When 'Never Again' becomes a slogan, Jews forget what it really means.

“Never again!” should stand as a warning to all Jews, not as a source of comfort.

The Israeli flag at a Holocaust memorial in Europe (photo:Timur Shakerzianov/Unsplash)

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This is a guest essay written by David Mandel, a cognitive psychologist.

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

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Future of Jewish has an interesting name.

Recently, it got me thinking, both about the name as a construct and about the actual future of Jewish.

Let’s start with the name. It’s not called “Future of Judaism” or “Future of the Jews.” It’s Future of Jewish.

But what exactly is Jewish?

It’s inexact and changing. If it wasn’t adapting over time, we wouldn’t need to focus on its future. Like the trail of spent empires, it would merely persist until it persisted no more. We can write endlessly about the future of Jewish precisely because it isn’t static and is far from spent.

“Jewish” is in flux. This is partly because Jews themselves are disproportionately dynamic transformers of the world. Rewind history and you’ll find them as the constructors of the first Abrahamic religion.

Fast forward to the modern era, and you will find that Jews, who comprise a mere 0.2 percent of the world’s population, earned 22 percent of the Nobel prizes. That’s 110 times or roughly two orders of magnitude greater than their proportion in the world population. It’s no fluky streak either, since it is recorded over roughly a century and a quarter.

Nor are their contributions restricted to a particular area. Jews earned 19 percent of chemistry prizes, 25 percent of physics prizes, 26 percent of medicine or physiology prizes, 41 percent of economics prizes, 13 percent of literature prizes, and 8 percent of peace prizes. Not bad.

Jewish is also in flux because of perennial Jew-hatred, the oldest of hatreds. The Jews’ adaptations to persecution led to their dispersal from our ancestral homeland, Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel).

In foreign lands, they learned new languages and adapted to new trades and professions, all while remembering their rich heritage. Those who are under adaptive pressure must be smarter than those not under such pressure to survive, let alone thrive.

Yet, Jews responded to such pressures and prejudicial handicaps time and again by excelling within the societies they entered, while maintaining a focus on the zachor (remembrance) of where their people came from and what they had collectively endured.

The dynamism, productivity, and explosive creativity of Jewish life are driven by Jewish adaptability to the contemporary conditions of Jew-hatred, which ebb and flow through history. I’m not saying that what makes “Jewish” special is only an adaptive response to hatred, but I do believe that both Jews and Jew-haters alike underestimate how much their interactions over time shape Jewish exceptionalism. It may be impossible to tease the contributions apart.

Some might say: Okay, for the Jew-hater, I get it. They don’t see that their hatred drives our adaptive reflexes and, ultimately, makes us stronger, even though it’s been this way now for thousands of years. The haters don’t see that their hatred breeds more hatred precisely because it fails to resolve their quest to destroy what they envy. They wish to smash Jewishness into dust but consume themselves in the process.

But, surely, some might say, Jews get all this. They know that the long history of Jewish persecution made their parents and grandparents physically and mentally nibble (provided they weren’t wiped out). But if this were true, why was the Jewish community so surprised by the explosion of antisemitism, notably in the West, on and after October 8th?

And why, in the 1930s and 1940s, were German Jews who felt like true Germans or Hungarian Jews who felt like true Hungarians (to give two examples of many) surprised when their status as equals was removed and, again, when their status as humans worthy of life was finally revoked?

The colorful evolutionary biologist, Robert Trivers, once described walking down a Manhattan street by the side of a beautiful young woman who he is enjoying the pleasure of talking to, only to be interrupted when he noticed a decrepit old man on her other side reflected in the storefronts’ window panes keeping pace with him. Moments later, he realizes the man is him ruining his experience.

To some extent, we all wear rose-colored glasses and deceive ourselves. Jews are no exception. We prefer the story in which Jewish exceptionalism is a mix of genetic and cultural good fortune, sprinkled with a healthy dose of self-focused, agentic attributions for success. This is just human nature, and what social psychologists call the self-serving bias.

German Jews in the 1930s knew about earlier pogroms, and Jews in 2023 knew about the Holocaust and the attendant Jewish disbelief. It’s why we sloganized “Never again!” Self-deception rather than ignorance is the cause of our surprise.

The inherent danger of sloganizing “Never again!” is it can reassure us that the worst for Jews is behind us. And perhaps worse, it can reassure us that it will never be relatively much worse than it currently is.

“Never again!” should stand as a warning to all, not as a source of comfort. Because, if we take it as a mere slogan, thinking that we’re over the past and that we can safely declare “Never again!” as if declaring a victory over a long oppressive past, we will only be setting ourselves up for surprise attacks such as those we witnessed on October 7th and thereafter.

Wouldn’t it be nice if “Never again!” meant we won and that the fight (at least the serious fight) was over?

But, in reality, and for the sake of collective self-preservation, it must be an injunction to be constantly vigilant. Of course, that’s easier said than done. Just as the adversities caused by Jew-hatred spur Jewish adaptation, the periodic abatement of such hatred triggers a mental adaptation. We relax and believe we are relatively safe. That won’t happen here. That won’t happen now. This adaption is normal and the failure to adapt in this way would be the hallmark of a trauma victim.

We don’t want the future of Jewish to be the experience of a trauma victim either, so we must face the fact that there are irreconcilable tradeoffs in Jewish experience. We must be vigilant and adaptive to ensure a positive future of Jewish, but we do not want to mis-calibrate such responses to the point where the future of Jewish is neurotic and paranoid. We want the future of Jewish to be thriving, not merely existing.

Jews in the West born after the Holocaust (like me) have learned to relax. If October 7th hadn’t been followed by the international resurgence of Jew-hatred of October 8th and thereafter, we would have been angered and saddened, but we would have continued to relax because it would have been about Israeli Jews, not about us in the Diaspora.

It is for the same reason that children of Holocaust survivors could relax knowing much about what their parents had endured, and yet feel as if they were fortunate to live in the post-madness world of “Never again!”

October 8 thchanged that. We saw something happening around us that reminded us of what we knew from the stories our parents or grandparents told us, as well as documentaries and history books. The sense of surprise was due to an expectancy violation: This wasn’t supposed to be happening now. This wasn’t consistent with “Never again!” As the days and weeks wore on, we were not sure what to expect. Would the response, which seemed like insanity, be tamped down — or would it escalate?

The hatred didn’t simmer down; it boiled over. As it did, Jews in the Diaspora reconnected in a direct way with the long history of Jewish suffering and insecurity. All of a sudden the fact that our numbers are small — and therefore our political power is small — mattered.

When police in Western country after Western country stood by while angry mobs chanted “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free!” (namely, Jew-free) and “Globalize the intifada!” (namely, kill Jews in the Diaspora), Jews in the West knew that their conception of permanent safety was an illusion.

If there were any lingering illusions that this boil-over could turn violent, last week’s cold-blooded murder of Sarah Milgram and Yaron Lischinsky (two employees of the Israeli embassy who were attending an event at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C.) should have shattered these illusions once and for all. The suspect, Elias Rodriguez, chanted the familiar zombie drone, “Free, free Palestine!” as he was taken away.

This is the cyclical rude awakening of the Jews that permeates history. We know our history, but still, we are caught feeling disbelief that this is happening now.

It’s unwelcome news, that’s for sure. We don’t know how ugly things will get, but we do know there are ominous signs all around us. We worry more now about the future of Jewish than we did two years ago — and not only as it affects our personal lives, but as it affects our people as a whole.

However, the affronts Jews experienced on October 7th, October 8th, and every day since must rekindle the adaptive spark that has helped guide our people through the darkest of times. Our challenge now is to recalibrate our perceptions and beliefs so that they align with the current reality. The long “end of history” for Jews in the West is over.

Hence, the future of Jewish is a return to creative adaptation, to showing the contemporary Jew-haters of the world the unintended second- and third-order effects that Jew-hatred causes: an explosion of Jewish flourishing.

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