Fighting antisemitism is distracting us from something more important.

This Yom Kippur, the question is not simply what we have done wrong, but what we have failed to learn.

photo: Levi Meir Clancy/Unsplash

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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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