Years ago in Australia, I rented a car and learned what every American driver eventually does overseas: instinct is not universal.
About 45 minutes into my first drive, I took a left turn too wide and drifted into the wrong lane. No crash. No damage. Just a slow, awkward mistake at a four-way stop.
An older driver exploded at me. Shouting. Cursing. A full theatrical performance of outrage.
I apologized immediately. I explained I was American and adjusting to the other side of the road. That only intensified things. Now the insults expanded — not just me, but my country and people like me. He wasn’t correcting a traffic error. He was indicting a type.
I didn’t engage. I blew him a kiss and wished him a good day. His fury was his burden, not my identity.
Then I drove away and forgot him.
I could afford to. He had no power. No platform. No mechanism to convert temper into consequence. He was just a man yelling at an intersection.
But imagine if he did.
Imagine if he persuaded Australian officials that Americans are inherently unsafe drivers. Rental cars should require warning stickers: CAUTION — AMERICAN DRIVER and charge them higher insurance premiums. Restricted roads. Special licensing. Even banning them from the road. Imagine it caught on and other countries adopted the same “precautions.”
Now the incident isn’t about a bad turn. It’s an inditement of an entire people, with irritation morphing to governance.
Apply this to western antisemitism.
The Mechanism
Western antisemitism rarely begins as doctrine. It begins as emotion: resentment, humiliation, envy. A story forms around the feeling. Jews are clannish, privileged, manipulative, alien.
From there, the sequence is almost mechanical:
Anecdote becomes stereotype.
Stereotype becomes narrative.
Narrative becomes moral permission.
Permission becomes policy.
By the time formal discrimination appears, the ethical resistance has already been dissolved. People do not feel they are doing wrong. They feel they are being sensible.
The danger is not the man screaming at the intersection; every society has loud fools.
The danger is when the fool’s story becomes civic common sense.
Why Pride Isn’t Enough
One response to the current wave of western antisemitism is to ignore the screamers and turn inward: strengthen Jewish identity, deepen learning, fortify community. There is wisdom there. Cultural confidence is stabilizing.
But pride is psychological armor. It is not structural protection.
You can build a stronger community life. That does not prevent surrounding institutions from teaching your neighbors to see you as a problem to be managed. Parallel vitality does not neutralize hostile narratives embedded in the systems that shape public belief.
Resilience helps you endure hostility. It does not stop hostility from becoming rule.
Where the Real Battle Is: Public Schools
Street hate is episodic. Institutional formation is durable.
Public schools are the key civic storytelling monopolies. For more than a decade, nearly every American child passes through them, and is taught and tested by them. That is where moral categories are formed, historical legitimacy is assigned, and group identities are framed as native or suspect.
If students absorb a picture of Jews as recent interlopers, racial outsiders, uniquely powerful, or structurally oppressive by nature, then the Melbourne intersection has already found its legislature.
Western antisemitism does not need crude slurs. It adapts. It speaks the language of equity, power, decolonization, and social justice — while recycling ancient claims of Jewish illegitimacy and hidden control.
A new syllabus needs to be established.
Students should be taught that Judaism is the ancient Israelite civilization of the Hebrew Bible; that Jewish peoplehood originates in the land of Israel long before Christianity and Islam; that both later faiths arise in dialogue with — and departure from — that earlier tradition. That millions of Hispanics today are descendants of conversos – Jews who were forced to convert by the Inquisition hundreds of years ago, and that the majority of Jews in Israel today are descended from Muslim-majority countries that forced them to flee.
Today, the opposite is taught at the most antisemitic public schools – like those in California and Massachusetts – where Jews are cast as “oppressors,” “racists” and only care about themselves.
The public schools are setting the environment, and while I respect Bret Stephens, Jewish pride is ill equipped to address the current curriculum.
Yes, Jews should spend more time focused on their Judaism, but that will not insulate them from a hostile society. Jews and all decent Americans should take back K-12 education from the socialist-jihadi alliance that has assumed control of many school boards and unions.
An immediate effort should be to advance more charter schools and enable funding of non-public schools. Breaking the monopoly of school unions is a must to save the future.
Another remedy would be to pass a law that any school union that does not take immediate action to report, investigate and discipline (as appropriate) incidents of racism and antisemitism, will lose its right to collect dues out of paychecks and to negotiate contracts with the relevant municipality.
Public schools should also be prohibited from using materials provided by another government, such as Qatar which has been funding K-12 textbooks and trips to Qatar. This initiative is being advance under the “Transparency in Reporting of Adversarial Contributions to Education Act,” the TRACE Act.
Antisemitism is being taught and instilled into children in many public schools around the country, via antisemitic and anti-Israel school boards, unions and foreign countries. It requires an all-out war to root it out.
As opposed to the COVID-19 pandemic which mostly impacted older people, the western antisemitism pandemic has consumed the youth, courtesy of a deeply broken and plagued public school system.
We cannot pretend it doesn’t matter and there’s nothing to be done. Not just for ourselves, but to save the West from the furious fools in the intersections who have gained real power.
First One Through 