The West is sleepwalking into a Jewish exodus.
The West will not lose its Jews in one dramatic moment. It will lose them through a slow drip of insult, a steady rise in fear, and a growing sense of no longer belonging.
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, who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.
The West is sleepwalking toward the loss of its Jewish citizens in what may be the most absurd chapter in the Jews’ long history of tragedy.
Unlike previous moral cataclysms, this undoing comes not from a single tyrant or ideology, but from the corrosion of a civilization that has forgotten how to protect the people who built so much of it.
Even as a fragile and tentative ceasefire holds in Gaza, Jews in the West are discovering that the nations they defended, enriched, and profoundly shaped have become increasingly inhospitable and — in some places — borderline unlivable.
The question is well past whether Jewish persecution could happen again in the West. It is happening. The mechanisms are unmistakable, the patterns familiar, and the implications dire and permanent.
If you want to understand what will make Jews leave, look at the police. Western governments vowed “Never Again” after the Holocaust, and for a good while they meant it. Even a hint of antisemitism would bring the fuzz to your door. Today, police stand and watch mobs chant for Israel’s destruction, call for the genocide of its people, harass visibly Jewish citizens, and drive antisemitic intimidation deep into urban life.
In London, Melbourne, Paris, Amsterdam, Toronto, and elsewhere, Jews report the same dismal experience: they call the police about an antisemitic threat and see no action taken. They are told harassment is “protected speech,” that antisemitic assaults are “difficult to prove,” and that even death threats must be understood in the “context of global politics.”
Hypothetical concerns are fretted over while Jewish victims’ very real dangers are dismissed.
The police are trapped in a pseudo-academic hallucination — trying to maintain “balance.” They now believe their job is to enforce the law only if it does not risk upsetting violent constituencies. This makes Jews expendable, because defending them risks confrontation. So the police retreat, and Islamists and other grotesque antisemites advance.
As history shows, and as we shall sadly see again soon, civilizations that cease defending their Jews reveal a deeper societal decline. It is a lesson the West refuses to learn or, for some reason, is now incapable of learning.
The ultimate test of a society’s tolerance is whether someone visibly Jewish can walk down the street without fear. In too many Western capitals, the answer has become “no.”
Jews are again donning caps instead of kippot (plural for kippah), dressing generically with no cultural markers, and avoiding even a tote bag with Hebrew on it. When a minority must erase itself to move safely through a city, its civil rights have already been eroded.
This is not normal or acceptable, and it is certainly not “different this time.” Those who insist the present situation is unique because Jews are now merely one minority among many in a multicultural, multireligious mosaic are suffering from an acute condition called being completely wrong.
Jews are also losing confidence in the West because they see their children facing new barriers. University campuses, supposedly cathedrals of inquiry but increasingly idiot factories, have become the most ideologically hostile environment for Jews since Europe in the 1930s. Jewish students report being spat on, stalked, doxed, barred from student government, forced to renounce Zionism to avoid assault, and having to run the gauntlet of masked activists chanting for their genocide just to get to class.
University responses have been so timid and banal they may as well be written in invisible ink. The fear of appearing pro-Israel has spooked administrators into a sympathetic freeze. They will protect every minority except history’s most persecuted one.
In a generation or two, universities will wonder why Jewish enrollment dropped, why Jewish philanthropy evaporated, and why Jewish academics quietly left as though it were a mystery. They will not admit that campuses became laboratories for legitimizing antisemitism and that academia somehow mistook targeting Jews for “social justice.” The impact will be vast: More than 60 percent of Western Jews attend university, compared to approximately 37 percent of the general population.
Beyond universities, Jews are losing faith in the West because of a corrosive (and rarely discussed) creep toward informal segregation in retail and service sectors. Jewish customers report being refused service. Hebrew on clothing invites insults. A mezuzah hanging from a rideshare mirror leads to cancellations.
In workplaces, discrimination is subtler but equally malignant. It is acceptable to be Jewish only if you do not defend Israel, call out only Right-wing Jew-hatred, and politely accept being labeled a “colonizer,” “oppressor,” and “white-adjacent” — whatever that means — while not challenging the fabricated distinction that Israel is somehow separate from Jewish identity.
Perhaps the most chilling development, and one many Western liberal Jews still fail to grasp, is the emergence of policies targeting dual nationals who served in the Israel Defense Forces. A growing number of countries are drafting measures allowing them to investigate, prosecute, or sanction their own Jewish citizens simply for fulfilling Israel’s compulsory military service — despite no evidence, or even suggestion, of wrongdoing.
This is unprecedented. It is the bureaucratic reclassification of Israeli dual nationals as presumptive war criminals. It is a modernized expression of the ancient antisemitic assumption that the Jew is inherently guilty. No country threatens Korean dual nationals for serving in the South Korean army. Or Greeks, Singaporeans, Swiss, or Finns. Only dual Israeli citizens are targeted. That is world-class racism.
Many fortunate Jews remain unaware of how severe antisemitism has become. Partly because they are living their lives, raising children, and trusting institutions; partly because the news media treats the issue with perfunctory boredom. Jew-hatred is reported like the weather — something that apparently happened somewhere.
There is no moral outrage, no systemic analysis or cultural reckoning. When Jews express frustration, they are accused of exaggeration or attempting to suppress criticism of Israel. Jewish fear is not treated as a real problem.
Even after the Hamas-led massacre of October 7, 2023 (the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust), large parts of Western culture did not pause. They doubled down on hating Jews and castigating Israel. The official response has been to appoint antisemitism envoys and tell Jews: “We hear you, but let’s talk about Gaza.”
A significant factor that may propel Jews toward the exits is that Western politicians, not creatures of high integrity even in good times, have learned that condemning antisemitism is safe and costless so long as it is vague and no action is taken. Confronting antisemitism, stopping the mobs, challenging the activists, and disciplining antisemitic bureaucrats all carry electoral risk, something politicians fear more than moral disgrace. Political classes treat Jewish safety as a public-relations issue to be managed, not a civil-rights obligation to be enforced.
There is also a growing political calculation that Jews are demographically irrelevant, especially compared with Muslim voters, with the U.S. being the only partial exception. Islamists and Far-Left activists are larger and louder blocs, so leaders choose numbers over decency.
Given all this, it is unsurprising that Jews across the West are asking: Do we have a future here? Should we encourage our children to stay? Is Europe safe? Is North America safe? Is Australia safe? Is South Africa safe? Should we move assets abroad? Should we obtain an Israeli passport as insurance? These are not hypothetical questions. Jewish emigration from France, Belgium, Sweden, and the UK has already accelerated. The U.S. is behind Europe, but rising too.
The West will not lose its Jews in one dramatic moment. It will lose them through a slow drip of insult, a steady rise in fear, and a growing sense of no longer belonging. A key question is whether today’s Diaspora Jews will repeat the mistake of their forefathers and wait for catastrophe before acting. The tremors before the earthquake rumble louder each day.
If Western nations lose their Jewish communities, they will forfeit things they never realized Jews had given them: parts of their moral compass, their historical memory of totalitarianism, a large portion of their intellectual class, and history’s finest early-warning system of civilizational decline.
Throughout history, how a society treats its Jews predicts its future with unerring accuracy. Antisemitism is a symptom of broader decay that putrefies its way into a society’s core. Western civilization will not fall because its enemies are strong, but because it is abandoning the people who held the line when others looked away.
Jews will not turn on the West; they will quietly leave, taking with them their culture, innovation, generosity, reverence for law, belief in democracy, and their disproportionate contributions to science, medicine, the arts, finance, technology, journalism, literature, and public life.
They will leave because a civilization that will not defend its Jews will defend next to nothing. The West — much of it confused, cowardly, morally exhausted, and presently self-absorbed — may not even notice the loss until it is far too late.
To say that the West is “sleepwalking” excuses the very conscious decisions made by Western governments, media, academics, so-called cultural elites. The reality is that the West is ushering in an exodus of its Jews.
Okay, so what are you going to do about it? Pack up and leave again? How about solutions as well as complaint, Nachum? I love your writing, and this essay is valuable, but again, are we going to just recognize the problem, shake our collective heads, abrogate responsibility to all that have suffered this before and begin to suffer again? The same old script.
My solution is a take on John Galt’s solution. Stop the money: Investment, donations, philanthropy. Walk away from research, the arts, medicine, etc. Don’t donate to ANY political campaign. Take all these measures for a time, and see what happens then. You cite an urgent and credible threat to diaspora Jews. Well then, you need a credible, difficult and painful solution. Otherwise, if things are as bad as you say, pack your bags again.