Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938 – November 9, 2026

Imagine being a Jew living in Germany in 1910, with the extraordinary ability to see the future. You know that Adolf Hitler will come to power in 1933, that antisemitic laws will follow, and that on November 9, 1938, synagogues will burn across Germany and Austria.

You love Germany. Your family has lived there for generations. You want to remain in your homeland, raise your children and grow old among your neighbors. What should you do over the next 28 years to ensure that you and your family will be accepted?

Perhaps you should enter government service immediately.

Excellent idea. On April 7, 1933, the Nazis enacted the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, removing Jews from government employment. But Jews who had entered service before August 1, 1914, were exempted.

Perhaps you should fight for Germany in World War I.

Another excellent decision. Jewish veterans who had fought at the front were also exempted from the 1933 civil service purge. Even Jews whose fathers or sons had died fighting for Germany received protection under that law. Some 12,000 German Jews died fighting for their country during World War I. Surely that counted for something.

Perhaps you should marry a Christian German woman, convert to Christianity and raise your children as Christians.

That might offer additional protection. Conversion would not change your racial classification under Nazi law, but an existing marriage to a non-Jewish German could affect how the authorities treated your family.

Or perhaps you should go even further. What if you supported Hitler himself?

You could embrace German nationalism, reject Jewish communal organizations, vote for the Nazi Party and seek to join its ranks. You could agree with its economic program, its hostility to communism and its promise to restore German greatness.

Would becoming a Nazi make you an acceptable Jew?

No. The Nazi Party generally excluded Jews from membership, and its racial laws did not reward Jewish ancestry with exemption because someone supported Hitler. Political loyalty could not transform a Jew into an Aryan. You might have agreed with every Nazi policy except its treatment of Jews. That disagreement would not have saved you.

And the other strategies were unraveling.

In 1935, the Nazis eliminated the civil service protections for Jewish veterans and longtime government employees. The Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of full citizenship rights and prohibited marriages between Jews and people classified as German or related blood.

By 1938, German Jews faced escalating economic exclusion, confiscation of property, arrests and expulsions.

Consider Victor Klemperer, a German professor, World War I veteran, Protestant convert and husband of a non-Jewish German woman. He had embraced German culture and served his country. The Nazis nevertheless classified him as Jewish and dismissed him from his professorship in 1935.

On November 9, 1938, Nazi-organized mobs burned synagogues, destroyed Jewish businesses, attacked Jewish homes and arrested tens of thousands of Jewish men. The German Jew who had spent decades demonstrating his patriotism could watch his synagogue burn alongside the synagogue of the Jew who had never sought to assimilate.

Eighty-eight years later, Jews across the diaspora face a renewed surge in antisemitism and questions about what makes them acceptable. In 2021, CAIR leader Zahra Billoo warned Muslims against the “polite Zionists,” including Jewish Federations, Hillel and synagogues. Even Jews who had stood alongside Muslims against discrimination were not necessarily friends. “Know your enemies,” she said.

So what should a Jew do today? Become an anti-Zionist? Denounce Israel? Turn against Jewish organizations? Would that finally be enough?

The German Jew of 1910 could spend the next 28 years changing everything about himself and still discover that he had changed nothing in the eyes of those who hated him.

There is no winning a contest in which someone else keeps changing the rules.

Jews should decide what they believe, whom they support and how they live their lives. The moment they begin making those decisions to satisfy people who demand that they become a different kind of Jew, they have already surrendered something far more important than approval.