I refuse to die before I am dead.

Antisemitism threatens Jewish lives, but the greater danger is allowing it to determine how Jewish those lives are.

photo: Benny Rotlevy/Unsplash

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

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

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There are few places where dignity is surrendered as efficiently as a hospital.

Within hours, your clothes are gone. Your privacy becomes negotiable. Strangers discuss your bowel movements with bureaucratic seriousness. You are punctured, prodded, scanned, wheeled through corridors, and periodically awakened so somebody can ask whether you have managed to sleep.

Your name migrates from your identity to a plastic bracelet around your wrist. The sovereign individual becomes “the patient in bed 12.”

I was recently that patient. Being in hospital reminds you how much of ordinary life depends upon the assumption that the strangers around us do not wish us harm. We assume the pilot wants the plane to land, the chef has not poisoned the soup, and the pharmacist has put the correct tablets in the bottle.

Sure, we have laws enforcing behavior, but when we enter hospital — frightened, sedated, or simply too ill to supervise our own survival — we make perhaps the greatest mundane act of faith modern society requires of us. We place our bodies into the hands of strangers.

For a Jew, there is now an uncomfortable footnote to that trust.

In February 2025, two nurses at Bankstown-Lidcombe Hospital in Sydney appeared in a video conversation with Israeli content creator Max Veifer. The exchange was grotesque. Asked what would happen if they had an Israeli patient, one of the nurses said she would not treat them. The other spoke about killing Israelis.

There is no evidence that Jewish or Israeli patients at Bankstown were actually harmed. Yet the footage was shocking for a reason that transcends whatever eventually happens in court.

These were not anonymous lunatics ranting beneath a Telegram post. They were nurses. They belonged to a profession whose moral authority rests upon the beautiful proposition that vulnerability erases tribal distinction. The wounded enemy is still wounded. The despised stranger is still a patient. Medicine, at its noblest, asks not whether a person deserves compassion but where it hurts.

But there it was: the possibility that hatred might follow Jews even into the hospital bed and the operating theater.

I thought about Bankstown while I was in hospital. Then I noticed that I was not frightened — because I am under no illusion about antisemitism. I do not subscribe to the comforting modern superstition that hatred disappears when sufficiently educated people condemn it. Jewish history is, among other things, a 3,000-year peer-reviewed study demonstrating the contrary.

Nor do I believe every doctor, nurse, or orderly secretly loves Jews. Why should they? Jews are not entitled to universal affection. No people are. Yet lying there, dependent upon strangers in a way adults rarely permit, I realized that I had absolutely no desire to make myself less Jewish in exchange for the possibility of feeling safer. That frightened me less than the alternative.

There is a distinction here worth making: I am not so proud to be Jewish that I am unafraid to die. I am so proud to be Jewish that I refuse to spend my life afraid of being one. Those are very different propositions.

The first is martyrdom. I have no appetite for it and no desire for an early appointment with the Almighty. Life is sacred. Danger should be avoided. Doctors should be consulted. Seatbelts should be worn. Suspicious lumps should be examined. Cholesterol should be regarded with considerably more seriousness than most Jewish men would prefer.

I want to live — preferably for an offensively long time.

Yet precisely because I want to live, I have become increasingly unwilling to surrender portions of my life to people who despise me. Antisemitism has always imposed two possible taxes upon Jews: violence and self-erasure. We talk more about the first. Pogroms, expulsions, massacres, and genocide leave bodies, ruins, and dates for historians to record. Self-erasure is quieter. It happens privately, incrementally, sometimes almost imperceptibly.

Do not wear that, say where you are from, or mention Israel. Maybe take off the Star of David, place the mezuzah out of sight, and do not let them know you are Jewish until you know what they think about Jews. Do not be conspicuous, provoke anybody or — with respect to Jackie Mason — be too Jewish.

Each concession can be defended as prudence. Sometimes it genuinely is prudence. Jews have survived for millennia partly because we possess an exquisitely calibrated sense of danger. There is no virtue in stupidity, and no commandment requiring us to advertise ourselves to someone carrying a knife.

However, somewhere between sensible caution and permanent concealment lies a moral frontier. Cross it often enough and the antisemite no longer needs to remove the Jew. The Jew begins removing himself. That is the victory I refuse to give them.

Antisemitism’s greatest triumph is not necessarily making Jewish life impossible. It is making Jewishness embarrassing, burdensome, or dangerous enough that Jews reduce themselves to fit the available space. History contains endless variations of the offer. You may remain, possibly even prosper, provided you convert, assimilate, or at least leave your Judaism at home. You may be tolerated if your Jewishness becomes sufficiently theoretical.

You may be Jewish, provided you are the “correct” kind of Jew: apologetic, embarrassed, politically neutered, culturally decorative, and reliably willing to denounce other Jews when requested or upon command.

The vocabulary changes but the proposition does not: Become smaller and we may leave you alone.

Nope. Sorry. Not playing that game.

There is something wonderfully clarifying about reaching that conclusion while wearing a hospital gown. We imagine courage theatrically. Courage belongs to battlefields, burning buildings, and speeches delivered beneath flags. Yet most courage is embarrassingly domestic. It occurs without witnesses. It is the small decision not to rearrange yourself around another person’s prejudice.

There was no heroic moment in my hospital room. No antisemite appeared to threaten me or demanded that I renounce anything. I simply became conscious that I would not. That mattered.

Illness has a brutal talent for editing life’s abstractions. Mortality ceases to be philosophical once somebody attaches electrodes to your chest and prods medical instruments up your various orifices. The body, which has spent decades politely allowing you to pretend you are immortal, suddenly reminds you that the arrangement was always temporary.

Once mortality becomes visible, another question presents itself: If death is ultimately non-negotiable, exactly how much of myself am I supposed to negotiate away trying to avoid it? Every human being eventually loses the argument with biology. Jews, despite controlling everything from the banking system to the weather, do not possess a special exemption.

So the relevant question is not just how long we live but whether fear is permitted to determine the dimensions of the life preceding death.

I refuse to die before I am dead. I refuse the incremental death in which one removes a symbol here, suppresses an opinion there, avoids mentioning one’s identity somewhere else, until eventually an entire personality and identity has been reorganized around the sensitivities of people who hate it. That is capitulation administered in small enough doses to resemble common sense.

Jewish history teaches something far more than victimhood. It teaches continuity. Our ancestors lived under rulers who regarded them as infidels, Christ-killers, racial contaminants, economic parasites, political subversives, cosmopolitan degenerates, and assorted other fantasies produced by societies requiring someone to blame for the weather.

Yet still they lived, married, had children, studied, traded, prayed, and argued with God (and, even more enthusiastically, with each other). They wrote books, told jokes, and complained about their relatives. Jewish history contains unimaginable death, yet it is life that is the Jewish achievement. Our inheritance is not the grave; it is the refusal to disappear.

This is why I find the contemporary injunction that Jews should respond to antisemitism primarily by becoming more discreet so enraging. There may be moments when discretion is necessary, but it cannot become a civilization’s organizing principle. A Judaism permanently hidden for its own protection has already surrendered something precious.

Jewish children should be learning that Jewish identity is not an heirloom to be removed whenever strangers enter the room. They should be taught to understand and appreciate that there is a privilege in belonging to this absurdly durable people.

We are the descendants of those who repeatedly encountered history’s most powerful empires and somehow outlived the footnotes. The Pharaohs are museum exhibits. Babylon is archaeology. Rome is ruins that tourists photograph while eating gelato. The Soviet Union is a chapter in dry textbooks. And somewhere this Friday evening, a Jewish mother will still be telling everyone to sit down because the candles are about to be lit. There is something indecently magnificent about that.

So yes, I thought about those nurses in Australia while I was in hospital. They made me want to stand taller. Courage has never meant the absence of vulnerability. It means refusing to make vulnerability your master.

If I am fortunate, I will live a long life as a Jew. I will write as one, argue as one, celebrate as one, worry as one, infuriate people as one and almost certainly spend an unreasonable amount of that life discussing what is and is not good for the Jews.

If I am unfortunate, I will die sooner than I would like. That possibility existed before Bankstown. It exists after it. It existed before October 7th. It will exist long after the current eruption of antisemitism has mutated into whatever respectable vocabulary the next generation invents for the same ancient pathology.

However, I have no intention of spending the interval pretending to be somebody else. The antisemite may threaten my safety, but he does not get custodianship of my identity. He does not decide how Jewish I am permitted to look, sound, think, or live. He does not get to make me ashamed or make me disappear. And he certainly does not get to make me die before I am dead.

I am a Jew. I intend to live like one. And whenever death eventually comes for me, as it comes for everybody, I intend to have given it as little advance territory as possible.

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