What a Time to Be a Jew

This is not the best time to be liked as a Jew, but it may be the best time to be one.

photo: Benny Rotlevy/Unsplash

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Last Sunday, at what should have been an uncomplicated moment of Jewish joy — a Chanukah celebration on Bondi Beach near Sydney — at least 15 people were murdered.

Candles, songs, children, families, a public expression of Jewish life in the open air of the Western world, and then violence. Not hidden. Not ambiguous. Not accidental.

It was a reminder, brutal and clarifying, of where we are.

To be a Jew right now is to live inside a widening contradiction. Jews in the West are more visible than ever, more integrated than ever, more accomplished than ever — and simultaneously more isolated, more targeted, and more quietly segregated than at any point in generations. The old ghettos had walls: visible, physical, undeniable. You knew when you were inside them and who had put you there. Gates closed at night. Boundaries were enforced by law and violence, not pretense.

Today’s Jewish ghettos are less historical and more sophisticated. They have no walls because walls would require ownership. Instead, they are built out of norms, narratives, and consequences. You are not expelled; you are frozen out. You are not banned; you are made uncomfortable, risky, radioactive. Access narrows quietly (to social circles, professional advancement, cultural legitimacy) until Jewish life once again contracts inward, not by decree but by pressure. The genius of the modern ghetto is that it allows its architects to deny it exists at all, even as Jews instinctively relearn the old skills: self-censorship, code-switching, careful visibility, and the calculation of when it is safer not to be seen.

In other words, we are witnessing the ghettoization of the modern Western Jew: social, professional, digital, psychological, and emotional. We are welcome everywhere until we are not. Included until we speak. Safe until we light a candle in public.

For decades, Jews believed they had struck a mutually beneficial bargain with the modern West: full acceptance in exchange for dissolving Jewish peoplehood into private belief and individual achievement. Jews were welcomed as individuals, not as a people. Jewishness was acceptable when it was invisible, apolitical, non-sovereign. Israel broke that bargain. Jewish particularism, especially Jewish sovereignty and power (completely justified of course), reintroduced something the modern world claims to tolerate but rarely does. And now the welcome is quickly being revoked.

What makes this moment especially dangerous is not only antisemitism itself, but Jewish dissonance in the face of it. And, unfortunately, dissonance has become a Jewish weakness.

Many Jews continue to vote Right or Left even as antisemitism surges and resurges on both sides, convinced that their camp is different, that their allies are principled, that the danger is exaggerated or temporary.

Many Left-wing Israeli Jews scoff at the absurdity of “pro-Palestinian” protesters abroad who chant slogans these protestors barely understand, yet these same Left-wing Israeli Jews dismiss Gaza as a serious threat, insisting that “everyday Gazans are not Hamas,” as if that distinction (presuming it’s even remotely true) has ever protected Jews from movements that weaponize populations. At the same time, many Right-wing Israeli Jews question if democracy is the best form of governance, despite it being the very framework that makes Jewish sovereignty work.

Abroad, many Diaspora Jews cling to universalism while quietly holding onto Jewish particularism. Others retreat into particularism while still hoping for universal acceptance. Accommodation and separation at once. Moral clarity and moral confusion, coexisting.

This dissonance is not new; it is how Jews have survived for centuries. In Egypt, in ancient Israel, and in exile, Jews learned early how to hold opposing truths at once — to belong without belonging, to adapt without disappearing, to flatter power while quietly resisting it. This psychological flexibility was not hypocrisy; it was survival. It allowed Jews to navigate empires, churches, caliphates, and nation-states that alternated between tolerating and persecuting them.

But what once functioned as a protective instinct is now being turned against us. The same habit of accommodation is exploited by movements that demand endless concessions while offering no reciprocal restraint. The instinct to explain, contextualize, and soften Jewish self-defense is weaponized by those who know many Jews will hesitate before asserting power without apology. In an age of globalized politics and viral outrage, dissonance no longer buys safety; it delays reckoning, leaving Jews unprepared for rapidly increasing hostility.

We are told, for instance, that Israel’s response to the Hamas-led October 7th massacre and kidnappings is the primary cause of antisemitism across the world. This is nonsense. The Jew-hatred was waiting in the shadows all along, long before October 7th. It was not spontaneous. It was not an emotional overflow triggered by images from Gaza. It was strategized, planned for, coordinated, timed. The slogans were pre-written. The narratives were pre-loaded. The social penalties for defending Jews were already designed. October 7th was the excuse, not the origin. What is intolerable is not what Israel does, but that Jews decide to do anything at all.

And so Jews are losing friends, colleagues, and acquaintances — not over something that touches these people’s actual lives, not over policies that affect their taxes or schools or public safety, but over “Palestine,” an abstraction that has become a moral performance.

“Palestine” exists less as a real place that defies everything great about the Western world, and more as a symbol, a stage on which “moral” virtue is displayed and social credit is earned. Most of the people judging Jews get their information from social media or fast-and-furious news channels; they’re graduates of “TikTok University,” not serious scholars who truly understand the historical, theological, and geopolitical dynamics at play between Israel and the Palestinian Territories, and in the Middle East at all.

Yet their opinions are treated as ethical imperatives, their condemnation as evidence of failure. “Palestine” functions as a convenient shorthand for righteousness: to side with Palestinians, to protest Israel in the abstract, is to claim righteous superiority. Jews are held accountable not for their actions or beliefs, but for the symbolic role they occupy in this “moral” theater. It is a cruelty disguised as conscience, a power imbalance framed as justice, and a dynamic that punishes Jews simply for existing in a world that has made an abstraction of their collective life and survival.

For many people, antisemitism has become a luxury belief, an opinion that carries social rewards and no personal risk. For Jews, Jewishness is not a belief; it is a liability. People who have no business having any opinion about Israel, “Palestine,” or Jews in general suddenly discover that their friendship with a Jew is conditional: conditional on silence, conditional on apology, conditional on accepting collective guilt. This is not societal or political; it is deliberate exclusion with a quasi-moral vocabulary.

The result is a psychological state Jews know well, even if we hoped never to revisit it: permanent alertness. Scanning rooms. Lowering voices. Choosing words carefully. Calculating risk before expressing identity. To be a Jew today is to live with a background hum of vigilance: rarely loud, never silent. History whispers in moments like Bondi Beach. Not as melodrama, but as pattern recognition. Every generation of Jews is told that this time is different. And every generation eventually learns what “different” really means.

Faced with this, more Jews are thinking seriously about moving to Israel, or at least applying for Israeli citizenship for the option to move to Israel at any time in the future. Just a few weeks ago, multiple Israeli government ministries executed an emergency immigration simulation in preparation for mass Jewish immigration spurred by serious antisemitic or destabilization incidents.

And Israel, in this moment, presents a truly double-sided coin.

On one side, Israel is extraordinary. It is a model society in ways that are easy to forget from the outside: deep family and communal bonds, universal conscription that creates shared responsibility, an education system that produces highly educated individuals, a population that travels the world yet remains rooted, a culture of hard work, a genuine love of the land, a democracy under constant pressure that nonetheless persists, a civilization compact enough to feel personal.

And that compactness cuts both ways. Israel is also an incredibly hard place to live. The government is not an abstraction; you feel it every day. The stakes are immediate. The arguments are loud. The wars are close and interrupt your life. The taxes are real. Sirens are not theoretical. Unlike vast Western countries where the state can feel distant and diluted, Israel presses in on you because it is small. Every decision matters. Every mistake reverberates. There is no hiding or finding your quiet little corner.

Even still, many Jews argue that this is the best time to be a Jew.

On one level, clearly not. Jews are being hunted in public spaces again. Antisemitism (often disguised as “anti-Zionism”) is socially acceptable in polite societies, governments, and institutions. Violence against Jews is contextualized, excused, or rationalized, while Jewish self-defense is constantly questioned and held to absurd double standards. Jewish safety is conditional; Jewish belonging is fragile.

And yet, on another level, yes — this is the best time to be a Jew. It is a clarifying time. Illusions are dissolving. Jews are discovering who their friends actually are. Jewish identity is no longer ornamental; it is consequential. Jewish history, peoplehood, and sovereignty are no longer academic topics; they are lived realities. The choice to be Jewish — publicly, unapologetically, consciously — has massive meaning again.

And Israel, with all its challenges, is not an abstract idea, but the central axis of Jewish life. No less that the Jewish state has one of the greatest armies and intelligence communities of all-time, capable of defending (for the most part) Jews both in Israel and across the world. (Still, today, many Diaspora Jews do not realize how many terror attacks the Mossad prevents against Jewish communities, events, and targets abroad.)

Certainly, this is not the best time to be liked as a Jew. But it may be the best time to be honest as one. It is not a comfortable time. It is a challenging one. And challenges have always been where Jewish civilization does its best work.

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