We are all October 8th Jews now.

October 8, 2023 was when the world changed for Jews, and when Jews began to change for the world.

photo: Chris Hearn/Unsplash

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.

---

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

---

If October 7th was the day that broke the Jewish world, October 8th was the day that remade us.

The images emanating from southern Israel on October 7, 2023 — the burned bodies, the stolen children, the laughter of murderers — tore open something ancient and fragile in the Jewish soul.

On October 8th, when the carnage was still fresh, we began to see with devastating clarity what we had long tried not to see: that the safety, belonging, and sympathy we once believed we had earned in the modern world were illusions. The spell was broken. October 8th was when the world changed for Jews, and when Jews began to change for the world.

For decades, many of us Jews believed that the Holocaust had finally secured us a place among the civilized. That the memory of six million would inoculate humanity against ever again tolerating open Jew-hatred. That our grandparents’ ashes had purchased, at last, a moral guarantee.

But the guarantee has expired. The Holocaust no longer buys sympathy. In universities and newsrooms, it has been relativized, dismissed, or perversely inverted — used as a cudgel against the very people it was meant to protect. “You should know better,” they tell Jews, as if suffering grants us not empathy but guilt. As if the descendants of the gassed are now responsible for the crimes of the world. The world has moved on. But we have not, because history has never stopped happening to us.

For our grandparents, Jewish identity was shaped by the Holocaust, by the world’s silence as Jews were industrially slaughtered. For us, it is shaped by the same silence returning. They built their Jewishness out of the ruins of Auschwitz. We are building ours out of the ashes of disbelief — disbelief that after “never again,” the world could look at Jewish blood and still ask, “But what did Israel do?” In a cruel twist of time, the grandchildren of the survivors have become witnesses again. Not to memory, but to repetition.

In the days after October 7th, the mask slipped everywhere. The activists who once claimed to stand for human rights couldn’t bring themselves to condemn Hamas, one of the world’s worst abusers of said rights. The same journalists who demanded we “believe women” suddenly didn’t believe Israeli women. And the same institutions that could issue 120-page statements about microaggressions couldn’t manage one honest sentence about Jewish dead. It was then that Jews realized something shattering: We are politically homeless.

The Left, which once promised solidarity, turned its back — or worse, its slogans — against us. The Right, which offers sympathy, often wraps it in conspiracies or conditional loyalty. The center, exhausted by outrage, simply tells us to “move on.” We now occupy a no-man’s land between worlds that either hate us or misunderstand us.

But perhaps that’s where we’ve always lived: on the narrow ridge between exile and home, between acceptance and isolation, between the dream of belonging and the reality of being alone.

And yet, out of that loneliness, something new — or maybe something eternal — has awakened. October 8th Jews are those who, in the vacuum of political shelter, have rediscovered something deeper than politics: peoplehood.

We have stopped waiting for the world’s approval to define our worth. We have remembered that our survival never depended on the kindness of kings, popes, or pundits; it depended on our own unbreakable covenant. We are the Jews who now know that safety does not come from slogans, but from solidarity. That the only protection stronger than an army is identity. That the only sympathy we can truly rely on is our own.

October 8th Jews live in an age of moral inversion, where those who murder Jews are called “resistance fighters,” and Jews who defend themselves are called “colonizers.” Where the language of oppression has become a theater of cruelty.

We once thought progressivism meant progress; now we see it can just as easily mean propaganda. We have watched words — liberation, decolonization, genocide — emptied of their meaning and filled with poison. It is a strange thing to live long enough to see universal values turned against the very people who helped articulate them.

The betrayal cuts deeper because Jews were among the founders of those modern moral movements. We practically invented civil rights, lent ourselves to the fights of the less fortunate, built the frameworks of liberal democracy — and now, those same movements have banished us from their ranks. It is not only a political betrayal but a spiritual one. October 8th Jews carry the sting of that betrayal, but also the freedom that comes after it: the freedom of no longer pretending to belong to those who would prefer a world without us.

The hatred that resurfaced after October 7th isn’t just about Jews. It’s a symptom of a large segments of civilization forgetting what decency means. They are caught in some perverse combination of lost, confused, brainwashed, incompetent, and corrupted.

When people cheer murder because the victims are Jews, something far deeper is rotting. The line between civilization and barbarism is thinner than we imagined. Jews are simply the first to feel it tear. That has always been our role in history: the canary in the coal mine of moral collapse. When antisemitism returns, it is never only about us. It is the herald of a world unmoored from conscience.

For too long, many of us believed that being Jewish was optional — a cultural hobby, a sentimental nostalgia, a heritage you could store in a drawer until Passover. Then October 7th reminded us: To be a Jew is not a choice others will let you forget. And so we have chosen, at last, to remember ourselves. October 8th Jews are not quintessentially religious or secular, Right or Left, Zionist or universalist; we are simply alert. Alert to the fact that the Jewish story has taken another wild turn, and that its next chapter will not be written by those who pity us, but by those who stand up as us.

A friend in Paris stopped wearing her Star of David; a college student in New York started wearing one for the first time. A grandfather in Tel Aviv who once said “We are tired of fighting” now says “We have no choice.” That is what October 7th did: It reconnected the scattered lights of a people who suddenly realized the darkness had returned. Some hid their identity out of fear; others displayed it out of defiance. But in both, a spark was kindled: the awareness that being Jewish is once again a statement, an act of courage, an act of continuity.

We are the generation that has outlived our illusions. The illusion that assimilation could save us. The illusion that Holocaust imagery would shield us. The illusion that political parties would defend us.

Those illusions died on October 7th, and we were reborn on October 8th.

Across the world, Jews are recalibrating — some in synagogues, others in front of computer screens, others in their own rediscovered hearts. We are learning Hebrew, studying Torah, defending Israel, singing old songs, and teaching our children not to whisper when they say they’re Jewish.

October 8th Jews understand that identity without courage is fragility. We know that education and excellence and achievement, while admirable, are no substitute for pride and solidarity. We have learned that safety comes not from apology, but from clarity — clarity about who we are and why we matter.

Our grandparents rebuilt Jewish life after the Holocaust with an optimism rooted in gratitude: gratitude for survival, for refuge, for the far-too-late sympathy of nations. But our generation must rebuild it with a different kind of strength. Not gratitude, but conviction. We are not here because the world allowed us to exist; we are here because we refuse to disappear.

To be an October 8th Jew is not to live in fear, but in purpose. It is to build Jewish schools that teach courage, media that tell truth, communities that radiate belonging. It is to reclaim moral language, to restore meaning to words like justice and freedom and peace, which have been mutilated by hypocrisy. We no longer need to ask who will stand with us; we are standing for ourselves, and through that, for the free and civilized world.

Because, if the Jews can stand tall in a world that wants them small, then humanity still has hope. If the people of the covenant can survive the betrayal of their supposed allies, then moral courage still has a future. To be an October 8th Jew is to understand that Jewish survival is not just about Jews; it is about preserving the idea that good and evil are not relative, that truth exists, that human life is sacred.

The Jew of October 8th is the Jew of Sinai, of Warsaw, of Jerusalem — the same soul, awakened again. Every time history tries to erase us, we write a new chapter. And if the world no longer pities us, perhaps that is good. Pity weakens; purpose strengthens. The world’s sympathy was never our shield; our unity is.

We are all October 8th Jews now. Not by choice, but by truth. We have no political home, but we have each other. We have no guaranteed sympathy, but we have historical strength. We have no illusions left — only faith, memory, and will. And perhaps that is the beginning of real freedom. Because, when much of the world stops pretending to protect us, we stop pretending to need its permission to exist.

We remember who we are. We build what we need. And once again, as always, we keep on keeping on.

---