The New Political Reality for Jews

No political camp is going to end the Jewish condition. Every coalition contains the logic by which Jews can be useful, suspect, defended, and discarded in rapid succession.

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This is a guest essay by Brenden Strauss.

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

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Some Jews say we are politically homeless. That is too soft a word.

Homelessness is a problem of location. It suggests that somewhere there is a rightful place for us, a coalition we have not yet found, a moral community that would take us in if only we chose better, argued better, assimilated better, explained ourselves better.

That is not our situation.

We are not homeless. We are tenants.

The defense we receive is conditional on our usefulness to someone else’s larger story. The lease renews when we fit. It lapses when we do not. The landlord changes faster than we do.

Some Jews trust strongmen and unapologetic nationalists. They look at history and conclude that force is the only language anyone has truly respected. A people whose 20th century included watching civilized societies collapse into pits does not emerge with much faith in polite institutions.

Other Jews trust liberal institutions, pluralist coalitions, and democratic norms. They know minorities survive not because powerful men favor them, but because laws restrain power across factions, because institutions outlast moods, because protection that depends on a patron’s loyalty is not protection at all.

Both instincts are responding to something real. Neither is reading the lease.

The Right embraces Jews now because Jews are useful as civilizational symbols: proof of Western resolve, contrast against Islamism, evidence that nationalism can still protect a threatened people. That embrace survives enormous contradictions.

In 2025, the Trump Administration froze the Nonprofit Security Grant Program, the one that helps pay for guards and barriers outside synagogues and Jewish schools. Later that year, the FBI cut ties with the Anti-Defamation League, ending a long institutional relationship with one of the country’s central Jewish anti-hate organizations. And Tel Aviv University’s 2026 antisemitism report warned that Hitler admiration and Holocaust denial had reached currents of the Republican coalition deeply enough to qualify as an existential concern.

Embraced at the press conference. Defunded at the agency. Praised as symbol. Abandoned as constituency.

The Left defends Jews when Jewish suffering fits a minority-rights template. When it does not, when Jewish particularity refuses to dissolve into universal abstraction, when Israel behaves in ways that disrupt the preferred moral story, Jewish pain becomes harder for the frame to hold.

Bondi Beach, Manchester on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Museum in Washington — 15 dead, two dead, two dead. In too many progressive spaces, these events could not simply be named as anti-Jewish atrocities. They had to pass through explanatory rituals that spared the framework from having to absorb what had happened.

Neither coalition is defending Jews as Jews. Each is defending the version of Jews its own story can tolerate. The moment that version becomes inconvenient, the defense weakens.

This is the choice Jews in 2026 actually face. Not true allies versus false ones. Coalitions whose commitments are both conditional, conditional in different ways, fragile under different stresses, calibrated to different tolerances.

We are living through a brittle period. Institutions are less trusted. Coalitions are more performative. Public life sorts people into symbolic categories faster than it can hold them as citizens. In such periods, Jews become acutely exposed, not because everyone agrees about us, but because so many different ideologies can find use for us.

Too Jewish for the universalists. Too diasporic for the nationalists. Too successful for the victim hierarchy. Too connected, too visible, too narratively available.

Societies do not need to hate Jews to sacrifice them. They only need Jews to become interpretable as an answer to disorder.

There is another cost to this arrangement, and it is the one Jews talk about least.

A people defended on terms learns to perform for protection. It learns which kind of Jew is legible in which room, which loyalties can be spoken here, which griefs can be spoken there, which version of Jewish fear can be heard without scandal, which version of Jewish resolve will get you cast as dangerous.

I know this because I have done it. I have made myself into the kind of Jew a room could tolerate before asking that room to tolerate the truth. I have trimmed the argument to fit the audience. I have held back the inconvenient part of the sentence until I was sure it would be forgiven. What I told myself was political judgment. What it was, most of the time, was adaptation. Seeing that clearly required admitting something humbling: that I had learned to express my Jewishness carefully, in forms a particular room would find palatable.

That is the private tax on the public arrangement. The damage is not only that we are imperfectly defended. It is that we are gradually shaped by the defenders we depend on, shaped into the kinds of Jews our coalitions can use, rewarded when we confirm what our patrons already believe. Safety bought this way is paid for in pieces of the self.

So many Jews are still confusing being courted with being protected.

A politician who says the right things about Jews is not safety. A coalition that includes us is not safety. Access, visibility, outrage on our behalf — none of it is safety.

Safety lives in harder things: institutional integrity, legal protection, physical security, communal seriousness, and the discipline to distinguish criticism from hatred without collapsing the categories. It lives in a Jewish community lucid enough not to confuse a useful patron with a durable one, and honest enough to resist being shaped into whatever version of Jewishness the current arrangement rewards.

No political camp is going to end the Jewish condition. Every coalition contains the logic by which Jews can be useful, suspect, defended, and discarded in rapid succession. The pattern is older than the current cast. It will outlast them.

We are not outside the house. We are inside on terms that can change.

The lease is conditional. The landlord changes. The terms are not written down. The rent is paid partly in performance. And eviction, when it comes, rarely arrives announced. It arrives in a language the age has already taught itself to find reasonable.

The first obligation is to see the arrangement clearly. The second is to build Jewish life that depends on it less.

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