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This is a guest essay by Leo Pearlman, who writes about Jewish identity, antisemitism, and Zionism.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
This past weekend, Jews around the world gathered around tables, dipped apples into honey, and wished one another Shana Tova U’Metuka, a good and sweet Jewish New Year.
Leading up to Rosh Hashanah, I looked back at what I wrote before the holiday in 2024 and 2025, curious to know what I found most resonant and most important at this crucial juncture in the Hebrew calendar.
In 2024, almost a year after October 7th, I was still trying to make sense of what had happened. Not simply the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, but what came afterwards. The speed with which sympathy evaporated, the demonstrations, rationalisations, conspiracy theories. The inversion of victim and perpetrator and the painful discovery that people with whom we had shared offices, universities, dinner tables, and political causes could apparently watch Jews being slaughtered and find, almost immediately, a reason to blame Jews for it.
In 2025, something in me had changed. I was less interested in persuading other people, in fact I believed attempting to do so was already a lost cause. I had begun thinking much more about us and particularly about our children. About ensuring that the next generation of Jews did not inherit our fear without also inheriting our pride.
But beneath both pieces, even beneath all the doom and gloom (my wife frequently describes me as the most depressing person in any room, I prefer “stark and unflinching realist”), I realise now that I was harbouring a secret hope. I thought this might pass.
Not antisemitism in general; I have never been quite naive enough to believe that. But this modern antisemitism; this explosion of it, this extraordinary social permission to say things about Jews and the Jewish state that would be immediately recognised as prejudice if said about anybody else.
Somewhere inside me, I believed in the miracle so many Jews desperately wanted to believe was coming, that the silent majority would wake up. People would look around, realise what was happening and say, enough. They would understand that the assault on Jews, Israel, and the broader liberal democratic values of the West were not separate phenomena but overlapping fronts in a much larger struggle.
I even retained hope that the useful idiots would eventually realise quite how comprehensively they had been manipulated. That their instinctive compassion had been exploited, their ignorance weaponised, and their certainty harnessed in service of people and ideas fundamentally at odds with the values they believed themselves to be defending.
In short, that normality would return.
Nearly three years after October 7th, I no longer believe that and admitting it is the necessary starting point for the Hebrew calendar year 5787.
This isn’t a moment anymore, meaning that the most frightening development of the past year is not another antisemitic placard, another smashed window, or another Jew abused on the street. It is permanence; the exceptional is becoming structural.
The J7 Large Communities’ Task Force Against Antisemitism monitors countries containing more than 90 per cent of the Jewish diaspora. Its latest report recorded more than 23,000 antisemitic incidents in 2025. Antisemitic incidents were 136 per cent higher than in 2022, the year before October 7th, and violent incidents up 97 per cent.
Twenty Jews were murdered in antisemitic attacks in Sydney, Manchester, Washington, and Boulder. 2025 was the deadliest year for antisemitic violence in the Jewish diaspora in more than three decades, and the first half of 2026 has given us precious little reason to believe that the trajectory has fundamentally changed.
J7’s conclusion is perhaps more frightening than any individual statistic. This is no longer a surge; it is the new normal. This isn’t merely happening on our streets. It has entered our institutions, infecting our culture and our politics.
That is what has changed most dramatically for me over the past twelve months. In 2024, we could see the direction of travel, but in 2026, I fear we are beginning to see the destination.
One of the most consequential developments of the post-October 7th world has been the electoral mainstreaming of politics in which hostility towards Israel occupies an extraordinary and defining position. Britain provides an uncomfortable case study. “Palestine” has demonstrated its ability to reshape constituencies and political campaigns. Politicians have discovered that hostility towards Israel can mobilise voters. What happens thousands of miles away has become a test of moral purity here at home, and inevitably Jews are expected to answer for it.
The rise of the Greens under Zack Polanski matters in that context, as does the prominence of his deputy, Mothin Ali. Whatever one thinks of their wider politics, rhetoric about Israel, and Zionism is no peripheral feature of the political coalition now being assembled; it is its glue, its heartbeat, its obsession.
More disturbing is what happens when the established parties decide not to resist this politics, but to chase it. The Labour Party under Keir Starmer was bad enough; under Andy Burnham, the direction is becoming clearer still. And then there is Ed Miliband, Britain’s Jewish Foreign Secretary.
Last week, Miliband stood at the despatch box and announced a new sanctions regime directed at Israeli settlement activity — banning settlement goods, targeting companies and individuals involved in settlement expansion, and imposing further restrictions on exports connected to what Britain now formally declares an “unlawful occupation.”
He began his statement by describing himself as a “proud British Jew.” He spoke movingly about his grandmother finding sanctuary in Israel after the Nazis murdered her husband and 60 members of her family — and only then he announced the sanctions.
I find that juxtaposition profoundly disturbing. Not because Jews must agree with the Israeli government, not because Israel should be immune from criticism and not because every Israeli policy is one I would defend. But because Miliband believes that his Jewishness and his family’s direct experience of the Holocaust confer some unique moral authority as his government contributes to the escalating isolation of the world’s only Jewish state.
There is something almost unbearable about invoking the murder of your own family as part of the preamble to such a policy. Surely the lesson of the Holocaust cannot simply be that Jews required sanctuary once. It must include understanding why Jews required a sanctuary of our own in the first place.
The promise of Israel was never that Britain, France, Germany, or America would permanently protect us. Jewish history had already demonstrated the danger of outsourcing Jewish survival to the goodwill of others. Israel was the answer to that lesson.
Miliband knows British Jews are frightened; our schools require security guards and synagogues need protection. He knows Jewish children are growing up thinking about whether it is safe to advertise who they are. Yet at precisely the moment antisemitism has established this horrifying new baseline, his government chooses to turn its moral fire on Israel. He will insist these things are entirely separate; it’s nothing more than a comforting fiction; it’s a lie.
For nearly three years we have watched the demonisation of Israel bleed relentlessly into the demonisation of Zionists and from Zionists into Jews. We have watched the vocabulary migrate from demonstrations to universities, workplaces, and cultural institutions, and from there into electoral politics and now government policy. You cannot watch that process unfold and continue pretending these things exist in hermetically sealed boxes.
Jewishness does not provide immunity from scrutiny for participating in it and family history is not a moral blank cheque. Beginning an argument with “as a Jew” does not determine whether what follows is good for Jews. Polanski, Miliband, Yachad, and the expanding cast of those whose Jewishness appears to be most publicly useful when providing cover for attacks on Israel are perfectly entitled to their views, but they do not speak for me and they do not get to use their Jewishness to settle the argument for the rest of us.
Britain is hardly unique in this regard. In New York City, home to the largest Jewish population outside Israel, the election of Mayor Zohran Mamdani represented another profound political moment. Mamdani rejects accusations of antisemitism; his defenders insist that his anti-Zionism must be distinguished from hatred of Jews, but the significance extends beyond one man.
A generation of “progressive” politics is emerging in which hostility towards Zionism is increasingly not an embarrassment or electoral impediment, but a credential. Alongside the growing influence of the congressional Squad, Mamdani’s victory should force us to confront an uncomfortable possibility.
Perhaps we are not waiting for the pendulum to swing back. Perhaps this is where the pendulum has swung and shall remain.
That makes writing a hopeful Rosh Hashanah message rather difficult. That is until you remember something: Jewish hope has never depended upon the world behaving well. That isn’t what hope has meant to us. If it were, we would have disappeared thousands of years ago.
Jewish hope is not optimism. Optimism says things will get better. Jewish hope says that whatever happens, we will still be here.
That is a very different proposition, and we have spent millennia learning the distinction. We were Jews when doing so meant exile. We were Jews through expulsions, forced conversions, ghettos, and pogroms. We were Jews when Europe industrialised our murder, and we were Jews when neighbouring armies attempted to extinguish the reborn Jewish state at birth. We were Jews after Masada, Jews after Munich, Jews after Entebbe, Jews after October 7th, and Jews after Bondi Beach and Manchester.
And we will be Jews after tomorrow.
Perhaps that is the hope I have been searching for — not that the antisemites will change, but that we won’t.
For Jews in Britain, that has consequences. For as long as we choose to build our lives here, retreat cannot be our response, nor can embarrassment, least of all the desperate performance of respectability in the hope that somebody will grant us an exemption. We must be more Jewish, not less, more knowledgeable about our history, more connected to one another, and more willing to defend Israel without beginning every sentence with an apology.
Our connection to the Land of Israel runs through our prayers, our festivals, our texts, our language, our history, and our collective memory.
Above all, we must understand who is watching us: our children. That is our greatest responsibility in 5787 — ensuring that our children are never persuaded to be ashamed of themselves.
We are the descendants of Abraham and Sarah, the heirs of the Maccabees, the descendants of people who survived expulsions, inquisitions, pogroms, and the Holocaust. Our children belong to a people who returned to their ancestral homeland after 2,000 years and rebuilt a sovereign Jewish state. Our responsibility is not to teach them that the world will always love them. It will not. Our responsibility is to make certain they never require the world’s permission to love themselves.
So tonight I will still dip the apple into the honey. I will sit with my wife, my children and my family and wish them a sweet year, even though, perhaps for the first time, I cannot honestly tell myself that I expect the world awaiting them to be sweeter.
And this year, 5787, I have finally understood something about the Rosh Hashanah ritual of apples dipped in honey: The honey isn’t a prediction. We don’t dip the apple because we have been promised sweetness, Jewish history would make that an absurd proposition.
We do it because, despite everything history has taught us, we still choose sweetness. We choose family, community, faith, and Israel. We choose Jewish children and Jewish grandchildren. We choose to build when others would have us disappear. We choose to dance again when others demand that we mourn forever. We choose life.
That is what Jewish hope actually is. Not the childish belief that this year everyone will suddenly like us, or believing that history inevitably bends towards justice. We know better than almost anyone that sometimes it doesn’t.
Jewish hope is not optimism. Jewish hope is the determination that, whatever happens, we will still be here.
You're an optimist if you expect normalcy to return in our lifetime.
The question, for me, is how do Jews define “normal.” One could argue that the treatment of Jews and the Western view of Israel post-WW2 was actually “abnormal” when compared to the prior 2000 years (more so in Europe than America). The tidal wave of antisemitism that building before and exploded after 10/7, the “othering” of Jews, the blood libels and conspiracy theories is actually a return to “normal” for much of the West. The mistake isn’t the hope that pre-10/7 normalcy would return, it’s the belief that the abnormal was the new normal.