Monthly Archives: April 2026

Inheritance and Indictment

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When rabbis portray Israel as a moral problem instead of a Jewish inheritance

Two progressive rabbis – Sharon Brous and David Ingber – sat before a packed Jewish audience in San Diego for a taping of the podcast Being Jewish with Jonah Platt, to wrestle with a distinctly modern Jewish dilemma: how does a tradition forged in exile process the return of Jewish power?

The subject was the rabbinate and Israel, but the deeper argument was Judaism itself.

The language was familiar: fear, shame, democracy, moral crisis. The question underneath it was older than the state and older than Zionism itself. What exactly is Judaism when Jews are sovereign again – and what does that mean for diaspora Jews?

That question is increasingly dividing Jewish life.

For years the pattern has been visible in polling, synagogue life, philanthropy, and communal politics. The further left a Jew moves politically, the more likely that Jew is to become publicly critical of Israel. The less traditional the Jewish framework, the more likely that criticism expands beyond policy into discomfort with Jewish statehood itself. Orthodox Jews criticize Israeli governments all the time, often fiercely, but they rarely place Jewish national existence itself in the dock.

That difference is not merely political. It is theological. It is civilizational.

Because traditional Judaism has always answered the question of Jewish identity in integrated terms: God, Torah, peoplehood, and land. These are particular to the Jewish people. They embody one structure. Remove one and the architecture strains. Remove the land and Judaism survives, but in suspension.

Diaspora Judaism became one of history’s great civilizational achievements, but it was always an adaptation to rupture. The prayerbook points toward Jerusalem. The festivals move according to the agricultural rhythms of the Land of Israel. The fast days mourn national destruction. The closing line of the seder and of Yom Kippur pushes in one direction only: next year in Jerusalem.

That was never metaphor. It was memory preserved as architecture.

For traditional Jews, Jewish self-rule is not simply politics. It is Jewish history restored. Such belief does not make every Israeli government wise or righteous. Jews argue bitterly over borders, settlements, courts, wars, and coalitions. But beneath those arguments lies a premise that remains fixed: Jewish political agency is indispensable.

Progressive – and especially non-Orthodox – Judaism increasingly begins somewhere else.

Its center of gravity is ethical universalism. Its first question is increasingly not what preserves Jewish continuity, but what satisfies universal justice. That instinct has deep Jewish roots. The prophets placed moral obligation at the center of covenantal life. But prophets do not run borders.

States do.

States defend territory, absorb casualties, deter enemies, and make violent decisions under imperfect conditions. Sovereignty stains the hands. Once universal ethics become the supreme framework, the Jewish state itself becomes vulnerable to indictment.

That is what the Brous–Ingber exchange revealed with unusual clarity.

And it was revealing precisely because it did not end in one room.

Their first conversation exposed a tension neither side could settle. Sharon Brous spoke from the prophetic register of progressive Judaism, where Judaism is primarily moral witness, conscience, and justice. David Ingber, while sharing much of that moral vocabulary, kept returning to something older and deeper: peoplehood, continuity, solidarity, historical necessity.

The disagreement lingered.

Brous later acknowledged discomfort with how the exchange unfolded, and the conversation resumed in a second round on Jonah Platt’s podcast. That itself was revealing. One debate became two because the argument underneath it could not be resolved by clarifying policy or refining moral critique. The disagreement was structural.

And in that second conversation, the divide remained.

Brous continued pressing the prophetic burden, insisting that Jewish moral credibility depends on confronting Jewish power when it acts unjustly. Ingber continued defending something prior to critique itself: the necessity of Jewish collective power in a world that has repeatedly shown its appetite for Jewish vulnerability, especially in light of the widespread antisemitism today.

One critiques Israel primarily as a moral actor, the other defends Israel first as a historical necessity and only then wrestles with its conduct.

It is the difference between inheritance and indictment.

And this internal Jewish struggle is increasingly being exported into the wider world, where it is eagerly consumed.

This week in the United Kingdom, leading progressive rabbis warned that Israel’s political direction poses an existential threat to Judaism itself, tied to the publication of their new book. The phrase was startling.

Israel as an existential threat to Judaism.

For two thousand years, existential threats to Judaism had names: the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, the Crusades, the Inquisition, pogroms, the Holocaust, Soviet repression, the expulsions from Arab lands.

Statelessness itself was the existential condition.

Now, for growing sectors of progressive non-Orthodox Jewish leadership, the Jewish state itself is increasingly being cast as the danger.

That is more than criticism. That is inversion.

And notice who was eager to amplify it.

The Guardian, a British publication whose editorial posture toward Israel has long been sharply critical, gave the book and its thesis prominent space. That matters because internal Jewish dissent carries unique public utility in anti-Israel discourse. Criticism from outside can be dismissed as hostility. Criticism from inside acquires the authority of confession.

Progressive Jewish critique often assumes its audience shares its covenantal investment in Jewish survival. The wider world often hears something simpler: if even rabbis are indicting the Jewish state, the case against it must already be proven.

That is one of anti-Zionism’s most valuable currencies: Jewish testimony against Jewish power.

Not because Jewish dissent is illegitimate. Jewish argument is one of Judaism’s oldest arts. But once internal critique detaches from internal solidarity, it stops functioning as family argument and starts functioning as prosecutorial evidence.

The family dispute becomes public exhibit.

And this is where traditional Jewish memory diverges sharply from progressive Jewish moral instinct.

Traditional Jews remember something progressive Jewish politics often struggles to metabolize: the central danger of Jewish history was never Jewish power: It was Jewish powerlessness.

The Holocaust was not a lesson in the abuse of Jewish power. It was a lesson in the consequences of Jewish defenselessness.

Then came 1948 and Jewish agency returned.

And within years, the map of Jewish history changed. Ancient Jewish communities across Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, and Morocco collapsed into expulsion, flight, and dispossession. Hundreds of thousands found refuge in Israel.

That memory disciplines judgment. It teaches realism.

Progressive Jewish consciousness inherited a different lesson from modernity: nationalism corrupts, power must be constrained, minorities must maintain moral vigilance.

There is wisdom in that inheritance – as a modifier, not as a ruling ethos. A beleaguered minority does not have the luxury of abandoning all rights and power to satisfy the mob.

That is what Zionism answered, not abstractly but operationally.

German Jews once believed they had solved history. They were cultured, integrated, patriotic, indispensable.

History did not care.

American Jews should similarly be cautious with assumptions of permanence.

Because beneath every synagogue fight, every anguished podcast, every progressive Jewish book tour, lies the same civilizational argument: is Judaism an inheritance to preserve, or a moral vocabulary to deploy?

These have become competing theories of Jewish survival.

For two thousand years Jews prayed toward Zion because history taught them exile was fragile. Progressive Judaism increasingly asks whether Israel deserves that loyalty, while traditional Judaism believes the land is central to Judaism and disagreements are best managed internally.

Whether in public or private discussions, the policies of Israel are becoming an exhibit in the philosophical rift between progressive and traditional Judaism.

Related articles:

Performative Moral Kashrut (August 2025)

Today, Only Orthodox Jews Yearn For Prayers On The Temple Mount (December 2022)

Reclaiming Zionism From Antisemites Will Not Occur With Tikkun Olam (September 2022)

The Tikkun Olam Brigade and the Taped Banana (December 2019)

A Basic Lesson of How to be Supportive (August 2018)

The Non-Orthodox Jewish Denominations Fight Israel (January 2018)

The Beauty of Tohu VaVohu in the Hands of Monet

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Claude Monet (1840-1926) spent his life chasing light.

He helped launch Impressionism by shifting painting away from fixed objects and toward the unstable conditions of the act of seeing itself. Through a variety of subjects – haystacks, cathedrals, train stations, coastlines – Monet returned again and again, capturing what never held still: morning light, evening shadow, fog, heat, atmosphere. The object remained. Perception changed.

And then, late in life, he turned almost entirely to water.

At Claude Monet’s House and Gardens in Giverny, France, Monet painted the pond in his garden more than 250 times, producing the vast Water Lilies series that consumed the final decades of his life. These were far more than decorative studies of flowers on water. They became his great final act, culminating in enormous panoramic canvases so large they stop functioning like ordinary paintings.

They become environments.

Stand inside the oval rooms at Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris and something unusual happens: you lose orientation.

Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris

There is no horizon line to stabilize the eye. No clear beginning or end. Water stretches outward without boundary. Sky descends into the pond as reflection. Trees fracture into color and light. Surface and depth collapse into one another.

You are no longer looking at a pond. You are inside a field of undifferentiated perception.

That is what makes the late Water Lilies so unsettling. And beautiful.

Monet strips away the architecture of the ordinary. In most painting, the world arrives in layers: foreground, middle ground, background. Here, those distinctions dissolve. What is above enters below. What is solid becomes liquid. What seems stable flickers and shifts.

The eye searches for boundaries and cannot quite find them. One is left with colors, sometimes sharp and other times diffuse, as solid and liquid vie for primacy.

And that is where the Bible begins. In tohu va-vohu.

The phrase describes a world before distinction. Existence is present, but unformed. Darkness over the deep. Water everywhere. No stable land, no horizon, no orienting line for human perception in the world before humans.

A world new and present, but unreadable.

Genesis begins in the same visual condition Monet creates: immersion in undifferentiated reality.

In the Bible, God focuses on creation through separation. Light from darkness. Waters above from waters below. Sea from dry land. Creation is manifest by distinction. Reality becomes intelligible because boundaries emerge.

This is the radical claim of Genesis: the natural world emerged from chaos, from the topsy-turvy world of tohu va-vohu. And Monet performs the reverse. He takes the natural world and loosens its boundaries, dissolving it back into its primal elements: light, water, color, reflection.

And yet it remains nature. That is the wonder of the Water Lilies.

They allow us to see the natural world as if it were returning to its chaotic first condition, before edges hardened, before boundaries settled, before the eye could fully distinguish one thing from another.

Monet, at the end of his life, took the simple beauty of his backyard garden and let humanity imagine the entire natural world at the moment of creation, before there were objects, before perception was even possible.

It was a remarkable end of a career for the gifted painter who chased light throughout his days, to conclude at the very First Day.

When Jews Come Home from India and Are Called Colonizers

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There is something almost miraculous about Operation Wings of Dawn.

This week, Israel began bringing the first members of the Bnei Menashe community from northeast India to Israel, the latest chapter in one of the most improbable stories in Jewish history. These are Jews who have long understood themselves as descendants of the Tribe of Manasseh, one of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, exiled by the Assyrian Empire nearly 2,700 years ago. Across centuries, empires, languages, and continents, they preserved fragments of ritual, memory, and identity tied to ancient Israel. In modern times, after study, rabbinic engagement, and formal recognition, thousands have made aliyah. Hundreds more are now on their way. For the Jewish world, it is an extraordinary scene: a people scattered to the farthest reaches of the earth still finding their way home.

That is the Jewish story in miniature.

Exile was never meant to be permanent. The Jewish calendar, Jewish prayer, and Jewish memory are saturated with return. From The Hebrew Bible to the modern Zionist movement, the idea of ingathering has been the central thread of Jewish continuity. Operation Wings of Dawn is not an immigration program in the ordinary sense. It is the continuation of that ancient civilizational arc.

It is also a reminder that Jewish peoplehood never fit modern racial categories. Jews came back to Israel from Ethiopia, from Iraq, from Yemen, from Russia, from France, and now again from India. Different languages. Different appearances. Different histories of exile. One people.

That should be a remarkable human story.

And yet, in some corners of the media world, it became something else.

Quds News Network ran a story framing the arrival as a “settlement push” of “new colonizers” in northern “Occupied Palestine”, reducing the Bnei Menashe to instruments of a political project rather than recognizing them as Jews returning to join the Jewish people in the Jewish state. The framing is familiar: Jewish return is recoded as colonial expansion.

This is not an isolated habit of language. Across anti-Israel activist media and parts of the NGO ecosystem, Jewish presence in Israel is increasingly interpreted through a “settler-colonial” framework in “Occupied Palestine,” meaning anywhere in Israel. Amnesty International’s apartheid framework leans heavily on this vocabulary, turning Jewish sovereignty itself into a structural offense rather than a legitimate act of national self-determination. That language then migrates outward, shaping how journalists, activists, and political movements speak about Jews in Israel. The result is a moral inversion in which Jewish return becomes aggression by definition.

And this is where the word colonizer collapses under its own weight.

Colonialism has an actual meaning. It is when an imperial center sends its people outward to dominate foreign land for extraction and rule. Britain in India. Spain in the Americas. France in Algeria.

Operation Wings of Dawn is the reverse movement: A dispersed people carrying an ancient memory of Israel, choosing to gather into the one Jewish homeland.

Calling that colonialism empties the word of meaning.

And the asymmetry is impossible to ignore.

When Palestinian Arabs preserve the memory of villages lost 77 years ago, the world treats it as sacred inheritance, a claim passed from generation to generation. Even when those same Arabs live just a few miles away from their grandparents’ homes, in the same land, with the same people, language and culture, people advocate for their relocation.

Yet when Jews preserve the memory of exile in distant lands and act on it, the same world increasingly calls it colonization.

That difference tells you everything.

The issue has never been whether Jews are European or Middle Eastern, white or brown, indigenous or diasporic. The Bnei Menashe expose how flimsy those categories always were. Indian Jews arriving in Israel should shatter the lazy caricature of Zionism as European implantation.

Instead, the caricature simply repeats the mantra:

A Jew from Poland returns as a colonizer.
A Jew from Iraq returns as a colonizer.
A Jew from Ethiopia returns as a colonizer.
A Jew from India returns as a colonizer.

For those committed to denying Jewish belonging, even a homecoming from India must be rewritten as invasion.

Understanding Israel’s Latest Population and Demographic Numbers

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When Israel declared independence in 1948, it had roughly 717,000 Jews and roughly 156,000 Arab citizens and residents. Those numbers were small, but what they carried was enormous: the ambition to reverse two thousand years of Jewish dispersion and gather a scattered people back into sovereignty.

Yet the first demographic fact that emerges from Israel’s modern history cuts against so much of the political mythology surrounding it. Since 1948, Israel’s Arab minority expanded at a faster proportional rate than its Jewish majority. The Jewish population grew from 717,000 to nearly 8 million, roughly elevenfold. Israel’s Arab population grew from 156,000 to more than 2.1 million, more than thirteenfold.

That fact strips away one of the central distortions in the debate over Israel. The rise of the Jewish state did not require the disappearance of its Arab minority. Quite the opposite. Israel’s Arab population expanded dramatically under Israeli sovereignty. Two populations grew inside the same state, but through entirely different engines. The Jewish story was one of ingathering, especially during the early years.

Today, Israel stands at more than 10.2 million people, nearly 8 million Jews and more than 2.1 million Arabs. A state born in scarcity became a fully formed society. But the road from 1948 to 2026 can best be understood through four distinct demographic phases: ingathering, expansion, retention, and preservation.

The first phase was ingathering. At first, Israel was an immigration state, and its earliest years were powered by catastrophe. The survivors of Europe came first, the broken remnant of the Holocaust arriving in a country still fighting its first war. Then came the collapse of Jewish life across the Arab world. Ancient Jewish communities in Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, Egypt, and Libya emptied under expulsion, violence, and state pressure. More than 800,000 Jews left the Arab world, many rebuilding their lives in Israel.

Then came the Soviet opening. The collapse of the Soviet Union released nearly one million Jews into the largest migration wave since the founding of the state. Europe’s destruction, the Arab world’s expulsion, and the Soviet opening formed the three great waves of Jewish ingathering. Three different historical ruptures, one destination. That is how Jewish Israel was built.

Population Growth, 1948–2026

Jews
1948    ████ 0.72m
1970    █████████ 2.6m
1990    ███████████████ 4.8m
2000    ███████████████████ 5.2m
2026    ███████████████████████████ 7.97m
Arabs
1948    █ 0.16m
1970    ██ 0.47m
1990    ████ 0.95m
2000    █████ 1.2m
2026    █████████ 2.15m

While Jewish Israel was growing through migration, Israel’s Arab population was growing through birth. Higher fertility and falling mortality created uninterrupted expansion over decades. That is why the proportional growth of Israel’s Arab population exceeded the proportional growth of the Jewish population.

Then the second phase began: expansion. At first, Jewish growth depended on aliyah. Over time, it depended increasingly on birth. The immigrants became citizens, the citizens became parents, and the children of refugees became the country itself. The engine of Jewish demographic growth shifted from the airport to the maternity ward. That is the deepest demographic transition in Israel’s history.

In 2025, Israel recorded approximately 177,000 births. Immigration that year stood at roughly 24,600. Births now outnumber immigration by more than seven to one. What would have been unimaginable in 1948 has become ordinary in 2026. Israel began as a refuge. It now reproduces itself.

Annual drivers of growth, 2025
Births        ███████████████████████
Immigration   ███
Deaths        ██████

That changes the meaning of the state. Political Israel started as the answer to Jewish vulnerability, a place Jews could flee to when the world closed. That remains true. But demographically, it is no longer Israel’s primary function. Israel is no longer merely where Jews go when exile fails. It is where Jewish continuity principally lives.

And here, another old assumption collapsed. For decades, Israeli politics was shaped by demographic anxiety: would Arab fertility permanently outpace Jewish fertility? Would a demographic clock eventually run down the Jewish majority? That fear shaped strategy, borders, and diplomacy. For years, the numbers seemed to support it.

Then the numbers changed. Arab fertility declined as Arab society modernized. Jewish fertility remained unusually strong for an advanced economy. Today, Jewish fertility has reached parity with, and in some years slightly exceeded, Arab fertility. The demographic trajectory shifted. A generation of political strategy was shaped by a demographic clock that slowed while everyone kept hearing it tick.

Fertility Shift

1990
Arab     █████
Jewish   ███
2026
Arab     ███
Jewish   ████

But demographic success creates its own new challenge.

For most of Israeli history, migration remained positive. Even when aliyah slowed, more Jews came than left. That changed in the last two years. In 2022, Israel absorbed more than 74,000 immigrants, driven heavily by war in Ukraine and departures from Russia. That surge faded quickly. By 2024 and 2025, net migration turned negative – more Israelis left than new immigrants arrived.

This is not a demographic crisis. Births still overwhelm migration losses, and Israel continues to grow. But the Zionist test has changed. For decades, the question was how many Jews Israel could gather. Now the question is how many it can keep.

Net Migration Trend
2022     +++++++++++++++++++++++
2023     +++++++
2024     ----------
2025     --------

The founding generations came because they had to. Future generations stay because they choose to. That is a different kind of national test. And the retention question is not merely numerical. If those leaving are disproportionately engineers, doctors, founders, investors, and elite military talent, the demographic issue changes shape. A state can absorb numerical loss. It feels the loss of capability much faster.

Above all these numbers sits the larger civilizational shift. In 1948, around six percent of world Jewry lived in Israel. Today, around 45% does. Soon it may be the majority.

Share of World Jewry Living in Israel
1948    ██ 6%
1970    ████ 18%
1990    ███████ 30%
2010    ██████████ 42%
2026    ████████████ 45%

There is one more demographic question hanging over Israel in 2026, larger than fertility, migration, or retention. It sits beneath almost every diplomatic formula and every argument about the future of the conflict.

The question is the scale and meaning of the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) having a “right of return.”

For decades, the Palestinian Authority and the United Nations have insisted on a “right of return” for Palestinian “refugees” and their descendants. The number most commonly cited is roughly 5.9 million. That number matters because it clarifies what the argument actually means in demographic terms.

Israel today has roughly 10.2 million people. Add 5.9 million Palestinian Arabs to that number and the demographic map changes overnight. Israel would become a country of more than 16 million people. Its Arab population would jump from 2.1 million to more than 8 million. Its Jewish population would remain just under 8 million. The Jewish majority would collapse into parity or slightly minority status.

That is not a marginal adjustment. It is a structural transformation of the state itself.

Put into historical perspective, the scale becomes even sharper. In 1948, Israel’s Arab population stood at roughly 156,000. By 2026, it had already grown to more than 2.1 million, more than thirteenfold growth, already exceeding Jewish proportional growth over the same period. Add 5.9 million more, and that Arab population would stand at more than 8 million, representing more than fiftyfold growth since the founding of the state.

A “right of return” on this scale is not simply an immigration proposal, already stripping Israel a basic right of sovereignty to determine who to admit into the country. It further demands that the Jewish State cease to be one.

That is why this issue forms the fourth demographic challenge: preservation. Preservation of the demographic framework that allowed Jewish self-determination to return after two thousand years of dispersion and discrimination.

For most of Jewish history, survival meant enduring dispersion. In Israel, survival became concentration, then continuity, and now choice. The next phase may determine whether it remains preservation.

Very few countries have grown by over 10 times since 1948, and none in the developed “Global North”, with Australia and Canada leading the group at 2.5x and 1.9x, respectively (no European country even doubled its population). In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region which saw explosive growth due to the discovery of oil, no country has had the minority populations grow faster than the majority.

Israel is a true anomaly, a developed country with explosive growth, sitting in the MENA region which suppresses the growth of minority groups but the Jewish State still saw oversaw a faster growth of non-Jews. Despite the basic facts, the world still pressures the country to admit even more people adding to the population density, and with minorities who never lived in the country, in particular, undermining the demographic status quo.

As Israel considers its plans for the years ahead, retaining educated talent and ending the so-called SAP “right of return” rank as the leading causes to maintain a thriving democracy.

Forgiven Isn’t Fixed

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At the center of Achrei Mot, on Yom Kippur, two goats stand side by side. Both identical and indistinguishable. Then, a lottery is cast.

If all you wanted was forgiveness for sins, one goat would be enough. Yet the Torah insists on two.

Forgiveness is easy. Change is not.

We like to believe wrongdoing is a series of isolated acts. You did something wrong, you regret it, you fix it, you move on. Clean, contained, manageable. It is how legal systems work and how people prefer to understand themselves.

It is also incomplete.

Most failure is not a moment. It is a pattern. It accumulates, settles in, becomes familiar, then invisible.

The altar can address the act. It cannot address the drift.

Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik drew a distinction that cuts through the ritual with precision. There is kapparah, atonement, and there is taharah, purification. A person can be forgiven and still remain unchanged. The ledger is cleared, but the self is not.

The first goat is about repair. Something was broken and must be restored. There is acknowledgment, cost, and a return toward the center. Without that, nothing holds.

But even after the offering, something remains unresolved. What about the part of you that made the act possible in the first place? What about the force that will bring you back to the same place again?

The second goat answers without pretending to solve. It is not elevated nor transformed. It is taken and removed, sent beyond the camp into a space outside structure and control. The Torah does something more honest than erasure. It refuses to let that force sit at the center.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks drew the line just as sharply. The Torah distinguishes between what you did and who you are. The act can be real, heavy, even defining in its moment, and still not be allowed to define you going forward.

That distinction is fragile. Without it, people fall into two familiar traps. One is denial, the instinct to send everything away, to blame, to project, to say the problem lives somewhere else. The other is paralysis, the belief that failure is permanent, that the stain cannot be lifted, that there is no meaningful way forward.

Two goats, not one, because one would allow the situation to settle in a bad place.

The first says you are responsible. The second says you are not reducible to what you did. Hold only the first and you collapse under your past. Hold only the second and you lose accountability.

Together they force something far less comfortable.

You are forgiven, but the forces that led you there still exist.

There is no promise here that the internal engine disappears. No claim that a single day resets human nature. The ritual does not erase memory or capacity. It offers something more restrained and more demanding. The sin is acknowledged, gathered, and pushed to the margins. No longer central, no longer defining, but not imaginary either.

You walk forward without it at your core. You do not pretend it was never there.

Two goats, identical at the start, divided by fate. One ascends, one disappears, and between them stands a person who has to live with both truths at once.

You can be restored. You are still capable of returning.

In a world where scapegoats have become the rage, let us all relearn and teach the world that the just path forward requires both atonement and purification of self.

NYC, Now It’s at Your Front Door

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It looked like a technical vote. In New York City, a proposed buffer zone around houses of worship. A few feet of space so people could enter synagogues, churches, and mosques without confrontation.

And the Democratic Socialists of America bloc on the City Council voted no.

Shahana Hanif (District 39), Alexa Avilés (District 38), Tiffany Cabán (District 22), Chi Ossé (District 36), and Kayla Santosuosso (District 47) held the same line. Protect protest at all costs. Treat any restriction as a threat to speech. Keep the sidewalks open, no matter what is happening on them.

Shahana Hanif (District 39)

On paper, that sounds principled. In practice, it lands somewhere else entirely.

Because in this city, right now, protests are not showing up randomly. They are showing up outside synagogues in growing numbers. The line between Israel and the Jew has been erased, and the synagogue has become a stand-in.

This is where ideology stops being abstract.

For years, the DSA has defined itself through opposition to Israel. That posture has moved from foreign policy into local reality. When Zionism is framed as uniquely illegitimate, and most Jews see it as part of who they are, the translation is inevitable. The target shifts.

No manifesto is needed. The pattern speaks for itself.

Vote against a resolution recognizing hatred against Jews. Argue about the sponsors instead of the substance. Reject a minimal buffer around houses of worship at a moment when Jewish institutions in New York are under visible pressure.

That movement is no longer adjacent to power in New York City; it has the power. With Zohran Mamdani as the city’s new mayor, the worldview is moving from activist circles into the city’s governing core.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is a member of the DSA

And the expansion is already underway.

On Tuesday April 28’s special primary day, Mamdani has backed Lindsey Boylan, a member of the DSA to take another seat on the City Council. Jewish City Council Speaker Julie Menin has endorsed Carl Wilson in an effort to stop the radical left gaining even more power in New York.

In the June primaries, NYC-DSA is backing a coordinated slate:

  • Darializa Avila Chevalier (Upper Manhattan/Bronx)
  • Claire Valdez (Brooklyn/Queens)
  • David Orkin (Queens)
  • Diana Moreno

—alongside a broader Assembly slate backed by the same network.

Endorsements from figures like Jamaal Bowman and Mamdani for radical anti-capitalists, anti-west, anti-Israel DSA members like Aber Kawas reinforce the same ideological through-line—where opposition to Israel is no longer one issue among many, but a defining filter.

Aber Kawas has long supported the dismantling of the Jewish State, now running as part of the DSA to gain a seat in the New York State Senate. She is backed by Zohran Mamdani and Jamaal Bowman

This is how local elections stop being local.

When protests move from slogans to synagogue doors in Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan, who holds the line?

Will NYPD treat intimidation outside Jewish institutions as a line to be enforced—or a situation to be managed?

Power shapes behavior. When activists see their worldview reflected in City Hall and Albany, boundaries loosen. What once felt marginal begins to feel sanctioned. The distance between protest and confrontation narrows.

The question is no longer what DSA believes about Israel where they believe every man, woman and child is a fair target for violence. The question for New York voters is what they are comfortable normalizing here.

On sidewalks outside synagogues. At the doors of people trying to pray. In the space between protest and intimidation.

The City Council vote on buffer zones answered part of that question.

The rest will be answered this coming Tuesday and in June—at the ballot box, and on the sidewalks outside your door.

ACTION ITEM

Support Carl Wilson in the primary on April 28.

Support opponents to the DSA candidates in the June elections.

Related:

Protecting Synagogues Like Abortion Clinics

The Thomas Friedman Theory of Everything

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A video shows officers from the New York City Police Department attack an unarmed man. That kind of footage demands scrutiny—what happened, what justified it, and what didn’t.

The video is clear; the surrounding facts with each side’s narrative needs to be heard, filtered and assessed.

But such steps are not needed if someone is so sure of his sense of right-and-wrong, and smarter than everyone else. Able to discern motivation, backdrop and situation even sitting comfortably and smugly many miles away.

Especially if named Thomas Friedman.

You see, Thomas Friedman is so so so much smarter than all of you. He knows that everything bad in the world stems from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Maybe occasionally Donald Trump, but his beat is the Middle East so he prefers to haul Netanyahu’s name before his reader base more frequently.

You see, “Israel Lost its Way,” according to the Great Sage Friedman, because Netanyahu has infiltrated Israeli society so deeply. Bibi’s love of Jews and hatred of non-Jews in Friedman’s worldview, has permeated everything in Israel today. So much so, that a soldier fighting in Lebanon who never met Netanyahu in his life, knows that the right thing to do is assert Jewish superiority, even outside of Israeli borders.

Thomas Friedman points to Israeli soldier destroying a statue as attributable to Netanyahu’s “geopolitical strategy.”

Somehow, a rogue soldier – one of thousands exhausted by a multiyear, multifront war – who destroys a religious icon is a perfect encapsulation of Netanyahu’s “geopolitical strategy.” It’s such an absurd comment, that only someone so full of himself would have the chutzpah to place it in the opening paragraph of an opinion piece in The New York Times.

Would Friedman argue that the two NYPD officers were acting under the political strategy of NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani? Of course not. Friedman would write that the officers were rogue and acted against Mamdani’s wishes. But Friedman is convinced that Israelis under Netanyahu have all become lunatics. They are not fighting defensive wars that they never wanted; they are engaged in ethnic cleansing in a raw campaign of Jewish superiority.

Friedman mentioned another picture from the anti-Netanyahu Israeli paper Haaretz, the Israeli version of the NY Times. He referred to “right-wing Israeli ministers” celebrating a new community being built that allows Jews – counter to the stated goal of the Palestinian Authority and the United Nations – to live in the area east of the 1949 Armistice Lines.

To add a little punch to the piece, Friedman added that this was “just another day of the Netanyahu government playing President Trump for a fool” to rile up Americans against Israel.

Friedman has been telling readers this for years: Netanyahu is an evil puppet-master. If that sounds like an antisemitic trope, he won’t apologize. He will double-down.

Cartoon in the international edition of The New York Times shows Netanyahu leading a blind Donald Trump around

Because this is the theory that explains everything. Jews are now the jihadists.

Now, every action is merely an expression of someone else’s “climate.” Responsibility floats upward until it becomes untethered from behavior itself. The soldier, the new “settlers”, the police officers no longer matter. Only the chosen author of the “atmosphere” matters.

The New York Times has inverted victim and villain in the Middle East, and Thomas Friedman is all too eager to say “I told you so,” with whatever irrelevant recent media he can find.

A Culture of Building and a Culture of Destruction

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Two words sit on the same date and define the cultures of the respective people.

Yom Ha’atzmaut – Independence Day in Hebrew – marks the moment a dispersed people executed a long-planned return to sovereignty. The modern engine was Zionism, but the impulse runs far deeper. A people with an ancient memory chose to translate that memory into institutions, borders, and power. The declaration in 1948 was the culmination of a project that built governing bodies, an economy, and a military before the flag went up. It was construction with intent.

Across the same date sits Nakba – “catastrophe” in Arabic. The word is used to describe a collapse that followed a war. In 1947, the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine offered a fork in the road: two states, side by side. Jewish leadership accepted a constrained map and moved to build. Arab leadership rejected the partition and moved to prevent a Jewish state from coming into existence in “any part of Palestine.” Local forces and surrounding Arab states chose war at the point of birth.

This is the hinge that still carries the weight.

One side organized for sovereignty and then defended it. The other side organized to block that sovereignty and then defined its politics around that goal. The result was not an abstract failure. It was a battlefield outcome with lasting consequences.

The pattern did not end in 1948. It hardened into a language and culture of rejection—of undoing the Jewish state rather than existing alongside it—reappears across decades, sometimes dressed in diplomacy, often in violence. When you look at public opinion at key moments, you see the persistence of that horizon. In surveys like those conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in June 2023 (before the October 7 massacre), the majority of Arabs in West Bank and Gaza expressed confidence that Israel would not endure to its centennial and endorsed continued “resistance” (violence) as the path forward. The expectation is not coexistence after compromise. It is reversal over time.

A standard question in Palestinian quarterly polls like the one above (Q67) asked whether people supported “armed attacks against Israeli civilians.” In Gaza, the percentage was 76.7%

This is where the narratives diverge in a way that matters for the future.

The Israeli story is anchored in a completed act of construction that must be maintained. It argues from existence. It invests in capacity—military, economic, technological—because survival depends on it. It measures success in what stands and functions.

The dominant current in Palestinian politics has been anchored in an unfinished act of negation. It argues from a horizon in which Israel is temporary. It invests in leverage—diplomatic pressure, internationalization, and violence—because the objective is to change the end state rather than to consolidate its own future alongside it.

You can trace every failed negotiation back to that split. Offers are read through different endgames. Concessions are weighed against different destinations. One side asks what it takes to secure a state that already exists. The other asks what it takes to transform the map.

There is a moral discomfort here that people try to smooth over with softer language. It doesn’t hold. History keeps intruding with hard edges. A decision to reject partition and wage war in 1948 set a trajectory. Repeated bets on pressure and violence to force a different outcome have reinforced it. Each round that ends without destroying Israel strengthens the very state the strategy set out to undo.

A century is a long time in politics and a short time in memory. The Jewish project marked its independence by building a country that persists. The opposing project has too often measured progress by how close it can get to erasing that country. That is a strategy that has not delivered a state.

The calendar will keep bringing the same day back. One side will celebrate a construction that proved durable. The other will revisit a war whose objective still shapes its politics. The future will turn on whether the goal shifts from ending a state to building one of its own.

Three Multinational Antisemitic Arcs, And World Jewry

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Over the past century, pressure on Jews has scaled, shifting from borders to regions to institutions, changing form while carrying a familiar direction.

The story begins in Europe 1938 with the Anschluss. Persecution inside Germany extends outward as Austria is absorbed and its Jewish population is pulled into the same system. Expansion of antisemitic forces follows conquest. Poland, France, Hungary, the Netherlands become extensions of a single design as control spreads across the continent.

An den Fenstern j¸discher Geschfte werden von Nationalsozialisten Plakate mit der Aufforderung “Deutsche, wehrt euch, kauft nicht bei Juden” angebracht.

Policy matures into infrastructure. Collaboration, coercion, and indifference form a landscape in which Jewish survival is unlikely. At the Wannsee Conference, extermination is organized across borders, ministries, and railways. The Holocaust becomes a continental system aligned toward a single end: the genocide of Jews.

That system collapses with the war’s end but the pattern carries forward, reshaped and redirected.

After 1948, pressure reappears across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Jewish communities rooted for centuries in Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Morocco and elsewhere begin to unravel with striking speed.

Baghdad Iraq’s 1941 slaughter of Jews

Each country follows its own path. Laws restrict, property is seized, pressure builds, departures accelerate. In Iraq, the Farhud foreshadows a collapse that soon becomes mass departure. In Yemen, Operation Magic Carpet lifts an entire community into exile. In Egypt, the Suez Crisis accelerates expulsions. Across North Africa, uncertainty and nationalism press communities toward exit. By the 1970s, nearly one million Jews leave and a regional Jewish presence that endured for centuries nearly vanishes completely.

By the 1970s, the arena shifts again. The contest moves from territory into legitimacy itself.

In 1975, the United Nations adopts United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379, recasting Jewish self-determination as a moral offense within the central forum of international diplomacy.

US Ambassador to the United Nations, Daniel Patrick Moynihan reversing the Zionism is Racism resolution

The repeal arrives in 1991 through United Nations General Assembly Resolution 46/86, yet the framing travels beyond formal votes. It resurfaces at the World Conference Against Racism in Durban in 2001 and diffuses through NGOs, campuses, and international forums, where evolving language carries forward an enduring challenge to Jewish sovereignty.

From there, the argument migrates into the civic fabric of Western democracies. In the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, vile ideas become chants in universities, media, and politics.

The mechanisms differ from earlier eras, yet the effects shape daily life. Jewish institutions increase security. Synagogues that once stood open now operate behind layers of protection. Public expressions of Jewish identity carry new calculations. Debates about Israel expand into broader judgments about Jews, blurring lines that once held more clearly.

Across these shifts, the effect becomes visible in the map of Jewish life.

President Joe Biden’s Jewish liaison person suggests that Jews should hide their religious symbols in 2021

A century ago, Jewish communities spanned continents, anchored in Europe and present across the Middle East, North Africa, and the Americas. The destruction of European Jewry removed the largest center. The unraveling of communities across the Middle East and North Africa compressed what remained. Many moved to Israel. Others built new lives in the United States.

Today, roughly 85 percent of the world’s Jews live in those two countries. There are only seventeen countries with more than 25,000 Jews when there used to be dozens just a century ago.

That concentration follows a century in which environments that sustained Jewish life across dozens of countries collapsed, expelled, or eroded. Dispersion gave way to consolidation. Geography followed pressure.

The forces shaping that consolidation continue to evolve. As legitimacy is contested in broader arenas, communities orient toward places able to sustain security, identity, and continuity. The gravitational pull toward Israel strengthens under those conditions, even as the United States remains a central pillar of Jewish life.

While Yom Ha’atzmaut marks Israel’s independence, it also marks the emergence of a center of gravity forged through history rather than theory. Across a century, shifting forms of pressure reshaped where Jews could live, how they gathered, and where they anchored their future.

Three arcs across a century redrew the Jewish map. As the narrative arc is still underway, Israel’s percentage of world Jewry will likely become a majority from a plurality, in just a few years.

Pain Wrapped in Love, A Wound That Does Not Close

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There’s a fundamental difference between Yom HaZikaron and how most countries remember their fallen. In many places—think of Memorial Day in the U.S.—remembrance exists alongside distance. Time has passed, wars feel historical, and public life has moved on. The rituals are real, but they share space with long weekends, travel, sales, and barbecues.

In Israel, there is no distance.

Israel is small. Military service is near universal. Loss is not abstract or inherited from history books—it is current, personal, and interconnected. The name read on television is rarely just a name. It is a classmate. A neighbor’s child. A cousin of a colleague. And beyond the battlefield, the victims of terrorism—on buses, in cafés, in homes—collapse any illusion that war lives somewhere else.

There is no clean line between soldier and civilian. The same people who argue politics, build companies, and raise families are the ones who serve, and sometimes die, in uniform. The same streets that carry ordinary life have carried violence. So when the siren sounds, it is not symbolic; it is recognition. The cost of survival has been paid by people just like you—often people you actually knew.

Other countries observe remembrance days. Israel mourns.

In a synagogue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, far from the sirens of Israel, that truth took human form.

At Temple Emanu-El in New York City, before an audience of more than a thousand people, Rachel Goldberg-Polin sat in conversation with Dan Senor. The setting was the diaspora. The subject was the same wound.

Temple Emanu-El in NYC for talk with Dan Senor and Rachel Goldberg-Polin on April 20, 2026 (photo: FirstOneThrough)

Her son, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, had been injured during the October 7 Palestinian Arab attacks, taken hostage into Gaza, and held for more than a year before being killed in the tunnels. She had come to speak about a book she wrote in response to a question people kept asking her: how are you doing?

The answer was not linear. It was not hopeful in the way people expect hope to sound. It was precise.

Pain wrapped in love. Love wrapped in pain.

She described her life now in three periods: before October 7, the time of her son’s captivity, and the period after his death. Not stages of healing. Not steps toward closure. Distinct worlds, separated by something irreversible.

And then she said something that lands differently once you understand Yom HaZikaron.

She does not believe things should get better with time. She does not understand why much of the world holds that as aspiration. The wound is there. Permanent. The task is not to erase it, or soften it, or move beyond it. The task is to carry it—together with the love that created it—in full.

Forever.

That is not just a mother speaking. It is the emotional grammar of a country.

Yom HaZikaron is not designed to heal. It is designed to remember without dilution. To hold loss and love in the same space and refuse to let either fade. To insist that what was lost remains present, not as history, but as part of the living fabric.

In other places, remembrance days ask for reflection. In Israel, and for those bound to it, the day asks for something harder: to accept that some wounds are not meant to close.

A siren sounds. A country stops. And what fills the silence is not only memory.

It is love that refuses to let go, and pain that refuses to fade.