The Jewish bargain with the West is collapsing quickly.

A Hanukkah massacre reveals the cost of trading Jewish power for acceptance, but Hanukkah reminds us: If we do not develop the habits of power, we will be left with the habits of fear.

photo: Josh Applegate/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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Bondi Beach near Sydney, first night of Hanukkah: a public menorah lighting featuring some 2,000 people becomes a mass-casualty scene. Authorities have described it as a targeted antisemitic attack; the Australian prime minister called it “pure evil.”

In the hours afterward, the usual Western choreography began: condemnations, vigils, and a hurried ring of extra police at Jewish sites from Berlin to New York to London.

Necessary. Also damning.

The point is not what governments do after Jews are attacked at a holiday celebration. The point is what they have been training their societies to tolerate before the attack — year after year, rally after rally, intimidation after intimidation, violence after violence — until antisemitism becomes not a crime, not a stigma, not even a scandal, but the background noise of public life. The state’s message, delivered in a thousand small hesitations, is simple: Jewish safety is a “community issue,” not a civilizational duty.

This is the new Western bargain: a political realignment (quiet in its mechanics, loud in its consequences) shaped by the demands of a growing segment of voters, activists, and cultural gatekeepers who openly or tacitly promote Jew-hatred while insisting they are merely doing “justice.” In this bargain, the Jew is granted conditional acceptance. You may remain, provided you do not insist on sovereignty (Israel), self-defense (Zionism), or even visibility (public ritual). In practice, you may exist as a museum piece rather than as a person.

And here comes the uncomfortable part that polite Jewish leadership avoids: Many Jewish liberal voters helped midwife this arrangement — often from admirable impulses, often from civic faith — and therefore bear responsibility for its predictable outcomes. Not responsibility for the attacker at Bondi, but responsibility for the political ecosystem that rewards people who excuse, sanitize, or rebrand anti-Jewish hatred, and then feigns surprise when that hatred graduates from slogan to violence.

We have made a disastrous category error. We treat antisemitism as an attitude to be corrected by education, when it is increasingly an instrument of power. We beg for “understanding” from people who understand perfectly — and who exploit our pleading as proof of their moral dominance. We demand “dialogue” with those who use dialogue the way an arsonist uses water: to control the fire he lit.

Consider New York City. This month and last, rabbis who had long criticized Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani met with him and emerged praising him as a listener, promising to “strengthen lines of communication” and hold follow-up meetings. “Heartened,” they gushed — like teenagers recounting a first date. He listened. He nodded. He promised “communication.” And they walked out as if they had won something. This is the diaspora’s pathology: the substitution of validation for victory.

Then, too, one of the rabbis at that meeting is on Mamdani’s transition team. The Maccabean books describe how, when Seleucid attention drifted elsewhere, and imperial ardor cooled, the Hellenists rushed to keep the war alive — appealing to the king, demanding enforcement, begging for a trusted man with troops to come and set Judea right: “Send a man whom you trust … and let him punish them.”

They could not defeat Jewish sovereignty, so they outsourced the job to the empire. Today, the outsourcing is softer (press releases, meetings, transition teams) but the purpose is identical: to domesticate Jewish power, to make Jewish survival contingent on the goodwill of those who resent it.

Bondi Beach is what that bargain buys you.

It also buys you another grotesque inversion: Jews are among the West’s most generous civic benefactors, yet are told — implicitly and often explicitly — that their own survival must be financed as a special exception. The historian Jack Wertheimer estimates that by 2020 or 2021, $13 to $14 billion a year was being donated by Jews to Jewish causes (including Israel-focused causes).¹ And yet much Jewish giving still flows outward.

In a major national study of American Jewish giving, donors directed about 38 percent of their charitable dollars to Jewish organizations overall, meaning most of their giving went to non-Jewish beneficiaries; among lower-income donors in that dataset, only about 25 percent of philanthropic dollars went to Jewish organizations.

The pattern is unmistakable: We have spent decades endowing the civic cathedral — universities, hospitals, museums, the arts — while underinvesting in the hard Jewish necessities: Jewish literacy, ties to Israel, and the political and operational capacity for pre-emption. My friend (and lawyer and investor) Daniel Arbess put it perfectly: We gave money, but not enough “light and strength.” And then we act shocked — shocked! — that the institutions we funded do not rush to defend us, and the political coalitions we empowered do not treat the threat as urgent.

So what do governments do when the bill comes due? Not a reckoning with the ideology. Not a sustained crackdown on intimidation networks. They offer security theater. Reuters reports that after the Bondi Beach terror attack, cities around the world ramped up policing around Hanukkah events and Jewish institutions. Necessary, yes. But also an indictment: Jews must live behind barricades because the state hesitates to confront the sociopolitical culture that necessitates such barricades.

And so we perform the ritual of modern diaspora governance: grovel for validation in rhetoric and negotiate for small increases in security budgets as if Jews are petitioners at the palace gates.

On Sunday night in Amsterdam, on the heels of the Bondi Beach bloodbath, the city’s most prestigious concert hall turned a Jewish Hanukkah concert into a political morality play over the participation of Israel’s chief military cantor. This episode led to lawsuits, reversals, and restrictions, with hundreds of pro-Hamas protestors attacking concert goers while the police looked on. That is where we are now: Jewish celebration requires court rulings, special conditions, and — always — the implied warning that Jewish public life is permitted only as long as it passes the ideological taste test.

Canadian professor Ruth Wisse’s warning about the Jewish temptation toward accommodation is precisely about this. A political strategy of appeasement confronts a political tradition of conquest. A self-defined minority seeks tolerance from a movement that doesn’t seek tolerance at all; it seeks hegemony. Accommodation, in such a contest, doesn’t end the war. It simply lengthens it and moves it closer.

This is why the Bondi Beach response — ramped-up security after the attack, solemn speeches, and then a return to the same permissive climate — is not merely insufficient. It is an accelerant. When you teach a society that antisemitism is a “complex conversation,” you guarantee the conversation will eventually become a confrontation.

Which brings us to Hanukkah. The lesson of this Jewish holiday was never candles; it was courage, minority resolve against an imperial culture and an internal elite that thought the only sane option was surrender. The Maccabean revolt succeeded not because the Jews obtained better talking points, but because they rejected the role assigned to them: compliant minority, grateful client, safe as long as invisible.

So the choice is ours. We can keep bargaining for validation, keep mistaking access for protection, keep applauding leaders for “listening” while mobs learn they can intimidate with impunity.

Or, we can relearn Hanukkah.

More specifically, Jewish dignity is not granted; it is defended (politically, culturally, and when necessary, physically) by insisting on equal enforcement under law and refusing to let Jewish life be negotiated down to a guarded remnant. Because if Bondi Beach teaches us anything, it is this: The bargain has expired. And if we do not develop the habits of power (the “light and strength” as Daniel Arbess described it), we will be left with the habits of fear.

Hanukkah, in its original register, is a rebuke to that style. It insists that a small people does not survive by winning statements; it survives by winning fights: legal fights, cultural fights, political fights and, when necessary, physical ones.

In the novel about the Maccabees, “My Glorious Brothers,” a Roman official wrote to the Senate, after Judea gained complete independence in 142 BCE, “that subsequent to the death of Judas Maccabeus, they fought, as near as I can learn, 12 major battles and 340 minor engagements. This I consider of extreme importance, for therein lies the clue to their victory. This tiny and seemingly defenseless land — which has only one walled city of any consequence, no standing army, and only the loosest type of administration — literally bled the Syrian Empire of the Greeks to death.”

Hanukkah celebrates that refusal to outsource Jewish survival to the moods of strangers. Because Hanukkah is not merely about lighting candles; it is about deciding whether we intend to be a people who ask for permission to exist, or a people who remember — again — how sovereignty is held.

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1. eJewish Philanthropy