The Most Dangerous Lie That New York Jews Tell Themselves
Jewish history is filled with prosperous communities that convinced themselves success meant safety — right before discovering it did not.
Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.
This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan, a longtime journalist and commentator who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Many New York Jews are in denial about their city and country’s antisemitism crisis.
While many acknowledge there is a problem, they insist that with almost two million Jews, New York remains “a Jewish city” and that fears are overblown.
It is amazing that so many of these people think that the Jewish population being much larger than anti-Israel protestors means Jews are safe. This analysis is dangerously wrong-headed.
Among the many things about which diaspora Jews reassure themselves is the phrase: “It cannot happen here.” It is never quite clear why they think New York is different. Is it Spain, Germany, Russia, Poland, Iraq, or somewhere else?
The languages and architecture change, as do some of the ruling ideologies, but the illusion does not.
So, today, as antisemitism floods Western institutions, as mobs scream for intifada in places like Manhattan and Melbourne, as Jewish students are chased on elite campuses, as synagogues quietly upgrade security while politicians lecture Jews about “tone,” one argument is heard over and over again: “New York will be fine. It is a Jewish city.”
Will it?
Warsaw was a Jewish city (30 percent Jewish), as was Baghdad (30 percent), Vilna (28 percent), and Budapest (24 percent). Almost half of Salonika was Jewish. Jews once believed Berlin was safe because Jews helped build modern Germany, and likewise Vienna because Jews shaped its culture. They believed Baghdad was safe because Jews had lived there for 2,500 years.
This does not mean that New York is about to become 1939 Warsaw. Historical comparisons are often abused by hysterics. America is not Nazi Germany. The point is not that history repeats mechanically. The point is that Jews repeatedly mistake prominence for protection.
They are not the same thing.
In fact, Jewish prominence often creates a fatal psychological vulnerability. Jews begin believing visibility equals permanence, influence equals security, and integration equals acceptance. Then reality arrives with a baseball bat.
For decades, New York Jews convinced themselves they had solved the Jewish problem. There were Jewish mayors, Jewish billionaires, Jewish neighborhoods, Jewish media figures, Jewish universities packed with Jewish students, Jewish philanthropy embedded into the city’s bones.
The bagel became American. The Yiddish-isms became mainstream. Hanukkah appeared in public schools next to Christmas trees. Jewish comedians became America’s court jesters. Jewish therapists became America’s secular priests. This created confidence and civilizational arrogance. American Jews began speaking as though antisemitism had been permanently defeated.
Then came October 7th, and Jews discovered something horrifying.
The people screaming “Globalize the Intifada” did not care how many delis were in Brooklyn. The Columbia activist did not become less radical because Midtown had kosher restaurants. The Islamists chanting outside synagogues did not pause because Jerry Seinfeld exists. The revolutionary Left does not abandon identity politics because Jews helped build New York publishing.
Assimilated Jewish communities make this mistake over and over again: They imagine themselves to be woven deeply enough into the fabric of society that society can no longer turn on them. But societies do not turn on abstractions; they turn on minorities who remain minorities no matter how successful they become.
The Jews of Baghdad learned this brutally.
For centuries, Iraqi Jews were integral to commerce, administration, and intellectual life. Baghdad was not merely home to Jews. In many ways, they helped define Baghdad. Then nationalism radicalized. Islamist and fascist influences merged, conspiracy theories spread, and Jews became associated with foreign enemies and internal corruption.
The Farhud (an infamous pogrom) arrived in 1941. It included murder, rape, looting, and humiliation. Eventually, nearly the entire Jewish community vanished. This happened not because Jews were marginal, but because they were visible. This is one of the darkest truths in Jewish history: Success does not erase resentment, and sometimes it intensifies it.
The same pattern haunted Hungary. Budapest once glittered with Jewish life. Jews helped modernize the economy, shape journalism, finance the arts, build industry, and transform the capital into one of Europe’s great cities. Hungarian Jews were among the most assimilated in Europe. Many considered themselves proudly Hungarian first and Jewish second.
Then politics changed. Economic instability and national humiliation arrived, as did radical ideologies. Suddenly, Jewish integration was reinterpreted not as contribution but as infiltration.
This is always how it works. The Jews who believe they have finally become accepted wake up one morning to discover they have instead become symbolic — not an individual, a symbol, a stand-in for capitalism or communism or globalization or colonialism or moral decay or elite power or financial corruption or “whiteness” or non-“whiteness,” depending on the mob’s ideological needs.
The details change, but the mechanism remains astonishingly consistent. New York Jews should think carefully about this because modern antisemitism is mutating rapidly. The old Right hated Jews for being alien outsiders. The new Left hates Jews for being successful insiders. That is not safer, just more fashionable.
Today, elite discourse increasingly frames Jews as hyper-privileged oppressors who manipulate institutions and wield disproportionate influence. This language is dangerous not because criticism of Jews is inherently forbidden. Criticism of everyone is normal in a free society. It is dangerous because Jews are once again being transformed from people into a cosmic explanation. That never ends well, and it becomes even more dangerous when Jews themselves participate in it.
Some American Jews now spend extraordinary energy reassuring anti-Israel activists that they are “one of the good Jews.” Others insist antisemitism concerns are exaggerated because acknowledging reality might damage “progressive” coalitions. This too has historical precedent. A recurring tragedy of Jewish history is that many Jews prefer social acceptance to civilizational self-respect right up until acceptance disappears.
And it is not accidental. Revolutionary movements fixate on symbolic enemies. Jews are symbolically useful because they can simultaneously represent whiteness, capitalism, colonialism, globalism, elitism, nationalism, and Western power all at once, depending on what grievance is fashionable that week. This is why absurd conspiracy theories flourish even among supposedly educated people.
Jews are too rich and too weak simultaneously, too “white” and not “white” enough simultaneously, and oppressors and perpetual victims simultaneously. The contradictions do not matter because antisemitism is not rational political analysis; it is emotional architecture. And New York is increasingly full of emotional radicals.
America possesses immense strengths that Europe historically lacked. The U.S. has stronger constitutional traditions, a more decentralized culture, broader religious pluralism, and a political structure less vulnerable to single-party ideological capture. Millions of Americans genuinely reject antisemitism. Many Christians remain deeply supportive of Jews and Israel.
This matters.
But mature civilizations survive by abandoning illusions, not feeding them. The illusion is that New York’s Jewishness guarantees Jewish safety. It does not. The illusion is that a society benefiting from Jews cannot turn against Jews.
The deeper lesson is not that Jews should flee New York tomorrow carrying sacks of gold bars while violin music plays in the background. The lesson is psychological. Jews must stop confusing comfort with permanence. The greatest danger to Jewish communities is often not open hatred but civilizational complacency. Complacent communities stop preparing, cease defending themselves culturally, stop maintaining internal cohesion, and stop teaching Jewish history honestly. They stop believing enemies mean what they say.
A surreal feature of modern American Jewish life is how many Jews still interpret calls for intifada as metaphorical performance art. History suggests taking radicals at their word is generally wiser.
No, New York is not about to become Baghdad in 1941, but Baghdad in 1930 also did not believe it was about to become Baghdad in 1941. That is the point. Civilizations can deteriorate faster than people imagine, especially sophisticated people. The assimilated elite always believes collapse is impossible because elite environments mistake institutional stability for moral stability.
Yet institutions themselves can radicalize astonishingly quickly. Universities already have. Sections of the media already have. So have parts of the arts world. And much of activist culture. Even the language has changed. Jews are increasingly discussed not as a vulnerable minority, but as a legitimate target of revolutionary grievance. Violence becomes contextualized. Harassment becomes rationalized. Fear becomes mocked as hysteria.
This is not normal. Jews who pretend this is normal because “New York is a Jewish city” are indulging in one of the oldest and most catastrophic fantasies in Jewish history — the fantasy of exemption, the belief that this time the rules no longer apply. They always apply.
The Jewish future in America will depend not on how many Jews live in Manhattan or Brooklyn, but whether Jews recover civilizational seriousness. Do they understand history? Do they recognize ideological danger, maintain communal solidarity, defend themselves unapologetically, and teach their children reality instead of comforting myths?
Most importantly, do they understand that no city belongs permanently to the Jews merely because Jews once flourished there?
Jewish history is filled with magnificent communities that believed their roots were too deep to be ripped out. Roots do not matter if the civilization around them turns poisonous.
The question is not whether New York is still a Jewish city. It is whether Jews have learned anything from the last 2,000 years.
Nachum, this is an excellent article, but in my opinion you omitted our number one vulnerability: the massive, bloated Jewish organizations that dominate diaspora Jewish life.
They take in enormous amounts of money, yet there is almost no accessibility, almost no accountability, no unified strategy, no coordinated messaging, and very little real leadership that reaches ordinary Jews on the street. Everything is reactive instead of proactive. We respond after the damage is already done instead of building long-term communal strength beforehand.
The other side understands slogans, propaganda, activism, emotional narratives, and strategic coordination. Meanwhile, our organizations often seem trapped inside endless bureaucracy, fundraising, conferences, statements, and institutional caution.
That, to me, is the true Jewish swamp.
And until that swamp is torn down and rebuilt from the ground up with real accountability, accessibility, clarity, and strategic seriousness, diaspora Jews will continue drifting without unified direction while the threats around them grow more organized and more confident.
100% correct Nachum. Thank you. ⭐🙏