Pride alone won’t save the Jews.

Jewish history makes one lesson unavoidable: Dignity endures only when it is backed by enforceable strength.

photo: Chris Hearn/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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In his recent “State of World Jewry” address at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, journalist Bret Stephens urged Jews to abandon the multimillion-dollar crusade against Jew-hatred as a “well-meaning but mostly wasted effort” and to invest instead in unapologetic confidence, cultural depth, and internal strength.

He recast antisemitism not as a curable misunderstanding, but as a dark tribute to Jewish virtues — our achievements, our stubborn insistence on life, our refusal to conform — rather than a reaction to our supposed defects. Something is bracing in this: an attempt to stop treating Jew-hatred as a PR problem solvable by a better brochure.

But confidence without consequence is not strategy; it is posture. The Jewish answer to persecution has never been therapeutic resilience alone. It has been the hard conversion of moral clarity into enforceable protection.

Stephens is right about pride. He is wrong if pride becomes a substitute for defense.

And he is wrong if he imagines that the communal version of “confidence” — more Jewish day school enrollment, more Jewish summer camps, more Hebrew songs and Israeli dancing — can substitute for confronting power where power is manufactured. Day schools and camps matter. They help produce Jews who feel Jewish. But feeling Jewish is not the same as being safe as a Jew, let alone being permitted to speak as a Jew in the institutions that define respectable opinion. Jewish pride is the result of achieving strength to fulfill covenantal obligations.

German-American political philosopher and historian Leo Strauss once described the Jewish People as the living witness to the absence of redemption, a people whose fate testifies that the world is not yet as it should be. Our liturgy agrees. The Aleinu prayer does not whisper polite relativism; it looks at idolatry and calls it vanity and emptiness. Judaism has always insisted on moral clarity.

The modern temptation is to stop there: witness, lament, and fundraising. Judaism does not permit that luxury.

Because being part of the Jewish nation has never meant merely surviving history’s blows. Plenty of peoples survive. The Jewish vocation is harsher, and higher: to see evil without illusion, and then to build the power that prevents it from repeating itself. The purpose of Jewish sovereignty is not therapeutic. It is moral and political: to convert Jewish perception of injustice into Jewish responsibility for justice — first for ourselves, and then, as a consequence, for others.

October 7th proved again that Jews are fated to witness the worst that hatred can do. But the Passover Haggadah refuses to let Jews remain passive chroniclers of suffering. It commands the opposite: In every generation, we must see ourselves as having personally gone out from Egypt. That line is often read as a spiritual expression of empathy. It is something sterner: political instruction.

The Haggadah is not a seder how-to book manual; it’s a battle plan for sovereignty. The narrative moves from helpless slaves to a nation that assumes responsibility for security, land, and mission. Jewish nationhood is not a reward for piety; it is the framework that allows moral clarity to become political action, that converts memory of injustice into institutions which resist it.

This is why Rabbi Akiva stands at the pivot of the Haggadah’s drama. Martyred by the Romans for teaching Torah, reciting the Shema prayer with his last breath, Rabbi Akiva embodied love of God not as quietism but as a mandate for national courage.

His support for Jewish military leader Simon bar Kokhba was not messianic escapism; it was a sober recognition that Jewish redemption would not descend from heaven onto a powerless people. Holiness, in Rabbi Akiva’s reading, follows courage. The choice to fight for sovereignty — to take up arms, to lead a revolt, to risk everything for a Jewish polity — is itself an act of love of God.

Bar Kokhba’s revolt failed, and the price was catastrophic. But the lesson that shaped Zionism for centuries was uncompromising: We do not wait for signs; we create the conditions in which Jewish life, dignity, and justice can be defended.

Pride is not a feeling. It is the willingness to assume the burdens of statehood: political struggle, military risk, and the ongoing discipline required to sustain Jewish sovereignty.

The State of Israel’s founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, facing the Nazis’ rise and the British White Paper’s betrayal, offered a principle that should be engraved above every Jewish communal boardroom: Support the war as if there were no White Paper; fight the White Paper as if there were no war.

So too today. Diaspora Jews must fight antisemitism as if there were no Israel, and fight for Israel as if there were no antisemitism. Not because the two are equivalent, but because Jewish responsibility is not a single-front war; it never has been. Ben-Gurion did not pit these fronts against each other; he prosecuted both with equal ferocity, because Jewish survival requires it and Jewish purpose demands it.

Witnessing injustice (synagogue mobs, campus harassment, workplace discrimination) demands immediate action through whatever tools are at hand: allies, courts, civil-rights enforcement. Simultaneously, we must fight for the Jewish state that makes such action possible at scale, a polity that turns individual resistance into national power.

This is not ideology. It is realism with a moral spine.

Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin understood something modern Jews are encouraged to forget: The path to Auschwitz ran through spiritual humiliation and division. A people stripped of dignity, trampled, and trained to accept degradation, becomes easy to destroy.

With the State of Israel’s rebirth, Begin believed history turned: no more destruction and no more defeats, and no more oppression — only Jewish liberty, with dignity and honor. A Jewish state is not a symbol. It is the practical instrument by which Jews refuse humiliation and ensure that injustice against us meets organized resistance.

And in the 21st century, that resistance is not limited to tanks and planes. Self-defense now includes legal power, regulatory power, and the ability to set precedents that make it dangerous to target Jews. To be part of a Jewish nation in our time is to help thicken that shield: in the IDF, in municipal councils, in courts, in media, and on campuses.

Witness is universal. Responsibility must be organized.

Which brings us to the missing ingredient in too many communal prescriptions: the return of the state. Not the state of our feelings; the state with subpoenas, injunctions, and prison terms. Because the most civilized societies have a dirty secret: Minorities are safest not when they are loved, but when their harassment is expensive.

For decades, Diaspora Jewry treated antisemitism the way many liberals treat crime: as a pathology to be studied, explained, mediated and, above all, managed. We built “dialogue initiatives.” We funded “awareness.” We held panels. We wrote solemn letters. In other words, we performed virtue and called it defense.

Hence, rather than abandon a war against Jew-hatred, we have to shift resources: We must follow the approach taken by U.S. Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, Harmeet Dhillon: Stop treating antisemitic intimidation as a regrettable social phenomenon and start treating it as what it often is — organized coercion aimed at civil rights, religious liberty, and the ability of Jews to live openly as Jews. And if it is organized, it has organizers. If it has organizers, it has networks. If it has networks, it has funders. The point is not to win arguments with the street cadre. The point is to make the infrastructure that underwrites intimidation legally radioactive.

Here, America’s Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act becomes more than a headline. Best known from abortion-clinic disputes, it also protects access to places of religious worship from force, threats, physical obstruction, and certain forms of property damage. Translation: When a mob blocks synagogue doors, traps congregants, or turns worship into a gauntlet, it is not merely “speech.” It is an interference with worship. And the federal government can treat it as a civil-rights violation rather than a civic ritual.

That matters because enforcement is not just punishment. It is education. It teaches institutions what reality is. It tells every university counsel, every city attorney, every police chief: A shul is not an acceptable target of “passionate protest.” Block the doors, intimidate worshippers, create a climate of fear — and you may discover that the federal government has very strong feelings about your “community organizing.”

But the larger point is that civil suits are the beginning, not the end. If a campaign is coordinated across jurisdictions (planned, transported, trained, funded) then civil-rights enforcement has a second gear: criminal civil-rights statutes designed precisely for conspiracies. Tools like the “Conspiracy Against Rights” law exist for a reason: to punish coordinated efforts to intimidate people in the free exercise of federally secured rights. In plain English: If you conspire to make Jews afraid to worship, assemble, or exercise civil rights, the law has a word for it — and it is not “activism.”

The practical effect is deterrence with teeth. Civil litigation builds precedent; criminal enforcement builds fear — fear in the only constituency that reliably responds to it (those who think intimidation is consequence-free). And when the state signals that it will not only sue the disruptors but map the network (who organized, who trained, who transported, who financed), suddenly the movement’s respectable patrons have a problem: They may still love the cause, but they will not love subpoenas.

Which is why Bret Stephens’ formula, if reduced to “more internal Jewishness,” is insufficient. More camps and day schools may help our children feel at home among Jews. They do nothing, by themselves, to contest the university’s authority to define Zionism, and Jews who defend it, as beyond the bounds of legitimate thought.

Israeli-American philosopher Yoram Hazony has made a blunt point that Diaspora Jewish leadership keeps trying not to hear: Our most popular “campus responses” are aimed at the periphery, not the core. Birthright Israel, kosher dining, Hillel, Chabad — these are genuine achievements. When done right, they open the university to Jewish life. They generate moments of homecoming: the first Shabbat dinner that feels like freedom, the first time a student says kiddush in public and realizes he can breathe.

These programs, by design, cultivate feelings (belonging, identity, uplift) while the university operates on an entirely different playing field. The university’s real power is not social. It is epistemic. It sets the boundaries of legitimate opinion by claiming jurisdiction over truth: what can be said with prestige, what can be researched without stigma, what can be taught without apology.

And here is the uncomfortable part: Hillel, Birthright, and Chabad generally do not contest what professors research, write, and teach — so long as it doesn’t look like overt antisemitism. They inspire Jewish feeling and leave the business of truth to the professors. Which means they leave the central engine of campus culture (its intellectual authority) largely untouched.

So yes: more camps, more day schools, more Birthright seats. Good. Necessary. Not sufficient. Because if the institution that defines “truth” is permitted to define Zionism as racism, Jewish peoplehood as colonial fiction, and Jewish self-defense as an offense against humanity, then you can raise the proudest Jewish child in the Diaspora — and still watch him enter a campus where his moral language is treated as heresy.

Yoram Hazony’s point is that unless Jews are willing to fight on the plane the university claims as its own — the plane of truth — our comforting investments in Jewish feeling will coexist with an academic machine that manufactures contempt.

There is a reason civil-rights enforcement matters. When government treats antisemitic intimidation as a civil-rights violation — when it brings cases, wins injunctions, extracts consent decrees — it does more than punish. It teaches. It builds doctrine.

Each successful case adds a brick to an iron wall of precedent: injunctions, settlements, compliance regimes that change institutional behavior long after the news cycle moves on. Administrators learn what triggers federal consequences. Trustees learn what liability looks like. Police departments learn that “hands off” is not a strategy but negligence. The next would-be intimidator learns something even more important: This time, there is a price.

That is what it looks like for a Jewish nation to bear witness, and then act, through the instruments of a sovereign, law-governed order.

There is also an internal front: the anti-Zionist Jew who romanticizes powerlessness, the communal professional who prefers permanent victimhood to the hard work of responsible power — this is not merely an intellectual error. It is a rejection of the purpose of Jewish nationhood.

Combating Jew-hatred, therefore, also requires confronting what American historian Gil Troy and former Israeli politician Natan Sharansky accurately defined as the “un-Jew”: those who seek to sever Judaism from Jewish peoplehood and Jewish nationalism, while claiming to act in Judaism’s name. They would keep the ethics and discard the instrument that makes ethics enforceable. They want the sermon without the shield.

It is worth recalling that the Midrash associates the Haggadah’s Wicked Son with Amalek¹: the one who separates himself from the community, derides the collective mission, and undermines unity at the moment unity is demanded. Estrangement is not a harmless posture. It is a strategy — sometimes ideological, sometimes psychological, always politically consequential.

These are termed “un-Jews” not as a casual insult but as a description of function: They claim to fulfill a Jewish mission by dismantling the very practices and loyalties that made Jewish continuity possible. They moralize the means of Jewish survival out of existence and thereby provide enemies of Zionism on the Right and Left the intellectual ammunition to destroy the Jewish state, and the kosher certification for doing so.

The Haggadah reminds us that defeating Amalek is critical to Jews’ devotion to Jewish statehood, and that such efforts are the wellspring not of personal pride but of collective dignity. As David Ben-Gurion wrote: “The state sees itself as the creation of the Jewish People and as designed for its redemption ... The establishment of the state did not mean the vision had been fulfilled, but only that its instrument had been established ... Independent Israel has enhanced the prestige of Jews in those lands as well, where there is neither will nor inclination to Aliyah.”

In an era when Jewish students hide their Magen David necklaces, and diplomats debate Israel’s right to exist as if it were optional, the choice is not complicated. We can dissolve into the comforting passivity of Diaspora fantasy, or we can do what the Haggadah commands: see ourselves as if we personally went out of Egypt, defeat Amalek, and then build and defend sovereignty.

Only then is Jewish pride more than a slogan. It becomes what it was always meant to be: a living, national testimony that injustice against Jews will be seen, confronted, and defeated — by a people that remembers, and sustaining a Jewish state that acts. National dignity in the eyes of the world is only achieved by participating in the religious-political enterprise of Zionism and equipping future generations with the means and will to do so as well.

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1. Amalek is a nation and ancestral figure in the Hebrew Bible described as a persistent, treacherous enemy of the Israelites, originating as a grandson of Esau. Known for attacking weary Israelites after the Exodus, they symbolize absolute evil and existential threats to Jewish survival.