make its repetition unnecessary. The Holocaust reinforces Israel’s determination to survive. It does not define the ethical framework through which such determination is pursued.

That framework is much older and grounded in a worldview which understands that some enemies cannot simply be wished away; they must be confronted honestly. It recognizes that moral clarity is not the absence of difficult choices, but the willingness to make them with a clear understanding of their consequences.

The modern world does not misunderstand Israel because it lacks information. It misunderstands Israel because it prefers moral comfort to moral clarity — and Israel refuses to provide it.

My name is Joshua Hoffman, and I’m reaching out on behalf of Future of Jewish — a publication dedicated to helping people better understand, think critically about, and feel more connected to Judaism, Israel, and the Jewish world.

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This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.

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“The world is in a terrible place.”

You hear it everywhere — at dinner tables, in group chats, across headlines, woven into the emotional tone of daily life. It’s become less of an observation and more of a reflex. Something bad happens, or many bad things happen at once, and the conclusion arrives pre-packaged: decline, decay, collapse.

In the Jewish world, especially since October 7th, that instinct feels justified. Antisemitism is rising in ways that are hard to ignore and harder to stomach. Just this week, two Jewish men aged 76 and 34 were stabbed and seriously wounded in the heavily Jewish London neighborhood of Golders Green in an antisemitic terror attack, the latest in a spate of incidents targeting British Jews.

Jewish students feel unsafe on campuses that once marketed themselves as havens of tolerance. Synagogues require security in countries where Jews once felt comfortably embedded. Social media churns with rhetoric that would have been unthinkable in polite society not long ago, now repackaged as activism, or irony, or just “part of the conversation.”

One would have to be willfully blind or intellectually dishonest to deny any of this.

But here’s the problem: Recognizing that things are upsetting and uncomfortable and unsettling is not the same as understanding what kind of bad we’re in. And right now, a lot of people are getting that distinction wrong.

Because when people say “the world is in a terrible place,” what they’re really doing is collapsing multiple, very different phenomena into a single emotional conclusion. They’re taking real deterioration, amplifying it through distorted expectations and constant exposure, and arriving at something that feels like civilizational collapse.

It isn’t.

What we’re living through is not collapse. It’s stress. And confusing the two leads to bad thinking — and worse decisions.

Take, for instance, visibility.

Antisemitism did not suddenly reappear in the last two and a half years. It did not lie dormant for decades and then erupt out of nowhere. What changed is not just the presence of hatred, but its frictionless expression. Social media didn’t create antisemitism; it removed the cost of broadcasting it. It scaled it. It algorithmically rewarded it.

What used to exist in private conversations, fringe spaces, or geographic pockets is now instantly visible, shareable, and repeatable. A single incident no longer stays local; it becomes national and sometimes global within hours. The result is an environment where everything feels bigger, faster, and more pervasive than it would have in any previous era.

That doesn’t make the hatred less real. But it does mean that what feels like exponential growth is, in part, exponential exposure.

Then there’s the issue of expectations.

Many Jews today, particularly in the West, are not comparing the present to most of Jewish history. They are comparing it to a very specific, very recent period: the post–World War II era, especially in North America, parts of Europe, and Australia. It was a time of unprecedented acceptance, integration, and opportunity; a time when being visibly Jewish did not, in most contexts, feel like a liability.

But that period wasn’t the norm; it was the exception.

For most of history, Jewish life was defined by some combination of vulnerability, exclusion, and dependence on the goodwill of others. Even in relatively stable periods, that stability was often fragile and reversible.

So when the ground shifts today — when hostility becomes more visible, when institutions wobble, when social acceptance feels less guaranteed — it doesn’t just register as change. It feels like collapse. Not because it is, but because the baseline people are using is historically distorted.

What feels like “the world falling apart” is often the end of an illusion: the illusion that a uniquely comfortable moment was permanent.

And then there’s the most uncomfortable piece of all: strength.

Because at the very same time that antisemitism is rising, something else is also true — something that complicates the narrative of decline. And that something is this: The Jewish People, collectively, are more powerful, more connected, and more capable of self-defense than at any point in history.

Israel exists, not as a theoretical refuge, but as a sovereign state with military strength, technological innovation, and global influence. Jewish communities around the world are networked, resourced, and able to mobilize in ways that were unimaginable even a century ago. There is agency where there used to be dependence.

And that changes the equation.

When Jews were powerless, antisemitism was often quieter in its expression but more catastrophic in its consequences. When Jews are visible, sovereign, and influential, antisemitism doesn’t disappear; it adapts. It becomes louder, more politicized, more globalized. It attaches itself to new narratives, new platforms, new coalitions.

That doesn’t make it less dangerous, but it does mean that its form is different.

Which raises a harder question than “Does the world suck right now?” The harder question is this: Are we worse off, or just more exposed?

Because those are not the same thing.

Part of what’s happening right now is not just a change in external conditions, but a shift in perception. The modern information environment is, fundamentally, a pessimism machine. It surfaces the most emotionally charged, morally outrageous, and attention-grabbing content at a relentless pace. It collapses distance between events, making everything feel immediate and personal. It blurs the line between widespread reality and concentrated noise.

A protest in one city becomes a symbol of everywhere. A viral video becomes evidence of consensus. A loud minority begins to feel like a dominant force.

This doesn’t mean the problems aren’t real; it means the scale is often misread.

There is a difference between institutional failure and societal collapse, between elite discourse and everyday interactions, between what trends and what actually defines most people’s lived experiences. Lumping all of that into “the world is in a terrible place” might feel accurate, but it isn’t precise. And imprecision, especially in moments of tension, is dangerous because it leads to the wrong conclusions.

If we think we’re living through collapse, our instincts shift toward despair, withdrawal, or panic. If we recognize that we’re living through stress — serious, uncomfortable, sometimes frightening stress — we’re more likely to respond with clarity, strategy, and resilience.

That distinction matters.

None of this is an argument for complacency. Rising antisemitism should be taken seriously — fought, exposed, and confronted without hesitation. Institutional failures should be named. Social trends that normalize hatred should be challenged.

But reacting effectively requires understanding reality as it is, not as it feels in its most amplified form. Hence, the mistake isn’t thinking things are bad; it’s thinking that bad means we’re losing, because what’s actually happening is more complicated and, in a strange way, more demanding.

The world isn’t in a terrible place; it’s under pressure. And pressure doesn’t just break things — it reveals what’s actually there.