Every Jew now has two jobs.
In 2026, being Jewish means answering questions nobody else is asked.
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This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan, a longtime journalist and commentator who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
It is Passover, a time to reflect on the state of Jewish freedom. It is now a different world for Diaspora Jews.
For a long time, longer than many can even remember, Jews in the West believed they could live ordinary lives.
They would become lawyers, teachers, doctors, engineers, shop owners, accountants — whatever it was they trained for. They would complain about rent, argue about football, watch television, and generally behave like everyone else.
Jewishness existed, of course, yet it did so quietly.
Unless one was Orthodox, it was something in the background of life — a family history, a cultural inheritance, perhaps a synagogue on Yom Kippur if guilt or nostalgia demanded it. It did not need to be defended in public like a doctoral dissertation.
Not anymore. Today every Jew has two jobs: their day job and their second one as a defender of Jews.
Unlike the first job, nobody applied for the second. It was assigned.
The Jewish architect who finds himself explaining Middle Eastern history at a dinner party because someone has just repeated a slogan they learned from TikTok between yoga classes — or maybe during them.
The Jewish university student who realizes that mentioning Israel in a seminar now triggers classmates who discovered the word “colonialism” sometime last Tuesday.
The Jewish employee who sits through workplace diversity sessions where every minority group receives solemn respect — except Jews, who are casually recategorized as “privileged oppressors” by pimply HR consultants with sociology degrees and the intellectual depth of a cereal box.
The Jewish parent who discovers that the school curriculum includes extensive units on colonialism, oppression, and historical injustice but omits 3,000 years of Jewish history in Israel.
None of these people trained for this. They did not enroll in graduate programs in Middle Eastern history, which is a good thing because there is no place worse to learn about Israel and the Middle East than Western universities’ humanities faculties.
Yet the moment someone discovers they are Jewish, an invisible alarm bell rings, showing once again that Ivan Pavlov’s work is in no way limited to canines, but also applies to their two-legged best friends.
Ah, here is someone who must now answer for Israel.
For Jews today, ordinary conversation has become a cross-examination. Casual remarks have become demands for political clarification. News stories have become moral interrogations. Social media posts have become loyalty tests.
“How can you support that?”
I always answer honestly by telling them I support it because Israel is Jewish land, and under no circumstances will we be giving any part of it away. Next.
If they persist, then I treat them to an exhibition of my poor anger management skills. The question is delivered with the smug certainty of someone who has just finished reading a 17-slide Instagram infographic. The premise is never examined. It assumes that Jews must explain Israel and answer for it, and must do this endlessly, patiently, and politely — preferably while being shouted at.
No other group is subjected to this bizarre expectation. Chinese people are not cornered at dinner parties to explain the Chinese Communist Party’s policies. Nobody interrogates every Muslim about Saudi Arabia before allowing them to finish their coffee. Jews alone are expected to arrive at every conversation carrying a portable lecture series on Middle Eastern geopolitics.
Apparently, Jewish identity now comes with homework.
What makes this ritual particularly exhausting is the staggering intellectual laziness behind it. The accusations are always the same nonsense about “colonialism,” “apartheid,” and the great genocide blood libel that give away instantly you are talking to an intellectual goose.
Ask them who ruled the land before the Ottomans and you will receive a blank stare. Enquire about when Jerusalem first appears in Jewish texts and they will look at you as though you have just introduced an alien concept. Ask them about the partition proposals of 1937 or 1947 and they will blink slowly, like malfunctioning robots who have been given eyelids to make them less frightening to humans.
Yet somehow these same people possess the confidence to deliver sweeping moral verdicts about the world’s most intractable conflict. It is an extraordinary performance. Ignorance has rarely been this loud.
Understanding what is really happening here is as easy as eating ice cream. Modern activist culture requires a villain and trims history down to cartoon simplicity to find one. Israel turned out to be extremely convenient. It is small, Jewish, democratic, Western-aligned and, like me, it bites back hard. For activists searching for a symbolic embodiment of colonialism, capitalism, Western power, and historical injustice, Israel checks every box.
Jews, inconveniently, exist inside this narrative, meaning they are expected to defend themselves inside a story that was written without them.
Carrying two jobs has consequences. The first job requires professional competence; the second requires emotional endurance, because defending yourself as a Jew today is not for buttercups. It involves confronting religious ideologues and whack-jobs from across the political spectrum who want to harm you or kill you.
Depressingly, none of this is original. Jews have been summoned to explain themselves for centuries. In medieval Europe, they were dragged into public disputations where priests attempted to prove Judaism false. In the 19th century, Jews were accused of controlling capitalism. In the 20th century, it was communism. Today, the accusation has simply changed language. Now Jews control geopolitics through Israel. The conspiracy evolves. The obsession and psychosis remain.
There is, however, a small irony buried inside all of this. When you force people to defend something long enough, they eventually learn everything about it.
Jews who once felt loosely connected to their heritage now find themselves reading Jewish history with renewed intensity. People who rarely followed Israeli politics now know more about it than most of the activists screaming about it — admittedly no mean feat. Communities that once took their security for granted are rediscovering solidarity and how to defend themselves.
In other words, the campaign to isolate Jews has galvanized them. It has reminded them who they are. Activists spent decades complaining about Jewish identity. Now they have helped strengthen it. It is not their most impressive strategic achievement.
So here we are. Every Jew now wears two hats: a kippah and a helmet. The helmet comes out whenever someone decides that Jewish identity requires explanation.
Until this obsession disappears, and history suggests it rarely does for long, the second job will remain. It is an exhausting arrangement. Yet Jews have been dealing with exhausting arrangements for more than 3,000 years.
One of the great ironies of history: The mass persecutions, ethnic cleanings and genocides of Jews over the past few centuries are what made Israel the powerhouse it is today. Jew haters are too stupid to understand that they continue to make the case for a strong Jewish state better than any Zionist ever could.
Exactly right. Every time a fellow Jew describes how they have changed in the past 2.5 years, I jump up and say “yes, me too!” Absolutely obsessed with our history, the birth and travails of Zionism, everything. Am Yisrael Chai!