Over the past year, American Jews have become less safe, have felt less safe, and have been making individual and group efforts to be safer. But who exactly is doing what to achieve that aim—and is anything working?
The physical threat is real and growing, manifested in crimes against Jews that range from menacing to manslaughter. The New York Police Department alone clocked 200 anti-Jewish hate crimes in the first half of 2024, a 70 percent rise over the same period in 2023. According to the Anti-Defamation League, the year following October 7, 2023, saw 10,000 anti-Semitic incidents, a 200 percent rise compared with the previous year. These have ranged from the attack on Paul Kessler, who died in November 2023 near Los Angeles after an anti-Israel protester hit him with a megaphone, to the harassment that led Columbia Hillel rabbi Elie Buechler to instruct students to “return home as soon as possible” for safety in April 2024.
Institutions and lawmakers are imposing some halting measures. Universities adopted a grab bag of Band-Aid fixes to avoid the escalating disruptions of the spring, like schemes to limit campus access at the University of Southern California and Columbia University, or prohibiting indoor protests at American University (before the school reversed itself). Some, like George Washington University, suspended their chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine or other groups bent on incitement. And others, such as the Universities of Georgia and South Florida, sanctioned students and upheld the sanction (unlike the capitulation to student appeals for lenient treatment at, for example, Pomona College).
Lawmakers are also pursuing targeted legislation. Senator Bill Cassidy introduced a bill to prevent unions from using member dues to promote anti-Semitism—such as through BDS resolutions—without workers’ consent. Representatives Mike Lawler and Ritchie Torres of New York drafted a law to monitor anti-Semitism on college campuses. This would allow the Department of Education to hire a “third-party antisemitism monitor” for any college or university that receives federal funding. On Long Island, Nassau County passed a law prohibiting masking at protests, enabling the arrest in August of an agitator outside a synagogue whose face was concealed by a keffiyeh. And many other jurisdictions are considering similar masking bans.
But while all of these are positive steps, they certainly haven’t reversed the tide. This was made clear in the nationwide Day of Rage activity that accompanied the October 7 anniversary, and in continued threats and attacks on Jewish students. These included, in Michigan, two violent attacks on Jewish students assaulted for their identity
Against this backdrop, American Jews have been taking steps not just to show support for Israel but to make themselves less vulnerable to attack. On the defensive, Jews are taking martial arts, getting gun licenses, hiding visible religious identifiers, and beefing up synagogue security. Going on offense, Jews are suing institutions for failing to protect them, suing unions for anti-Semitism, gathering information on funding sources for tent encampments, and boldly and intentionally displaying their Jewish identity.
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There are differing opinions about which of these steps are really effective. Central to this muddle is that Jews differ in their understanding of what safety even means. One involved Ivy League professor, whom I’ll call Richard, told me that, while concerned Jewish parents call him all the time afraid for their kids’ safety, no students at his university have suffered real physical harm. “I don’t think they are in physical danger on campus,” he told me. Used to wrangling with antagonistic faculty, Richard explains that the professors’ “comeback is. ‘Show us the evidence where someone wearing keffiyeh on campus physically assaulted a Jewish kid.”
Richard worries that sounding alarms about physical threat will make Jews sound delusional. But at the same time, he asks, “How can you justify treating people like pariahs based on their identity?” He considers this lack of “psychological safety” the truer danger. And making the distinction, he believes, is critical to combating it.
But this distinction rings bogus to Jeffrey Lax, a law professor and department chair who founded SAFE Campus three years ago to combat the anti-Semitism taking hold within CUNY, New York City’s public-university system. He likened Richard’s attitude to saying an abused woman isn’t really in physical danger just because her boyfriend hasn’t broken any actual bones…yet.
Mike, a longtime law-enforcement and counterterrorism officer who now advises Jews on security at dozens of prominent colleges, immediately appreciated the distinction. “For the most part,” he told me, “the demonstrations are causing more emotional harm than physical threat.” Mike depicted the trauma for many Jewish students at Hunter and Baruch Colleges in Manhattan, for example, who have never had angry confrontations with anyone before. Suddenly, just to enter the main lecture buildings, they have to walk through demonstrations daily, past people calling them “baby killer” in response to events taking place thousands of miles away. And all they want to do is get an education and have some college fun.
Given these contrasting views on the character of the danger, it’s not surprising that many Jews are makings efforts to increase their safety through approaches that fuse psychological and physical defenses. Rabbi Yossi Eilfort, an idiosyncratic former MMA fighter who also exudes the convivial energy of his Los Angeles Chabad community, founded the nonprofit community-protection agency Magen Am almost a decade ago. He talks about developing the “Magen mindset”: understanding not just how to protect yourself in various situations, but also grasping the real nature of those who want to hurt Jews.
“Bad guys think like predators, and good guys often think like prey,” he told me. “If good guys start thinking they also are predators, spotting predators becomes easier, and they’re automatically not prey.” Being peaceful, he explained, doesn’t mean you’re incapable of violence—that would just be harmlessness. Rather, being capable of violence and avoiding it allows you to choose peace.
This idea of having choice is also key for Tsahi Shemesh, who founded Krav Maga Experts in New York City. A former IDF paratrooper, Shemesh actually lost some clients who were uncomfortable with his visible support for Israel and Israeli hostages after October 7. “I had to remind them,” he recounted, “this is my identity. I am Israeli. I am IDF.” And like many Krav Maga studio managers, he’s seen an upsurge in Jewish enrollees looking to bolster their self-protection.
He explained that even if the end result of an assault is the same, it’s important to feel that you have agency in how you choose to respond: “When you’re in a situation with some form of threat, and you feel you have absolutely no choice in the matter, that’s when trauma forms.” He believes that when you know how to fight and defend yourself, you always carry your own body as a weapon. “Stop being choiceless,” he reiterated.
For Shemesh, being visibly Jewish in all situations reinforces that empowering sense of choice. These days, he says, “I don’t even leave home without a Jewish identifier. I don’t want someone to mistake me for not a Jew.”
Rabbi Eilfort shares this sense that concealing one’s Jewish identity actually creates or invites a lack of safety: “When we hide being Jewish, we embolden them to attack us because we’re running. And then they are encouraged to do it again.”
This is counterintuitive to many people, and indeed, not everyone thinks displaying Jewishness should be considered a verified safety measure. Retired NYPD Lieutenant Terence Byrne, a regional security director with the Community Security Initiative, explains: “I would never tell you to be afraid to show your beliefs and how you identify.” But, he cautions, it’s different if you’re with a group and showing solidarity than if you’re walking by yourself past an anti-Israel protest: “You’re inviting people to start screaming at you and spew venom, and try to engage.” He cited the example of Joey Borgen, who was mobbed and attacked by “protesters” when he was coming out of a subway, alone, draped in an Israeli flag. Lieutenant Byrne noted that if you’re around a protest, “you might tuck your hostage dog tag in your T-shirt.”
But some aspects of this decision are less a choice and more the natural outgrowth of different personalities. “It depends on the student,” Mike, the campus-security expert, explains. “If they’re more introverted and want to keep to themselves, they will walk a block out of the way to avoid a protest. Other kids will get right in protesters’ faces and not give a shit.” What’s the breakdown between these categories? “It’s about 50-50,” he observes.
Lieutenant Byrne also feels that the distinction between psychological and physical safety does not comport with reality. “You’re not safe if you don’t feel safe,” he attested. “We’re talking about anti-Semitism here,” where Jews are treated as an enemy just for their religion. “Do I feel safe in an environment like that? Absolutely no.”
While Byrne agrees that self-defense classes can give you more confidence and situational awareness, he warns that if you miss the signs and don’t avoid a threat, martial arts won’t necessarily help you defend yourself. Not only that, but as Shemesh emphasized to me, to internalize the skills of Krav Maga enough to use them in a crisis takes a genuine time commitment. Simply signing up is not enough.
While martial arts courses have limitations, they for many are a constructive choice with few downsides. Other forms of self-defense, however, are trickier. This is especially true for gun ownership, which has skyrocketed: Gun shops in areas with large Jewish populations reported 75 percent increases in first-time ownership in the immediate aftermath of October 7.
Like many experts, Lieutenant Byrne finds this past year’s Jewish rush to acquire guns problematic. “When people carry a gun,” he says, “they think it’s the solution to all these problems, and it’s not.” Safely carrying requires a level of training that is almost unique to law enforcement and the military. You have to internalize a sense of restraint until it’s a reflex and fire only when there is an imminent threat to life itself. When average citizens get a license, they’re not really prepared to use the gun expertly in the moments of intense pressure for which it’s intended.
“If your whole confidence and plan depends on a device, then you should not expect good results,” agrees Shemesh, who underscores that most civilians won’t get anything like the type of firearms training he received in the IDF.
But for those living in less densely urban areas—such as the more exposed homes in the suburbs of Los Angeles—the specter of a riot that ends with an anti-Semitically charged home invasion makes gun ownership much more relevant. These concerns are far from academic. In September, Scott Hayes, a licensed gun owner, was tackled at a pro-Israel rally near Boston. He shot his assailant—who is expected to survive—and was arrested and arraigned on a count of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon.
Magen Am’s Rabbi Eilfort has a different approach. Not simply a neighborhood patrol, his organization has accredited security-guard licenses that allow members to carry guns even at synagogues—something prohibited for other civilians. He can then exert some quality control, he explains, through maintaining standards for skill and temperament. “And these standards cover you under our insurance policy because my logo is on your back,” Eilfort attests. He says, “If they’re going to carry near my kids,” such community standards would also make him more comfortable. He also offered a series of eight lectures on responsible post–October 7 gun ownership that drew 1,200 attendees. “They are buying guns anyway,” he underscores. “Let’s make sure they’re responsible.”
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But, of course, guns are irrelevant to most of the threatening scenarios Jews are navigating daily. There’s a much more mundane safety tool, which CUNY’s Jeff Lax feels we’ve all lost. He recalls how after the 9/11 terror attacks, all New Yorkers became “very vigilant for a long time” in embracing the maxim “If you see something, say something.” But he frets that everything is so controversial now, and people take offense so easily, that no one is piping up when they see a potential threat.
He advises campus community members who have observed worrisome behavior to email or call their school’s president directly. “If you email the president about a security issue,” he says, “they may not respond, but they will take it seriously. There will be action.”
He contrasts this action with the passivity that he sees in others’ calls to “document” incidents. These others believe that while hate speech is and should be protected speech, that doesn’t mean it can’t be documented. Indeed, another community-defense leader I spoke with recommends reporting hate incidents so that if later the same harassers start a physical fight, for instance, there will be documentation indicating who probably initiated it and what motivated the person.
In general, he encourages those who experience or witness anti-Semitism to come forward, even if they do so anonymously—something SAFE Campus facilitates. The organization also has a website with more than 130 volunteer attorneys who have made themselves available to represent anti-Semitism cases at no cost. If you suffer an incident, you can go to the website and be matched in minutes. Mysafecampus.org has already matched around 50 victims of anti-Semitism with pro bono lawyers who could help them pursue legal redress.
StandWithUs, another organization initially created to defend against campus anti-Semitism but since expanded to address situations outside academia, recently launched another kind of matching program. Director Yael Lerman told me about its new initiative to help anti-Semitic hate-crime victims navigate the criminal-justice system, in everything from reporting anti-Semitic incidents to prosecution. The program will also help Jews who are falsely accused or who are being targeted because of their support for Israel. “All the different angles,” Lerman explained, “helping victims, those accused—we’re just making the criminal-justice system do its job better for Jewish people.”
Utilizing and supporting these mechanisms for reporting and redress are hugely important. But they also point to another way in which Jews, for their own safety, need to go on the offensive.
All of this reporting requires stronger definitions of what constitutes anti-Semitism. And, at root, this revolves around one key factor: Zionism’s centrality to Jewish identity needs stronger recognition. This was one of the conclusions of New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s otherwise underwhelming “Antisemitism and Discrimination at the City University of New York” report, drafted by Judge Jonathan Lippman. The report attests, if weakly, that “many Jewish people” feel connected to Zionism.
Lax argues that unless we more strongly assert Zionism’s connection to most Jews, both secular and religious and irrespective of personal politics, we will allow others to define it—dangerously and badly. He gives the example of the New York Times’ definition of Zionists: “people who believe Jews have a right to a state in their ancestral homeland in present-day Israel.” Lax, a law professor, notes that, to the contrary, there are practicing and secular Jews whose Zionism connects them to the land of Israel regardless of its current nation-state status. All these categories of Jews and of Zionism should and must be protected identities.
Lax tells every campus member who files a complaint about an anti-Zionist incident to ask the investigating diversity officer, “Does the university protect Zionism as part of my Jewish identity? Is that a protected class?” If the answer is no, he explains, there’s no hope for the complaint because the university won’t recognize that identity as protected. CUNY has yet to clarify whether Zionists are protected—or to define anti-Semitism clearly. “Imagine a black person having to ask ‘Does the color of my skin make me a protected class?’” he says.
The non-protected nature of Zionism on campuses and beyond has been a deep source of the type of “psychological” unsafety that troubles my anonymous Ivy League professor friend Richard. In particular, it thwarts attempts to have public, civil debates and discussions about what is happening in Israel and Gaza, because faculty and students invoke Zionism as an evil too great to explore: “Ideological people say, ‘I’m sorry, I’m not participating, because this is the moral crime of the 21st century.’”
But in the absence of civil debate, the atmosphere worsens and grants greater leeway for one side constantly to lob accusations—“baby killer!” “genocidal!” “terrorist!” This is the environment in which Columbia students were told by a campus protest leader that “Zionists don’t deserve to live.”
Lax captured this lopsidedness in describing how, after October 7, his Kingsborough College president wouldn’t put out a statement condemning the massacre—something she had done passionately in the past for Asian Americans after a spate of anti-Asian hate crimes and for black Americans after the death of George Floyd. Lax used the intra-staff email server to call her out over her silence; in response, she shut down the entire employee email system. It remains shut down. “I feel like I’m in a game of chess and she’s turning over the board,” he says. “Is it an impingement on free speech? I think it is.”
The same analogy holds for Jewish groups who attempt to enter into dialogue with anti-Israel protesters—only to have their antagonists metaphorically flip over the chessboard. In one example from Columbia, a series of events intended as open discussions on the conflict in Gaza—part of the Dialogue Across Difference (DxD) series—foundered because of concerted boycott efforts by faculty and student organizations and unions. As one professor explains, they objected on the grounds that these discussions would “normalize” the topic—and so they convinced everyone arguing from the Palestinian perspective not to participate.
Even worse, Mike recounted that various Jewish students he’s spoken with were kicked out of coursework-related WhatsApp chats—the most popular form of campus communication—when others simply found out they were Jewish. These chats were “not related to anything,” he explained. “They were, like, for intro to physics class.”
But why do university heads allow this anti-intellectual and bad-faith chessboard-flipping? “They are deathly afraid of being called pro-Zionist,” Mike, the security consultant, asserts. And this allows a university-wide trickle-down chessboard-flipping effect: “If the professors are afraid of ‘normalizing’ Israel, then the students they’re teaching will never look at Israel as a country.”
This institutionalized demonization of Zionism is even poisoning the very programs universities invest in specifically to combat anti-Semitism. “Welcome to anti-Semitism training, where we’ll teach you that anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are different,” Richard explains. “It’s the fox guarding the henhouse.”
Similarly, CUNY’s own Jewish Advisory Council was dismissed by SAFE CUNY as a “shameful disgrace” for not adopting Zionism officially into the definition of anti-Semitism—or doing anything else constructive. “It is complete garbage,” Lax told me. “CUNY shouldn’t be in charge of investigating themselves by creating whatever mechanism” exists to combat anti-Semitism.
And while campuses hide behind sanctioned anti-Zionism to flourish as hotbeds for attacks on Jews, the same arrangement holds elsewhere as well. Large-scale demonstrations against Zionists barrel through major cities, swarm synagogues, and deface mailboxes, subway walls, and Jewish businesses with anti-Semitic graffiti. How can Jews defend Zionism when masked, amplified mobs deprive Zionists of their right to an equal platform?
In a way, this overturned, one-sided chess game is not just at the heart of every Jew’s sense of “psychological” danger; it is also the ultimate state of “choiceless-ness,” the very condition that Krav Maga warrior Tsahi Shemesh warns against. When people are yelling “Zionism is terrorism” in your face, Jews have no choice to engage through speech. And beyond guns, karate moves, and cordoned-off campus walkways, Jews need free speech to be safe.
“The First Amendment is the greatest gift any government ever gave its society,” Lax says. “We are systematically destroying it. In the name of the First Amendment, people are abusing rights they don’t have: the right to harass Jews.”
Against this backdrop, it follows that perhaps the most widespread grassroots Jewish action since October 7 has been the posting of kidnapped hostage fliers. The ensuing tit-for-tat of anti-Semites pulling the posters down, Jews filming them doing it, new posters going up, and “Free Palestine” defacements of them is a twisted proxy for an actual civic debate. And it provides a sad testament to how powerfully this conversation is needed and how impossible it is to have.
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So where does this leave American Jews who want to make themselves safer? They need to focus on reinforcing the most important potential choice: the option to be a public Zionist in America. It’s that simple. And this requires demanding and forcing the chessboard back into position.
Jews will be choiceless as long as they can be demonized and harassed while a top-down anti-Semitic establishment gives cover to “anti-Zionists” to renounce dialogue, reason, and civility. And this, for many Jews, will mean, ultimately, being deprived of the choice of safely wearing a Jewish star or yarmulke while walking through campus or strolling past a protest. Ultimately, this condition means living with a physical threat that’s always present, just below the surface.
This work has to be a Jewish grassroots endeavor because it is often hard for even well-intentioned non-Jews to recognize this aspect of Jewish safety. As a former NYPD detective admits, for many cops and campus-security officers, the attitude is: “Who gives a shit if someone is yelling ‘river to the sea,’ or if they’re saying you’re a baby killer when you’re not.”
Sidestepping useless institutional leadership, Mike mentioned some successful work by an international group called Students Supporting Israel. He described how its members recently helped Columbia students organize an event at which two IDF reservists came to campus, sat at a table, and chatted with whomever wanted to engage. It mostly went well. “Chances are somebody got in their face,” Mike observes, “but [the IDF soldiers] don’t give a f—k. They feel they are fighting for Western civilization.”
All the steps Jews are taking to feel and be safer are worthwhile. But whether it’s through displaying symbols of Zionism, or reporting anti-Zionist incidents of anti-Semitism, or lobbying institutions and governmental bodies to codify anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism, Jews of all stripes and political orientations should put pressure, time, and capital toward ensuring that Zionism is incorporated into institutional, governmental, and legal definitions of anti-Semitism. And they should call out the intellectual bankruptcy and cowardice of refusing to engage on the topic of Israel, naming and pressuring leaders who enable this silencing of dialogue.
Because identity itself is not a choice. And if Jews don’t demand the space to defend their core Zionist identity in public discourse, we will find that choice has been made for us.
Photo: Eric Thayer/Getty Images
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