The Jewish Identity Crisis Nobody Wants to Talk About

The crisis facing Jews today is not only antisemitism but self-expression. After decades of translating Judaism into Western pop culture, many do not know how to explain Judaism on its own terms.

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This is a guest essay by Nina Saadat, who writes about intellectual currents and Jewish issues.

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

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A tremor in the American Jewish establishment is becoming a landslide.

Its earliest shudders were felt in 2021 when the Jewish-American author Dara Horn published “People Love Dead Jews,” a book that exposes the affection liberals have for the chosen people after they have been safely massacred. These sympathetic gentiles derive this affection — or really, this gratitude — from the morally rehabilitative effects of subjecting themselves to dead-Jew exhibits and feeling very sorry indeed.

The awkward and therefore stirring element of Horn’s observation is that many of these tributes were created and sponsored by Jews in an effort to neutralize antisemitism.

Horn’s diagnosis matured into a social and political force among American Jews. Anecdotally, most of my young professional Jewish friends in Washington, D.C. have copies of the book on their shelves, and the “dead Jews” idea is a common reference among the Jewishly and politically engaged.

The mounting dissatisfaction with Jewish self-presentation accelerated this year with two events in quick succession.

The first was Jewish-American columnist Bret Stephens’s “2026 “State of World Jewry” address, in which he said:

“...the fight against antisemitism, which consumes tens of millions of dollars every year in Jewish philanthropy and has become an organizing principle across Jewish organizations, is a well-meaning but mostly wasted effort. We should spend the money and focus our energy elsewhere. The same, I might add, goes for efforts to improve the quality of pro-Israel advocacy or hasbara (Israeli international PR).”

That statement received near-immediate, if unintentional, public confirmation in the form of Jewish-American NFL team owner Robert Kraft’s “Blue Square Alliance Against Hate” advertisement during the Super Bowl.

In case you haven’t seen it — more than 56 million have on YouTube alone at the time of writing — the 30-second spot follows an excruciatingly nebbishy boy who is shoved in a school hallway by a white student in a conspicuous red baseball cap. The boy removes his backpack to find a sticky note reading “Dirty Jew,” only for his tall Black classmate to cover it with a blue one. “Don’t listen to that,” says our dashing hero. “I know how it feels.”

Israeli journalist Liel Leibovitz’s response captured the overwhelmingly negative reaction from American Jews online. On the contrary, Mr. Kraft, Leibovitz assured us, Jews are actually sexy, tough, and cool: “A group of hot IDF soldiers is standing around, cleaning weapons, getting ready for action,” he proposed as an alternative scene. “Cut to: Black screen. Caption: ‘Don’t Like Jews? F*ck Around, Find Out.’”

Thus, the disapproving online responses from American Jews were often as embarrassing as the ad itself.

Horn, Leibovitz, and Stephens have achieved half an insight. They are right that these cloying requests for sympathy are ineffective at what they claim to pursue. Instead, they are embarrassing wastes of Jewish philanthropic resources.

But these commentators have yet to reflect on the political and ideological content of these messages, or on why American Jews produced them for so long despite such clear failure. If Jewish American educators, philanthropists, and organizers do as Stephens recommends and turn their money and energy inward, they should be careful not to let the rot set in on themselves.

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The common messages of American pro-Israel and anti-antisemitism propaganda can be arranged by depth, from the shallowest to the most substantial. I reference them jointly for two reasons.

First, the same organizations and people tend to produce both. Therefore, their producers and critics frequently invoke them in the same breath. Second, their moral language is structurally the same. When one part of its vocabulary doesn’t map neatly onto another subject, the connection is made indirectly.

For instance, the first tenet is antisemitism as racism — not directly applicable to the state of Israel — but those who leverage it point out that disproportionate negative attention toward the Jewish state is the new form of an all-too-familiar bigotry.

Ultimately, Jewish institutional representatives have ceased the effort to distinguish between “anti-Zionism” and antisemitism, efforts that I must say were often as pedantic as they were futile.

The idea of antisemitism as a form of racism is the daydream from which cultural products like Robert Kraft’s ad emerge.

Its protagonist is the long arc of history bending toward justice: emerging from the ashes of the crematoria, liberated by a newly integrated American military; through the Nuremberg Trials and the birth of Human Rights; to the Civil Rights Movement, in which Jews lawyered Black Americans into formal legal equality; and onward to an egalitarian future — not, as Third-Worldists fantasize, one in which the oppressed take violent revenge, but one in which racial distinctions lose all meaning except as symbols of equality’s triumph.

The enemy can only be the Nazi and the Klansman: an anonymous, evil, deranged figure who stands in the path of the benevolent juggernaut of progress and is, inevitably, crushed. In this vision, Jews and Black Americans share a morally uncomplicated victimhood whose dignity is redeemed in liberal-justice eschatology.

Robert Kraft is 84 years old. He was 4 on Victory in Europe Day and 50 when the Soviet Union fell — poised to sprint to the Fukuyaman finish line within his lifetime. But the intervening decades repeatedly exposed the limits of this vision, from Ocean Hill–Brownsville and Black Panther “anti-Zionism” to Crown Heights and beyond. Even the election of a Black president failed to resolve the tensions many believed were fading.

The Black Lives Matter movement of the late 2010s and early 2020s catalyzed two relevant changes. First, it anchored the millennial and Gen-Z Black activist generation in the Third-Worldist-victim zeitgeist. Axiomatically “anti-Zionist,” its ideological supporters concocted an imagined community with their “kin” in “Palestine.”

The second relevant change, and the one that most affected the capitalism-friendly progressive class that contains Kraft, was the movement’s corporate appropriation. This phenomenon has been extensively discussed during and after its roughly decade-long lifespan. Cudgeled by fear of boycotts and cancellations and goaded by the competitive game of marketing, senior executives signaled their virtue through quota policies and advertising campaigns.

The social-media emblem of this class was the black square on Instagram. For a brief moment in 2020, posting it became a near-mandatory signal of anti-racist virtue. The gesture was both low-effort and popular, qualities that seem to have inspired Kraft’s Blue Square Alliance.

Beyond the advertisements, enamel pins, and the melodramatic call to “Stand up to hate!”, what is one of its flagship initiatives? Unity Dinners: a partnership with the Jewish college organization Hillel International and the United Negro College Fund. They seem to have petered out in 2025. There is no more on-the-nose symbolic representation of Kraft’s worldview and its sputtering decline than this.

I do not expect these efforts to have the intended effect on the level of Jew-hatred among Black Americans, which available data indicates is relatively high, or among any other group. Instead, they serve as life rafts for those survivors of the DEI backlash who are still genuinely liberal, decent, and too dependent on old Jewish Democratic money to go full Tentifada.

The post-Christian myth of messianic racial fraternity that flourished in the 20th century is collapsing quickly and definitively. It depended on a predictive historicism — a philosophy of history that claims to know the future — that has not only been overturned by reality but should have been recognized as hubris from the outset. It would be a healthy exercise for Jews of means and interest to reflect on the deadness of this project.

photo: Carlin Trezil/Unsplash

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‘We’re here. We’re queer.’

This second category, a close cousin of “Antisemitism Is Racism,” jangles the keys of Israel’s multiracial composition and egalitarian gender policy in the faces of American liberals and leftists.

Look, says Noa Tishby, at the Tel Aviv Pride Parade. Look at Arab-Israeli representation in the Knesset. Look at women serving in the military. One ought to compare the Jewish state not to the dystopia of “The Handmaid’s Tale” or apartheid South Africa, but to a flatter, drier, browner Bay Area, replete with the associated tech bros.

Although this approach rests on the same ideological architecture as “Antisemitism Is Racism,” it is a step above it because it is more substantive. The litany of talking points is not wrong: Israel is multiracial by American aesthetic standards, Arab Israelis do enjoy political representation, and Israel’s laws around gender and sexuality are comparable to those of any Western nation.

The Nova music festival and kibbutznik victims of October 7th demonstrate that Israel not only had a progressive population, but that its politics had nothing to do with its vulnerability to horrific slaughter.

Nonetheless, this line of argument has two related and crippling weaknesses.

First, like “Antisemitism Is Racism,” it cedes too much to those who will never be convinced because it does not understand its purported interlocutors. Leftist “anti-Zionists” are structurally Marxist accelerationists, not progressives. They see Israel’s extension of liberal rights as an effort by a settler-colonial entity to placate the underclass, act as a fig leaf on the global stage, and further entrench its power.

That is why they accuse American Jews who raise these facts of pinkwashing; there can be no defense of the settler state of Israel, and whatever liberty it extends is merely evidence of its relative strength. See the far-Leftist support for Iran: not in spite of its repressive authoritarianism, but, in part, because of it.

Second, Israel’s progressive political wing is a fragile minority. Israeli demographic change and the political aftershock of October 7th may already have doomed anything recognizably comparable to an American progressive cause in the Jewish state to irretrievable marginality. This argument can defend only an Israel that flatters the sensibilities of elite, urban American liberals.

Jews who are honest with themselves must decide, if they have not already, whether Israel is a means to a progressive end, an exemplar of their aesthetic and political preferences, or whether their support for Israel rests on something a level deeper than their domestic instincts.

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Israelism

This third, richer source of ideological pastiche — I’ll refer to it as Israelism, with the caveat of possibly endorsing our adversaries — is the domain where Judaism, which for many signifies little beyond anti-antisemitism, and Zionism converge to establish a more robust theoretical framework.

Its main claim is that “anti-Zionism” is a disease of ignorance, curable by a particular narrative of Jewish history that justifies the Jewish state.

In the broadest possible strokes, the story goes as follows: ancient Jewish civilization in the land of Israel; exile and suffering in diaspora; the Holocaust; the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty; and Israel’s survival and success against hostile enemies.

Israelism is a standard deviation more rigorous in both content and truthfulness than the previous two efforts. Though it is comparable to Gazology as an example of self-referential mythmaking for the educated Westerner, it is far more serious, factual, and hopeful in its storytelling. It is also unequivocally the case that Jews must have a political entity with a powerful military to secure their survival. On this point, the Israelists have a firm grasp of material reality.

Yet as propaganda, Israelism falls flat.

This is not because non-Jewish Americans are incapable of immersing themselves in the aesthetics of other groups; see not just the elite fascination with the “Palestinian cause,” but also the centuries-long infatuation across classes with Native American-themed kitsch. Mass-produced souvenirs, pulp fiction, and movies depicting the wild and noble Indian demonstrate that the ineffectiveness of Jewish romanticism cannot be dismissed as the American public’s inability to fall in lust with another culture.

Instead, Israelism plucks a pair of discordant heartstrings whose notes do not harmonize.

The first string assumes a post-Christian structure in which the Jewish moral position derives from authenticity, distinctiveness, and, above all, victimhood. Where the Jews may have had a brush with power initially, it is safely buried under the sands of time. What matters to the moral imagination is that the overwhelming bulk of Jewish history appears as a long drama of exile, brilliance without power, and perseverance under duress.

The axiomatic question the Jew confronts has only to do with himself, and therefore he is his only tragic victim. Does he remain a Jew, with all the associated spiritual magic, at risk of losing his life? Or does he assimilate for safety?

This movement closes with the Holocaust, which answers with terrible finality that there is no escape from Jewish identity or its ramifications for one’s fate.

The second act wrenches the listener out of this contemplative mood and demands that they rise in praise of organization, competence, and victory. Its shift is out of key with the established paradigm.

If we implicitly understand the Jews to be good — or at least to be the protagonists — because of their powerlessness and obscure genius, how could we now admire them for their effectiveness and pragmatism? For their military formidability? For becoming, after all, a nation among the nations?

If we carry the moral physics of the first half into the latter part of the story, do not the Palestinians occupy the Jewish role in the drama as the romantic, oppressed, indigenous, stateless underdogs?

Now we can understand not only why Israelism has failed to catch on among non-Jews (except perhaps among ideologically motivated evangelical Christians), but also why it is risky to inculcate young Jewish minds with this framework.

It is philosophically and emotionally unintelligible.

Jewish students have already found themselves uneasy with this presentation. At an adolescent age of debunking, this discomfort may prompt either total apathy or positive hostility.

Israelism remains beholden to the superficial liberal historicism of the previous two pillars, ornamented with the translation of the Holocaust experience into post-colonial shibboleths. It is eclectic and inconsistent, trying to be hard and dramatic without actually arousing drama.

To what should its audience aspire?

Non-Jews have no role other than enemy, apologizer, or admirer. Even Jews must conjure fervor over the struggle to become milquetoast Western liberals — a recipe for impotence and frustration.

photo: حسن/Unsplash

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Western Civilization™

Western Civilizationists™ advance a three-legged, mutually reinforcing claim of self-identification and justification. Pro-Israel Western Civilizationists™ shift their weight between these legs, but place the most on the third.

The first is the Hegelian climax described in Francis Fukuyama’s journal article, “The End of History and the Last Man.” We, the Westerners™, have reached the ceiling of political technology. There is neither improvement in nor prevention of the spread of liberal democracy as the global governing structure.

Fukuyama writes:

“The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism.”

Even today, many anti-Western movements remain trapped within the political vocabulary they claim to reject, seeking alternatives that are still defined by Western liberal assumptions. And though the spread of nationalist particularism is a step toward the end, discrete groups must either “realize [their] own uniqueness and remain stuck in history” (according to Fukuyama) or converge on homogeneity.

This is the fulcrum on which Israelism both depends and continues to unravel: Israel is cast as a democratic beacon in the Middle East, yet its irreducible particularity sits uneasily within a worldview that treats the rationalization and convergence of governance as history’s end.

The second pillar is technological achievement. Western Civilizationists™ argue that liberal political order has produced unprecedented prosperity, innovation, and security. Israel therefore appears as a model of technological and utilitarian excellence.

Conservative, if relatively secular, pro-Israel Western Civilizationists™ recognize that the two preceding pillars are rooted in the relationship between Athens and Jerusalem, forming their third and critical leg.

This canonical source functions as the epistemological, linguistic, and symbolic wellspring from which human effort is directed, organized, expended, and justified. Absent the influence of Athens and Jerusalem, humanity would be left with little more than stagnation and naked power competition. Instead, the intellectual tradition extending from the two cities is understood to have produced a civilization grounded in reason, morality, and cultural development.

Western Civilizationists™ understand themselves to have real-life enemies in Chinese, Islamist, Russian, and domestically woke movements that seek to replace them as the global hegemon and install their own vocabularies. These are the barbarians at the gates. Israel occupies the forward line on Hadrian’s Wall, followed by the United States and then a sputtering Europe.

The Western canon and sensibility are further presented as an antidote to domestic decay. One is asked to contrast the unmarried, childless, pornography-addicted, endlessly distracted, and deeply depressed subject with the healthy member of a large family. Whether as cause or effect, the revival of Western Civilization™ is linked to the transformation of the former into the latter.

These are the notions that animate both conservatives and dissident liberals who support Israel. They even prompted such avowed atheists as Richard Dawkins and Ayaan Hirsi Ali to declare cultural affinity with, or conversion to, Christianity while treating Jesus as a distant secondary figure or neglecting to mention him altogether.

Christianity becomes the adoptable symbolic emblem of the West™ — a badge of affinity one can pin to one’s chest. It appears to these figures, and to a large audience, that the Axis and Allies, the Communists and the Free World, are being recast both on the battlefield and in the minds of their children. Clarity of alignment becomes a moral and strategic necessity.

Western Civilizationalism™ is particularly appealing to Jews, who can see themselves as both underdog protagonists and surviving stewards of Civilization’s original seed. It provides a substantive basis for the claim that the tiny Jewish minority must be a light unto the nations while preserving distinctiveness and participation in a larger human drama.

As with the previous categories, people in this camp tend to make largely accurate claims. America and Israel’s strategic rivals occupy that position for ideological reasons rather than because of poverty or misunderstanding. The foreign-policy prescriptions of Western Civilizationists™ — a strong U.S.–Israel alliance, expansion of the Abraham Accords, and similar measures — are directionally sensible and often grounded in material reality.

But, like the previous types, Western Civilizationists™ misunderstand both their environment and themselves.

The identity claim regarding the canon flattens its textual content into a loose aesthetic and shows little interest in its actual and contradictory implications. The drag brunch in Tel Aviv has as much to do with the canon, defined broadly enough, as the contemporary Catholic Mass and the AI seminars at the University of Austin. The canon indeed orients psychological, philosophical, political, and aesthetic discourse. But it is more comparable to a canvas and palette than to a paint-by-numbers kit.

Western Civilization™ cannot be what its proponents tacitly claim it is: a positive organizing teleology. Once one moves beyond the first pillars of text (which also contradict one another), it can be defined only negatively, in terms of what it is not.

Moreover, this account of Western Civilization™’s adversaries obscures the fact that they, too, operate firmly within the Western intellectual tradition. Here, the Fukuyamans identify a critical truth. While the enemies’ foot soldiers may be acting out of material or epistemic necessity, the founding leaders of the Chinese and Islamist threats were educated and radicalized in Western institutions, reading Western texts. The Russian intellectual tradition is arguably as Western as any other one would consider. The wokes are parasites on core Western institutions, no matter how much those institutions have attempted to placate them.

The Third World is not invading us. Our own ideological dust is being carried back into our eyes by their wind.

This circumscribed outlook suggests that Western Civilizationists™ are more interested in self-consolation than in objective analysis and persuasion, whether they know it or not. While debates are held, books are published, and projects are financed in the battle over the Jews and the West, the true audience remains within these same groups.

Who is purchasing Douglas Murray’s live-show tickets, for instance? I can report from experience that there are two types in those seats: older, upper-middle-class American Jews seeking reassurance that their viewpoint has both intellectual backing and financial support, and young conservative networkers.

When self-soothing becomes institutionalized and well-funded, it creates its own class of professional beneficiaries. The arguments reassure existing supporters far more effectively than they persuade outsiders.

Ultimately, Western Civilizationalism™ requires a narrow and shallow reading of its very foundation. It renders the value of Jewish life contingent on continued loyalty to this idol.

What if American and Israeli geopolitical interests become divorced? Can a pro-Israel Western Civilizationalist™ outlook tolerate this reality long enough to provide a useful answer? Can it even consider the possibility?

photo: Nikolas Gannon/Unsplash

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Bret Stephens is right: Jews should not devote much energy to worrying about what non-Jews think of Jews and Israel. Americans have sound reasons to grasp why the war in Iran serves U.S. interests; many people more knowledgeable than I am about the intricacies have explained them far better than I could.

Suffice it to say that beyond a moderate spike in gas prices, the war has very little effect on the lives of the overwhelming majority of Americans. The less time a person spends ruminating about “the Jews” as such, the healthier he is.

The Jewish corollary is structurally similar, but it demands more painful self-examination.

In his piece on the “Palestine” complex, Hussein Aboubakr Mansour (a Fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America) concluded that at the center of its meta-form is “the individual human being choosing to reject God and seek vain satisfaction in the feeling of victimhood, superiority, and self-justification.” Fortunately, the Hebrew Bible provides several examples of people who did precisely this, ultimately found God’s forgiveness, and accepted His prophetic mission.

One such figure was Jonah, who fled from God’s direct command. After God sent a tempest against the ship on which he was attempting to escape, the other sailors cried out to their totems while Jonah remained asleep. The sailors awakened him and implored him to pray to his God, whom they believed might yet take mercy on them.

“What meanest thou, O sleeper? arise, call upon thy God, perhaps God will think upon us, that we perish not.”

After casting lots and discovering that Jonah was to blame for the storm, the men asked: “...for whose cause this evil is upon us; what is thy occupation? And where dost thou come from? What is thy country? And of what people art thou?”

The sailors’ questions to Jonah are the questions every hasbara campaign attempts to answer. What is your occupation? Where do you come from? What is your country? Of what people are you?

The messages surveyed in this essay represent successive attempts to answer these questions in terms that the questioner will find legible and desirable. Each conscripts the Jew to a vision not his own: liberal eschatology, progressive identity politics, post-colonial indigeneity, Western civilizational teleology. Each places the sacrifice on an altar built by others and waits for fire that does not come.

Jonah’s answer refuses every available vision. He does not narrate his suffering and victimhood, nor does he advertise his utility. He does not claim kinship with the sailors’ causes or locate himself within the arc of their history. Instead, Jonah says: “I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.”

His statement is one of both maximal compression and alienation. It is utterly strange. It offers no transaction, no alliance, and no basis for the kind of sympathy one extracts through shared victimhood or mutual interest. It does not even console, since the God that Jonah names is the author of the very storm threatening the ship’s destruction.

What it offers, however, is the truth, which is terrible and non-negotiable: This is what I am, this is whom I serve, and the disaster you are experiencing is a consequence of my flight from Him.

Stephens is right that the fire will not come, and that the resources currently being burned in its pursuit would be better spent elsewhere. Jews should stop chasing the approval of people who will never grant it. But his recommendation, sound as far as it goes, does not go far enough.

The main problem is not that hasbara is tactically inept, which it is. The problem is that it is a species of idolatry — an attempt to win favor by translating Jewish existence into the moral vernacular of a post-Christian world whose categories are shards of a theological order that was never ours.

Victimhood, progressivism, nation-building, civilizational guardianship: These are pieces of a mirror that shattered when the Christian West lost meaning, and Jews who pick them up will find that they cut the hand without reflecting the face. To turn inward, then, should not merely mean redirecting institutional energy. It is to confront the question that the outward performance was designed, in part, to muffle.

What are Jews for, beyond the world’s uses for them?

The condition described in the Hebrew Bible is one of chosenness experienced as arbitrary, a demand for fidelity that precedes comprehension, and a covenant whose obligations are inherited before they are understood. God does not require utility but faithfulness. The distance between these two demands is the distance between hasbara and Judaism, and no amount of philanthropic ingenuity can bridge it.

Jonah, it is worth remembering, did not want the job. He fled. God pursued him. He was a fugitive asleep below decks while the sailors above him cried out to their own totems. And yet it remains the first moment in the book where he speaks truthfully about who he is and what he owes.

The desperate machinery of self-presentation may be, at bottom, a kind of sleep: noise generated to cover the sound of the single Voice one would prefer not to hear. To cease producing it would not be a strategic correction but a spiritual one.

It would mean waking up.

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