A cosmic injustice is being done to the righteous cause of the safety and security of the Jewish people, and as the months and soon the years go by, we are getting an unmistakable message: Live with it, you troublesome people. For what exactly, our elites ask, is to be done about the assaults on Jews?
The most culturally dominant voices in our country either regretfully oppose or are actively horrified by any systematic or tough-minded effort made to stamp out the unequal treatment or the open mistreatment of Jewish students on college campuses. They have responded, or failed to respond, because they believe such efforts might stifle speech, interfere with academic freedom, and damage the good working order of our most famous universities.
The fact that these institutions have been stifling unpopular speech for more than a generation, have made a mockery of academic freedom with their ideological campaigns against unconventional professors and students in the guise of Star Chamber investigations, and have been exposed by DOGE as swimming in dough because of “overhead” costs they skim off the top of government grants made to scholars and scientists, at an average of 80 percent of each dollar—all of these undisputable facts go undiscussed, unrecognized, or actively suppressed.
Meanwhile, outside the halls of academe—halls lit by electricity paid for 500 or a thousand times over through those “overhead” charges—actual acts of criminality against Jews or in opposition to the Jewish state also go mostly unpunished. The perpetrators might be met with arrest, but then what follows? Local prosecutors elected in cities with massive Democratic Party–registration advantages then dismiss the charges without sanction. And when the new Trump administration chose to move on these matters at the federal level, through the application of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and through immigration law, oh, such weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth didst ensue. The rending of garments and the cries unto the Lord about injustice—these came about not against what had been done, and was still being done, and will yet be done to Jews in this country, but because of the attempt to enforce laws. Laws against vandalism. Against trespass. Against assault. Against kidnapping.
And they wailed and gnashed, too, against the move to rid this country of bad actors who hate Jews and the Jewish state. Deportations of those involved in anti-Semitic activity, or who shared a household with a man who spent a year plotting his firebomb attack on Jews in Boulder, have been greeted not with an understanding that such moves might be a grim necessity to protect Jewish citizens but with sodden stories about pregnant wives and dreams of medical school.
Day after day, the due-process rights of Jew-haters are invoked in a spirit of high dudgeon while any expressions of outrage at the acts being committed, or disgust with the monstrous and life-denying words they speak, are muted.
In short: American freedoms are being deployed as weapons to destroy Jewish peace of mind.
Those of us worried about Jewish safety and security—about our own, and our families’, and of every other Jew in America, even the ones who hold views we consider loathsome but who we know are in the crosshairs just as we are—are being told that our concerns are secondary and tertiary at best and that other concerns are simply more important.
Those concerns are so much the focus of the media conversation that they verge into outright Swiftian parody. For example, the Egyptian on a tourist visa here for many years illegally, the one who set eight Jews on fire in Colorado, has a daughter who, USA Today tells us, is also “one of his victims.” Why? Well, “Habiba Soliman wanted to be a doctor. Then, her father firebombed Jewish marchers.” About the firebombed we know nothing from USA Today’s story, clearly because they matter less. Those firebombed Jews are likely not dreaming much as I write this; they are too busy suffering the agonies of recovery from third-degree burns. But Habiba Soliman’s desire to be here, and the desire of her mother and other siblings to be here, is so moving that a judge in Colorado stayed their deportations on the grounds that, well, what the hell, he didn’t even specify any grounds!
The wounded have become the abstractions, while those who have done the wounding are characterized, humanized, and individualized. We know all about the Columbia graduate student activist Mahmoud Khalil, who is currently in detention by choice. He remains in a jail only because he is seeking to block his deportation. That deportation has been ordered under the terms of a statute that gives the secretary of state the authority to determine whether a person in the United States on a visa is acting in a manner injurious to American foreign policy. In other words, Khalil need not be in detention at all; he is free to walk around freely as a free man this very second. Just not in America. All he needs to do is board a plane and get the hell out of this country. But he has an American wife, and she had a baby, and the evil Trumpkins wouldn’t even let him attend the birth, and let’s face it, is he really that bad a guy when you get right down to it? He cares about people. Just not Jews. Sure, he wants to see Israel wiped off the map, but isn’t that his right, and isn’t his activism legitimate?
The simple response—which is that Khalil has no right to be in the United States but rather had been granted a privilege to be our guest, and he has abused it—is somehow viewed as an act of infamy. If so, why do visas even exist? The answer is commonsensical. They exist to place conditions on the presence of non-Americans as they move about our country. Visas feature time limits; they feature limitations on many forms of behavior; and they can be revoked at a moment’s notice. Sometimes these matters get a little complicated, like when a visa holder is married to an American or fathers a child born on American soil, but even those facts do not constitute prima facie grounds that the visa holder’s claim to remain on American soil has merit. A visa holder is in this country temporarily. He is here temporarily, by definition. The rights of an American citizen to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are, by contrast, unlimited and lifelong, and they trump any visa holder’s needs or wants or desires or views. Mahmoud Khalil’s presence in this country, according to the secretary of state under the words of our laws, constitutes a threat to the rights of Americans because it has been deemed injurious to our national interests.
Courts continue to interpose themselves in these matters involving those who wish ill on Israel and the Jews, presumably on constitutional grounds. That’s nice, and it’s their job, one can argue, I suppose. But no less a figure than Abraham Lincoln avowed that the Constitution is not a suicide pact—by which he meant that we are not obliged to lose all our freedoms in the defense of a single dubious claim that such freedom is being abridged. Of course, the idea that freedoms can be abridged in a time of emergency can be a slippery slope, as we saw during Covid. But the fact that we’re talking about visa holders changes that argument, because such people simply have no right to be here. And the argument against having them here when they behaved badly has the advantage of being true.
It’s not just that Khalil and others express views; it’s that they express those views about a minority people who are part of clal Yisrael, a minority national identity. History tells the tale about who is the abused and who is the abuser where Jews are concerned, and it’s not the Jews. Khalil and his ilk are committing moral crimes at the very least, and felonious crimes at the very most, and they are not innocent until proven guilty. That is a legal standard, not a moral standard. I am talking about what they say and what we hear and what other people hear, and their words and actions are unambiguous and unmistakable. And they are evil.
The fact that they are evil, and are still being defended, tells me something I do not want to hear, and do not want to believe, but that I cannot help but hear and now I cannot help but believe. I understand now: In 2025, we are to accept that we are less.
We are to suck it up and shut up, lest we help the ideological cause of the real enemy, the Trump administration. Oh sure, Trump looks like he’s trying to help Jews and fight anti-Semitism, but because he doesn’t spend enough time criticizing the anti-Semites of the right, he’s no ally or friend or supporter at all. Here is the weird moral inversion of this moment: The politicians who effectively side with those who are making life worse for Jews are to be excused, while those who are actually fighting the jackals are to be criticized and condemned. We are told that Trump is following in the footsteps of Hitler, a view that might be worth consideration if Hitler had ever said it was wrong to attack Jews. Hitler didn’t, you see. No, he attacked Jews. He rallied his Brownshirts and then his police officers and then his SS to attack Jews, to destroy their businesses, and murder 6 million of them. But in the logic at the highest levels of American and Western discourse, the person at the forefront of an effort to protect American Jews is a Nazi, while the true neo-Nazis in their midst, on their campuses, in their classrooms, on the podia at their commencements—those Nazis must be defended from him.
Telling people that a friend is an enemy and an enemy isn’t anyone to be worried or concerned about because that enemy is a student, or a husband, or impregnate someone, or would really rather stay here and not leave—that is how we are told things are and things should be in 2025.
They should not. Not only should Jews refuse to give in to the implicit assertion of our lesser status; it is time for us to stand up for ourselves in all ways—legally, juridically, educationally, and civilizationally. We’ve been doing it, and we need to keep doing it. We should sue. We should raise huge sums of money to oust politicians who side with those who want to hurt us. We should continue to work to impoverish the institutions that don’t care about us or hire people who want to damage us and our people’s homeland. These are things we should do without apology. Quite the opposite. We should do these things because in doing so we will serve our posterity—and the posterity of this earth.
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The Jewish people have been a force for good since the dawn of time. We are the inheritors of the greatest and noblest tradition in the history of this earth. For reasons that can only be transcendent, we are still here in 2025 when every tribe that existed at the time of the Bible has vanished from the earth. We have weathered the expulsion from the Holy Land, the blood libels of the Middle Ages, the Inquisition, the mass slaughters after the rise of Shabbetai Tzvi, the ritual humiliations of the Catholic Church and the original genocidal thinking of Martin Luther, the ghettoizations, the denial of rights, the grudging advancement of rights and then their retraction, the pogroms of the late 19th century, the Arab uprisings in Palestine, the Holocaust, the expulsion of the Jews from Arab lands after the formation of the state, the Arab wars of annihilation that failed in 1948 and 1967 and 1973, the Munich massacre, the Zionism-is-racism resolution, the intifadas, the rocket attacks, Poway, Tree of Life, and on and on. It is time to act on our own behalf without apology not because of our victimization but because we are few, a not-so-merry few these days, but still a band of brothers and sisters who have waited out the storms and held aloft our Five Books and our prophets and our scholars and our arguments. And we are still here.
We are as flawed as any people. You only have to read every Torah parashah to know this. Our foundational story is a story of bad behavior, criminality, selfishness, cruelty, all the things that humanity can be at its worst—until we were given 613 rules to live by and a structure of daily, weekly, monthly, annual, and jubilee life that would allow us to be good people just by following along. We didn’t even have to believe. We just had to walk the walk. You want to know why Jews punch above our weight in terms of influence, success, and intellectual achievements—why 2 percent of the population of the United States is responsible, by one measure, for 20 percent of the philanthropy in the United States, and why one-third of America’s largest donors are Jews? Because we are people of the Book, even when we’re not. I doubt Michael Bloomberg knows what Pirkei Avot is; though he has lately been more generous to Jewish causes than at other times in the past, his faith tradition is not a central preoccupation for him. Ask me and I’ll tell you I’m not thrilled with some of the groups he donates to. But he is the wealthiest man in my city, and to date, by one calculation, he has already given away $20 billion. He is doing what God wants him to do, even if he doesn’t know it.
I have two friends. You’ve never heard of them because they do not want to be known. One of them, a quant, is in the process of giving away $10 billion, mostly to the effort to ensure Jewish continuity. He will die unknown to all but the Holy One, Blessed Be He, who will know, which is likely all my friend needs to know. I know another, a real-estate mogul. He gives Commentary money. Not only will he not allow me to use his name when he maxes out to our annual benefit—he asks of me that I do not mention to other donors—other friends of his!—that he does it.
This eleemosynary demand courses through our veins. Seventy-six percent of American Jews give to charity, and according to Inside Philanthropy, due to our incredibly fortunate financial standing, the per-household giving amounts to nearly $11,000 per year. Only Mormons give more. Let’s unpack this. Two minority religions in the United States, one with 3 million and the other with 5.2 million, outgive everybody else by a factor of 2.
Why am I praising us? I’m not, actually. I’m actually enraged at a great many of my fellow Jews, who promote cultural ideas I revile and vote for politicians and causes I believe are injurious to America, to civil society, to the world, and to the Jews, both here and in Israel.
No, what I am praising is our birthright—and the good fortune we have been granted because of it. This is something worthy of celebration, and we must give thanks for our forebears for being forbearing. Throughout Jewish history, being a Jew was not something you could say granted you worldly good fortune. But each Jew in history lived and bore children and kept the flame alive to bring us here today, to this moment. It would be a sin against the difficulties they faced, far worse than anything we’ve faced, not to connect ourselves to the thing that connects us deeper than blood.
They said the same prayers we say. They followed the same rules the more rigorous among us follow. If we met them across centuries, if we time-traveled to a Saturday morning in the Alteneuschul in Prague in the 13th century when it was first constructed, one or another of us would be able to say, Hey, that was my bar mitzvah parashah. And depending on how good our memory is, and how good our reading is, and how solidly we know trop, we could go up and take an aliyah and read.
These are all the reasons that being proud of being a Jew, teaching our kids why they should be proud to be Jews, and feeling that transcendent connection across time and space is everything.
No reason to apologize.
And yet so many do. The question is why.
Some of it is a natural occurrence of being a small band conscious of our differences and conscious that others feel we are different, such that we are hyper-aware of the way bad actors might reflect on us. Who among us hasn’t breathed a sigh of relief to discover that, say, some lunatic or evil killer or other—the guy in Idaho, or Luigi Mangione, or the Menendezes—are not members of the tribe? We feel this way because we feel it so keenly when one is. Madoff. Weinstein. Epstein. Whose heart has not sunk to the bottom of his or her chest at the sound of their names?
So we feel responsible for each other, and worry about blame affixing to us, because we are so few.
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Now consider the condition of Jews in 2025. Worldwide. Israel was attacked in October 2023. It was invaded. Thousands were killed and injured. And that attack and those killings and casualties ignited an old-fashioned blood lust—a lust for Jewish blood, or at least Jewish humiliation, or capitulation.
That was surprising. I know because we were all surprised. And shocked. And dismayed. And depressed. And filled full of rage. And sorrow. And a sense that for the first time in our lives as American Jews, we were at some form of risk in the land that had been very nearly a paradise for us after 1,800 years in the Diaspora.
What was not surprising, alas, was the presence among those with that blood lust of Jews themselves—or what Eli Lake has called the “as-a-Jews.” The type that says, “As a Jew, I am horrified by the images on my television,” or “As a Jew, I believe in tikkun olam, and Israel is not healing the world the way it should.” I say this was not surprising because these people have been present in our public life since I was a kid. More recently, I think of the example of a 2021 letter issued by rabbinical students condemning what they called Israeli apartheid.
I quote the letter and analysis from a Jewish Telegraphic Agency report:
“Our political advocacy too often puts forth a narrative of victimization, but supports violent suppression of human rights and enables apartheid in the Palestinian territories, and the threat of annexation,” the letter says. “How many Palestinians must lose their homes, their schools, their lives, for us to understand that today, in 2021, Israel’s choices come from a place of power and that Israel’s actions constitute an intentional removal of Palestinians?”
Frankie Sandmel, a rabbinical student at Hebrew College, a nondenominational school in suburban Boston, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the letter was intended as an act of caring, but also a call to change policy regarding Israel.
“We wanted it to be clear that we deeply care about all of the people who live in that region and that every single person is hurting and terrified,” Sandmel said. “And we’re able to hold that and also hold Israel accountable.”
The letter argues that while many American Jewish institutions have been engaged in reckoning with racism and injustice in the past year, many of them have been silent on issues of equity in Israel and between Israel and Palestinians. The situation represents a “spiritual crisis,” it concludes.
“Our institutions have been reflecting and asking, ‘How are we complicit with racial violence?’ the letter says. “And yet, so many of those same institutions are silent when abuse of power and racist violence erupts in Israel and Palestine.”
What was the motive force behind the issuance of this letter? Oh, nothing. Only the firing of rockets at Israel from Hamas, which prompted a brief 2021 Israel–Hamas war, which was blamed on Israel by these rabbinical students. Israel responding to deadly attacks occasioned the condemnation of the Jewish state for its “violent suppression of human rights.” The letter did not mention Hamas. The reporter asked Frankie Sandmel why not. Sandmel answered: “As an American Jew who has never lived in Gaza or the West Bank, I don’t feel like I have ground to stand on to try to influence how Palestinians respond to oppression. I do have the ability to speak to the American Jewish community that I am hoping to lead, to look at the ways that we vote and the ways that we give tzedakah and the ways that we educate our communities.”
Four years on, where is Sandmel now? He is, his bio at Mem Global says, “Base Rabbi of Base Bay Area, a new type of pluralistic, communal rabbinate.” (And “base” it is, though I mean to cite the word in its darker meaning.) “Frankie believes deeply that there are as many ways to be Jewish as there are Jews.… Under the tutelage of their partner Elaina, Frankie has come to love all the Bay has to offer. They love to bake and crochet, play board games, and maximize opportunities to be outside.”
So in 2021, Frankie and “their” gang of would-be Jewish leaders for the next century literally sought to delegitimize the Jewish state for the crime of defending itself against a frenzy of rocket attacks—rocket attacks from the very group that would invade the state two years later and slaughter and maim and burn and rape and dismember and torture hundreds of Jews at an outdoor rave who were, like Frankie, maximizing “their opportunities to be outside.”
That letter is a different kind of apology for being a Jew, because of course Frankie and “their” cosignatories on this vile piece of virtual parchment, which should be stored forever in the genizah in Gehenna, aren’t apologizing for anything. What they are doing is praising themselves, blowing kisses in the mirror at themselves, and elevating themselves by acting as though it is Israel that should be apologizing for fighting for the 9 million people who live and work and raise children and will be the actual future of the Jewish people while Frankie is playing board games and baking and crocheting.
Judaism is unique among all faiths, everywhere, for being universalistic and particularistic. The idea that all men are created in God’s image is the originating idea of Judaism, and it is the source of the idea that liberty and the right to dignity precede all other facts of life for all people everywhere. At the same time, Judaism is a rule book for a small and specific number of people, a set of obligations unique to us that have made our existences deeply meaningful but that are burdens. Obligations. Responsibilities. Strictures that others are not obliged to live under. Frankie and “their” friends want to revise Judaism so that their anti-Zionism, their rejection of the idea of a Jewish homeland, can exist comfortably under a large tent in a faith tradition that is literally about the land God gave to our ancestors. The word “Israel” appears 2,507 times in the Torah.
That letter in particular and Jewish anti-Zionism in general constitute a modern-day extrapolation of the question the wicked son in the Passover Haggadah asks his parents: “What does this ritual mean to you? To you and not to him.” The Haggadah tells us that by way of answer, we are to “set his teeth on edge.” We are to say if he had been at the first moment of existential crisis for the Jewish people, he would not have been redeemed.
So beware those who proclaim their shame or embarrassment about the acts of Jews or the acts of Israel. They are not ashamed. They are proud of how they set themselves apart. They believe themselves to be virtuous by dint of the fact that they effectively support the enemies of the Jewish state and those who want to kill my sister, my niece, my two nephews, and my sister’s four grandchildren. And the Arabs of Israel. And the Druze of Israel. They are worshippers of a death cult, by which I mean, they seek the death of Judaism.
Do not fall under the sway of the siren’s song. Do not complain about the distribution of humanitarian aid, which will rain down on Gazan heads the second Hamas is gone. Say that every morsel of flour denied to the Gazans is being denied them not by Israel but by Hamas. Because it has the advantage of being true. Also true: You can hate Benjamin Netanyahu. You can want another government in Jerusalem. You can say the war should end now. You have free will, and we are a religion in the form of a debating society.
What you must not do is apologize for being a Jew, and you must not allow yourself to be motivated by a spirit of apology—by the idea that, say, you are obliged to nod sadly when someone throws the subject of food aid in your face. You are not starving anyone, and neither is Israel, and neither are the Jewish people. This is a blood libel. Not only are we not guilty, we are deserving of thanks from those who do not thank us and love from those who do not love us. We should know this, and it should make you as angry as I am.
That anger is something we owe the 6 million. We owe history. We owe the children who were sacrificed to pagan gods before we revolutionized the moral code of humankind to make child sacrifice the greatest of all evils rather than a false means of propitiating nature. And we owe it to our posterity to speak aloud the simple truth that the culture and faith provided to the world by our ancient forebearers has made very nearly every blessing on this earth possible.
We are not less. Oh, no. We are more.
This article is adapted from a speech delivered at the Paul Feig Tikkun Leil Shavuot at the Marlene Meyerson JCC in Manhattan on June 1, 2025.
Photo: Getty Images
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