Jews are caught in a political trap.
But being caught in this political trap also presents a hidden opportunity. Instead of pleading for recognition, Jews can turn the tables.
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For centuries, Jews have been told to choose sides in societies that rarely had their best interests at heart.
Today, the situation is no different; only the scenery has changed.
In the modern West, Jews are trapped between political forces that both claim moral authority, yet both weaponize the Jewish story for their own ends.
On the Right, Jews are praised as long as they conform to a narrative of “Western civilization” and “Judeo-Christian values.” Israel is lauded as a bulwark against radical Islam, and Jews are held up as model minorities who embody discipline, education, and entrepreneurial drive.
But the support is conditional. When Jews do not fit neatly into the Right’s cultural wars, when they demand recognition as Jews rather than as symbols of someone else’s ideological agenda, the admiration quickly morphs into suspicion. Old tropes of disloyalty, financial power, and foreign influence reemerge.
On the Left, Jews are celebrated as victims of the past, but scorned as “oppressors” in the present. Once, Jews symbolized the struggle for equality and justice; today, in “progressive” spaces, Jews are often cast as a privileged group, defined almost entirely by Israel’s existence. The Holocaust is invoked selectively, as a cautionary tale about fascism, but Jewish suffering is erased when it conflicts with fashionable narratives about “decolonization” and “power dynamics.” A people who were history’s quintessential scapegoats are now scapegoated again, accused of standing on the wrong side of history.
This trap is not new. In 19th-century Europe, Jews were pressured to assimilate into nationalism or dissolve into socialism. Nationalists demanded loyalty to the state, socialism demanded loyalty to class struggle — both were uneasy with Jewish distinctiveness.
In mid-20th-century America, Jews were welcomed into liberal coalitions as proof of the nation’s tolerance, yet told to keep their identity private. They could march for civil rights, but once they advocated for Jewish causes like Soviet Jewry or Zionism, they were dismissed as parochial and tribal.
Israel has only heightened the bind. On the Right, Israel is instrumentalized as a fortress of Western strength; on the Left, it is vilified as the ultimate symbol of colonial oppression. In both cases, the actual complexity of Jewish self-determination is ignored. Jews are the only people expected to condemn their own state to prove moral worth, or to justify every Israeli policy decision before they can participate in broader causes. No one demands that French Canadians answer for Paris, or that Muslim Australians condemn every regime in one of the 45-plus Muslim-majority countries.
Yet Jews are always on trial.
The underlying dynamic is the oldest in the book: Jews are always too much and never enough. Too weak to defend themselves, or too powerful to be trusted. Too assimilated, or too separate. Too universalist, or too tribal. Whatever the political climate, Jews are cast in a double bind where any choice is wrong.
This dynamic creates not only political marginalization, but also cultural isolation. On college campuses and in grassroots movements, Jewish students are pressured to renounce Israel — or even Jewish peoplehood — if they wish to belong. In nationalist or populist movements, dog whistles about “cosmopolitan elites” and “global financiers” thrive, often alongside professions of support for Israel. In both spaces, Jews are flattened into symbols: the useful minority, the eternal oppressor, the perennial scapegoat.
The psychological toll is heavy. Jews find themselves constantly second-guessing: “If I support Israel, will I be labeled a racist? If I criticize Israel, am I betraying my people? If I stay silent, am I complicit in my own erasure?” This corrosive uncertainty leads to exhaustion, self-censorship, and the fragmentation of Jewish communal life into factions aligned more with Western politics than with Jewish needs.
And yet, there is a way forward. The Jewish People have endured precisely because they refused to be defined by others. Our identity predates the modern Left and Right, and our destiny cannot be subordinated to them. To escape the trap, Jews must reclaim the right to define ourselves. We must insist that our story is not a prop in someone else’s political theater.
But being caught in this political trap also presents a hidden opportunity. If no major political party, ideology, or movement will embrace Jews on our own terms, then Jews are free from the obligation of loyalty to any of them. Political homelessness, though uncomfortable, can be empowering. It creates space to set terms rather than merely accept them.
Instead of pleading for recognition, Jews can turn the tables: If you want our votes, prove it. If you want our donations, show it. If you want our participation, earn it. This flips the dynamic from dependence to accountability. Political parties and movements cannot simply assume Jewish support while ignoring Jewish safety, dignity, and continuity.
In practical terms, that means pressing every candidate and every institution with clear demands: Will you fight antisemitism consistently, even when it comes from your own side? Will you defend the legitimacy of Israel as the Jewish homeland, regardless of if you agree or disagree with any given Israeli governing coalition? Will you ensure that Jewish identity is respected as equal to every other minority identity?
By refusing to be trapped, Jews can turn vulnerability into leverage. Political homelessness is not weakness; it is independence. It allows Jews to remain Jewish first, and only then decide which alliances are worth our trust.
The lesson of history is clear: Jewish survival has never depended on fitting neatly into the categories of the majority. It has depended on self-confidence, continuity, and the refusal to dissolve into ideologies that erase what makes us unique.
The Torah and Jewish tradition make clear that Jewish survival was never meant to come from fitting neatly into the categories of the majority. In the book of Numbers, the prophet Balaam, gazing upon Israel from the mountaintop, proclaims: “Behold, it is a people that dwells alone, and is not reckoned among the nations.” This was not a curse, but a recognition of a unique destiny. From its earliest days, the Jewish People were set apart — not because they sought isolation, but because their role in history could not be reduced to political or cultural conformity.
The Midrash sharpens this point when it teaches that Israel was redeemed from Egypt because they did not abandon their names, their language, or their clothing, even after four centuries of slavery. In other words, what saved them was not assimilation into Egyptian society but fidelity to their own identity.
In Deuteronomy, God calls the Jewish people “a holy nation” and “a treasured people,” chosen not for their numbers or power, but because of the covenant that bound them to something higher than politics or empire. Holiness here means separateness, a life lived by values and rhythms not defined by the surrounding nations.
The prophets return to this idea again and again, describing Jewish survival not in terms of mass acceptance, but in terms of a faithful “remnant.” Isaiah declares that even if the people are reduced to a fraction of their size, that remnant will carry the covenant forward. Jeremiah and Ezekiel echo the same refrain: Continuity depends on commitment, not on majority approval.
The rabbinic tradition extends this logic. In Ethics of the Fathers, Jews are warned not to separate themselves from their community — meaning the Jewish community, not the surrounding majority. Survival requires solidarity with one another, especially when the wider culture seeks to dissolve Jewish distinctiveness. The Talmud in Sanhedrin goes further, teaching that the entire world endures for the sake of the righteous minority, underscoring the principle that truth and continuity are not measured by numbers, but by moral fidelity.
Later commentators crystallized this ancient wisdom in the face of modern challenges. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, writing in 19th-century Europe, insisted that Jewish endurance in exile did not depend on mimicking European categories of culture or nationalism, but on holding fast to Torah as a distinct way of life. In the 20th century, Rav Kook, the first Chief Rabbi of pre-state Israel, argued that Israel’s spiritual role in the world was precisely to stand apart — not in arrogance, but in order to elevate the nations by modeling holiness, creativity, and faith.
Taken together, these texts form a clear pattern. Jewish survival has never depended on majority acceptance or assimilation. From Egypt to Babylon, from medieval Europe to modern democracies, Jews endured not because they dissolved into the nations, but because they carried their covenant through the nations. The lesson of Jewish history, grounded in Jewish texts, is that survival comes from faithfulness, distinctiveness, and unity — not from trying to fit neatly into categories that were never designed to include us.
Therefore, the way out of today’s political trap is for Jews not to pick a side, but to transcend the binary and affirm a truth as old as our history: that Jewish survival, dignity, and future rest not on Left or Right, not on liberal or conservative, and not on progressive or traditional.
Jewish survival, dignity, and future rests on ourselves. As our ancient texts remind us: All Jews are guarantors for one another.
This is an important lessons for Jews to assimilate and internalize. The Jews' claim to Eretz Yisrael does not depend on the benevolence of outsiders but on their own God-given right to the land which predates the existence of most of the nations on earth. No one questions the rights of Britons to the UK, of the French to France, not even of Americans to America, that latest manifestation of modernity for which the ancient Hebrew commonwealth was the seedbed society, which derives from the Hebrew Bible. So Jews should wake up and sign on to the deal they have so often betrayed and finally lay claim to their land; and when they find themselves elsewhere, make their enemies' lives so uncomfortable that they stop asking the Jews to deny their own existence.
"If you want our votes, prove it. If you want our donations, show it. If you want our participation, earn it." Agree with this statement but the key to it all is will Jews have the intestinal fortitude to walk away from those who ignore or take them for granted? No muss, no fuss, and no support of any kind, just walk away. These people need you more than you need them, remember that.