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Most religions build monuments to permanence. Judaism, at the height of the harvest season, tells us to move into a hut.

That alone should tell us that Sukkot is stranger and more radical than we usually make it sound.

We spend the year building walls, acquiring things, strengthening institutions, accumulating money, protecting our families, defending communities, and trying to create some small island of certainty in a profoundly uncertain world. Then Judaism interrupts us and says: Go outside. Leave the solid roof. Sit beneath branches. Eat there. Celebrate there. Invite people in. Look through the gaps toward the sky.

And then, as if the hut were not strange enough, Judaism tells us to pick up a palm branch, a citrus fruit, myrtle, and willow, bind them together, and wave them toward every direction of creation.

It can look primitive from the outside. but it may actually be one of Judaism’s most sophisticated statements about what it means to be a Jew, and the Jewish theory of civilization.

The sukkah begins with a brutal proposition: Nothing we build can save us completely. Not the house, not the bank account, not the career, not the institution, not the political system, not even the country. This does not mean those things are unimportant. Judaism is not a religion of withdrawal from the physical world, but Sukkot insists that we distinguish between building something and worshipping it.

There is a moment in every successful society, and every successful human life, when achievement begins to disguise itself as permanence. We start believing that because something has stood for a long time, it cannot fall. Because we have accumulated enough, we are protected. Because our institutions are old, they are indestructible. Because our walls are high, nothing can get through them.

Jewish history has cured us of that fantasy more times than we would ever have wished. And so every year, Judaism stages a peaceful demolition of our illusions. We leave the permanent house for the temporary one.

But notice something extraordinary: The sukkah is not a bunker. It is not built to keep the world out. Its entire sacredness comes from the fact that it remains exposed to the world. Wind enters it. Heat enters it. Cold enters it. Sounds from the street enter it. Through the roof there are openings to something larger than ourselves. The structure is sufficient to be called a dwelling, but insufficient to create the illusion that we control everything around us.

That may be one of the most Jewish ideas imaginable. Jewish survival has never depended upon making ourselves invulnerable. We have never been invulnerable. Jewish survival has depended upon learning how to remain Jewish while vulnerable. An invulnerable people needs perfect walls; a resilient people knows who it is even when the walls disappear.

That is why the material placed over the sukkah is such a remarkable symbol. The schach (raw, detached plant material) comes from things that grew from the earth but have been cut away from where they originally grew. Branches, reeds, vegetation — once rooted, now detached, they become the covering over a Jewish home. It is difficult not to see the Jewish story in that. We are perhaps history’s most famous uprooted people.

Jews were repeatedly separated from places where generations had lived. Communities moved from Judea to Babylon, across North Africa, through Spain, Poland, Iraq, Yemen, Persia, Russia, Germany, Morocco, America, and countless other places. Languages, clothing, music changed, recipes, and the architecture around us changed. And somehow the Jewish home kept reappearing.

That may be the deeper meaning of Jewish rootedness. A Jew can be uprooted geographically without becoming rootless spiritually. The branch is cut from the ground, and somehow it still becomes shelter.

This is also what makes Israel so emotionally significant to the Jewish People. After centuries in which Jewish life became extraordinarily skilled at portability, Jews again built a national home in the land at the center of Jewish memory.

Yet Sukkot offers an important warning even here: A home should give us belonging, responsibility, and strength, but no home can eliminate uncertainty from human existence. The Jewish answer to insecurity has therefore never been simply to build stronger walls. It has also been to build stronger Jews.

And then we arrive at the four species. The lulav, etrog, myrtle, and willow could hardly look more different from one another. One is tall and rigid. One is fragrant. One is a fruit unlike anything else on the ritual calendar. One grows close to water and can wither quickly without it. Judaism does not tell us to choose the finest symbol among them. It tells us to hold them together.

There is an old Jewish tendency, and a very modern Jewish temptation, to decide which Jews are the “real” Jews. Religious Jews look suspiciously at secular Jews. Secular Jews roll their eyes at religious Jews. Israelis criticize diaspora Jews for not understanding the Israeli experience. Diaspora Jews criticize Israelis for not being more Western. Ashkenazis, Sephardics, Mizrahis, Persians, Yemenites, Russians, Ethiopians, Americans — all of us have inherited different expressions of the same civilization.

Sukkot gives a simple response: Pick them up together. The mitzvah is not fulfilled by admiring the etrog while discarding the willow. Jewish unity does not require Jewish sameness. In fact, the image created by the four species suggests precisely the opposite. Jewish peoplehood works because different things can remain recognizably different while still belonging to the same bundle.

That lesson feels increasingly urgent. A healthy Jewish future cannot be built only by Jews who pray the same way, vote the same way, dress the same way, speak the same language, or relate to tradition in the same fashion. Jewish civilization has survived precisely because it developed multiple forms without surrendering the idea that underneath those forms existed a shared people, shared memory and shared destiny.

The four species are therefore not merely symbols of Jewish unity. They are symbols of a more demanding idea: Jewish unity must be strong enough to contain Jewish difference.

Then we wave them outward in every direction. The gesture refuses to allow holiness to remain confined to a synagogue, a Torah scroll, or a moment of prayer. East. West. North. South. Above. Below. The sacred is not somewhere else. It surrounds us.

That is an especially important Jewish message because Judaism has never been particularly interested in separating the spiritual world from ordinary life. We bless bread. We sanctify wine. We turn meals into rituals, doorposts into reminders, calendars into memory, marriage into covenant, and agricultural produce into religious obligation. Sukkot goes even further. Take the physical world in your hands and then recognize that it belongs to something larger than you.

This may also explain why Sukkot arrives precisely at the harvest. The harvest is the dangerous moment, not because there is too little, but because there is enough. Scarcity naturally produces humility. Abundance can produce amnesia. When the barn is full, the harvest successful and the year productive, a person can begin to believe the oldest lie in civilization: I did this entirely by myself.

Sukkot arrives at that exact moment and orders the successful farmer to leave the farmhouse. Your harvest matters. Your work matters. Your success matters. But none of it makes you God.

For Jews, this idea has significance far beyond agriculture. We have built extraordinary things wherever history has permitted us to build: businesses, universities, charities, synagogues, cultural institutions, scientific achievements, neighborhoods, and eventually a modern sovereign Jewish society. Sukkot does not tell us to apologize for building. It tells us not to confuse achievement with immortality.

That may be why Sukkot is called zman simchateinu — the season of our joy. The timing seems absurd. Joy should belong inside the palace, yet Judaism places it inside the hut. Perhaps because there are two kinds of happiness. There is the happiness that says everything is finally under control. And there is the deeper Jewish happiness that says everything has never been under control, and still we are here.

We are still singing, still eating together, still welcoming guests, still telling the story, still holding the lulav, still teaching children words their ancestors spoke thousands of years ago. We are still blessing, still building, still returning and, yes, still arguing. This is not naïve happiness. Jewish history would make naïveté impossible. It is defiant happiness.

Sukkot asks us to celebrate not because the world has become safe, but because life remains sacred even when it is not safe. Therein contains the secret of Jewish endurance. The Jewish People survived because catastrophe was never allowed to become our entire identity.

We mourned, and then we married. We buried, and then we planted. We remembered destruction, and then we built another house. We told stories about exile while teaching our children how to live. And once a year, we deliberately construct something we already know we will dismantle.

There is profound philosophy of life contained in that act. The fact that something ends does not make it worthless. A meal ends. Childhood ends. Generations pass. Civilizations change. Jewish life has never required permanence in order to produce meaning.

We build anyway. We decorate anyway. We invite people inside anyway. We say the blessing anyway. And then, when the time comes, we take the sukkah apart and begin another year. Maybe that is what all the symbols of Sukkot are trying to tell us.

For thousands of years, Jews have carried that knowledge from generation to generation. Build the house, but remember the hut. Plant roots, but learn how to carry them. Protect the Jewish People, but do not let fear become Jewish identity. Create a strong Israel, but remember that strength alone has never defined us. Hold tightly to who you are, but leave enough room in the bundle for the Jew who looks nothing like you.

And when history once again reminds us that the roof above our heads is thinner than we imagined, look upward through the branches. Then do what Jews have always done: Make a blessing, invite someone inside, and keep building.

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This is a guest essay by Dory Benami, an Israeli-American writer and author of the book “Bad Jew: How October 7 Changed Everything I Thought I Knew.”

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

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Israelis have a word for what I am trying to describe here: ביצים (beitzim).

Literally, it means eggs. In Hebrew slang, it means balls.

Not chutzpah. Chutzpah is audacity. Gall. Beitzim are something else. They are what you need when the choices are bad, the consequences are enormous, and the decision is yours.

I have been thinking about that since October 7th.

I was born in Israel and raised in America, and I have spent most of my life looking at one country partly through the eyes of the other. In America, military service belongs to a relatively small part of society. In Israel, the military runs through families, workplaces, and neighborhoods. The reservist disappearing for months is not an abstraction. He is your cousin, your neighbor, your coworker, the father you saw at school drop-off.

That changes the way Israelis think about leadership. Did you see it coming? Were you prepared? Did you listen to the right people? When your assumptions failed, did you adjust? When everyone else was losing his head, did you keep yours?

Maybe that is one reason Israel has spent so much of its history turning generals into politicians.

But a great commander does not necessarily make a great prime minister. A commander is given a mission. A prime minister has to decide what the mission is, what it is worth, and when it ends.

For me, that question begins with Golda Meir, the four prime minister of Israel, serving from 1969 to 1974, as well as our country’s first and, to date, only female prime minister.

Golda looks different to me after October 7th. For most of my life, the 1973 Yom Kippur War arrived already interpreted. Israel was surprised. The intelligence failed. The first days were disastrous. Israel recovered. Golda eventually resigned.

Then October 7th happened, and some of 1973 became easier for me to understand. October 7th showed me what it feels like to wake up and discover that assumptions you trusted were wrong and institutions you believed were watching had failed to see what was in front of them. I had my own reckoning afterward, with Israel, America, antisemitism, security, and my own Jewishness. Somewhere in that process, I started looking at Golda again.

My family makes that complicated. My uncle Yossi Peer’s younger brother was Ze’ev Peer, Zeevik. He was 19 when the Yom Kippur War began and served in a tank unit. On October 7, 1973, his tank was hit by Egyptian antitank fire in Sinai. The commander was killed. Zeevik got out wounded with two other crewmen. The other two were recovered. Zeevik was not. His body has never been found.

I never met Zeevik. I was not born yet. I know his story because my uncle Yossi lost his little brother and never got him back. My uncle Udi had a different story. He happened to be off when the war started. His best friend was not. He was killed and is buried in Ness Ziona. I never met him either. Udi survived and carried guilt about that for the rest of his life. I do not pretend to know exactly what that felt like.

This is how the Yom Kippur War came down to me. It was not only something I learned about in history books. My family had been shaped by people who did not come home. So when I reconsider Golda after October 7th, I am not looking for a reason to excuse what happened in 1973.

Israel’s political and military leadership was surprised, and Golda was prime minister. The failures before the war remain part of her record. But so does what happened after the attack began.

Then there is one of the darkest questions from those first days. Later testimony from Arnan “Sini” Azaryahu described Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan raising a nuclear “demonstration” option amid fears about the Golan Heights front. According to Azaryahu, two other cabinet members opposed it and Golda rejected it. Other accounts, including Seymour Hersh’s “The Samson Option,” allege that Israel took additional nuclear preparatory steps. The evidence remains contested, and Israel has never publicly confirmed possessing nuclear weapons.

What matters here is the decision Golda faced. The people in that room did not know how the war would end. They were contemplating what Israel should do if its conventional defenses failed.

America was part of Golda’s calculation too. Henry Kissinger was born into a Jewish family in Germany, fled the Nazis for America, and by October 1973 was the United States secretary of state. His biography connected him intimately to the Jewish experience, but his job was to represent American interests. Washington ultimately mounted a massive airlift to replace Israeli losses while Kissinger was simultaneously thinking about the Soviet Union, the Arab states, oil, détente and where the war would end.

Israel and America were allies. They were not the same country.

That tension has never disappeared. An Israeli prime minister has to know when Washington is right, when to push back, how much American support Israel can depend on and what happens when the two governments agree about the threat but disagree about the response.

Sometimes restraint takes beitzim too.

Golda was 75 and privately undergoing treatment for lymphoma while all of this was happening. I do not need to turn her into the honorary man implied by that old line about her being “the only man in the cabinet.”

She was Golda. And Golda had beitzim.

On May 14, 1948, with fighting underway and neighboring Arab armies preparing to enter the war, David Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of the State of Israel. There was no modern IDF, no Iron Dome, and no American military relationship remotely resembling today’s. Hindsight turns dangerous choices into dates on a calendar.

Levi Eshkol may be the least glamorous example, which is partly why he belongs here. In May 1967, Egypt moved forces into Sinai and closed the Straits of Tiran. Israel mobilized, but Eshkol first pursued diplomacy and accepted American requests not to initiate hostilities while Washington explored an international response.

When diplomacy failed, Eshkol expanded his government, gave Moshe Dayan the defense portfolio, and authorized the June 5th strike. Six days later, the strategic map of the region had been transformed.

Eshkol did not know on June 4th that there was going to be a Six -Day War. He knew the straits were closed, Egyptian forces were in Sinai, diplomacy had not solved the crisis, and waiting carried risks of its own.

There is something important about Eshkol handing the defense ministry to Dayan. Beitzim does not require pretending you can do everything yourself. A prime minister has to decide who should be in the room and who should be given authority.

Menachem Begin’s record complicates any attempt to equate nerve with aggression. In 1981, his government ordered the airstrike that destroyed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor. But Begin also made peace with Egypt and agreed to return Sinai. Those decisions pointed in opposite directions, but both carried enormous strategic and political consequences. Beitzim is not simply a willingness to use force.

In 1976, Israeli and Jewish hostages were held at Entebbe Airport in Uganda. The rescue plan required commandos to fly across Africa, defeat hijackers and Ugandan forces, free the hostages, and bring them home. On July 3rd, Rabin’s government approved the military plan. About an hour later, he told the chief of staff: “Let the troops take off.”

Entebbe became Entebbe because it worked. Rabin had to decide before anyone knew that it would.

During the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein fired Scud missiles at Israel. The United States pressed Israel not to retaliate, fearing that an Israeli strike could damage the coalition against Iraq. Shamir’s government chose restraint.

That same year, Operation Solomon airlifted more than 14,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel in roughly 36 hours. One decision was not to strike back. The other was to move thousands of Jews out of a collapsing country with extraordinary speed. The point is not that the decisions were equivalent. They were not. It is that leadership does not always look like charging forward.

Ariel Sharon makes the distinction between commander and prime minister particularly clear. His military reputation was built on audacity: Unit 101, paratroopers, becoming a general, and the Suez crossing in 1973. I think Sharon’s beitzim were easier to see before he became prime minister.

As prime minister, the courage demanded of him was less cinematic and more consequential. His government launched Operation Defensive Shield in 2002. Three years later, a man associated for decades with the Israeli Right carried out the unilateral disengagement from Gaza, fought much of his own political camp over it, left Likud and formed Kadima. General Sharon could charge. Prime Minister Sharon had to calculate.

A commander asks how to take the hill. A prime minister has to decide whether the hill is worth taking.

Which brings me to Benjamin Netanyahu.

October 7th happened while he was prime minister. That fact is not going anywhere. But responsibility and a complete historical explanation are not the same thing. We still do not know everything that was warned, dismissed, assumed, or misunderstood in the years and hours before the attack.

The record will become fuller as investigations, testimony, and archival material accumulate. People who sat in the rooms will tell their stories. Historians will argue about what Netanyahu knew, what the military knew, what the intelligence services believed, what Hamas understood about Israel, and which assumptions failed. That is why I keep coming back to Golda.

I grew up with half a century of hindsight about 1973. We do not have that with October 7th. wWe are still inside it.

The American relationship is different now too. Earlier this year, I sat in the room at the Israeli-American Council National Summit in Florida and listened to retired General Michael “Erik” Kurilla, the former commander of U.S. Central Command, talk about Iran. He recalled a conversation with U.S. President Donald Trump and U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff, in which Kurilla said, “If we’re ever going to take action, I want to phone a friend, and that friend is Israel.”

Kurilla explained that Israel had unique capabilities and emphasized the friendship between the two countries. Israel still needs America, but America also sees strategic and military value in Israel. An Israeli prime minister still has to know what to do when the interests of two close allies overlap, and when they do not.

Looking across these decisions, what interests me is not aggression. Some of the choices were to attack. Others were to wait, withdraw, negotiate, rescue, or restrain. Eshkol waited in 1967 and then authorized war. Golda rejected proposals for a preemptive strike in 1973 and then had to lead through the consequences. Begin bombed Osirak and made peace with Egypt. Shamir absorbed Iraqi Scuds without retaliating. Sharon spent much of his life associated with taking territory and then, as prime minister, withdrew from Gaza.

That is what I mean by beitzim. The person sitting in the prime minister’s office does not get the history book first. There is intelligence, pressure from Washington, generals arguing, families waiting for soldiers to come home, and sometimes no good option at all.

Someone still has to decide. Someone still has to have beitzim.

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This is a guest essay by David S, based in Los Angeles, and Joshua Hoffman, the founder of “Future of Jewish.”

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

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Boy George is probably not the first person you would expect to hear about in an essay about the Jewish future.

The eyeliner, the hats, the unmistakable soundtrack of the 1980s — none of it immediately suggests a lesson in Jewish peoplehood.

Yet this year, the British pop star released a song called “We Will Dance Again,” invoking the young people murdered at the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023. His declaration was simple: “I stand with the Jews.”

There is something both moving and deeply unsettling about how much those words mean to us. Moving because solidarity, when it comes without an asterisk, can feel like oxygen. Unsettling because a non-Jewish musician affirming that Jewish people deserve his support should hardly be a remarkable event. It should not require an explanation, much less an act of professional or social courage. Yet here we are, grateful for a sentence that ought to be ordinary.

Perhaps that is one of the harder things to absorb about the years since October 7th: discovering how many relationships came with conditions we had never understood. We thought certain friendships, institutions, and communities would know what to say when Jews were massacred. We assumed that people who spoke eloquently about the humanity of strangers would recognize ours. For many Jews, the shock of the attack was followed by another, more intimate shock: realizing whom we could no longer count on.

We discovered that some people could discuss Jewish suffering only after placing it inside a political argument. Before acknowledging a murdered family, they needed to establish their credentials, announce their positions, and explain the context. There is always room for serious discussion about history, war, and the responsibilities of governments. But when every expression of sympathy for a Jewish victim requires a preliminary negotiation, something has gone badly wrong.

That experience can become consuming. We keep track of who said something, who said nothing, who signed which letter, and who quietly disappeared. We celebrate the unexpected ally and spend hours arguing with the predictable enemy. We find ourselves mentally revising the guest list of people we once considered friends. Some of that attention is necessary. Trust should respond to evidence. But there is a danger in allowing the Jewish future to become a referendum conducted by everybody else.

An entire people cannot spend its life refreshing the screen to find out whether it has been granted permission to exist. Nor can we allow our sense of possibility to rise and fall with the opinions of actors, professors, musicians, or people whose principal achievement is having a large social media following. Their choices can matter. They do not relieve us of making our own.

At some point, the question has to move beyond who is standing with us. We have to ask what we are prepared to do with our own solidarity.

The promise of dancing again offers a place to begin. At Nova, people had gathered for something wonderfully unremarkable: music, friendship, the pleasure of being young and alive. They were not assembled to make a geopolitical argument. They did not owe the world an explanation for being there. The horror of their murder includes the destruction of that ordinary freedom — the ability to inhabit a moment without imagining that someone might kill you for it.

Dancing requires a certain trust in the world. You stop monitoring yourself so closely. You surrender a little control. You assume that the stranger beside you is there for roughly the same reason you are: to enjoy the music, to feel connected, to have a good night. Terror attacks that trust as surely as it attacks the body. It tries to make every future gathering feel like a risk, every celebration feel irresponsible, every moment of happiness feel like something that can be punished.

To envision Jews dancing again is therefore to envision something larger than survival. Survival can mean merely reaching tomorrow. Dancing suggests that tomorrow might contain something worth anticipating. A wedding. A celebration. An evening when a parent does not spend every minute checking the phone. A future in which Jewish life has room for more than defending its right to continue.

None of this means that grieving people owe anyone a display of resilience. Those who have suffered do not have to turn their pain into an uplifting lesson for the rest of us. Some losses remain losses. Some empty chairs will always be visible to the people who know who should be sitting in them. The responsibility belongs to the wider community: to help create a world in which the bereaved can live without being asked either to forget or to remain forever inside the worst day of their lives.

That future requires practical work. A country needs functioning institutions, an economy, businesses willing to expand, and people willing to commit resources before the outcome is certain. Communities need teachers, gathering places, and families who believe that what they are building will endure. A damaged life may need years of support after the public has moved on to another story. Hope becomes consequential when someone accepts responsibility for making it possible.

This is where the word “bond” becomes particularly useful. We speak about the bonds of family, faith, and peoplehood as though they exist independently of our choices. We assume that because we feel connected, the connection is secure. But anyone who has maintained a friendship, a marriage, or a relationship across continents knows that a bond can be sincerely felt and still poorly tended. Affection does not automatically become attention. Concern does not automatically become help.

The bond between Jews in Los Angeles and Jews in Jerusalem cannot consist entirely of shared anxiety whenever the news becomes unbearable. If we belong to the same people, that relationship has to include some investment in one another’s ordinary lives and long-term prospects. Otherwise, we become relatives who call only when someone is in the hospital: genuinely concerned, perhaps, but largely absent from everything that makes a life.

An Israel bond gives that relationship a concrete form. It is a loan to the State of Israel, with repayment and interest governed by the terms of the particular bond. The program began in 1951, and Israel Bonds reports an uninterrupted record of on-time principal and interest payments. That history matters, even as any investment still requires attention to its terms and risks.

There is something compelling about the structure itself. A donation responds to a need; a loan also anticipates a future relationship. It establishes a date beyond the present crisis. It assumes that there will be years ahead in which obligations are met and life continues. In the Jewish experience, where so much energy has gone into surviving the immediate threat, committing resources to a future date carries an emotional significance that a financial statement cannot fully capture.

A bond has a maturity date. Hatred would like us to believe that the Jewish story has an expiration date. Choosing to invest is one practical way of refusing to organize our lives around that expectation. We are making plans beyond the emergency. We are entering into an agreement with a future we intend to help sustain.

This is especially meaningful because the news trains us to experience Israel almost entirely in the present tense. The latest attack, the latest political dispute, the latest diplomatic confrontation. Everything is urgent; everything demands a reaction. An investment asks us to widen the frame. What do we expect to exist in five years? What do we want to be stronger in ten? What are we doing now that will still matter when today’s arguments have been replaced by tomorrow’s?

Of course, an investment cannot settle every argument about Israel, nor should it be expected to. Jews disagree about governments, military decisions, religion, economics, and almost everything else. Supporting Israel’s future does not require pretending that every decision made by its leaders is wise. It requires recognizing that the lives and prospects of millions of people cannot be reduced to our opinion of whichever politicians currently hold office.

There is an immaturity in treating a country as though it were a person who must earn our friendship by agreeing with us. Countries contain children, elderly people, political opponents, exhausted parents, ambitious students, and citizens who are themselves furious with their government. To withdraw all concern for their future because we dislike a leader is to make those people disappear behind the very politics we claim to take seriously.

For Jews, the relationship also reaches beyond the politics of the moment. Israel is part of our language, our calendar, our prayers, our family histories, and our understanding of where we come from. That does not dictate a position on every policy. It does explain why the connection cannot be switched on and off like a subscription. A serious relationship can withstand disagreement. It should also generate responsibilities that survive disagreement.

Nor should Israel’s right to a future depend on assembling a sufficiently impressive list of its contributions to the world. Its medical advances, scientific research, and technological achievements deserve recognition. They reveal a society doing far more than the narrow image of perpetual conflict allows outsiders to see. But Israelis should not have to cure a disease or invent a device to establish that their children deserve safety.

Sometimes, in our eagerness to defend Israel, we accept a degrading premise without realizing it: that Jewish existence must continually demonstrate its usefulness to everyone else. We present our accomplishments as though arguing against our own eviction. Pride in achievement is healthy. The suggestion that our rights depend on achievement is not. The Israeli who has never invented anything has exactly the same claim to a peaceful life as the scientist whose work benefits millions.

The deeper case for investing is about participation. Those of us living outside Israel can easily become spectators, even intensely emotional ones. We follow developments, defend positions, and experience every crisis through a screen. We may finish a day feeling depleted by something to which we have contributed very little beyond our attention. The exhaustion is real. So is the gap between feeling involved and being useful.

An investment is one way to close that gap. Supporting an Israeli business, sustaining a Jewish institution, educating our children, and showing up for our communities are others. The point is not to establish a single financial test of Jewish loyalty. People have different means and different responsibilities. The point is to ask whether our concern produces anything that can outlast the feeling — whether someone, somewhere, is stronger because we cared.

This also changes the meaning of solidarity. We often speak of it as a public declaration, something announced loudly enough that other people can hear. But much of the solidarity that sustains a people is quiet and repetitive. It is a standing commitment, a renewed membership, a purchase, a lesson taught, a relationship maintained. It rarely generates the emotional satisfaction of winning an argument. Its value is that something exists afterward that otherwise might not.

That is what makes an Israel bond a meaningful gift for a wedding, a bar or bat mitzvah, or a new baby. Such occasions already express confidence in continuity. We gather around a child because we expect that child to grow. We celebrate a marriage because two people have decided to build something together. A gift connected to Israel’s future places that personal milestone within a larger story: Your life is your own, and you also belong to a people whose next chapter you will help write.

Imagine what that gift communicates when it is explained properly. Years from now, when this bond matures, you will be older. You will know things you do not know today. Your life will have changed in ways none of us can predict. And at this moment, while celebrating who you are becoming, someone chose to connect your future to the future of your people. The financial value matters. So does the act of expectation.

Jewish history is often taught as a succession of catastrophes, interrupted by brief periods of relief. Yet catastrophe alone cannot explain why we are still here. Persecution explains what threatened Jewish continuity. It does not explain what sustained it. For that, we have to look at the people who kept teaching children, establishing households, building communities, and making commitments whose rewards they might never personally see.

They carried grief, but they also prepared for celebrations. They preserved the names of the dead and chose names for newborn children. They remembered destroyed communities and took responsibility for living ones. They gave the next generation more than a record of what had been done to us. They passed on something to belong to, something to practice, something to love.

That is the responsibility we have inherited. We cannot allow Jewish identity to become an elaborate system for monitoring antisemitism. Our children deserve to know why Jewish life is worth living before they are asked to understand why others resent it. They deserve songs that are sung for pleasure, gatherings that are not responses to tragedy, and a connection to Israel that includes curiosity and affection alongside concern.

Boy George’s solidarity deserves our gratitude. It should also prompt us to examine our own. We cannot control how many people stand beside the Jewish People, but we can decide how firmly we stand beside one another. We can give that commitment a place in our calendars, our communities, and, where appropriate, our investments. We can make decisions that assume the Jewish future is something we are responsible for building.

The next Jewish wedding will need musicians. The next generation will need schools. The next Israeli startup will need someone willing to believe in it before it succeeds. Somewhere, a child who has not yet been born will grow up to celebrate beneath a chuppah, surrounded by people who made that future possible without ever knowing their name.

If we want a future filled with dancing, we have work to do before the music starts.

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 Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.

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There is a strange tradition at the United Nations General Assembly.

A world leader approaches the green-marble podium, clears his throat, expresses his unwavering commitment to peace, international law and human dignity, and then discovers that every word in the English language except genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and Israel has mysteriously disappeared.

This year’s General Assembly has been particularly impressive. Apparently, the dress code was dark suit, tasteful tie, and the most apocalyptic description of Israel one could squeeze into the allotted speaking time.

There were statements so demonstrably at odds with the record that they seem to have escaped from the podium before a staffer could whisper, “Sir, they have Google.”

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey went first and set an almost impossibly high bar for irony. Gaza, he announced, had become “the most inhumane and shameful concentration camp of our time.” Israel, he said, possessed a “genocidal mindset that can never get enough of killing.”

Then, almost without stopping to appreciate his own performance, Erdoğan called on the international community to recognize the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus and described Turkey as “an island of stability amid conflicts in its vicinity.” You have to admire the efficiency. Most politicians require two separate speeches to contradict themselves this elegantly.

Northern Cyprus exists because, following a Greek-junta-backed coup in 1974, Turkey intervened militarily and the island was effectively divided. The self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is recognized by precisely one UN member state: Turkey. A substantial Turkish military presence has remained there for decades. Erdoğan had therefore managed to condemn territorial occupation while simultaneously asking the United Nations to legitimize the territorial arrangement created by his own country’s military intervention.

This is less “speaking truth to power” and more “please do not look at the Mediterranean while I am talking.”

Then came Jordan’s King Abdullah II, who accused Israel of forced displacement and warned that the Israeli government’s “expansionist appetite is now a regional threat.” He also presented the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative as essentially a magnificent peace proposal that Israel inexplicably refused, suggesting that the obstacle was simply an Israeli government unwilling to say “yes.”

That is a wonderfully streamlined version of Middle Eastern diplomatic history. It is the Netflix adaptation.

The actual Arab Peace Initiative offered Israel normalization with Arab states, which was significant, but it also required full withdrawal from territories captured in 1967, a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital and a refugee settlement tied to UN Resolution 194. Those were not decorative footnotes. They were among the central issues the parties had been fighting about for decades.

You may believe Israel should have accepted those terms. You may believe it should not have. But describing the initiative as an uncomplicated peace offer that Israel simply rejected is like describing a mortgage as “the bank offered me a free house, but for some reason there was paperwork.”

History also did not begin on June 5, 1967. After the 1948 war, Jordan controlled the West Bank and the Old City of Jerusalem and incorporated the West Bank into the kingdom in 1950. Jordan occupied the Old City, and the Jewish Quarter surrendered to the Arab Legion in May 1948, with its Jewish civilians evacuated — making lectures implying that territorial complications materialized suddenly when Israel arrived in 1967 rather historically adventurous.

The Jordanian-Israeli relationship becomes even more surreal when you descend from the UN podium to the plumbing. Under their 1994 peace treaty, Israel undertook to sell Jordan 50 million cubic meters of water annually at a subsidized price; subsequent arrangements expanded water cooperation. Such is Middle Eastern diplomacy: Condemn your neighbor as an expansionist regional menace before lunch, coordinate essential water supplies with him after lunch, and try to be home by dinner.

France’s Emmanuel Macron provided perhaps the cleanest factual blooper of the week when, while discussing the West Bank, he declared: “Hamas was never active in the West Bank.” His government later said he meant that Hamas does not govern the West Bank. That would certainly be a more defensible statement. Unfortunately, it is not the sentence that came out of his mouth.

Hamas being active in the West Bank is not an obscure allegation requiring access to Mossad archives. Hamas itself has said so. In August 2024, its al-Qassam Brigades claimed responsibility for a deadly shooting near Mehola in the Jordan Valley and specifically described the attackers as its “West Bank-based fighters.” Days later Reuters reported Hamas fighters clashing with Israeli forces in the West Bank; Hamas has repeatedly acknowledged members and operations there.

Macron managed to say Hamas had “never” been active in the West Bank in a building with Wi-Fi.

There was an especially awful irony that the comment came two days after an Israeli was murdered in a West Bank shooting. Hamas praised that attack, though importantly it did not claim responsibility, so it would be inaccurate to use that particular murder as proof of Hamas authorship. Fortunately for anyone interested in facts, we do not need to. Hamas’ own previous statements already demolished Macron’s “never.”

Antonio Guterres may have delivered the week’s most revealing performance of selective memory. Gaza, he declared, had suffered “a scale of killing and destruction unlike anything I have witnessed in all my years as Secretary-General.”

Unlike anything he has witnessed? Guterres became Secretary-General in 2017. During the broader Syria war, the UN estimated 306,887 civilians were killed between 2011 and 2021. In Yemen, a UN study estimated the war had caused 377,000 deaths by the end of 2021, including direct and indirect deaths. And in Sudan, researchers estimated more than 61,000 deaths in Khartoum State alone during the first 14 months of the war, with the national toll believed to be substantially undercounted.

Guterres apparently remembers every Israeli bulldozer but has misplaced entire wars. That is not impartiality. It is selective outrage wearing a UN badge.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian was considerably more generous because he gave fact-checkers something measurable. Iran, he told the General Assembly, had responded to its enemies, “but we did not hit civilian populations.”

Nevermind that Iranian cluster-munition missiles striking Israel during this year’s fighting were well-documented. One cluster missile killed an elderly couple near Tel Aviv and damaged a major train station. Another strike hit a residential building in Tel Aviv, where civilians were evacuated with injuries. Other footage documented damaged homes, vehicles, and residential neighborhoods.

Pezeshkian also portrayed Iran as the victim of terrorism and complained that “they kill, we are sanctioned,” an extraordinary bit of political minimalism in which decades of Iranian regional hegemonic policy apparently vanished backstage while the president was walking to the microphone. Presenting Iran solely as a hapless bystander is the geopolitical equivalent of arriving halfway through “The Godfather” and wondering why everyone is being so mean to the Corleones.

Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani then delivered the full sampler platter: genocide, apartheid, settler terrorism, and desecration of Al-Aqsa. He declared that what happened in Gaza was “genocide in every sense of the word” and accused Israel of responding to criticism by throwing around accusations of antisemitism.

That is quite a closing argument from a country that simultaneously advertises itself as the region’s “trusted mediator and peace facilitator.” Apparently mediation now means sitting between two parties, putting on a referee’s shirt, and then spending 10 minutes explaining why one team is genocidal, apartheid, terroristic, and desecrating holy sites. Qatar has somehow reinvented neutrality as prosecution with complimentary refreshments.

Spain’s Pedro Sánchez decided to bypass all of this irritating legal ambiguity altogether. Spain, he announced, was “unequivocally condemning the genocide that Netanyahu continues to perpetrate in Gaza.”

The more revealing question with Sánchez is not merely what he says about Israel, but why Israel seems to become most useful whenever his government is drowning in problems at home. Critics of Sánchez have explicitly accused him of using his increasingly confrontational foreign policy as a distraction from domestic scandals.

The timing certainly gives them material. Just days before his UN appearance, his wife, Begoña Gómez, was ordered to stand trial on influence-peddling and embezzlement charges; in July, his brother David was convicted of administrative misconduct and banned from public office for nine years; and Sánchez’s Socialist Party and inner circle have been engulfed by a string of corruption investigations.

Israel is an extraordinarily convenient subject: Every minute Spain spends debating Netanyahu is a minute it is not debating Sánchez. If La Moncloa (the official residence and workplace of Spain’s prime minister) had a smoke detector, it apparently wouldn’t beep when the building caught fire. It would start shouting “Gaza!”

And then there was Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who announced that UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese “must not be silenced for telling the truth.” Apparently the position of UN Special Rapporteur has quietly been upgraded to Oracle of Delphi.

Perhaps next year the United Nations can install a small light beside the microphone. Green means “documented fact.” Yellow means “political argument.” Red means “big, fat lie.” And if someone says Hamas has never operated in the West Bank, the microphone simply shuts off and opens Google.

It would not solve the Middle East, but it might improve the General Debate.

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This is a guest essay by Simone Rodan, a senior envoy for Europe at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

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

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In September 2001, friends of mine traveled to South Africa for the “United Nations World Conference Against Racism.” They were young European Jews, and they went to Durban because they believed its cause was theirs.

The promise was extraordinary: a worldwide gathering against racism in a country that had only just defeated apartheid. There would be discussions of slavery and its legacy, of discrimination against migrants, of the persecution of minorities.

Alongside the government delegations, thousands of people from hundreds of NGOs would meet at a parallel forum. This obviously included Jewish student organizations. As children of the generation that had survived the Holocaust in Europe, my friends expected to find people with whom they shared a common fight.

What they found was very different.

Twenty-five years later, the United Nations is preparing to commemorate the declaration adopted there, at a meeting in New York on September 28th. But before another round of speeches about Durban’s achievements, I wish those attending would remember what my friends experienced.

The place to start is Joëlle Fiss’s “Durban Diaries.” Joëlle, then president of the European Union of Jewish Students, who had kept a diary throughout the conference, describes the students setting up their stand: a two-meter wooden table, some pamphlets about antisemitism, an Israeli flag. She writes about how they had wanted to show that friendship with Israel and a commitment to fighting racism could perfectly well go hand in hand. But little did they know that this was not how others saw it.

A Swedish human-rights activist asked Joëlle how she dared raise antisemitism while Palestinians were dying. Joëlle explained that she was European, that she did not always agree with Israel’s leaders, but that she had come to discuss racism. “Murderer,” the woman replied.

That was only the beginning. A crowd gathered. “Israel is committing genocide!” someone shouted. Then: “You should not be allowed to have a stand! You Jews, you have become racists!” There was fear, for the first time amongst the Jewish participants.

Around them circulated pamphlets praising Hitler, caricatures of bloodthirsty Jews, copies of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” When one NGO asked that the Arab Lawyers Union lose its accreditation over its antisemitic material, the forum’s steering committee replied: “Sorry, we cannot do anything. This brochure is a political expression.”

At 9:50 p.m., Joëlle recorded that the NGO assembly endorsed the right of victims to define their own discrimination. Ten minutes later, a delegate moved to delete the Jewish caucus’s paragraph on antisemitism. That paragraph addressed attacks on Jews and synagogues, and the accusations used to delegitimize Israel’s existence.

“I am against antisemitism, but I am also against the genocide against the Palestinians,” the delegate said. Thirty-nine voted to remove the paragraph. Three voted to keep it.

Everything is in that “but.” Opposing antisemitism became conditional on acknowledging and rejecting Israel’s inherent racism and genocidal nature. The right of victims to define their own discrimination had lasted exactly 10 minutes. The only way for Jews to be heard was if their testimony did not interfere with a verdict against Israel that had already been reached.

The NGO forum’s final declaration branded Israel a racist apartheid state guilty of genocide and called for its complete isolation. Mary Robinson, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, declined to recommend it to the governmental conference. And on September 3rd, the United States and Israel walked out.

I have read Joëlle’s diary many times. For Durban’s 20th anniversary, I decided to republish it for the American Jewish Committee. I strongly believed then and now that Durban’s significance does not lie in the presence of antisemites at an anti-racism conference but in the willingness of everyone else to accommodate them, to bend towards them — and in the language that made the accommodation so incredibly easy.

Durban represented a sea change. It marked, in a sense, the beginning of the corruption that would plague our institutions, our language for the decades to come.

The French historian Pierre-André Taguieff was among the first to analyze what happened at Durban. Traditional European antisemites, he noted, had accused Jews of cosmopolitanism: of being foreign, incapable of belonging to the nation. Now Jews were accused of embodying the West itself, including its racism, its nationalism, and its colonial ambitions. They had been “Westernized,” even “Aryanized,” and turned into a kind of “super-white man.”

“The figure of the persecuted Jew,” Taguieff observed, “remains the paradigm of persecuted humanity.” Others could claim that place for themselves while assigning Jews the role of their own persecutors. At Durban, the comparison of the Jewish state to the Nazis made this very apparent.

I saw exactly the same thing happen in Geneva in 2009, at the Durban Review Conference. By then I had worked for France’s ambassador for human rights and had seen from the inside how badly things had slid. Unsurprisingly to me, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took the podium. The Holocaust-denying Iranian president used an anti-racism gathering to attack Israel, describing its very creation as having taken place on the pretext of Jewish suffering.

Students from the French Union of Jewish Students decided once again to demonstrate courageously. They brought rainbow wigs and red clown noses. They interrupted his speech, shouting “Racist!” and threw the noses toward him. Security removed them and Ahmadinejad kept speaking. But the message was clear, and it was probably the best description of the world we had entered: a world of masquerade and clowns.

Once again, the final text was welcomed as a diplomatic achievement. But a cleaned-up resolution could not erase everything that had happened. Rhetorical violence was out in the open, while the final written statement kept a relative appearance of respectable political language.

Beneath these failures lay very different visions about the world and about the purpose of human rights. The Universal Declaration had allowed citizens all over the world to challenge their own rulers, defend minorities, and condemn abuses committed by their allies. The distance between those principles and political reality was often enormous. Still, there was a standard against which failure could be measured.

Pierre-André Taguieff describes what happened in Durban as the “de-universalization” of anti-racism. Universal values came to be treated as an expression of Western domination, while movements opposing the West were welcomed as forces of liberation. Judgment increasingly depended on which camp a government or movement belonged to. How it treated actual people became secondary.

The UN Human Rights Council, created in 2006 to replace a discredited commission, made Israel the only country in the world with a permanent agenda item of its own. That has been just one of the stains the world has so easily lived with.

After October 7th, everything we saw in Durban back then has only taken a different dimension. Addressing an international audience on the morning of October 7th in an English press release, Hamas issued a press release in which it invoked colonialism, apartheid, international law, and genocide. Much of the activist world already understood Israel through those terms. They allowed Hamas to present itself as a liberation movement even after the massacre of civilians, in the eyes of too many people.

Of course, that does not make everyone who uses those terms necessarily a supporter of Hamas. But it does expose the consequences of a worldview in which one side’s violence can always be explained by its oppression, while the other side’s claims are always considered dangerously suspicious. Universal human rights should have made the murder, rape, and kidnapping of civilians impossible to excuse. Yet this is not what we have witnessed.

I would have liked us to repair the institutions that allowed this confusion to take hold. That would have meant confronting governments and organizations we preferred to accommodate. It would have meant accepting an argument, a diplomatic incident, perhaps the collapse of a conference. It would have meant walking away, many times. Yet, somehow protecting multilateralism always took precedence over protecting its purpose — not realizing that its very purpose was sliding away.

A few days after the Durban conference ended, the planes struck New York and Washington. Looking back, I associate both events with the end of an illusion I had grown up with in postwar Europe. I had believed that we had learned enough from our history to know what needed defending and what should be named.

Twenty-five years later, the loss of confidence is profound. Authoritarian leaders have learned that the vocabulary of human rights can be borrowed as easily as it can be ignored. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, he claimed to be stopping a genocide in the Donbas and he called Ukrainians Nazis. He and others like him have every reason to rejoice over the war the West fights among itself and with the rest of the world over Israel.

Every time an international institution, whether the International Criminal Court or the UN Human Rights Council, stretches its universal principles to apply it specifically to Israel, it means the institutions meant to fight against ruthlessness lose more credibility.

I still care about what those institutions were created to do. That is why another commemoration without an honest reckoning is so utterly dispiriting. On September 28th, I would like everyone to either boycott the event or at least for someone at the podium to speak about the Jewish students who went to Durban to fight racism, and about what their treatment should have taught us.

My friends believed in that fight. I went into human-rights work because I believed in it too. In Geneva, the students with the red noses were trying to defend what the conference itself was mocking. That message should have been heard loudly and clearly. Instead, they were escorted out of the room.

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On Thursday at the United Nations General Assembly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke eloquently, while correctly attacking accusations that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza.

But his address was also bombastic, combative, and short on vision. It was a “me against the world” speech that offered defiance without a corresponding sense of possibility.

Netanyahu had every reason to challenge the accusations against our country. An Israeli prime minister should not stand before an international audience as though Jewish self-defense requires a permission slip. Nor should he pretend that every government lecturing Israel about morality has earned the authority to deliver the lecture.

But I wanted to hear an argument bigger than our enemies. I wanted the prime minister to explain what the world gains from the Jewish People, what it gains from the Jewish state, and what it throws away when it decides that excluding us is more important than improving its own future — because the Jewish contribution to civilization is not something we need to whisper about.

Across the societies in which Jews have made their lives, they have contributed as physicians, merchants, scientists, teachers, writers, musicians, entrepreneurs, and public servants. They have built institutions, expanded knowledge, created employment, and enriched cultures. Often, they accomplished these things while navigating restrictions their neighbors never had to consider.

And when societies gave Jews greater freedom to participate, those societies gained more of what Jews had to offer. The beneficiaries were never only Jewish.

That is a history worth telling from the podium of the United Nations, especially to an assembly in which some representatives appear more comfortable discussing the supposed dangers of Jewish power than the demonstrable benefits of Jewish participation.

I would have begun with Persia.

In 539 BCE, Cyrus conquered Babylon and permitted Jewish exiles to return to Jerusalem and restore their religious life. Jewish memory preserved a Persian ruler as a liberator. His imperial order could accommodate Jewish identity and the Jewish attachment to our ancestral homeland.

Imagine an Israeli prime minister looking into the cameras and telling the Iranian people: Before your rulers taught you to chant against us, our people remembered one of your rulers with gratitude. Before they made hostility toward Israel a national mission, there was a different chapter in our relationship.

That history belongs to Iranians, too. Their government has no right to imprison their imagination inside an endless confrontation with the Jewish state.

Cyrus understood something that the region’s aspiring strongmen might consider: Another people’s identity does not diminish your own. Recognizing Jewish belonging did not make Persia less Persian. A civilization confident in itself could make room for a people with its own history, faith, and national aspirations.

Then I would have taken the assembly to Iraq.

Jews had lived in that land since the Babylonian exile, long before the modern Iraqi state existed. They became participants in its commerce, public life, literature, and music. Sassoon Eskell served as an early finance minister. Jewish families helped build the country they considered home, alongside their Muslim and Christian neighbors.

These were people contributing to Iraq’s future. Then their Jewishness became grounds for questioning whether they belonged in it.

The Farhud (pogrom) in 1941 brought murder and devastation to Baghdad’s Jews. Subsequent persecution and insecurity helped destroy the foundations of a community that had endured for millennia. By 1951, approximately 124,000 of Iraq’s 135,000 Jews had immigrated to Israel.

Consider the enormity of that loss. A country lost neighbors who knew its language, understood its institutions, loved its music, and possessed generations of accumulated experience. It lost the businesses their children would have established, the patients they would have treated, and the ideas they would have developed. You can seize a family’s house. You cannot confiscate the contributions its grandchildren would have made.

Iraq’s subsequent disasters had many causes, but the destruction of its Jewish community was itself a disaster for Iraq. A society had driven away part of its own human inheritance and mistaken the damage for an assertion of national identity.

Many of those Jews went to Israel. The country that was supposed to be the source of the problem became the home in which they rebuilt their lives. What Iraq rejected, Israel received.

Europe offers another lesson in the staggering foolishness of deciding that Jewish talent is a national contaminant. Nazi Germany expelled Jewish scholars and scientists from institutions they had helped distinguish. Laboratories and universities were subjected to racial ideology. People who had contributed to German intellectual life were stripped of their positions because the regime preferred an acceptable ancestry to an exceptional mind.

America benefited from some of those who escaped. Its doors were far too narrow, and its own antisemitism was real. Yet the refugees who reached American institutions strengthened the country that received them. Research on German Jewish refugee chemists has documented substantial increases in American invention in their fields, including through the younger scientists they trained.

The benefit did not end with the arrival of a scientist. It continued through students, colleagues, discoveries, and institutions. Knowledge multiplied. Opportunity passed from one generation to another. This is how a country gains from welcoming people who have something to contribute. It gains what they build and what they enable others to build.

The Jewish contribution to America (and, really, the greater West) belongs proudly within that story. Jews helped strengthen the country’s scientific, commercial, and cultural life, alongside Americans of countless other backgrounds. America gave generations of Jews opportunities that other societies had withheld. Jewish Americans helped make those opportunities valuable for everyone.

Now return to Iran. In 1979, the revolutionary government executed Habib Elghanian, a prominent Jewish industrialist and community leader. His death terrified the country’s Jewish and business communities. Here was a man who had helped build Iranian industry, killed by the new order governing his country.

There is a terrible contrast between Persia’s memory of Cyrus and the Islamic Republic of Iran’s treatment of a Jewish builder. One chapter offered restoration. The other delivered a warning about the dangers of belonging.

Today, Iranians endure repression and profound economic hardship. They deserve a future larger than the ideological obsessions of their rulers. Imagine what Iranian and Israeli scientists, entrepreneurs, physicians, and engineers could accomplish if they were free to work together. Imagine how much energy could be released if confronting Israel ceased to be treated as an achievement in itself.

How many ordinary Iranians have been asked to sacrifice opportunities for a confrontation they did not choose? How many more generations are supposed to inherit it?

This is the invitation I wanted Netanyahu to place before the world. Look at the record of Jewish contribution. Then look at what the Jewish state is offering.

Israel’s partnerships already extend far beyond diplomatic ceremonies. Through MASHAV, its international development agency, Israel shares experience in agriculture, water management, medicine, education, entrepreneurship, and other fields. Established in 1958, just 10 years after modern independence, the agency made sharing practical knowledge part of the young country’s international role. A country still building itself was already working to help others build.

Countries that welcome Israeli expertise gain opportunities to improve harvests, manage scarce resources, develop businesses, and expand scientific cooperation. The value of those relationships reaches people who may never attend a diplomatic reception or think much about Middle Eastern politics. It reaches them through practical improvements in their lives.

So what, precisely, is accomplished by making those partnerships unacceptable?

A university that excludes Israeli researchers has produced an exclusion. It has not produced a discovery. A government that refuses cooperation has established the limits of its willingness to cooperate. It has not solved its people’s problems.

If your campaign succeeds in preventing a useful partnership, be honest about the result. Someone will go without an opportunity so that you can feel satisfied with your position.

Jewish dignity does not depend on usefulness. We do not owe anyone an invention in exchange for the right to exist. But when a movement presents Jewish participation as a problem, the record of Jewish contribution is a devastating answer.

I would have wanted Netanyahu to say:

“To every country willing to work with us, Israel offers a partnership. Bring your researchers, your students, your entrepreneurs, and your ambitions. Let us build projects that improve lives. Let us measure success in problems solved and opportunities created. You will find a people eager to contribute, because contributing is part of how we understand our place in the world.”

And then I would have wanted him to explain what Israelis have continued doing since October 7th — because that is where the argument becomes extraordinary.

After the murder of families in our homes, the slaughter at a music festival, and the taking of hostages, Israel faced a national trauma whose reach cannot be understood through casualty figures alone. In a country of Israel’s size, the distance between a headline and someone you know is painfully short. The grief entered families, workplaces, classrooms, and entire communities.

In the war that followed, Israel confronted threats across seven fronts. Our people were called upon to defend our country while sustaining the life inside it. The same society had to fight, mourn, care for its wounded, support displaced families, and keep functioning.

And Israelis kept going to work.

The significance of that deserves more than a passing compliment about resilience. People continued researching, treating patients, teaching, designing, founding companies, and maintaining international partnerships while carrying a burden that virtually every other country would struggle to comprehend.

The results are measurable. According to the Israel Innovation Authority’s 2026 report, Israeli technology companies raised approximately $14.6 billion in 2025, and high-tech exports reached approximately $85 billion. The report also documents serious pressures, including a decline in domestic research-and-development employment. The achievement is that creation continued despite those strains, with investors and partners continuing to commit to Israeli capabilities.

Behind those figures are people who had every reason to feel exhausted, frightened, or consumed by what our country had endured. We nevertheless kept making things the world wanted and needed.

That is the Israel I wanted the United Nations to hear about: a country that suffered a devastating assault on its life and continued investing in life. A people who carried grief into the working day and still found the strength to create something beyond it. Even after October 7th, even through a war spanning seven fronts, even while parts of the world demanded our isolation.

Imagine what these people could accomplish with more partners and fewer enemies. Imagine what the world could gain if more governments approached Israel with a proposal instead of another denunciation.

We are going to keep building. Jewish history gives us ample reason to believe that, and Israeli life since October 7th has demonstrated it again. The question before the world is whether it wants to build with us, or keep explaining to their own children why they refused.

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

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

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Human beings have spent thousands of years getting better at building walls.

We began with mud and stone. Then brick, concrete, steel, gates, locks, alarms, and cameras.

We learned how to keep out the weather, strangers, animals, and enemies.

Much of civilization could be understood as one long attempt to put thicker walls between ourselves and everything that might hurt us.

And then, once a year, Judaism tells us to leave the house.

For seven days on Sukkot, which begins Friday evening, we step out of the permanent structure we have spent the rest of the year making comfortable and secure, and we enter something deliberately less permanent.

A sukkah has walls, but it is not sealed off from the world. Wind can move through it. Sounds enter. Light enters. Its roof is made from branches rather than concrete, and through the gaps above us we remain aware of the sky. It is a strange religious ritual when you think about it: We spend our lives trying to make ourselves safer, and Judaism asks us to voluntarily enter a structure that makes us less protected.

Maybe the point is not that walls are bad. Maybe the point is that we need to think much more carefully about the walls we build. Walls are necessary. They protect us. They define where one space ends and another begins. They allow us to preserve things that would otherwise disappear. That is certainly true for the Jewish People.

Jewish survival has always depended, in part, on boundaries. We preserved our Hebrew calendar when the surrounding world followed another one. We preserved our languages, rituals, foods, prayers, and stories when the dominant cultures around us had their own. Jews married Jews, built Jewish communities, taught Jewish children, maintained Jewish law, and created spaces in which Jewish life could reproduce itself from one generation to the next.

A people that preserves nothing eventually has nothing left to preserve.

There is a tendency today to treat boundaries as inherently exclusionary, as though anything that distinguishes one community from another must somehow be morally suspect. But Jewish history tells us otherwise. Distinctiveness is not necessarily hostility. Sometimes it is simply the mechanism by which a civilization survives. A Judaism without boundaries would eventually become indistinguishable from everything around it.

But there is another danger. Walls that protect us can eventually become walls that imprison us, and that is true of communities as much as it is of people. We all build walls, often after being hurt. We decide we will never trust that kind of person again. We protect ourselves from disappointment by lowering expectations, from rejection by never becoming completely vulnerable, and from being wrong by surrounding ourselves with people who think exactly as we do.

The wall usually makes sense when we build it. That is what makes walls so difficult to recognize later. We rarely construct emotional walls because we want to become isolated. We construct them because something happened that convinced us isolation was safer.

Over time, though, the thing that kept danger out can begin keeping life out too. A person becomes so afraid of being hurt that nobody can get close enough to love them. A community becomes so afraid of losing its identity that it forgets how to welcome anyone into it. A political or ideological group becomes so afraid of opposing ideas that disagreement itself starts to feel like betrayal.

Protection slowly becomes confinement.

The sukkah offers a different architecture. It has boundaries. There is still an inside and an outside. Judaism does not ask us to stand exposed in an open field and pretend that boundaries do not matter. But neither does the sukkah allow us to pretend that safety means complete separation from everything outside. The world still enters. You can hear your neighbors. You can feel the wind. You notice whether the night is warm or cold. You look upward and see that your ceiling does not completely separate you from what is above it.

Perhaps that is the kind of boundary human beings actually need: strong enough to protect what matters, but open enough to let life in. It is a dynamic that feels especially important for Jews right now.

The years since October 7th have given many Jews powerful reasons to become more guarded. People discovered hostility in places where we assumed they we accepted. Friendships changed. Institutions disappointed us. Campuses, workplaces, cultural spaces, and political movements that had spoken endlessly about inclusion suddenly seemed unable to extend the same understanding toward Jews.

For many Jews, the natural response has been to turn inward: Spend more time with Jews, support Jewish businesses, join Jewish organizations, date Jewish, travel to Israel, build stronger Jewish communities, and be more careful about whom you trust.

In fact, some of it may be exactly what Jewish life needs. But there is a question worth asking as we build those walls: How do we protect ourselves without allowing the people who hate us to determine what kind of people we become?

There is a version of Jewish survival that becomes so focused on defense that survival itself becomes the entire purpose of Jewish life. We cannot allow that to happen. Judaism cannot become merely a bunker from antisemitism, and Jewish identity cannot be constructed entirely in opposition to the people who dislike Jews. We did not survive thousands of years simply so that we could become exceptionally skilled at surviving.

We survived in order to live — to study, argue, celebrate, build families, make art, tell jokes, eat together, create communities, wrestle with God, wrestle with one another, and to build a sukkah. That may be one of the most beautiful things about this holiday.

The sukkah is not a fortress. It is a place for a meal. We do not enter it preparing for siege. We bring food. We invite guests. We decorate it. We sit with family and friends. We sing. We make kiddush. We turn an intentionally imperfect shelter into a place of joy. That is an extraordinary Jewish instinct: The structure is fragile, but the response is not fear. The response is hospitality.

Perhaps this is why Sukkot comes when it does. Only days earlier, on Yom Kippur, we were inside synagogues examining ourselves. We confessed, reflected, and asked difficult questions about who we had been and who we wanted to become. Then Judaism moves us outside. It does not allow introspection to become permanent withdrawal. It tells us to build something, invite people in, eat, celebrate, and look at the sky.

The movement from Yom Kippur to Sukkot may itself contain a lesson. There is a time to turn inward, but eventually we have to come back out. There is a time to protect ourselves, but eventually someone has to be allowed through the door. There is a time to build walls, but we should periodically examine whether the walls we built years ago are still serving the purpose for which we built them.

Perhaps this is one of the questions Sukkot quietly asks us every year: Which boundaries in my life are protecting something important, and which ones have simply become walls? Which parts of my Jewish identity need strengthening, and which parts have become unnecessarily closed? Which people am I wisely keeping at a distance, and which people am I keeping outside because I am afraid of what might happen if I let them in?

There are no simple answers, nor should there be. Judaism does not tell us to tear down every wall. The Jewish People would not have survived without walls. Human beings cannot live healthy lives without boundaries, and communities cannot preserve themselves without defining what they stand for. The sukkah offers something more difficult than the command to simply open ourselves to everything.

It asks us to construct boundaries without confusing them with fortresses. To preserve without suffocating. To protect without disappearing. To remain distinctly Jewish without losing our curiosity about the world outside. To be strong enough to know who we are and secure enough to leave a door open.

That may be the architecture Sukkot is asking us to practice, because the hardest walls to examine are not the ones made from concrete. They are the ones we stopped noticing we had built. And perhaps once a year, Judaism asks us to leave the permanent house precisely so that we can see them again.

Not every wall needs to come down. Some need to remain. Some need to become stronger. Some simply need a door. And occasionally, we need to remember to leave enough room to see the sky.

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This is a guest essay by Paul Finlayson, a Canadian professor who writes the newsletter, “Freedom to Offend.”

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

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If Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels had access to TikTok, Instagram, X, Telegram, smartphones, influencers, super bots, and an algorithm that could monitor your every subconscious predilection, we might remember the Second World War rather differently.

Let’s talk about Allied bombers over the Ruhr Valley. A bomb drops. A school building collapses. A German child is yanked desperately from the rubble. Now start the video right there. Not five years earlier. Not Poland. Not Paris. Not Russia. Certainly not Dachau.

Begin with this poor child.

Add mournful music. But no Drake, please. Add a caption: ALLIED BOMBS KILL GERMAN CHILDREN.

Thirty million views before breakfast. Mark Ruffalo starts crying on his Instagram and reposts it. A professor who hasn’t had a real job in 30 years explains that the bombing must be understood within the broader hegemony of Anglo-American imperialism. This same professor can’t order a Big Mac combo at McDonald’s without referring to colonialism.

Someone at Harvard starts building an encampment. Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, lounging in Berlin with his blue verification badge, wonders which pagan deity he followed made him wait until the 1940s to start using this wondrous social media. Goebbels sees his like count climbing and thinks the 1000-year Reich should last 1,500 years.

The joke contains a serious point. Our information ecosystem has become a monstrous snack counter, and people love snacks. Some live on nothing but snacks.

A proper meal involves work. History is a meal, not a snack. Context is a meal. Reading a serious book is like a grand feast that nobody will pay for. You have to sit down, chew, compare competing claims, and perhaps run into some unpleasant fact that shoves aside what in your mind was held with a grand sense of superiority. You might even have to change your mind, and that — in the age of social media — is often thought to mean you have a character defect.

The modern political snack is considerably easier. Look at Israel: genocide, apartheid. ethnic cleansing, baby killers, Nazis, fill in modern blood libel.

No definitions required. No footnotes. No painful questions about what happened before the photo, what the other combatants are doing, and questions such as whether hostages are being held, whether ununiformed fighters hide under civilian neighbourhoods, whether warnings were given, whether evacuation corridors existed, or whether the proper meaning of a term is even close to the way it is being hurled around online.

It is not as if the Jews did not already have enough historical experience with this type of thing. Queue the history reel, they’ve been accused over the centuries of ritual murder and using Christian blood to make bread, of poisoning wells, spreading plague, hexing harvest, fomenting communism and, with admirable ideological dexterity, still being capitalist overlords who control the banks, the press, and much of the planet. We should not forget the banks and the space lasers.

It is truly quite an indictment. Jews are blamed for both sides of almost every argument. Heads I win, tails Jews lose. Tough game.

Back to the snacking metaphor. Those inconvenient complications are vegetables. And nobody came to TikTok for boiled parsnips.

To their great shame, academics have become some of the age’s great snack pushers. One might once have expected the schools to be the place where slogans went to be dissected, but they are the place where they were invented. But this happened in Goebbels’ time too, so we should not be surprised.

Complexity is exhausting, nuance is dopamine-free, and a sufficiently fashionable accusation can accelerate through an academic department with considerably less resistance than a rumour through a high school dance.

Gen Z, to be sure, must be said to have been raised inside the snack bar. This is not an accusation of stupidity. It is an observation about the intellectual dining culture. A generation trained by platforms scientifically set up to consume information in clips, captions, short videos and fragments is, of course, going to be vulnerable to political messages crafted in such a palatable form. The marvel is not that this generation eats snacks.

The marvel would be if they suddenly demanded a seven-course meal that meant pulling out the intellectual cookware. Goebbels would have understood all of this immediately.

Nazi propaganda was highly skilled at depicting Germany as both conqueror and victim. Germany was forever being encircled, betrayed, humiliated, and forced to defend itself. Germany proclaimed itself the true Christian nation. Any German aggression was justified, of course, as retaliation. German violence was a necessity to protect the motherland, and behind virtually every calamity always stood the perennial scapegoat and villain of European political mythology: the Jew.

Pause a second. Now give that operation an iPhone.

Let’s return to the Ruhr Valley. Another bombing raid. Another crumbled cathedral. Another German mother running with an injured child. The camera does not always have to lie, but AI video creation could come in handy. Even without falsification, the power remains. The suffering can be entirely real.

The lie is in what is left outside the frame. No Warsaw. No invasion of France. No Poland. No V-1 rockets screaming into London. No night of the long knives. No caricatures of beaked-nosed Jews on brick walls. No deportations. No death camps. No explanation of why the bombers are over Germany in the first place. Just the rubble and the pain.

That is what modern propaganda has learned to do so incredibly well. You do not always need false photographs. You need true photographs stripped of history, and devoid of context. You need to know how to crop.

The Anti-Defamation League’s most recent Global 100 survey estimates that 46 percent of the world’s adult population has significant antisemitic attitudes. That does not mean 46 percent of humanity is secretly spitting and polishing their jackboots in the garage, but it is alarming. It means that familiar negative stereotypes about Jews remain extraordinarily widespread.

And let’s be honest, opinions don’t form in a linear progression; they are shaped by pushing people past tipping points. People tend to believe what they want to believe. For the skillful propagandist, that is all they need.

Propaganda, of course, does its best work when it does not need to create its raw material. It just activates what is already there.

Goebbels was no fool and would not open TikTok by announcing, “Guten Morgen, let me tell you why Jews must be killed.” Yes, even TikTok has standards. Goebbels would start off with the German child. Then another German child. Then a poor, grieving German mother. Then Hamburg. Then Dresden. Then the questions would roll out: Why are the Allies so cruel? Who secretly benefits? Is there a secret Jewish plot that has brought on all the pain of the Weimar Republic?

Then some dim-witted young man with 600,000 followers would explain that he wasn’t taking sides at all. He was merely “posing questions.” Right. The wonder of propaganda is that it does not always have to make you believe the lie. Sometimes it just needs to make you doubt the truth.

Imagine 1944 if it were conducted according to today’s rules of public discussion.

A streaming influencer would soberly ask Winston Churchill whether Russia, the United States, and Britain’s response has become “disproportionate.” A League of Nations official, draped in false empathy, would express deep concern over Germany’s deteriorating humanitarian situation.

A movie star or a blue-haired faculty member, both bloated with hubris, would post a black square for the victims of Hamburg. Someone else could make up a civilian casualty statistic that omitted every military and historical consideration and announce that all the moral questions are answered by dint of the fact that words have escaped their lips. A university society would howl that the Royal Air Force is genocidal.

At a rally at the University of Guelph, professors and students would march with signs that said, “From the Rhine to the Sea, Germany will be free!” Even Goebbels might at this point have asked everyone to dial it back.

This is satire. Nazi Germany is not Gaza. Israel is not 1944 Britain. Hamas is not the German military. Historical analogies become ignorant when people treat them as equations. The comparison here concerns propaganda, emotional manipulation, and the amazing vulnerability of a culture that, though caught in a dense forest of informational noise, seems unconcerned with differentiating the mighty living oak from a rotten branch lying on the forest floor.

Canadian lawyer and author Warren Kinsella’s “The Hidden Hand” is helpful in this context. His argument carefully explains how anti-Israel information infrastructure that exploded into public view immediately after October 7th did not simply spontaneously appear from within the vapours of immediate moral outrage. Networks, messaging strategies, social-media accounts, and organizing machinery were already there beforehand.

It is difficult to argue against the proposition that Hamas and its ideological fellow travellers have shown great aptitude in the information war. Hamas and their fellow travellers understand the snack counter.

Think about it: An Israeli military briefing that discusses such boring material as operational constraints, tunnel systems, targeting procedures, evacuation routes, hostage rescue, the laws of armed conflict, and the strategic implications of an enemy embedded within a civilian population could drag out 20 minutes, far outside the modern attention span. A photograph of a dead child works in a nanosecond. Guess which one triumphs within the battlefield of Instagram.

And now return once more to Essen.

Imagine this choice offered up to an American college student in 1944. On one screen: a 200-page discussion of Hitler’s invasion of Europe, Nazi genocide policy against the disabled, the Jews and the Roma, the strategic importance of the industrial Ruhr, German war production, and the moral and military case for bombing industrial targets. The other screen: a crying German child.

Swipe.

This creates an ugly incentive that we don’t want to discuss. If civilian suffering leads to diplomatic and political damage for your enemy, then it is not a stretch to say that civilian suffering has immense propaganda value.

Slow down on this point, for that proposition should horrify all because of what it leads us to. If we state it, though, it will create outrage, and outrage, in our public discussions, now substitutes for thought.

The sad reality here affects something older than the algorithm: the Jew. And this takes us back to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. He would have fallen in love with our century — because we have manufactured the most powerful information-distribution system in human history and then secretly designed it to reward speed, anger, tribalism, and emotional volatility. Goebbels did well in his day going old-school with newsreels and newspapers; imagine what he could have done by feeding Germans our modern digital intellectual snack diet.

Goebbels wouldn’t have had to persuade Americans or Britons that Hitler was a lovely chap. That would have been pushing it. He would just have had to make people believe that those bombing the Ruhr were monsters too. Show Essen. Show the carnage and above all show the child. Do not show what came before. Serve up the snack.

When somebody finally arrived carrying the proper slow-cooked and full meal, you can be sure most of the audience would already have gone home, possibly humming Deutschland über alles — the historic German National Anthem, which translates to “Germany above all else.”

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This is a guest essay by Tomer Persico, a Senior Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute and author of “In God’s Image: How Western Civilization Was Shaped by a Revolutionary Idea.”

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

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We need an explanation that’s more than “ignorance” if we want to get to the bottom of a guitar-playing, Hezbollah-sympathizing Western student.

Ignorance is of course ubiquitous, but there’s something much deeper going on here, certainly when we realize that very learned people share such support, and at times, indeed, admiration.

I am talking about the support, by the radical left, of Islamist terrorism, which often taken as a form of legitimate “resistance” and as a liberation movement; more specifically, the interpretation, easily proven wrong, that Islamist terrorists form national liberation movements, or any kind of liberation movement in the colloquial modern sense for that matter.

The conception of Islamic terrorist movements, specifically Hamas and Hezbollah, as liberation movements, has become common in radical circles. The Anti-Defamation League collected dozens of statements to that effect about Hamas issued by student organizations between October 7 and 9, 2023. Of course, we shouldn’t expect too much from students attending elite universities. But what of an acclaimed intellectual like Judith Butler, who in 2006 asserted that “understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important.”

At about the same time, another scholar, Norman Finkelstein, wrote that Hezbollah’s capture and killing of Israeli soldiers was “a noble gesture.” And after October 7, 2023 he stated, “If we honor John Brown’s armed resistance to slavery, if we honor the Jews who revolted in the Warsaw Ghetto — then moral consistency commands that we honor the heroic resistance in Gaza.”

Butler takes the same position. At a conference in France in March 2024, she felt it was “honest and historically correct” to claim that the “uprising” of October 7th was “an act of armed resistance” and that “it is not a terrorist attack.” In other words, Palestinian resistance is paragliding into civilian populations to kill, rape, and kidnap whoever they find.

To bring a final, grotesque example of this, we can turn to Peter Beinart’s 2025 book, “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning.” Beinart fully condemns Hamas’ actions on October 7th, but never once uses the word “terrorism” to describe them or “terrorists” to describe Hamas. For Beinart, Hamas members are always “fighters,” and Hamas isn’t a terrorist organization but an “insurgent group” or a “guerrilla” organization.

Hamas is clearly portrayed in the book as a liberation movement. Beinart states:

“October 7th has more in common with the murder, torture, and rape of thousands of Europeans in newly independent Haiti in 1804, or the Fort Mims massacre of white settlers by Creek Indians in what is now Alabama in 1813, or the Lari massacre by Mau Mau rebels seeking to overthrow British colonialism in Kenya in 1953 — gruesome, pitiless attacks by oppressed peoples resisting dispossession.”

For Beinart, Hamas is simply another iteration in a long tradition of liberation movements. Brutal, no doubt, because liberation from oppression is never easy nor gentlemanly. But what do you expect? Hurt people hurt people and decolonization is not a metaphor. In the end, just as we see the freed slaves of Haiti as heroes, we must also see Hamas fighters (don’t say terrorists) as such.

The analogy to the enslaved and the natives is of course essential to the criticism of Israel as a colonial power and the justification and smoothing over of Hamas’ atrocities. It makes it possible to trivialize the acts of savagery committed by these movements and to legitimize almost any barbarity inflicted on Israelis and Jews.

But I think there’s more here than a tactical concession used for condemnation of a hated country or people. There’s a deeper transformation going on here, in the thought of certain circles within the radical Left. There is a shift in the very meaning of progressivism. In order to make this clear we need a quick dive into the history of terrorism.

The most useful framework for this would be David Rapoport’s analysis of “four waves” of modern terrorism: the anarchist, the anti-colonial, the New Left, and the fundamentalist religious.

We begin in the 19th century, when “terrorism” gradually migrates from the term as used in the French Revolution (violence deployed by a revolutionary government to intimidate and transform society) toward its modern meaning: violence against states and civilians in order to generate intimidation and achieve an ideological goal.

The first wave of terror was revolutionary and anarchist, beginning with the Russian Narodnaya Volya (“People’s Will”), founded in 1879 and responsible for the assassination of Alexander II in 1881). It spread quickly and involved a large number of radical revolutionaries and activists.

Modern principles of popular sovereignty — political authority deriving from “the people,” all considered equal — as well as the modern understanding of political revolution as a good thing, Enlightenment values of liberty and equality, and radical Left ideologies such as anarchism, combine to create an extraordinary sequence of assassinations (such as Empress Elisabeth of Austria, King Umberto I of Italy, and U.S. President William McKinley) and public bombings, all seeking an audience which is provided by the burgeoning press and the quickly expanding use of the telegraph.

World War I transforms the ideological environment. The breaking up of empires and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s belief that self-determination change the main motivating principle for terrorism from radical revolution to national self-determination. David Rapoport therefore identifies the second wave as nationalist and anti-colonial.

Ireland and the Irish Republican Army are an early paradigm, carrying out hundreds of attacks in the early 1920s; Egyptian nationalist terrorism operated at much the same time; and terrorist activity during the Indian struggle for independence began in 1925 and lasted till independence in 1947. Later cases include the Arab Revolt in British Mandate Palestine (from 1936 to 1939) and Jewish paramilitary organizations such as the Irgun and the Lehi (from the late 1930s to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948).

Without normatively evaluating their actions, it’s important to note that we again witness what clearly are liberation movements. All are struggling against colonial oppression and for the modern conception of a people’s right to self-determination. The strategic logic is to make colonial rule politically, economically, and normatively non-viable, and the importance of this wave is that contrary to the former: It succeeds, colonial forces withdraw, and nation states are born.

David Rapoport’s third wave (from the 1960s to the 1980s) offers varied manifestations of New Left movements. Stimulated particularly by the Vietnam War, the Cuban Revolution and Third World Communist and Maoist revolutionary movements, and infused with radicalization gestating in Western universities, this wave presents many of the infamous organizations of the 1960s to the 1980s: the Red Army Faction, the Weather Underground, Action Directe, the Japanese Red Army, and so forth.

This wave is also when the Palestinian struggle takes center stage. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) is founded in 1964 and attracts Westerners to its cause. Organizations that devote themselves to this cause are crucial to the transformation of terrorism during this period, helping make it transnational and international, while engaging in daring, media-spectacular operations. This is when we are introduced to airplane hijackings, hostage taking, embassy seizures, and attacks at international events (such as the 1972 Munich Olympics).

They are all, at least in their perpetrators’ own understanding, anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, and all aim to promote equality and liberate the downtrodden.

The fourth wave is where things dramatically change. David Rapoport dates the fourth wave precisely to 1979, stressing two geopolitical events: the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. To these he adds the seizure, in the same year, by hundreds of extremist Sunnis from 12 different countries, of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, taking over the holy site and proclaiming that the Mahdi had arrived. These developments inspire a wave of terrorist activity centered around fundamentalist religion, specifically Islam.

Iran’s Islamic revolution makes it into a global exporter of terrorism, funding and directing terrorist activity and indeed whole terrorist organizations. In Afghanistan, fundamentalist religion humiliates and drives off a secular superpower, arousing religious enthusiasm in soviet republics with large Muslim populations.

Islamic forces rise in Bosnia; Kashmir heats up. Suicide bombings and self-martyrdom become the distinguishing terrorist tactics in this wave, and it extends all the way to al-Qaeda and ISIS, both ruthless and extremely media-savvy, and both devoting their violence to the realization of a contemporary caliphate in which Islamic rule replaces modern nation states and modern humanistic and liberal values.

While Islamic groups are responsible for the greatest number and deadliest terrorist attacks in this wave, other religions did not sit idly by. The Jewish Underground of the early 1980s attempted to blow up Al Aqsa, Islam’s sacred shrine in Jerusalem, with messianic hopes, and Aum Shinrikyo (combining Buddhist, Hindu, and Christian theology) released nerve gas on the Tokyo subway in 1995, seeking to restore “original Buddhism” and anticipating “Armageddon” in 1997.

The transformation this wave brings is scale: Attacks become more numerous and considerably larger, more deadly, and, in the case of Iranian-sponsored terrorism, state-funded. From an ideological perspective, with the fourth wave violence justified primarily through revolutionary, national and historical narratives becomes violence embedded in metahistorical or transcendent narratives. Legitimation for action comes not from “the people” but from God.

This leads to the greatest break between the previous three waves and the fourth. As David Rapoport writes: “The first three waves aimed to achieve various goals the French Revolution had introduced. But the Fourth Wave was hostile to the French Revolution’s aim of creating a world of secular nation-states.”

But he does not develop this point, which is most important: Within the fourth wave, terrorism for the first time does not insist its struggle is devoted to the realization of Enlightenment values. In fact, it rejects them and it clearly states its fighting to overthrow them.

The first three waves justified themselves within the normative grammar of Enlightenment modernity. Even when they radically rejected liberalism, they championed popular sovereignty, emancipation, equality, national self-determination, and secular historical progress.

The fourth wave is the first major wave of modern terrorism whose distinctive ideological contribution is not another radical interpretation of the Enlightenment, not another modern promise of emancipation, but a principled challenge to the Enlightenment values and indeed to Western modernity. It is in fact a rebellion against universal humanism and the values of freedom and equality, not to mention secularity, as understood in the tradition of Western Enlightenment.

What, then, can we make of the insistence of major radical Left figures on treating this wave as if it were another version of the previous three, as if it was promoting liberty and equality in the sense that they themselves espouse?

One answer to this question is that the radical Left has shifted its understanding of progressivism from a substantive conception to a positional one. A movement is no longer judged by its vision, but by where it stands in a structure of power: colonized versus colonizer, oppressed versus oppressor, East versus West, resistance versus empire.

For the Left in the past, the question was what a certain movement seeks (universal emancipation, equality, self-government, liberation from hierarchy). But in the current Third-Worldist imagination, one simply asks against whom does a certain movement struggle. Progressive status has migrated from ends to position. It no longer depends on what you stand for, but on whom you stand against. Fourth-wave terrorist organizations are thus judged not by their ideology or agenda, but by their status relative to other powers.

This, of course, gets boosted to a ridiculous degree when the side doing the oppressing and being fought against is Israel, which the radical Left considers the most extreme manifestation of Western, colonial, imperial, capitalist, white civilization, making any organization engaged in destroying it the veritable savior of humanity. Within this context, Hamas and Hezbollah are treated as “progressive” not because of the society they want to build, but because of the society they want to destroy.

A second answer shifts attention from the position occupied by the terrorists to the identity of the power they resist: the West. What is most damning about Israel is not that it is, in their eyes, a colonial project, but that it is a Western colonial project. Indeed, we all know these groups hardly have any issue with Arab, Turkish, Persian, Russian, or Chinese colonialism or oppression. Here, then, the axis to make judgement on the basis of isn’t colonizer versus colonized, but West versus non-West.

The West is the problem, and anyone resisting it is ipso facto laudable.

If so, the fact that the fourth wave of terrorism rejects Enlightenment values is not a flaw on its part, but precisely what makes it so attractive. Enlightenment for these radicals is, of course, not the promise of reason, science, separation of church and state, personal freedom, and equality, but “the dialectics of Enlightenment” that inescapably bring about an industrialized, mechanized society of alienated one-dimensional men schematizing their lives according to instrumental reason in the great panoptical prison which is Western capitalist society.

Progress itself acquires a negative connotation. Therefore, a movement not only need not offer a more egalitarian, liberal or humane form of society, but may qualify as emancipatory precisely by negating the civilization understood to have become an industrialized dungeon.

Any resistance to that is of course liberating “resistance,” and this is exactly what fundamentalist Islam offers — the same that already in 1978 fascinated French philosopher Michel Foucault, who wrote fawning articles in praise of Ruhollah Khomeini’s coming Shia revolution in Iran, the same that on 9/11 orchestrated what French philosopher Jean Baudrillard hailed as an “absolute event” aimed at the heart of the “system of generalized exchange.”

What we find here, then, is a deep yearning for liberation from the West, construed as a positive, “progressive” move. A movement’s refusal of Enlightenment humanism is no longer a disqualification from “progressive” credentials; in fact it can be seen as the more radical, more authentic decolonization, because it refuses not just territorial occupation but the entire framework of Western modernity, which itself is read as one big (bureaucratic, disciplinary) colonizing project.

The counter-Enlightenment content of the movement (divine sovereignty, collapsing separation of religion and state, patriarchy, hierarchy between believer and unbeliever, opposition to sexual equality, rejection of personal autonomy) becomes what is specifically liberating about it.

This also explains a curious asymmetry: Western liberal order is judged against its own universal claims (equality, freedom, democracy, human rights) and condemned whenever it fails to live up to them. Its enemies, by contrast, are exempted from those standards not only because the liberal order is itself suspected of being a Western imposition, but because subverting Enlightenment values is the “progressive” thing to do.

Western Enlightenment values are thus both the standard by which the West is condemned and an instrument of domination which the non-Western dissenter is praised for undermining.

The enslaved people that freed themselves in Haiti, or the Native Americans that fought in Alabama, never wanted anything beyond their freedom. They had no plans for world conquest nor the religious coercion of others. They rebelled against their oppressors, and the atrocities they committed were done for the liberation of their community. Neither rebellion was religious, let alone fundamentalist, and neither had messianic aims.

As much as we condemn some of their actions, they were liberation movements in the common-sense, colloquial meaning of the term.

Moreover, the enslaved and the indigenous Americans carried out terror in the name of values linked to the Enlightenment tradition and the history of humanist struggles against oppression: freedom, self-determination, human dignity.

But the analogy to the enslaved, the natives, and numerous national liberation movements, as far-fetched as it is, is essential to the criticism from the radical Left, because it alone allows the members of the fourth wave of terrorism to be recognized as heroes struggling against villains. It alone allows the atrocities done by those movements to be glossed over and it alone allows any abomination administered towards Israelis to be justified.

But there’s more here than simply finding a way to justify violence against Jews, facts and morals be damned. This is not only an intellectual compromise born out of convenience. We are witnessing a shift, within radical circles, in the vector of normativity, with a new understanding of progressivism not as a humanistic endeavor, but as code for the “oppressed” or as a medal to be bestowed on whoever and whatever undermines the West.

Consequently, we are presented not only with Ivy League students but with acclaimed intellectuals that seemingly miss the vital differences in ideological character between successive waves of terrorism, in practice changing the very meaning of progressivism, and contributing to the fulfillment of a deeply held wish, sometimes subconscious and sometimes spoken out bluntly, for the destruction of Western civilization.

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This is a guest essay by Iola Kostrzewski, a writer, organizer, and Jewish community advocate exploring faith, identity, and civic life.

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

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There are people I owed apologies to before Yom Kippur. There are relationships I needed to examine if some need to outright end. Things I said too sharply. Things I should have said sooner. Times I was wrong. Times I was right but cruel about it. Times my ego mattered more to me than repairing something.

That is what teshuvah required of me.

But this year I realized there is somebody else I owe an apology to: to myself.

I owe myself an apology for every inch I gave to people who proceeded to take a mile. I owe myself an apology for believing that everybody who approached me wanting to “have a conversation” actually wanted a conversation. For the hours I spent explaining Jewish history to people who had already decided what Jewish history was. For explaining Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews to people who had already decided every Israeli was a “white European settler.”

I owe myself an apology for watching people who spent years telling everyone to “believe Black women” suddenly discover approximately 17 exceptions to that rule the moment the Black woman speaking was also a Jew. Apparently, “believe Black women” came with an asterisk: unless she disagrees with me about Israel.

And I am tired. Because after hearing “Free Palestine” thousands of times, I have started asking what should be a very basic question: Okay, what does that mean?

Not what is the slogan. What is the plan? What does Palestinian freedom actually look like? What happens to Israelis? What happens to Hamas? What happens to Palestinian leadership? What borders are they proposing? How are Palestinians protected? How are Israelis protected? What happens the morning after everybody gets the thing their Instagram graphic says they should get?

I am not asking because, if they are going to claim Palestinian freedom as their cause, I think they should care enough about Palestinians to have thought beyond the slogan.

Instead, too often, I ask what comes next and eventually we arrive at Jews being “white colonial settlers.” And suddenly I am explaining Jewish ethnicity, migration, exile, North Africa, the Middle East, and antisemitism to somebody whose education on this subject seems to have occurred almost entirely through social media.

Sometimes the conversation gets racist astonishingly fast. That has been one of the stranger experiences of the last few years: watching people who have built entire identities around being anti-racist become remarkably comfortable explaining my identity back to me because my Blackness and my Jewishness have collided in a way that inconveniences their politics.

I am a Black Jewish woman. My Jewish family is Moroccan. I have been to Israel. I plan to return to Israel. I hope one day to live there. Israel is part of my Jewish life.

None of those things means they have to agree with my politics. They don’t make me a spokesperson for Israel. And my identity does not automatically make me correct. But if their understanding of Israel requires pretending Jews like me don’t exist or explaining to me why my Jewishness doesn’t count in quite the way I think it does, maybe their framework needs some work.

Because I have spent years listening. I have listened to Palestinians. I have listened to Muslims. I have listened to Israelis. I have listened to Jews who disagree profoundly with me. I have listened to people advocating two states, one state, confederation, separation, coexistence, and things far messier than anything that fits onto a protest sign. And listening has changed some of my thinking. That is what listening is supposed to do.

There are people who have challenged me and made me reconsider things I thought I understood. There are Palestinian perspectives I needed to hear. There are Jewish perspectives that have made me deeply uncomfortable that I still needed to hear.

But I have also learned that there is a difference between someone challenging me and someone waiting for their turn to tell me why I am wrong. There is a difference between activism and performance. There is a difference between criticizing Israel and deciding Jews are uniquely undeserving of complexity. And there is an enormous difference between wanting peace and wanting their side to win.

So these days I have another question: What are they building?

Because I know what they want to tear down. They’ve posted it. They’ve marched it. They’ve hashtagged it. They’ve screamed it at city council. They’ve put it in my comments. They’ve sent it to my inbox. I understand what they oppose, but what are they building?

Where are they when Israelis and Palestinians are actually doing coexistence work? Where are they when people are doing the boring, frustrating, imperfect work of building relationships? Where are they when nobody gets to be completely righteous? Where are they when peace requires acknowledging both Palestinian suffering and Israeli humanity? Where are they when the solution doesn’t give them a villain uncomplicated enough for an Instagram post?

Peace is boring. Peace is compromise. Peace means sitting across from someone whose historical narrative makes you uncomfortable. Peace means accepting that two peoples can carry histories that collide without requiring either people to disappear. Peace means acknowledging Palestinian suffering without requiring Jewish disappearance. Peace means acknowledging Jewish history without requiring Palestinian suffering. And none of that fits particularly well on a protest sign.

And I don’t say any of this because I think peace means sitting around a table agreeing with each other. I have actually sat across the table from Palestinians who want change in Gaza; from Palestinians I did not agree with on everything; and from Palestinians who certainly did not agree with me. There were moments in those conversations when I wanted to jump across the table because I felt insulted, dismissed, and furious.

But I stayed at the table. And so did they. We did not walk away agreeing. We did not solve the Israeli-Palestinian over lunch. Nobody had some beautiful kumbaya moment where we suddenly realized we had misunderstood each other and everything was fine. It wasn’t fine, but it was a start.

At least we were sitting across from actual human beings whose lives, identities, and ideas were more complicated than the version of each other we could have created online. At least we were willing to hear something we absolutely did not want to hear. At least we were doing something considerably harder than reposting people who already agreed with us.

And that’s why I get so frustrated with the “pro-Palestinian” community. Most of them haven’t sat across from the people they have spent years talking about. They haven’t had to look somebody in the eyes while they tell you something about your history that makes your blood pressure rise. They haven’t had to decide whether they’re going to get up from the table or stay there long enough to understand why they believe what they believe.

But they have posted, they have commented, they have shared an infographic. They have told Jews what Palestinians believe. They have decided who the “good Jews” are, who the “bad Jews” are, which Palestinians deserve amplification, and which ones become inconvenient the moment they complicate their narrative.

And somehow, from their couch, they have achieved a level of certainty that I have never managed to achieve after actually sitting at the table. Maybe that’s because sitting at the table does something that social media doesn’t: It complicates people. And peace, if we are ever going to have it, is going to require people willing to be complicated.

I have watched Americans spend countless hours demanding symbolic ceasefire resolutions from municipal governments thousands of miles away. Fine. Participate in local democracy. Make your position known. But when it’s over, I still want to know: What changed? Who was fed? Who became safer? Which Palestinian gained political freedom? Which hostage came home? Which Israeli or Palestinian became one step closer to a durable future?

Symbolism has a place. Symbolism cannot become a substitute for outcomes.

I am done confusing volume with commitment. I am done assuming someone cares more about Palestinians because they post about Palestinians more frequently. A flag is not a master’s degree. A hashtag is not foreign policy. And outrage is not expertise.

Most importantly, Palestinians deserve better than being props in somebody else’s identity designed to make the feel like a “good person.” Their lives are real. Their grief is real. Their political future is real. Israeli lives are real. Israeli grief is real. Jewish fear is real. None of those things becomes less real because acknowledging all of them makes one’s politics inconvenient.

And maybe that is where Yom Kippur entered this year for me. Teshuvah asks something difficult of us. It asks us to look directly at ourselves. Where did I cause harm? Where was I wrong? Where do I owe an apology? Where did my ego keep me from repairing something? And, most importantly, if I am placed in the same situation again, will I behave differently?

For me, the answer this year is yes — I would leave sooner. That might be the apology I owe myself most. I kept believing one more explanation might change things. One more conversation. One more benefit of the doubt. One more source. One more piece of myself. I kept giving inches. And some people took a mile.

So this year, I am taking the mile back. Not because I have stopped caring about peace, but because I care about it too much to confuse shouting with peacemaking. Not because I have stopped caring about Palestinians, but because Palestinian humanity deserves something deeper than using their suffering as social currency. And not because I am unwilling to be challenged.

Challenge me. Bring evidence. Bring history. Bring Palestinian voices. Bring Israeli voices. Bring uncomfortable facts. Bring the things that complicate what I already believe. Just come prepared to listen too.

Somewhere along the way, social media convinced us that expressing an opinion creates an entitlement to a response. It doesn’t. Someone can say something wrong about you and you can leave it sitting there. Someone can misunderstand you and you can let them misunderstand you. Someone can confidently explain your own identity to you and you can decide that their ignorance is no longer an assignment you have been given.

Not every opinion deserves a response. Not every accusation deserves a defense. Not every question is being asked in good faith. And not every person demanding your emotional labor is entitled to receive it.

Dialogue requires another person. We cannot have dialogue with someone who has already written our lines for us. And perhaps that’s something worth carrying into this Jewish New Year. We spent the last few days thinking about what we need to repair. Maybe we should also think about what we need to release.

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When Ed Sheeran finally broke his silence on September 19th over the controversy surrounding Macklemore’s removal from his tour, he described the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as “the most complex political issue on the planet.”

The most complex political issue on the planet. Really?

More complex than every other geopolitical dispute, civil war, ethnic conflict, nuclear standoff, or centuries-old struggle over sovereignty unfolding across the world? By what measurement? How does one even begin to rank the complexity of political conflicts? Is there an international complexity index that the rest of us have somehow missed?

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is certainly complicated. It involves competing historical narratives, territorial claims, security concerns, refugees, religion, and generations of trauma. But describing it as the single most complex issue on Earth is not an explanation. It is a superlative masquerading as one.

And perhaps the most frustrating thing about describing the conflict as impossibly complex is that much of its basic history is not particularly difficult to understand. It requires some reading, a willingness to distinguish historical facts from political tribalism and propaganda, and perhaps a little less confidence from celebrities who have apparently discovered the Middle East through their Instagram feeds.

Let’s begin with something remarkably simple. Jews are from Judea. The English word Jew derives from the Hebrew Yehudi, associated with Judah and the ancient Jewish homeland. The Jewish People developed our national, religious, and cultural identity in the Land of Israel thousands of years ago.

Jerusalem was the center of ancient Jewish political and religious life long before it became a holy city to Christianity or Islam. Hebrew was and still is our language. Our temples stood in Jerusalem. Our religious calendar, festivals, literature, and traditions developed around this land. These are not modern Zionist inventions. They are matters of documented history.

Nor did the Jewish connection to the land suddenly disappear when the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE or following the Bar Kokhba revolt in the second century. Although wars, expulsions, and successive foreign rulers devastated Jewish communities and contributed to the growth of the diaspora, Jews continued living in the land.

Jewish life persisted through the Roman, Byzantine, Islamic, Crusader, Mamluk, and Ottoman periods, although individual communities experienced destruction, displacement, and renewal. Generations of Jews abroad continued to orient their prayers toward Jerusalem, mourn the destruction of the Temple, and express their longing to return.

And this is where a little linguistic history becomes useful. Jews are from Judea. Arabs originated in the Arabian Peninsula, and Arab identity subsequently spread far beyond it.

The Arab-Muslim conquests of the seventh century brought the region under new rule, followed by centuries of Arabization and Islamization. Some Arabs migrated into the region, while many existing inhabitants adopted Arabic language and culture or converted to Islam. Modern Palestinian Arabs consequently have varied ancestry.

But the notion that Jews appeared in “Palestine” as a foreign people with no prior connection to the territory is incompatible with the historical record. The modern State of Israel was established in 1948; the Jewish People’s connection to the land preceded it by millennia.

That brings us to another historical distinction that is too often lost: Modern Zionism did not begin with the Holocaust.

What emerged in the 19th century was a modern political movement that transformed an ancient religious and national aspiration into an organized project of Jewish self-determination. One of the principal forces behind that transformation was antisemitism.

Consider what was happening in Europe. In the 19th century, Jews were increasingly promised emancipation, citizenship, and equality. Yet even as legal barriers began falling, antisemitism found new political and racial expressions.

Following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, pogroms swept through parts of the Russian Empire. Jewish homes and businesses were destroyed, communities terrorized, and civilians assaulted and murdered. These were not abstract disagreements about foreign policy. They were violent attacks on Jews because they were Jews.

In response, Jewish movements such as Hovevei Zion (the Lovers of Zion) began organizing immigration to Ottoman-controlled “Palestine.” Beginning in 1882, the wave known as the First Aliyah brought approximately 35,000 Jews, primarily from Eastern Europe, alongside immigrants from Yemen. They joined Jewish communities already living in the land and established agricultural settlements, including Rishon LeZion, Rosh Pina, and Zikhron Ya’akov.

Some came fleeing persecution; others were motivated by religion, nationalism, or the desire to rebuild Jewish life in their ancestral homeland. Their motivations were varied, but their historical connection to the land was not invented upon arrival.

Then came the Dreyfus Affair. In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer serving in the French army, was wrongfully convicted of treason. His case unleashed a wave of antisemitism in a country that celebrated liberty and equality. For Theodor Herzl, who reported on the affair, it helped demonstrate a disturbing reality: even Jews who assimilated, served their countries, and embraced European society could still be treated as permanent outsiders.

In 1896, Herzl published “Der Judenstaat” (“The Jewish State”), and in 1897 he convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel. The proposition was that Jews needed political self-determination rather than having their security depend entirely on the goodwill of others.

And history did not become kinder. In 1903, a pogrom in Kishinev left 49 Jews dead, hundreds injured, and more than a thousand Jewish homes destroyed. The violence followed the circulation of antisemitic accusations, including a false allegation that Jews had murdered a Christian child. The same old blood libels, the same dehumanizing stereotypes, and the same willingness to turn Jewish neighbors into legitimate targets.

Then came the rise of Nazism and, eventually, the Holocaust. But by the time Hitler came to power, the modern Zionist movement had already been building institutions, reviving Hebrew as an everyday language, and encouraging Jewish immigration for decades.

After the Holocaust, many survivors who could not or would not return to Europe sought refuge in British-controlled “Palestine,” where immigration restrictions remained in force. Israel was not conceived simply as compensation for six million murdered Jews. Its establishment followed a much longer history of Jewish nationalism, migration, institution-building, and the search for security.

Nor was the Jewish search for self-determination exclusively a European story. Long before Israel became a state, Jewish communities stretching from Morocco to Iraq and Yemen had maintained their own traditions, languages, institutions, and connections to the Land of Israel for centuries, and in some cases millennia.

Consider Iraq. The Jewish community there traced its origins to the Babylonian exile in the sixth century BCE, roughly 1,200 years before the arrival of Islam. For centuries, Babylonia was one of the great centers of Jewish civilization. The Babylonian Talmud, one of Judaism’s most important texts, emerged from the scholarship of its rabbinic academies. In the 20th century, Iraqi Jews were deeply involved in commerce, culture, and public life. They were not recent arrivals from Europe. Iraq was their home.

Similar histories existed across the region. Jewish communities in Yemen developed distinctive religious and cultural traditions over many centuries. Moroccan Jews helped shape the country’s commercial, intellectual, and cultural life. Jewish communities in Egypt, Syria, Libya, and Tunisia maintained institutions and traditions of their own.

These were not merely isolated religious minorities waiting for modern Europe to invent a national identity for them. They were part of a Jewish civilization whose connection to Israel long predated the 19th-century Zionist movement.

And their history under Muslim rule deserves to be understood in its entirety.

It included periods of coexistence, cultural flourishing, and important Jewish contributions to surrounding societies. But it also included legal inequality, forced conversions, expulsions, and massacres. Under various Islamic governments, Jews were classified as dhimmis, protected non-Muslim subjects who could generally practice their religion but occupied a subordinate legal position, paid a special tax, and faced restrictions that varied considerably across time and place. Protection was not the same thing as equality.

In the 12th century, the Almohad dynasty imposed forced conversion on Jewish and Christian communities in territories it controlled across North Africa and Muslim Spain, prompting many to flee. In Yemen, in 1679, Jewish communities were expelled to the harsh region of Mawza. The exile became one of the defining catastrophes of Yemenite Jewish history, remembered for its terrible mortality and devastation. Neither episode had anything to do with the modern State of Israel, which would not exist for centuries.

Then came the Farhud. In June 1941, during the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, mobs descended on Baghdad’s Jewish neighborhoods following the collapse of Iraq’s pro-Nazi government. Between 150 and 180 Jews were murdered, hundreds were injured, women were raped, and approximately 1,500 Jewish homes and businesses were looted. This was seven years before Israel declared independence, and its victims belonged to a Jewish community that had existed in Iraq for roughly 2,500 years.

This history does not resolve every question about the creation of the modern State of Israel, but it is available to anyone prepared to study it. We should not need a celebrity to declare the entire subject incomprehensibly complicated before we are permitted to explain it.

And it is worth asking why this particular conflict so often attracts such extraordinary language.

When Jews enter the conversation, the vocabulary frequently moves toward hyperbole: genocide, apartheid, open-air prison, the world’s most complicated conflict. The strongest possible accusations and the grandest possible descriptions become part of the ordinary language of debate.

Genocide is a specific crime involving an intent to destroy a protected group, in whole or in part. Apartheid has a distinct legal meaning. Neither is simply a synonym for a terrible war, an unjust policy, or a government someone despises. Turning crimes against humanity into interchangeable expressions of outrage makes it harder to distinguish a substantiated finding from a slogan.

The danger is that language begins to do the work that evidence and argument are supposed to do. Once a label has been applied, the audience is invited to believe that the case has already been proved. Anyone who questions the label risks being treated as someone who denies the suffering behind it.

And when the subject is the Jewish state, that rhetorical escalation raises another question: At what point does criticism of a government become a justification for hostility toward Jews?

Criticism crosses a different boundary when Jewish people become stand-ins for the Israeli government, when ancient stereotypes about Jewish power are repackaged as political analysis, or when violence against Jews is rationalized through events thousands of kilometers away.

If Israel is portrayed as an embodiment of absolute evil rather than a state that was dragged into war on October 7th, it becomes easier for some people to extend their hostility from the state to the people they associate with it.

The Macklemore controversy illustrates why these distinctions deserve more attention.

In 2014, the rapper performed in a dark wig, beard, and large prosthetic nose that drew criticism for resembling an antisemitic Jewish caricature. The exaggerated Jewish nose and other physical caricatures belong to a tradition of antisemitic representation that long predates the modern State of Israel. Such imagery helped portray Jews as alien, sinister, and fundamentally different from their neighbors.

The Kishinev pogrom provides an especially grim reminder of how conspiratorial accusations against Jews could contribute to violence. Macklemore’s costume was not equivalent to a pogrom, but understanding that history explains why many Jewish audiences recognized the imagery and found it offensive.

Antisemitism did not begin with Zionism, and it cannot be explained exclusively through contemporary Israeli government policy. The stereotypes, conspiracy theories, and violence that helped motivate the Zionist movement existed long before the State of Israel.

And that brings us back to Ed Sheeran. In his Philadelphia statement, Sheeran described the October 7th attacks and the devastation in Gaza in consecutive sentences. He characterized October 7th as horrific and an event that compounded centuries of Jewish pain, before calling the situation in Gaza catastrophic, unjustifiable, and disproportionate.

There is nothing wrong with grieving Israeli and Palestinian lives in the same speech. Empathy is not a finite resource. The problem arises when expressions of grief become a substitute for distinguishing between different actions, actors, and responsibilities.

October 7th was not merely another tragedy that happened to the Jewish People. It was a coordinated attack led by Hamas in which civilians were deliberately targeted and people were abducted into Gaza. Israel’s subsequent military campaign was a response to those attacks. It was not the same event.

That is why a serious discussion cannot end with the assertion that both sides have suffered, or that both sides have engaged in unjustifiable actions.

The questions must be more exacting. Who initiated a particular act of violence? What was its objective? Who was targeted? Who bears responsibility? And what distinguishes the right to respond to an armed attack?

Those questions are harder to answer than simply declaring that everyone is wrong.

Perhaps this is what makes Sheeran’s description so unsatisfying. He invokes extraordinary complexity but offers little explanation of what that complexity actually consists of. He appeals to humanity, but leaves his audience with a series of conclusions rather than the reasoning behind them. His words acknowledge suffering without adequately distinguishing the particular acts that caused it.

There is a strange contradiction in declaring an issue impossibly complex while discussing it almost entirely in absolutes. If the conflict really is as complicated as Sheeran says, then surely it deserves something more rigorous than a few emotionally charged adjectives delivered before a stadium concert. Complexity should be an invitation to investigate, not an excuse to stop thinking.

The historical record offers a starting point. Jews did not invent their connection to Israel in 1948. Zionism did not begin with the Holocaust. Antisemitism did not begin with the establishment of the Jewish state. These are distinct historical facts that can be acknowledged.

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This is a guest essay by Ellen Ginsberg Simon, a Jewish mother, recovering lawyer, and compliance and ethics professional.

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

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Dear Ed,

For a week, your Jewish fans waited with increasing dismay for you to respond, react — to say anything — after your concert at MetLife Stadium was hijacked by Macklemore and transformed into an anti-Zionist rally.

As the silence from your team grew deafening, our disappointment turned to resignation. We knew we would have to let go of yet another artist willing to platform Jew hate.

After all, anyone who has not lived under a rock for the past decade knows Macklemore’s record. You invited him to open for you and represent you on your tour knowing that he had once donned a large rubber nose and wig to cosplay as a Hasidic Jew, like a Jewish version of Sambo. You knew his track record of turning concerts into radical, “pro-Palestinian” rallies over the past three years. He began screaming about genocide before Israel had even responded to October 7th, while the country was still sifting through the detritus for its dead.

Macklemore claims the two of you have been friends for 15 years. Given that history, it appears you knew exactly whom you were inviting onto your stage and were willing to platform him — and die on that hill.

Any musician knows how much preparation goes into a concert of this magnitude. Sound checks, lighting checks, AV checks — including, presumably, the Gaza war video Macklemore aired alongside his anti-Zionist song. It is inconceivable that you and your team failed to notice his intentions. Plausible deniability does not exist in this scenario.

Your reaction, however, feels worse than the most rabid pronouncements of Javier Bardem, Mark Ruffalo, or John Cusack. Their respective mad ravings and extremist, performative shenanigans are almost comical in their inanity. You did not rant in support of Macklemore’s free speech rights or mount a soapbox to declare Israelis genocidal maniacs.

No.

Instead, you showed us the more mundane side of how a real genocide germinates.

It took whole countries of complacent people to serve as Hitler’s willing executioners. They did not all need to embrace his ideology. All they needed to do was turn a blind eye to rabid hate. All they had to do was convince themselves that looking the other way, pretending not to see, absolved them of complicity. In doing so, ordinary Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and so many others enabled mass murder on a hitherto unseen scale.

They, too, believed they were not complicit because they stood still and silent while morality around them melted to ash.

As it turns out, the more mundane side of complicity is the most terrifying of all. All it takes is for someone like you to normalize Jew hate for history to repeat itself. The Holocaust was not perpetrated by the SS or the Brownshirts alone — the “true believers.” It was also facilitated by people who convinced themselves they bore no responsibility because they were not the ones carrying out the unimaginable.

The fact that you only took action to remove Macklemore from your tour when Robert Kraft refused to welcome hate into his own house — and then tepidly claimed you were not taking sides — demonstrates that your self-proclaimed apolitical stance is nothing more than base self-interest. It is the same instinct for personal survival at the expense of those around you that typified so much of 1930s Europe. Only when your livelihood was affected did you suddenly find yourself capable of making a choice.

Anyone who claims to be apolitical is either delusional or lying. Silence does not indicate neutrality. It is neither passive nor harmless. It is an active political choice of its own.

It is the choice of the cowardly bystander who watches his friend being beaten up on the playground, hoping the bullies will spare him. It is not the choice of the upstander who protects his friends with a stiff moral backbone, even if doing so means walking away with a black eye himself.

Elie Wiesel recognized this game, identified it, and decried it in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. The voice of a lost generation, Wiesel taught the world: “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormenter, never the tormented. Sometimes, we must interfere.”

And who were the victims? The tormented?

Jewish families who spent their hard-earned money to bring their children to hear you. Families who patronized you because they believed you stood for something wholesome and beautiful, not empty and callow.

Let me paint a picture of what your concert meant for Jewish children who loved your music and came to cheer for you.

During the concert, my 12-year-old daughter received a text from a friend expressing her shock and fear at what was unfolding around her.

Fear.

That is what your supposed lack of “complicity” engendered in your young fans. You sat silent and pretty while children at your concerts were bullied and exposed to hate speech that you tacitly condoned through your silence, all under the guise of neutrality and innocence.

That child’s mother told me this was her third time seeing you. It will also be her last. She described feeling appalled and completely caught off guard, unsure where to go or what to do as she found herself surrounded by hate, outnumbered, and responsible for the safety of a young girl. She asked her daughter whether she wanted to take a walk until the ranting ended.

“The worst part was that people applauded this,” she explained. “It made me nauseous. It made me sick to my stomach. I was upset. My daughter was upset. It was just so wrong, and I was completely appalled. I sat in my seat furious the rest of the night. My sister has since deleted all of Sheeran’s music from her Spotify. Basically, we’re done. And then he permitted it to happen again the next night and has said nothing since then for a week. The lack of response from Sheeran’s team speaks volumes.”

Another Jewish mother I know attended the second night at MetLife with her 10-year-old daughter. When the chants of “Free Palestine” began, she ushered her child out of the concert and into the concession area, hoping to protect her from the crowds cheering Macklemore’s descent into blood libel.

Her daughter was reluctant to return to their seats, riddled with anxiety. She could not understand why everyone was screaming and angry at her people. In the days since, she has continued talking about the experience with her friends, unable to shake its impact.

Her mother explained, “I felt so, so angry that my daughter was there for it. I felt like the opportunity to protect her and shield her from it was taken away from me — a decision that, as her mom, should be mine, not Macklemore’s or Sheeran’s.”

Now you face the backlash of your other openers and band members quitting in response to your decision to remove your erstwhile pal from the tour. It appears that the other artists involved in your concerts are on the same page as Macklemore.

A man is known by the company he keeps. The company you have chosen to surround yourself with was happy to traumatize Jewish children at a music concert and apparently unconcerned with the murder of other Jewish children at a music festival.

We Jews lack the numbers to make any meaningful impact on your income stream by deleting your music from Spotify or boycotting your shows. Your career will survive this moment perfectly intact, even if this tour founders.

However, as Jews spent 25 hours in self-reflection and admonishment for Yom Kippur this week, I exhort you to take a moment for some deep soul-searching of your own.

Is this the message you want your art to convey? That certain children will not be safe at your concerts? Have you considered the impact of your shows on unsuspecting fans who will carry these memories with them for a lifetime, forever associating you and your songs with trauma and bullying?

I do not actually think you want that.

I think that, like the average German of the 1930s and 1940s, you simply want to go about your life, record your albums, and not have to worry about these problems.

No one is asking you to make political speeches or politicize your concerts and music in the manner of Macklemore. We are asking you to consider the consequences of your pretended non-complicity and agnostic attitude when you knowingly invite people onto your stage who will leave your own customers in fear.

As another Jewish mother who attended told me, “I’m all for everyone having their own opinions about things, but you’re a celebrity. There’s no reason for celebrities to bring their politics to stage. This isn’t part of your job. Do your job. We don’t take our political beliefs into our workplace, so why do you think it’s okay to do that in yours?”

We are not asking you to scream louder than Macklemore and his ilk. We are asking you to show compassion, forethought, and care in deciding whom you invite onto your stage, so that a Jewish mother who brings her third-grader to your show does not have to spend the following week tucking a crying child into bed.

That is not asking you to declare sides, censor anyone, or polemicize on your perspective of Middle East affairs.

It is asking you to demonstrate the common decency that the average, silently complicit citizen of Nazi Germany lacked: the decency to recognize threats and bigotry rather than turn a blind eye while actively hosting and platforming them.

This is not a heavy lift.

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

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

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We tend to remember the 1973 Yom Kippur War through the same familiar images: Golda Meir, Egyptian soldiers crossing the Suez Canal, Israeli tanks in the Golan Heights, and the eventual Israeli counteroffensive.

But beyond the battlefield is a much richer history involving secret diplomacy, extraordinary espionage, military innovation, Jewish immigration, economic warfare, and political upheaval.

Here are seven chapters of that history that deserve considerably more attention.

1) Jordan’s king warned Israel about the coming war, and then sent his own soldiers to fight it.

On September 25, 1973, Jordan’s King Hussein secretly met Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. Although Jordan and Israel had no diplomatic relations, the two leaders had maintained discreet contacts for years. Hussein warned that Syrian military preparations suggested an impending war and indicated that Egypt might participate. He did not provide the precise date of the attack.

Eleven days later, Egypt and Syria attacked.

What happened next is even more extraordinary: Hussein initially avoided opening a third front directly across the Jordan River, but pressure from other Arab leaders eventually led him to send an armored brigade to Syria.

On October 11th, American intelligence reported that Hussein was preparing a personal message to Meir explaining why he was moving Jordanian armor into Syria and asking Israel to avoid attacking the brigade if possible. By October 15th, another American diplomatic cable reported that Hussein had informed Israel that his forces would inevitably enter combat.

His brigade subsequently fought Israeli forces alongside Syrian and Iraqi units.

2) One of Israel’s most important spies was the son-in-law of the Egyptian president who lost the Six-Day War.

His name was Ashraf Marwan.

He was married to Mona Abdel Nasser, daughter of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, the leader whose country had suffered a devastating defeat against Israel in 1967. Following Nasser’s death in 1970, Marwan became a close aide to his successor, Anwar Sadat.

He was also supplying information to Israel’s Mossad.

On October 5, 1973, Marwan met Mossad chief Zvi Zamir in London and warned that Egypt and Syria would launch a coordinated attack the following day. The warning reached Israel in the early hours of October 6th, giving its leaders time to begin mobilization but not enough to complete it before the assault.

Marwan’s reported timing was also wrong. He indicated that the attack would begin toward evening. Egypt and Syria struck at 2 p.m.

The story becomes even more intriguing after the war.

Was Marwan genuinely working for Israel, or was he an Egyptian double agent who helped manipulate Israeli expectations? The question became the subject of a long-running dispute among intelligence officials and historians. Zvi Zamir defended Marwan’s reliability, while others argued that aspects of his reporting served Egypt’s deception strategy. Intelligence historian Uri Bar-Joseph has argued that Marwan was a genuine Israeli source.

3) Israel had a secret plan to evacuate children from the Golan Heights months before the war.

One of the most revealing documents in Israel’s Defense Ministry archives concerns a plan with an almost painfully innocent name: Pekudat Yeled, or “Child Order.”

In May 1973, five months before the war, the Northern Command prepared a contingency plan to evacuate civilians from 14 Israeli communities established in the Golan Heights after 1967. The plan was approved on May 31st, but commanders decided to keep it confidential, partly because they feared opposition from residents.

Two days before the war, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan visited communities in the Golan and reassured residents who were worried about an impending conflict. By the morning of October 6th, however, the military was discussing the immediate evacuation of women and children.

During one discussion, Dayan even considered presenting the evacuation as an organized children’s outing.

The evacuation began as the war approached, but the Syrian offensive complicated it. Heavy shelling delayed buses, and several communities had to arrange their own transportation. By that evening, the military reported that the evacuation of women and children had been completed. During the night, the order was extended to the men. Some residents refused to leave and had to be persuaded by military personnel.

4) The Israeli Navy fought the world’s first missile-boat battle on the very night the war began.

While Israeli ground forces were suffering severe setbacks, something very different was happening at sea.

During the night of October 6th and 7th, Israeli missile boats engaged Syrian naval vessels near the port of Latakia. The battle became the first naval engagement in history between missile-armed boats using ship-to-ship missiles.

In the years preceding the war, the Israeli Navy had developed an extensive program involving Gabriel anti-ship missiles, electronic countermeasures, and new tactics. Syrian missile boats possessed Soviet-made Styx missiles with a considerably longer range than the Israeli Gabriels.

The Israelis developed ways to counter those missiles electronically, allowing their vessels to close the distance and fire their own weapons.

The engagement ended with five Syrian vessels destroyed and no Israeli vessels lost.

The war that exposed serious weaknesses in Israeli preparedness also demonstrated the capabilities of an Israeli military branch that had approached its challenges differently.

5) Egypt opened a little-known third front nearly 1,000 miles away from the main fighting.

When people visualize the Yom Kippur War, they imagine the Golan Heights or the deserts of Sinai. Almost nobody thinks of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.

Yet Egypt sought to cut off Israeli shipping through this narrow passage connecting the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. The blockade threatened maritime access to Eilat, Israel’s southern port, and the commercial connections linking Israel with parts of Africa and Asia. Egypt deployed naval forces far from the principal battlefields to enforce restrictions on shipping associated with Israel.

This third front continued to burden Israel’s economy even after ceasefires had taken effect on the main battlefields.

6) Soviet Jews continued immigrating to Israel even after war broke out.

The 420 Soviet Jewish immigrants who landed in Israel on October 7, 1973 were not an isolated case.

Another 150 immigrants arrived through Vienna on October 10th. Among them was Shlomo Dresner, a defendant in the Kishinev trial who had been sentenced to three years in prison and had subsequently obtained permission to emigrate.

Many of the arrivals wanted to be sent immediately to assist the soldiers. The Jewish Agency and Absorption Ministry instead directed them to immigrant absorption centers across the country.

There was another fascinating detail: 45 Soviet Jews sent a cable to the Israeli government and people expressing solidarity. They acknowledged that the fighting would cause suffering among Arabs and Jews while affirming their connection to Israel and its people. The message was an act of Jewish identification sent from a country whose government was supplying military assistance to Egypt and Syria.

7) Portugal became the indispensable stopover for America’s emergency airlift.

When Israel began running short of essential military supplies, the United States organized Operation Nickel Grass, a major airlift of weapons and equipment. But flying massive military transport aircraft from the United States to Israel presented a significant logistical problem.

Many European countries refused to grant American aircraft landing or overflight permissions because of concerns about Arab retaliation, particularly restrictions on oil supplies.

Portugal allowed the United States to use Lajes Air Base in the Azores, enabling American aircraft to cross the Atlantic, refuel, and continue toward Israel through a carefully planned Mediterranean corridor.

The first American military airlift aircraft arrived at Lod Airport in Israel on October 14th. It carried approximately 186,200 pounds of cargo. A second aircraft carrying material-handling equipment was delayed by mechanical problems. As a result, American crew members and Israeli civilians had to unload the first C-5 manually.

By November 14th, the American airlift had delivered more than 22,000 tons of material in 567 missions.

Portugal’s assistance was not without consequences. The Arab oil embargo imposed during the war eventually targeted Portugal alongside the United States, the Netherlands, and South Africa.

The story of Portugal and the Azores is one of the least-discussed but most consequential logistical chapters of the war.

Bonus: Golda Meir won an election after the war, and then resigned four months later.

The conventional version of the story suggests that the Yom Kippur War brought down Golda Meir’s government. It did, but the process was considerably more complicated.

Israel had been scheduled to hold a general election on October 30, 1973. The war forced the election to be postponed until December 31st.

Despite the public anger over the military and intelligence failures, Meir’s Labor-led Alignment won 51 Knesset (Israeli parliament) seats, compared with 39 for the newly formed Likud. She subsequently assembled another government, but public dissatisfaction continued, particularly among soldiers returning from the front.

One of them was Motti Ashkenazi, who had commanded the Budapest outpost along the Suez Canal. His position was the only Bar-Lev Line strongpoint that had remained in Israeli hands throughout the war.

Ashkenazi had warned of serious shortcomings before the fighting. When he returned to civilian life, he launched a solitary protest outside the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem, demanding that Defense Minister Moshe Dayan resign and that the government accept responsibility.

What began with one reservist developed into a much larger protest movement.

Then came the Agranat Commission. Its interim findings placed substantial responsibility on senior military commanders but did not assign comparable personal responsibility to Meir and Dayan. The conclusions provoked considerable public controversy.

Meir resigned in April 1974. Yitzhak Rabin formed the next government in June.

The war also contributed to longer-term changes in Israeli politics, culminating in the end of Labor’s uninterrupted period in power when Menachem Begin’s Likud won the 1977 election. Other social and political developments contributed to that transformation as well.

Fifty-three years later, the Yom Kippur War remains an extraordinary study of how a single conflict can affect almost every dimension of a nation’s existence.

Perhaps the most striking fact is how young Israel was when all of this happened. The state had existed for just 25 years. Many of the people defending it had been born before it existed, and some had spent their childhoods in countries where Jewish sovereignty had seemed unimaginable.

Their country possessed an army, intelligence agencies, an independent government, and the power to make decisions that earlier generations of Jews had never been able to make. Yet 1973 exposed how vulnerable those institutions could be when faced with mistaken assumptions, determined adversaries, and unexpected circumstances.

Israel’s survival was one chapter of the Yom Kippur War. What the war revealed about Israel, and what Israelis did with that knowledge afterward, is the history we should be studying, too.

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There is a moment at the beginning of Yom Kippur when something extraordinary happens: Jews who have spent the entire year speaking English, Hebrew, French, Spanish, and countless other languages gather in synagogues around the world and listen to a declaration in a language that most of them cannot understand.

The cantor begins chanting Kol Nidre, two Aramaic words meaning “All Vows,” and a melody that seems to carry the weight of Jewish history fills the room.

For many, it is one of the most emotionally powerful moments of the Jewish calendar. Yet few stop to consider an astonishing fact: We are beginning the holiest day of the Jewish year not in Hebrew, the language of the Torah, but in Aramaic, a language that was once spoken across the ancient Middle East and became deeply embedded in Jewish life.

Why Aramaic? Why begin Yom Kippur with a legal declaration about vows rather than a prayer about forgiveness? And why has a text that most Jews cannot translate, containing words about annulments and obligations rather than sweeping declarations of faith, become one of the most recognizable and enduring rituals in Judaism?

The answers take us far beyond the synagogue, into the story of Jewish exile, adaptation, controversy, and survival. They also reveal something profound about the Jewish People: Our history has been shaped not only by the promises we have made, but by what we have managed to preserve when almost everything around us changed.

Aramaic was not originally a Jewish language. It emerged among Aramean communities in the ancient Middle East more than 3,000 years ago and gradually became one of the region’s great languages of communication.

By the eighth century BCE, it was widely used throughout the Assyrian Empire. When the Persians established their vast empire, they adopted Aramaic for administration across territories stretching from Egypt to Central Asia. It was a language of government, commerce, diplomacy, and everyday life. Long before English became the international language of business, Aramaic performed a similar function across much of the ancient Near East.

And then came one of the great turning points in Jewish history: In 586 BCE, the Babylonians destroyed the First Temple in Jerusalem and deported a significant portion of Judah’s population. Jews found themselves living in Mesopotamia, far from Jerusalem, surrounded by new political realities and languages.

Over time, Aramaic became deeply embedded in Jewish life, both among the exiles and, increasingly, among Jews in the Land of Israel. Hebrew did not disappear. It retained its religious and literary importance, and its spoken use continued in various forms. But Aramaic became a central language through which Jews conducted business, discussed religious questions, and understood the world around them.

The historical evidence is remarkable. In the fifth century BCE, a Jewish military community on Elephantine, an island in the Nile River in Egypt, left behind documents written in Aramaic. Parts of the biblical books of Ezra and Daniel are written in Aramaic. Jewish scholars produced Aramaic translations of the Hebrew Bible, known as Targumim, allowing communities that no longer understood Hebrew fluently to access their sacred texts.

Centuries later, the rabbis of the Babylonian academies debated Jewish law in a form of Aramaic that became the language of much of the Babylonian Talmud, one of the foundational works of Jewish civilization.

Consider what this means. The Jewish People lost political independence, endured exile, and found themselves living under foreign empires. Their response was not to pretend that nothing had changed. They learned the language of their surroundings and used it to preserve, interpret, and expand their own civilization.

In other words, a language that had once belonged to the wider world became a language of Jewish scholarship, law, prayer, and identity. The empire provided the language. The Jews filled it with their own ideas.

Aramaic eventually became so intertwined with Jewish life that it entered some of our most intimate religious experiences.

When we mourn someone, we recite Kaddish, written largely in Aramaic. When a couple marries, the traditional ketubah, the marriage contract outlining their obligations, is written in Aramaic. At the Passover Seder, we begin the storytelling with Ha Lachma Anya, the Aramaic declaration introducing the bread of affliction and inviting those in need to join us. Even the Zohar, the great medieval work of Jewish mysticism, was composed largely in a distinctive form of Aramaic.

Aramaic is far less foreign to modern Jews than we might imagine. Every day, Israeli children call their fathers Abba (אבא) and their mothers Ima (אמא), words with Aramaic roots.

When a Jewish boy becomes a Bar Mitzvah, the word bar is Aramaic for son, the equivalent of the Hebrew ben. When Israelis encounter a problem, they call it a be’aya (בעיה). When they establish a fact, they call it an uvda (עובדה). They say agav (אגב), meaning “by the way,” and bedi’avad (בדיעבד), meaning “after the fact.” A mortgage is a mashkanta (משכנתא).

Even Hebrew grammar bears Aramaic’s fingerprints: Several Aramaic nouns ending in -a, originally a marker of definiteness, entered Hebrew as feminine nouns. The language did not merely contribute a few borrowed expressions. It helped shape the vocabulary and structure of modern Hebrew itself.

Aramaic survives not only in ancient manuscripts and synagogue rituals, but also in the everyday language of the modern State of Israel. The ancient empires that spread it have long since disappeared, yet Jews continue to carry their language forward.

There is something beautiful about this continuity. Aramaic appears when we remember our dead, when we celebrate a marriage, when we tell our children the story of the Exodus, and when we confront our own mortality and imperfections on Yom Kippur. It accompanies us through some of the most significant moments of Jewish existence. A language that was once a practical necessity of exile became part of the spiritual vocabulary of Jewish civilization.

But what, exactly, are we saying when we recite Kol Nidre?

Contrary to what many assume, Kol Nidre is not technically a prayer. It is a legal declaration concerning the annulment of certain vows and oaths. In its traditional forms, it addresses vows that were made or might be made rashly, inadvertently, or without proper consideration.

Different Jewish communities have historically used different versions: Some refer to the vows of the year that has passed, while others anticipate those of the coming year. Crucially, Kol Nidre does not erase promises made to other people, cancel debts, or release us from our moral and legal responsibilities. It deals with a restricted category of personal religious vows, and Jewish law places important conditions on their annulment.

Judaism takes words seriously. A promise is not merely a collection of sounds that disappears once it leaves our mouths. Words can create obligations. They can establish trust, transform relationships, and bind us to a course of action. A person who makes a vow is placing something of themselves into the future. But human beings are imperfect. We speak impulsively, make commitments we cannot fulfill, and occasionally mistake our intentions for our capabilities. Kol Nidre acknowledges this reality without suggesting that our responsibilities to other people can simply be wished away.

The history of Kol Nidre itself is just as fascinating as its meaning. Its precise origins remain unknown, but it was already being discussed by Babylonian rabbinic authorities in the eighth and ninth centuries. Some of those rabbis strongly opposed it. Amram Gaon, a prominent ninth-century Jewish scholar, criticized the custom, concerned that people might misunderstand the declaration and treat their vows too casually.

Yet Kol Nidre continued to spread. In the 12th century, rabbis in France and Germany helped reshape its wording to address future vows rather than simply attempting to cancel past ones. Various Jewish communities preserved different versions, including Hebrew forms of the declaration.

Even this history contains an important lesson: Kol Nidre was not handed down as an entirely unchanging text that every Jewish community adopted simultaneously. Rabbis debated it, criticized it, revised it, and struggled to reconcile its emotional significance with Jewish law. Its place in the Yom Kippur service emerged through a long historical process. Jewish tradition survived not because it was incapable of change, but because generations of Jews cared enough about it to argue over what should be preserved and how it should be understood.

There is also a popular story linking Kol Nidre to the Jews of Spain, who were forcibly converted to Christianity and secretly maintained their Jewish identity. According to this interpretation, the declaration allowed them to renounce the religious vows imposed upon them and return to their people. It is a powerful image, but it should not be confused with established history.

Kol Nidre existed centuries before the Spanish Inquisition, and historians have not established that forced conversion was the reason it was originally created. The association nevertheless helps explain the emotional meaning that later generations attached to it: the yearning of Jews who had been separated from their community to find their way back.

There is a detail in the traditional ceremony that speaks directly to this idea. Before Kol Nidre is chanted, the congregation recites a formula invoking the authority of the heavenly and earthly courts and granting permission to pray with transgressors.

Think about the implications: At the beginning of the holiest day of the year, Judaism does not announce that only the righteous may enter. It explicitly makes room for those who have fallen short. The community is not assembled from perfect Jews. It is assembled from imperfect Jews who have chosen to stand together.

Perhaps that is why Kol Nidre is so emotionally powerful even for people who cannot understand its words. We are not merely listening to a legal declaration. We are participating in an inherited ritual that has accompanied generations of Jews through remarkably different circumstances. The language has become a bridge between people who may share neither a country nor a mother tongue, yet recognize something of themselves in the same ancient words.

And the language itself has an extraordinary afterlife. Aramaic gradually lost its position as the dominant everyday language of most Jewish communities, but it never disappeared entirely. Jewish communities in Kurdistan and neighboring regions continued speaking various forms of Neo-Aramaic into the modern era. Many of their descendants now live in Israel and elsewhere, and these dialects survive today, although they are endangered.

The history of Aramaic teaches us that Jewish continuity has never depended on freezing Judaism in a particular century. The Jews of ancient Babylonia did not preserve their identity by refusing to learn a foreign language. They learned it, mastered it, and made it a vehicle for Jewish civilization. Later generations continued that process in Greek, Arabic, Yiddish, Ladino, English, and modern Hebrew.

The languages changed, but the central challenge remained: How do we carry our inheritance into a world that looks nothing like the one in which it was created?

We face the same question today.

When the cantor begins chanting Kol Nidre this Yom Kippur, listen closely. Behind the melody is the history of a people who learned to speak in the languages of empires without surrendering their own voice. Behind the legal declaration is a recognition that human beings fail, that our words matter, and that responsibility cannot be replaced by beautiful intentions. And behind the ancient Aramaic is an invitation to reconnect with a tradition that has reached us across an almost unimaginable distance of time.

The empires that once used Aramaic to administer their territories have disappeared. The Jewish People remain, still speaking some of their words, still debating their meaning, still gathering on Yom Kippur to confront the same human imperfections.

The extraordinary fact that Kol Nidre has survived is not, by itself, enough. The real question is what we will do with the inheritance we have received. Our ancestors preserved the words. It is our responsibility to preserve their meaning.

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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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The great rabbinic sage Moses Ben Maimonides (known as the Rambam) writes that teshuvah is not merely regret, nor merely confession.

In his “Laws of Teshuvah,” he sets an almost impossible bar: A person has truly repented when they have changed so completely that “the One who knows all secrets” would testify they are no longer the person who sinned — when someone who knew you before would look at you and say, “This is not the same person.” For Rambam, teshuvah is not an apology issued to whoever you wronged. It is the construction of a new self.

As Jews prepare for Yom Kippur, that definition should trouble us, not because of what we’ve done to others, but because of what we haven’t done for ourselves.

I want to suggest an unusual addition to this year’s Yom Kippur reading list: Israeli politician Einat Wilf’s book, “Teaching Zionism: Revelations from a Skeptical Classroom,” read alongside the machzor (a special prayer book used during the High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur).

Wilf, a former Knesset (Israeli parliament) member and one of the sharper public intellectuals writing on Zionism today, is now running third on the joint list of The Reservists and the New Economic Party ahead of Israel’s October elections — a fitting move for someone whose book argues that Zionist literacy is itself a form of national service.

Wilf’s book asks the same question Yom Kippur insists we confront — not what you have said in your defense, but who you have become. If teshuvah means returning to a truer version of yourself, Wilf’s book argues that diaspora Jews have, due to ignorance of its Zionist history and what it teaches, drifted from a truer version of themselves without quite noticing, and that recovering it requires study, not just sentiment.

Teaching Zionism does not explain what to say to anti-Zionists. It explains what to know as a Zionist. A people that knows its own story does not beg permission to tell it. Wilf’s book is an act of claiming — not a defensive crouch but an assertion. This is who we are, this is what we built, this is why it was necessary, and why it endures.

Three years after October 7th, we have become extraordinarily good at responding. We have gotten faster at flagging the post, sharper at rebuttal, more organized in demanding condemnation.

What we have not done is become new. We have not built the kind of Jew Rambam describes: someone unrecognizable from who they were before, not because they argued more but because they learned more, became more, stood differently in the world. Teshuvah without transformation is just better defense. And defense, however skilled, is not who we are supposed to become.

We know the cast of characters we’ve spent this year defending against by heart — the antisemites on social media, the campus activists, the podcasters who have discovered that Israel explains everything wrong with the world, the indispensable “as a Jew” anti-Zionist. We study their posts, screenshot their insults, demand condemnations.

And every morning the algorithm delivers a fresh shipment, and we answer it, dutifully, as though answering it were itself a form of teshuvah. It isn’t. It’s the treadmill Rambam warned against: motion without transformation.

Meanwhile, how much time are we spending reading Herzl? Or Pinsker? Nordau? Ahad Ha’am? Jabotinsky? Ben-Gurion?

Wilf’s book grew out of a course she taught at Georgetown University in 2021, two years before October 7th. One of her Jewish students told her afterward that taking the course had been worth “dozens of hours of therapy.” That is an extraordinary thing to say about a history course. And it tells us something about the problem diaspora Jews now face: The student wasn’t being treated for antisemitism. She was discovering something her education had never given her: an intellectual understanding of her own people’s national story.

An old Jewish story underlies this situation. Emancipation encouraged Jews to prove their Jewish identity was no barrier to Western society. Leon Pinsker’s 1882 pamphlet “Auto-Emancipation,” written after the pogroms in the Russian Empire one year prior shattered his faith in that promise, opens the entire Zionist intellectual project — and is the text most likely to stop a contemporary reader cold.

His central claim is clinical: Judeophobia is not a prejudice to be corrected through argument or civic virtue. It is a psychosis, rooted in the anomalous nature of Jewish existence. Jews are, in his phrase, a “ghost people” — a nation without a body, wandering among living nations whose instinct is to recoil from what they cannot classify. No degree of assimilation can dissolve the category, because the category was never about behavior. It was about existence.

Zionism was, among other things, a revolt against that condition. Herzl, Pinsker, Nordau, Ahad Ha’am, Jabotinsky, and Ben-Gurion disagreed about what Jewish national renewal should look like. What they shared was a refusal to accept that Jewish existence had to be justified in categories supplied by somebody else. Jews were not simply religious adherents seeking toleration. They were a people capable of, and obligated to, acting in history.

Menachem Begin, who later became Israel’s prime minister, described the transformation in “The Revolt,” writing:

“A new generation grew up which turned its back on fear. It began to fight instead of to plead. For nearly two thousand years, the Jews, as Jews, had not borne arms, and it was on this complete disarmament, as much psychological as physical, that our oppressors calculated. We gave up our arms when we were exiled from our country. With our return to the land of our fathers our strength was restored.”

Too much of the Jewish response to anti-Zionism still resembles pleading. Please understand that Zionism isn’t racism. Please don’t call us colonialists. Please condemn the person who said this about us. Sometimes those demands are necessary. But they cannot constitute a strategy, much less a Jewish identity.

Here is the sharpest challenge Wilf’s book poses — one we should struggle with on Yom Kippur. The Diaspora mentality is not only political timidity. It is a habit of concealment rooted in the Haskalah (Jewish enlightenment) bargain: Visibility invites attack, so conceal your particularity, soften your claims, and translate your existence into terms the majority can accept.

After October 7th, that theory was buried with the victims of Kibbutz Be’eri. Concealing did not protect us. Conceding did not appease our enemies. The quieter we made ourselves, the louder the libels against us became.

Going on offense means recovering the psychological transformation Begin described. Stop pleading and start making the case. That means preparing, coordinating, verifying facts, and making precise claims — which is also where the advantage lies, since opponents who rely on emotionally charged language are unprepared when challenged to justify their claims and evidence. It does not mean becoming louder or angrier than the people shouting “genocide.” It means showing up better prepared than everyone else in the room.

A Jew who has read Pinsker does not have to respond to every charge of Zionist racism by desperately searching Google for a rebuttal. A Jew who understands Herzl, the Mandate, partition, the Yishuv, and the competing national movements can force the discussion onto historical terrain — and can recognize when a fashionable argument is merely an old one in new vocabulary.

And perhaps this is the most difficult adjustment we must make as part of teshuvah: For years we have behaved as though our principal task were to demonstrate that accusations against us are unfair. Zionism suggests something different. Its founders did not wait for the world to become fair. They studied reality, organized, built institutions, and acted.

Teaching Zionism is basic training rather than inoculation. It does not merely produce better rebuttals; it produces people capable of making an affirmative case for Jewish sovereignty. For 2,000 years, Jewish survival often depended on how persuasive our pleading was. Herzl’s generation understood this was not a strategy but a condition, and that the only way out was to become a different kind of people — one that acted in history rather than petitioning it.

But Zionism did not only make Jewish survival possible. It is a mighty force against tyranny itself. Mark Twain saw this clearly. He and Herzl had met in Paris in 1894 and became genuine friends in Vienna, close enough that Twain wanted to produce a play Herzl had written. Writing in 1899, Twain observed:

“The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone ... The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age ... no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind.”

Every empire that tried to erase the Jewish people mistook force for endurance. The Jews outlasted them not by matching their power but by refusing the terms of their disappearance — and Zionism is that refusal, translated into a state. Tyranny’s oldest wager is that if it waits long enough, the people it persecutes will simply stop existing. Zionism is the standing proof that the wager fails.

Ben-Gurion put it more simply than any of us need to: “In the Land of Israel, we are not guests. We are the builders and masters of our fate.”

We finish Ne’ilah (the final, concluding prayer service held at the end of Yom Kippur) by shouting, “Next year in Jerusalem!” Let next year be the year we muster the fire and fury, the devotion and determination, the love of God and the Jewish People to become better builders and better masters of our people’s destiny.

Let next year be the year where we learn, rediscover, and relive our glorious history of survival and hope.

Let us enter the new year as Joshua as our people did when they conquered and settled the Land of Israel — our land, our hope — free of fear and full of courage.

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This is a guest essay by Lucas Gage, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and author.

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

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I was one of the most prominent and viral antisemites in the world.

Swattings and attacks on my family didn’t pull me out of it. They pushed me deeper.

What helped pull me out was a two-hour conversation over coffee with a religious Jew who was never once offended by anything I said, and I think the people fighting antisemitism need to hear why that worked.

For a long time, the standard approach to people like me was to label and shame but not to engage. For example, many Jewish organizations and scholars hold a firm policy of refusing to debate Holocaust deniers. I understand the reasoning: A debate can make the other side seem legitimate. But in practice, what replaces the debate is the label, the boycott, the censorship, and the public example. Seek and destroy.

My argument, from my own experience, is that this gets the order backwards. The first response to an antisemite should be to de-escalate, debunk, and deradicalize. Destroying someone’s life should be the last resort to prevent violence, not the first. I’m not writing this from a position of arrogance. I’m writing it as someone the first strategy created, but I was deradicalized by the second.

We always hear that antisemitism is a unique form of hatred. I agree, because Jewishness itself is an unusual identity: ethnic, religious, and national at once, and Jews don’t even agree among themselves on how those strands fit together. A Jew can be secular and a Zionist or religious and an anti-Zionist. That matters, because the entire antisemitic worldview depends on Jews being a malevolent monolith, wearing different masks to fool the goyim.

Jews, especially Ashkenazi Jews in the West, have excelled in fields like mathematics, science, finance, and media, so they are disproportionately visible wherever they live, in good things and, unfortunately, in bad things.

What antisemites, my former self included, fail to notice is that this isn’t unique to Jews. Europeans are majorities in the West but a global minority, disproportionately represented in both great achievements and great crimes, and you can see the same logic in Black Lives Matter-era rhetoric against White people.

The pattern forms whenever a minority is disproportionately successful and still looks like an “other.” I expect Indian-Americans, who have risen quickly to lead major corporations, to face the same kind of resentment, and online you can already see the early shape of it.

For most of history, antisemitism was religious. Christians condemned Jews for killing Christ. In theory, a Jew could escape that by converting, but even that door kept closing: Spain’s conversos converted and were hunted by the Inquisition anyway. Racial antisemitism, which emerged in the late 1800s and peaked with the Nazis, offers no door at all. That’s the kind I subscribed to. I believed Jews had a proclivity for certain behaviors and that whether an individual Jew was good or bad, Jews as a whole were bad for my people.

Once you accept that premise, the “solution” to the so-called Jewish problem can only be expulsion or extermination. I was never an exterminationist. Even at my worst, I told myself the peaceful answer was for us to live apart. I’ve since had to face that it was the same premise with a gentler ending. I do think we can all get along, but we must share the same values and be honest with each other.

People fighting antisemitism often explain it as jealousy. But from someone who was on the inside, it never was about any sort of jealousy. When a race realist looks at Jews in positions of power, he feels he’s lost sovereignty over a country his ancestors founded. If these Jews in positions of power are able to effect massive changes to his society that he deems negative, he’s naturally going to blame them.

Imagine if Arabs, who are a minority in Israel, dominated its media, academia, and financial system. Imagine if these Muslims promoted laws against Islamophobia and pursued special interests that harmed the majority of the Israelis. Even if those Arabs were benevolent, Israeli Jews would feel they no longer had sovereignty over their own land. That’s what I felt.

But that feeling rested on a premise I never examined: Racial antisemites see all those Jewish names as a group with one will. The secular Zionist and the religious anti-Zionist, the senator and the donor funding his opponent.

So, it was never about jealousy but about sovereignty; not seeing the average American Jew as a fellow American made them an other, even when they suffered under the same rule of the political elite. The average Jew doesn’t get special benefits just because some of the elites are Jewish billionaires. That’s like thinking the average White person benefits just because there are White billionaires.

I was the kind of racial antisemite who was all-in. The frame I lived in predicted I’d be attacked, so every attack confirmed it. The boycott, the censorship, the label, the public example: Every one of those confirmed exactly what I already believed about a powerful, coordinated group.

Shame only works on people who share your values. It works inside a community, on someone who cares what the people shaming him think. But an antisemite already sees Jews and Jewish organizations as the enemy, so their condemnation doesn’t register as shame. It registers as a badge of honor. The louder they condemned me, the more the people around me took it as proof I was over the target, and the more I believed it too. You can’t shame someone out of a movement whose values are defined against you.

When Kanye West’s antisemitic rants cost him an Adidas partnership and his other major deals, those were companies deciding they didn’t want their names next to his. Inside the movement, nobody saw it that way. They saw a billionaire silenced overnight, and they filed it as proof. When Elon Musk, after his fight with the Anti-Defamation League over advertisers, apologized publicly and then visited Israel and Auschwitz, antisemites said, “Look, even the richest man in the world has to bow to them.”

The label “anistemite” itself is being worn down, too. When Greta Thunberg, known for her anti-Israel activism, lands on the same top-10 antisemites list as Dan Bilzerian, the word stops meaning anything specific. She may be an anti-Zionist. Whether that makes her an antisemite is exactly the distinction a list like that waters down.

Anti-Zionism deserves to be confronted on its own terms. Once a state exists, with millions of people born there, calling for its dismantlement isn’t a policy disagreement. It’s a demand that those people lose their country. But when every anti-Zionist and every antisemite gets the same label, people inside the movement conclude the word just means “anyone Jews don’t like.” Then they stop listening when it’s used on someone who has actually earned it. I was someone who earned it. Diminishing the word doesn’t reduce antisemitism; it makes more antisemites.

What pulled me out wasn’t Holocaust lectures or shame. It was a conversation based on facts after all the attacks stopped and the dust settled.

When I told everyone I decided to abandon antisemitism in February of this year, Jake Turx (an Orthodox Jew and former senior White House correspondent) left a comment on my post and asked to meet up. My initial plan was just to make peace with Jews and vanish, to go on and focus on philosophy and self-improvement. When he reached out, I was hesitant at first, but I decided a meet up couldn’t hurt, and I wanted to actually build bridges like I said I would.

We met up for coffee. He started by asking how I was feeling and how I was doing. Then we went through everything: Israel, 9/11, Gaza, and the conspiracy theories I still held. For about two hours, every topic we could think of about antisemitism was on the table. It was cordial the whole way through. He was never offended. He didn’t accept my claims, and he didn’t just deny them either. He asked, “Why do you think that? What makes you think that?”

This approach was the key. Think about it: How would the conversation have gone if Jake used shaming tactics and brought up the Holocaust? The old playbook would have driven me away. More importantly, he didn’t deny history as it’s actually recorded, including the uncomfortable parts, like Jewish overrepresentation among early communist leaders. He just dealt with the points. But he also taught me how those things also led to Jewish persecution in Russia, how religious Jews were treated, and other things I didn’t know.

I brought experience as an antisemite to the table. I told him about the hypocrisies and contradictions I’d caught in the Jewish Question movement. The movement demanded that every Jew answer for the worst Jew and never held itself to that standard. Once I saw that the rule only ran in one direction, I couldn’t help but snap out of it.

That coffee led to my first podcast interview, on “Living Lchaim” with Yaakov Langer, with Jacob there on camera as the friend who introduced us. The episode reached a lot of people, and it led to more private conversations with both of them afterward. That’s when I really got to see these two religious Jews up close and how kind, forgiving, and honest they were. They weren’t arrogant. They weren’t supremacists. They were nothing like what I’d been taught they would be. In fact, we shared the same issues with the same people because we actually shared, for the most part, the same values.

This meeting didn’t have to take place, but it did. Part of it came from Jews who had a curiosity about me; the other part came from me wanting peace after 14 years of fighting with Jews. The conservation cost us nothing, and a bridge was built between peoples.

This meeting led to more conversations with more Jews, both in private and on other podcasts, with rabbis, and even making peace with former enemies. Speaking to both American and Israeli Jews led me to learn more history about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, bringing more nuance to it, rather than the one-sided story I received after October 7th.

So, peaceful and cordial conversations. That’s the approach I’m asking Jewish people and organizations to adopt.

Conversation only works if you can answer what you hear. When I was inside, most of what I believed about Jews came from a handful of claims passed around the Internet, antisemitic books I read, and figures in the movement I trusted. Almost nobody I knew had fact-checked any of them. Neither had I. I believed Jews were behind 9/11 for years without once opening the 9/11 Commission report. When I finally read it, after I had already left, what I found was al-Qaeda’s plot, documented in detail.

Take, for example, the various Talmud quotes that circulate online. Some are outright fabrications or misunderstandings, such as the claim that the Talmud allows marriage to a 3-year-old. This is absolutely false and is easily debunked. But be honest about the hard parts, too. If you tell someone there’s nothing difficult in the Talmud and he finds one real passage, you’ve lost him, and you’ve confirmed his suspicion that you were hiding something. It’s far more convincing to say, “Yes, that line is real, here’s what it’s actually discussing, here’s how Jewish commentators have read it, and here’s why it doesn’t mean what you were told.”

Answer the claim; attack the belief, not the man holding it, and do it with compassion. That takes a particular kind of patience: knowing who you’re talking to and answering false claims without hostility. It can be learned, and I think it’s worth cultivating. Someone who has been told for years that Jews will try to destroy him has nowhere to put a Jew who simply answers his question. If Jews run away from debates and refuse to engage with antisemites, it seems like they have something to hide, which fits the “subversive, lying Jew” trope.

I’m not saying conversation works on everyone. Against those who truly want to harm Jewish people, defend yourselves with everything you lawfully can. When people treated my rhetoric as a threat, they were right to. Although I knew I would never harm a Jew, my rhetoric was indistinguishable from the rhetoric of someone who meant it. But not everyone who says those things is that person.

I’ve tried to live by what I’m asking of you. When you leave a movement, like I did with the Jewish Question movement, the people you left have a lot to say about you, and a lot of it is ugly. I haven’t answered any of it, and I don’t intend to. I know how that frame works from the inside, and contempt can’t break it. If I answered them the way they expected, they would hate me more, and it would only reinforce their beliefs. That is why the only thing I’ve been doing is posting the facts I’ve discovered and ignoring all the personal attacks and lies being spread about me.

There are many people I’ve turned into antisemites who I still want to reach. If they’re ever going to leave it, it will be through the same kind of conversation that reached me: honest, calm, with no covering up uncomfortable history and no excuses for anyone’s bad behavior. The order matters. De-escalate first, debunk the claims, and give the person room to deradicalize, because destroying the ones who could still be reached turns them into the ones who can’t.

I changed when the dust settled and the people across from me were willing to talk. If the censorship and the attacks had never stopped, when would I have been calm enough to even consider that I was wrong?

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This is a guest essay by David Gerber, the senior rabbi at Congregation Gates of Prayer in New Orleans.

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

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A lot of us are walking into this new year tired in a way that has nothing to do with how little we slept last night.

It’s been a year of a particular kind of tzuris — exhaustion, if you want the English for it — but tzuris is closer. Not the kind that comes from one unthinkable event; tragically, we know how to brace for one of those.

This is different. This is the exhaustion of a thousand small cuts. Another celebrity we used to like, discovering they think Israel shouldn’t exist. Another university where a swastika shows up on a dorm wall, and the response is a memo about “context.” Another influencer with 11 million followers casually implying that the one Jewish state on earth is the one state that doesn’t get to defend itself.

None of it, on its own, is the Inquisition. None of it, on its own, is Kristallnacht. And that’s exactly what makes it so exhausting: It never quite rises to the level of the thing you can point to and say, “There, that’s the crisis, now we respond.”

It just accumulates. A drip. A year of drips. Until we’re sitting here during the Ten Days of Repentance, feeling something a lot of us have trouble naming honestly out loud. Not fear, exactly. Fatigue. And underneath the fatigue, a worse question: What can I possibly do about any of this?

I’m one person. I don’t run a network. I don’t own a platform. I can’t un-radicalize a comedian or fact-check a musician mid-concert. What is our move, here, against a tide that big?

I don’t think we’re wrong to ask that question. I think it might be the most honest question in this room today. But I don’t think the answer is going to come from making ourselves smaller, quieter, or easier to overlook.

For the past three years, I’ve been part of a group called “Recharging Reform Judaism” — hundreds of Reform rabbis who share one concern: that our movement, representing roughly a million and a half Jews in the United States, isn’t sufficiently addressing the rise in antisemitism or the growing polarization around support for Israel.

I hear a version of this constantly from colleagues — rabbis, Zionists, lovers of Israel — who tell me they stay right down the middle in their own sanctuaries because they’re afraid half the congregation will walk out. Rabbi after rabbi, editing their love for the Jewish People in real-time so the room doesn’t split in half.

I don’t think staying down the middle is working. I don’t think it’s protecting anyone. I think it’s just a quieter way of losing. And in my 15th year as a rabbi, I’ve learned not to predict what a year is going to ask of us, but I believe we’ve reached an inflection point in American Jewish life. I believe Reform Judaism has a choice to make.

I want to speak for a minute in the language of this digital era, because I think it’s the clearest way to say what I mean. Every one of us runs on an operating system — some fundamental way of looking at the world that decides what we notice, what we prioritize, what feels obviously true, long before we ever consciously choose anything.

And somewhere over these last decades, as the distance grew between us and the Holocaust, between us and the Yom Kippur War, between us and the generation that built a state and a movement with their own hands, I worry that American Reform Judaism’s operating system quietly changed.

We became universalists.

Look at what our movement has chosen, again and again, to spend its voice on: voting rights, immigration, environmentalism. None of them are particularly Jewish things. We don’t need a synagogue for any of that. We don’t need Hebrew, or Torah, or 3,000 years of an argument with God. We need a good newsletter and a mailing list. If we as a synagogue offer people the same universal values they can get anywhere, what is the point of us?

And here’s what I know is causing emotional exhaustion for a lot of us: Sometimes the causes we care about so deeply ask us, quietly, to hide the parts of ourselves that complicate the coalition.

To not mention Israel too loudly in that meeting. To leave the kippah at home for that march. To let our Jewishness go a little soft around the edges so it doesn’t get in the way of belonging to something bigger. I don’t know about the rest of you, but every kids’ show I watched growing up in the 1980s taught me the same lesson: If we have to change who we are to fit in, they were never really our friends to begin with.

I think Judaism has to be the operating system again — not an app we open for a cause, or a holiday, or a wedding, and then close. And to be clear, making Judaism our operating system does not mean we give less to the world. It means we stop showing up to fix the world as a scattered collection of individuals, each of us quietly editing ourselves to fit into somebody else’s room. It means we show up as a people, rooted enough in who we are that we can actually be of use to everyone else, instead of just useful enough to be tolerated.

We have confused one of Judaism’s greatest gifts with Judaism itself.

Judaism has given extraordinary ideas to the world: that every human being is created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God; that we have obligations to the stranger; that justice and human dignity matter. Those are Jewish ideas. I believe them. I hope you do too. But Judaism does not begin with humanity in general. It begins with Abraham.

God calls one person, who becomes one family, one people, bound by one covenant, connected to one land. And God tells Abraham that through him, “all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” Listen to the order of that. First Abraham, then blessing. First covenant, then responsibility. First particularism, then universalism.

Judaism’s ability to be a universal blessing grows out of Jewish particularism. It does not replace it.

Somewhere along the way, especially in American Judaism, I worry we reversed the equation. We became extraordinarily good at translating Judaism into universal values like justice, equality, compassion, human dignity. All beautiful. All important. But if that’s all Judaism is, our children will eventually ask the same question, just aimed at something closer to home: Why do I need Judaism to believe any of that?

Judaism was never meant to be a delivery system for values available everywhere else. Judaism is a covenant, a people, a way of life. We inherited a calendar, a language, a land, a history, and an argument with God that has been going on for 3,000 years. Particularism means that before I belong to humanity in the abstract, I also belong to a particular people, with obligations that are specifically Jewish. Not because other people matter less. Because our people matter too.

There’s an image sitting right in front of us every High Holiday season that explains this better than I can: the shofar.

The sound only comes through the narrow place — the tzar. It’s the language of the Psalms: Min hameitzar karati Yah; anani vamerchav Yah. “From the narrow place I called to God; God answered me from the wide expanse.”

We cannot improve a shofar by widening its mouthpiece. Sand it down, make it comfortable, remove the constriction, and we’ll have the most inclusive shofar in Jewish history.

It just won’t make a sound — because the narrowness isn’t a defect. The narrowness is what creates the voice.

And it’s not even a coincidence of language. Tzar, the narrow place, and tzuris, the word I used at the very start of this essay, share the same Hebrew root. Our word for trouble and our word for the narrow place have always been the same word, wearing different clothes. This means that, if we take our own tradition seriously, the very thing squeezing us this year is also, somehow, the place the sound comes from.

Without the tzur of the shofar, nothing downstream of it works — not the wide, beautiful, universal values we send out into the world, not any of it. It all has to run through the narrow place first.

And this is where I want to be careful about what I mean by narrowness. The narrowness is not the boundary of our compassion. It is the source of our identity. The mouthpiece is narrow; the sound is not. In fact, the whole purpose of that narrow place is to produce a sound capable of traveling far beyond it.

I think that’s where Reform Judaism finds itself right now. We’ve spent generations widening — removing barriers, opening doors, making Judaism more accessible. Much of that was good. I am a Reform Jew because I believe in much of what that widening accomplished.

But there’s a point at which widening stops being welcome and starts becoming erasure; a point at which we translate ourselves so thoroughly we can no longer remember the original language; a point at which Judaism becomes so universally agreeable there’s no particular reason left to be Jewish.

I don’t want that Judaism. I want the narrow end: God, Torah, Israel, Hebrew, Shabbat. Peoplehood. Obligation. Not because I want Judaism’s reach to be smaller, but because I want its voice to carry farther.

And we’ve done this before. When the wider world shut doors in our faces, Jews built our own institutions. Locked out of country clubs, Jews built our own. Hospitals wouldn’t hire our doctors, so Jews built hospitals. Shut out of industries, Jewish immigrants created new ones. Not because isolation was good for us, and certainly not because antisemitism was some kind of gift, but because Jews understood that when there was no room waiting for us, we had the ability to build one.

And then something remarkable happened. Once we built those rooms, we opened the doors to everyone. We built Jewish hospitals and treated everyone. We built Jewish charities and helped everyone. We built Jewish institutions and used them to make the world better.

We did not have to become less Jewish in order to care more about humanity. Our particularism gave us somewhere solid from which to care.

I don’t think that instinct died. I think it’s dormant. And maybe this is exactly the kind of year that wakes it back up.

Because Reform Judaism is not 11 people in a chat group wondering what to do about the news. It is roughly a million and a half Jews in the United States. Hundreds of congregations. Rabbis, cantors, educators, camps, schools, and families raising the next generation of Jewish children right now, in sanctuaries just like this one, all over the country.

Imagine, for a moment, if a movement that size actually pointed in one direction: that Jewish safety and Jewish dignity are not up for debate. That kind of unity doesn’t require a million and a half Jews to agree on everything. It asks us to agree on something much narrower and much more fundamental: We are a people. We have obligations to one another. Our safety matters. Our future matters.

That’s the mouthpiece. That is where the sound can travel from.

I think the answer is both smaller and harder than fixing the whole tide. We become more Jewish, not more conservative or more liberal, but more Jewish.

Because an operating system rooted in Judaism doesn’t ask us to be more conservative or more liberal. It asks us to be the kind of Jews who know that loving our own people doesn’t require hating anybody else’s; who can say Am Yisrael Chai without apology; who understand Israel as part of the story we were each born into; and how dark and unthinkable the world can be absent a Jewish state.

Judaism was never supposed to just affirm what we already believe. It is supposed to challenge us, shape us, root us, and sometimes tell us no.

We are living in a narrow place. October 7th changed us. Recent antisemitism has changed us. Israel is under extraordinary pressure. And there’s an enormous temptation, in a moment like this, to respond by widening ourselves. Say less, sand down the edges, don’t say anything that might make someone walk out, blow through the wide end.

But we already know what comes out — nothing.

This narrow place does not imprison us; it gives us a voice. Our roots don’t keep us from reaching outward; they’re what let us grow.

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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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In 1968, Poland found a politically acceptable word for a Jew it wanted gone.

Twenty-three years after Auschwitz was liberated, Polish Jews were packing their suitcases again. They were professors, doctors, journalists, military officers, actors, students, engineers, civil servants, and families whose roots in Poland went back generations. Some had survived the Holocaust. Some had fought in the Polish army. Some had returned after the war, rebuilt careers, raised children, and tried to make lives in a country where entire Jewish neighborhoods had disappeared.

By 1968, the Polish communist government had found a word that could cover almost any of them. It could describe someone who supported Israel or had relatives there. It could be attached to a professor who criticized the government, a journalist who had fallen out of favor, or a party official someone wanted pushed aside. A person didn’t even have to consider himself one.

The word was “Zionist.”

In June 1967, Israel fought the Six-Day War against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. The Soviet Union had armed and backed the Arab states, and Moscow’s allies across Eastern Europe followed its political lead after Israel’s victory. Poland broke diplomatic relations with Israel. Some Polish Jews were happy Israel had survived.

On June 19th, Władysław Gomułka, the leader of communist Poland, stood before a trade union congress in Warsaw and spoke about Jews who had celebrated Israel’s victory. He warned of a “fifth column” inside Poland and suggested that people who felt greater loyalty to Israel should leave.

About three million Polish Jews had been murdered during the Holocaust. The people now being questioned about their loyalty included survivors and their children. They had Polish birth certificates, Polish educations, Polish jobs, Polish military records, and Polish addresses. Still, the government began looking more closely at their ancestry.

Jewish officers and others suspected of sympathy for Israel were removed or demoted in the military. Party officials came under scrutiny. Security services gathered information about citizens of Jewish origin, including people who had been detached from organized Jewish life for years. Whether someone actually belonged to a Zionist organization was becoming less important than what the government could find in a family tree or personnel file.

There was another fight happening inside Poland’s Communist Party. Interior Minister Mieczysław Moczar had built a nationalist faction known as the “Partisans,” many of them men with wartime resistance credentials who wanted greater influence inside the government. Removing officials branded as Jewish or Zionist created vacancies for other people to fill. Antisemitism and political ambition worked quite well together.

Even some communist leaders thought Gomułka had gone too far with “fifth column.” The phrase was removed from the published version of his speech. Everyone who had listened to the speech had already heard it.

The confrontation that brought all of this into the streets didn’t begin with Israel. It began at the theater. Adam Mickiewicz’s “Dziady” was playing at Warsaw’s National Theatre in late 1967. Written in the 19th century, the play contained passages about Russian oppression, and Polish audiences living under Soviet domination understood the parallels. Their reactions during the performances made the government increasingly uncomfortable.

Authorities limited the number of performances and eventually canceled the production. On January 30, 1968, the final performance ended and students walked to the monument of Mickiewicz in Warsaw to protest censorship. Police arrested demonstrators, and the dispute moved onto university campuses, where resentment had already been building over censorship and government interference in intellectual life.

Two University of Warsaw students, Adam Michnik and Henryk Szlajfer, were expelled after informing foreign journalists about the protests. On March 8th, students gathered in the university courtyard to demand their reinstatement and greater freedom. Police, militia units, and government-backed “worker activists” moved into the crowd and beat demonstrators.

Protests spread to universities and cities across Poland. Tens of thousands of students participated. Authorities detained about 2,700 people, students were expelled, academics lost their jobs, and dozens of protesters eventually went before courts.

The government now had to explain why young Poles were protesting against a Polish communist government, and it already had a convenient answer. State newspapers, radio, and television began connecting the unrest to “Zionists.” Factory meetings and “anti-Zionist” rallies were organized around the country where workers were expected to denounce Israel, Zionism, and the supposed conspirators operating inside Poland. A protest over censorship had been turned into evidence of a Jewish conspiracy.

Professors disappeared from universities. Journalists lost their positions. Government employees were dismissed. Military officers were removed or demoted. Party members were expelled. Writers, filmmakers, researchers, administrators, and other professionals watched careers built over decades disappear.

The government also revived “żydokomuna,” the old accusation that Jews were collectively responsible for communism. This produced a useful contradiction: Poland’s communist government could attack Jews for being associated with Stalinism while accusing the same Jews of serving Israel, the West, and American imperialism. A person could be too communist and insufficiently loyal to communist Poland at the same time.

Names appeared in newspapers and workplace meetings became places to denounce colleagues. Jewish ancestry could suddenly cost someone a job, while people who defended Jewish friends and coworkers could find themselves under attack too.

The purge created opportunities for other people. Professors removed from universities left chairs to be filled, while officials forced from government left offices behind. Academics who advanced into positions vacated during the purge became known derisively as the “March docents.” Calling someone a Zionist could clear more than a person’s reputation. It could clear his desk.

By the spring and summer of 1968, families were applying to leave, but leaving meant surrendering Poland first. People of Jewish origin applying to emigrate to Israel were required to relinquish their Polish citizenship and return their identity cards and passports. The government issued them a green, sometimes blue, booklet called a travel document.

Inside was a sentence that said what their Polish passport no longer could: “The possessor of this travel document is not a citizen of the Polish People’s Republic.”

There was no replacement citizenship listed because there wasn’t one. Poland had made the person stateless. Some of the people carrying those booklets had survived the German occupation, losing parents, siblings, spouses, children, cousins, grandparents, and entire communities. They had survived ghettos, hiding places, camps, forests, deportations, and executions and returned to Poland after the war.

Now the government had figured out how to expel Jews with paperwork. A person could walk into an office as a Polish citizen and leave it without a country.

Warsaw’s Gdański railway station became the departure point people remembered. There were suitcases and trunks on the platforms. Friends came from work, neighbors came, relatives came, and other Jews preparing for their departures came to say goodbye.

Janina Goldhar remembered crowds filling the station when her family left. Another Warsaw resident, Estera Migdalska, remembered going there so often to see Jewish friends off that it became almost routine. Trains carrying emigrants toward Vienna were leaving again and again.

The trains usually went first to Vienna. From there people continued toward Israel or made arrangements for somewhere else. Those heading for the United States sometimes traveled through Italy. Their belongings often traveled separately by sea in containers and could take weeks to catch up with them. Families had to inventory what they were taking, and some possessions, including works of art, needed additional permission before they could leave the country.

The paperwork said Israel because Jewish emigrants were made to declare Israel as their destination, but many never went there. They scattered to Sweden, Denmark, France, the United States, Israel, and elsewhere. Some didn’t speak Hebrew, weren’t religious, and had spent their entire lives considering themselves Polish. Poland had called them “Zionists” and processed their departures accordingly.

Among those who left was Ida Kamińska, one of the great figures of 20th-century Yiddish theater. Her mother, Esther Rachel Kamińska, had been known as the mother of Yiddish theater. Ida grew up onstage and became an actress, director, playwright, and translator.

She survived the war in the Soviet Union and returned afterward to a Poland where almost everything that had supported the country’s prewar Jewish cultural world was gone. She helped rebuild Jewish theater and eventually became director of the State Jewish Theatre in Warsaw.

In 1965, Kamińska starred in the Czechoslovak film “The Shop on Main Street,” about the destruction of a Jewish community during the Holocaust. The film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and Kamińska received an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. Three years later she left Poland.

Writer and actor Henryk Grynberg had already decided not to return after traveling to the United States with the theater company. Grynberg had survived the Holocaust as a Jewish child in occupied Poland. His father, younger brother, two uncles, and five aunts had been murdered.

The departures took a disproportionate share of Poland’s educated professional class. The percentage of university students and people with university degrees among the post-March emigrants was several times higher than in the Polish population as a whole. Doctors, scientists, professors, writers, artists, engineers, and students joined the people carrying those one-way travel documents through Gdański station.

Before World War II, Poland had been home to about three million Jews. Warsaw was one of the great Jewish cities of the world, filled with Yiddish newspapers, schools, synagogues, political movements, theaters, publishing houses, businesses, charities, and religious institutions.

The Holocaust destroyed most of that world. Tens of thousands more Jews left Poland after the Kielce pogrom in 1946. Another large wave departed in 1949 and 1950, followed by tens of thousands during the political thaw of the late 1950s. The people still there in 1968 were what remained after all of it.

About 13,000 people of Jewish origin left during the post-March exodus, with some estimates closer to 15,000 depending on who is counted. In absolute numbers, it was smaller than some earlier postwar Jewish emigration waves, but it took a huge share of the Jews who were still there.

Organized Jewish life in Poland lost families, professionals, students, artists, and community leaders. Parents and grandparents sometimes stayed while children and grandchildren left. Because emigrants had surrendered their citizenship, returning wasn’t simply a matter of buying a ticket. They had to apply for Polish visas as foreigners, and some were refused permission to return even for family funerals.

Official propaganda rarely needed the word “Jew.” Conveniently, “Zionist” could do the work. “Zionists” were accused of controlling the student protests, tied to former Stalinists, and portrayed as people serving Israel, West Germany, and American imperialism.

Historian Dariusz Stola has spent years studying the campaign and argues that even calling it an “anti-Zionist campaign” can be misleading. It began as an anti-Israel campaign after the Six-Day War and became anti-Jewish. A person’s actual beliefs about Zionism became almost irrelevant. A Jewish parent or grandparent could matter more; so could relatives abroad or an entry in a government file.

“Jew” would have said plainly what Poland was doing only two decades after the Holocaust. “Zionist” sounded political and gave the government something it needed: deniability. The people losing their jobs knew who was being targeted, as did the families selling what they could before leaving and the officials collecting their passports and citizenship documents.

Years later, a plaque was placed at Warszawa Gdańska for the people who left during the post-March exodus. It carries a line by Henryk Grynberg: “They left behind more than they had.”

Some of their travel documents survived too. One in POLIN Museum’s collection belonged to Aleksander Kaganowicz, a student who had been studying in Italy when the campaign began. He returned to Poland to help his family prepare to leave. His document was issued on December 31, 1968 and expired on February 10, 1969. His luggage cleared customs in Warsaw on February 8th.

On February 11th, Kaganowicz finally boarded a train out of Poland. Border authorities pulled him off at Zebrzydowice because his travel document had expired the day before and detained him for a day.

He eventually crossed the border carrying that little government booklet. Where a passport normally identified its holder’s citizenship, Kaganowicz’s identified what he no longer had: “The possessor of this travel document is not a citizen of the Polish People’s Republic.”