The Question Jews Were Never Supposed to Ask

For centuries, Jews have been told to justify themselves in exchange for belonging. But what if the real problem was the assumption that Jews must always stand trial in the first place?

photo: Salvatore Favata/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Joanne Strasser, a postgrad fellow at the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism.

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

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Recently, Pulitzer Prize finalist Gary Rosenblatt, longtime editor of The Jewish Week (a premier digital and independent community news source serving the metropolitan New York City area), attended a debate at The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center in New York City.

On the way out, security directed the crowd away from a protest on Fifth Avenue. At the corner of Madison, police held the perimeter. A group in keffiyehs stood there cursing them as Jews.

The next morning, Rosenblatt called the center’s executive director to ask about the security: photo IDs at the door, phones surrendered in the lobby, scores of officers outside and on site.

“This is what it takes to be Jewish in New York these days,” Gady Levy, the executive director, told him.

Rosenblatt heard it as rueful. That it is. It’s also evidence of something worse: A community that once would have called this outrageous has learned to call it “normal.”

Reading Rosenblatt’s essay, I kept returning to his central question: Do diaspora Jews have to choose between openly supporting Israel and being accepted by their peers? I had no idea.

The question is a trolley problem: two tracks, no brakes, a choice that must be made. The current debates argue over which lever to pull, but none of them ask who decided the trolley couldn’t be stopped, or why we are the ones at the lever?

That adjudication has a form, and it recurs. The debate at The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center between journalist Bret Stephens and Jeremy Ben-Am, the founder and president of J Street (a U.S.-based liberal Jewish and Israel advocacy organization that has increasingly become anti-Zionist in practice) is one version of it.

Stephens argues that movements applying to Israel standards applied to no other state are engaged not in criticism but in structural exclusion; Ben-Ami argues that unconditional American Jewish support for policies he considers both unjust and self-defeating weakens Jewish standing over time.

Both could be making substantive arguments, but it doesn’t really matter. The content isn’t issue — the form is.

Who decided these were the only two tracks? Who assigned Jewish conduct as the operative variable — the thing that, if only calibrated correctly, would resolve the tension? Who made Jewish positioning the question, rather than the framework that keeps generating the need for positioning?

The bargain that produced this question is centuries old. While degrees of Jewish civic belonging in Western modernity varied across Europe, Australia, Canada, and the United States, the underlying logic was consistent: Jewish particularity could be privately maintained, while its entry into public life required justification in terms set unilaterally by the dominant culture.

This was a structure extending beyond merely social arrangements — it was built over centuries into law, theology, and institutional practice long before the Enlightenment offered its conditional bargain. Liberalism did not invent the asymmetry; it inherited and formalized it.

After the Holocaust, there was a period of partial interruption in which Jewish testimony about persecution was granted provisional authority; however, it organized around victimhood. Jewish particularity (what that victimhood meant, the history that had produced it, and what persisted) remained a proposition requiring corroboration rather than knowledge that stood on its own.

October 7th and its aftermath exposed this very structure.

Jewish students reporting harassment on their campuses found themselves required to establish that what they had experienced counted as antisemitism rather than legitimate political expression. Academic associations quick to issue careful statements about Gaza were slower to address — and in some cases silent on — the documented sexual violence committed during the attacks themselves. The chants in the streets were given charitable interpretations that were not extended to the Jewish witnesses of them.

In each instance, Jewish testimony about Jewish experience was treated as a position that needed to be assessed by non-Jewish parties before it could count as testimony

It doesn’t have to be this way.

The framework can be refused — in public, deliberately, at cost. It has been done before.

In January 1898, when French novelist and journalist Émile Zola published “J’Accuse…!” on the front page of the famous newspaper L’Aurore, he was not merely debating whether Jewish French army officer Alfred Dreyfus had been wrongly convicted of treason; he was challenging the broader antisemitism, corruption, and institutional dishonesty that had shaped the entire case.

He was attacking the framework itself: the army’s honor, the court’s independence, the witnesses’ credibility, the entire machinery that had decided in advance that a Jewish officer must be guilty. Zola saw how Dreyfus’ appeals through proper channels had only deepened the original lie.

So, he flipped the tables. He made the court that had positioned itself as the site of judgment the object of judgment.

While it took years, the case against Dreyfus eventually collapsed. But it wasn’t because there was new or better evidence; it was because the framework’s defenders could no longer hold their story together.

Sixty-seven years later, the Second Vatican Council’s Nostra Aetate worked the same way at a different layer. It began with John XXIII, who as a Vatican diplomat in Istanbul during the Second World War had issued baptismal certificates to Jews fleeing the Nazis. He commissioned Cardinal Augustin Bea (a Jesuit Scripture scholar born in Germany) to draft a statement on the church’s relationship with Jews.

Bea’s draft named the doctrine which assigned collective guilt to Jews for the crucifixion and interpreted Jewish survival as evidence of divine rejection. This surfaced the narrative that had been invisibly operative for 19 centuries; it was put on a page and could no longer pass without scrutiny.

Like Dreyfus, the erosion of the framework took years. Bea’s drafting was contested; conservative bishops fought the original language. And while the 1965 text still exposed the framework, its language was softened. The doctrinal revisions came over decades — Good Friday liturgies rewritten, catechisms revised, and seminary curricula restructured.

Zola and Nostra Aetate worked at different layers — one political, one doctrinal — and both succeeded by the same route: naming, in public, what the frame was doing. Both were attacks on the same structure: the disqualification of Jewish testimony before it could be heard. What both cases show is modest, but they demonstrate that the disqualification can be interrupted. This can be done and it has been. The precondition is refusing to argue inside those arrangements while leaving them uncontested.

Bret Stephens, at the 92NY’s “State of World Jewry” address in February 2026, came closer to naming this than anyone in current diaspora Jewish discourse. He argued that the fight against antisemitism through education and advocacy is “a well-meaning but mostly wasted effort”; that antisemitism is a neurosis that cannot be educated out of existence; that seeking external approval is a fool’s errand.

His prescription was this: Stop caring about the world’s verdict and invest in Jewish thriving on Jewish terms, so we can build our own table. The diagnosis is right, but Stephen’s prescription is incomplete.

Building Jewish institutions is the work, but we cannot leave the public square organized as is. The further step is to refuse the framework on which Jewish standing is being adjudicated — to contest it, in public, the way Émile Zola contested the army and the Council contested its own theology. Stephens sees that arguing for Jewish worth is futile, but he has not yet asked who authorized the argument in the first place.

We need to ask the prior question — not which lever to pull, but who authorized the trolley and told us we had to make a choice.

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