A lecture on the archaeology of ancient Israel and Judah was supposed to take place at the British Museum this month. Instead, it was postponed after organizers learned that protesters intended to disrupt the event.
The subject was not the Gaza war nor settlements nor Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
It was archaeology.
It has happened before. In 2014, UNESCO canceled an exhibition on the Jewish people’s 3,500-year history in the Land of Israel after objections from Arab states. More recently, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas repeatedly denied that the Jewish Temples stood in Jerusalem, at one point claiming they were actually located in Yemen.
These episodes share a common thread. The dispute is no longer simply about the modern State of Israel nor its policies or actions. It is increasingly about the history of the Jewish people themselves.
Yet the evidence is overwhelming. The kingdoms of Israel and Judah are among the best-documented societies of the ancient Near East. Their existence is attested through inscriptions, seals, coins, manuscripts, monuments, and the records of neighboring civilizations. The British Museum itself houses artifacts that tell this story.
Seal of King Hezekiah found in Jerusalem, around 700 BCE
That is why archaeology poses such a problem for those who seek to portray Jews as foreign interlopers – colonizers – with no ancient connection to the land. Artifacts cannot be pressured into changing their testimony. Every discovery points in the same direction: the Jewish story in the Land of Israel stretches back thousands of years, before the births of Jesus and Mohammed.
Few people would tolerate a museum debating whether ancient Egypt existed or whether Rome stood in Italy. Yet Jewish history is increasingly treated as uniquely negotiable.
Curiously and alarmingly, the protest at the British Museum had a much more immediate backdrop than the current war. This talk was to take place during Jewish Culture Month and the protestors were assembled by an anti-Israel group called “Jewish Artists for Palestine.” The museum’s efforts to highlight Jewish history in the land of Israel during a period of focus on Jewish culture brought out Jewish anti-Israel protestors.
Institutions are backing away from Jewish history and culture with the backing of fringe extremist Jews and anti-Israel Arabs. So basic history becomes debate, and the debate has moved from the policies of the Israeli government to Jews themselves.
The Nazis physically annihilated the Jews of Europe as it sought to place their culture as historical artifacts in museums. Now, museums and institutions seek to erase Jewish history and culture as a prelude to eradicating Jews in the Middle East.
The new play Giant has revived the scandal of Roald Dahl, the beloved children’s author whose antisemitism became inseparable from his legacy. Dahl’s hatred had its roots in an obsession with Israel, especially after the 1982 Lebanon War, which hardened into something older and darker: Jews as a collective object of blame. Political fury dissolved the line between a state and a people.
Matt Chun shows where that road now leads.
Chun is an Australian children’s book illustrator, part of a profession entrusted with shaping how children understand innocence, cruelty, and empathy. But when Jews were murdered at a Jewish Hanukkah celebration in Bondi, his response in an article title “Never mourn a fascist,” exposed something far beyond political critique: raw antisemitism. The victims were neither Israelis nor soldiers. They were Australian Jews gathered in communal celebration, among them a ten-year-old girl. Chun denied their innocence and treated their deaths as politically qualified, as though Jewish identity itself diminished the claim to grief.
People stand near flowers laid as a tribute at Bondi Beach to honour the victims of a mass shooting that targeted a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach on Sunday, in Sydney, Australia, December 16, 2025. (credit: REUTERS/Flavio Brancaleone)
That marks the evolution. Dahl saw war and blamed Jews. Chun sees Jews and explains away their murder.
That is why the cancellation of Chun’s forthcoming children’s book Bila by University of Queensland Press was fitting. Children’s books are an act of trust. Parents place them in their children’s hands believing that the people behind them understand something fundamental about innocence and human worth. A creator who cannot recognize the innocence of a murdered Jewish child at a Hanukkah celebration has forfeited any claim to shape the moral imagination of children.
Dahl’s antisemitism traveled through Israel before landing on Jews. Chun begins with Jews.
Chun wrote that “lands have been pillaged, poisoned, desecrated, and set ablaze by colonisers,” as he celebrates the slaughter of people at a holiday party. Alas, he is only the latest author instilling venom in the ink of books being marketed to children.
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.
Surrealism did not invent the language of dreams and symbols; it applied the principles to art. For the Jewish people, that language had long been central: a civilization built on ritual, memory, and meaning encoded in objects, stories, and repeated acts of remembrance.
When Surrealism emerged from Freud’s ideas, it offered a new lens to examine what Jews had already lived: that symbols shape identity, and that dreams can carry a people across time. In the aftermath of Europe’s destruction, that lens reveals a stark contrast: while others turned to common stories to process loss, the Jewish people used their symbolic tradition to rebuild and to turn dream into reality.
Interpreting Dreams
At the turn of the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud (1856 Czechia – 1939 United Kingdom) proposed something radical: that the human mind operates on two planes at once. The conscious – ordered, rational, disciplined. And beneath it, the unconscious – restless, suppressed, filled with fears and desires that shape behavior without announcing themselves.
Dreams, Freud argued in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), are the bridge between these worlds.
They are not noise. They are language.
A language built on symbols: recurring forms that carry meaning across individuals and cultures. A house becomes identity. Water becomes birth or transformation. Men are featured as long cylindrical objects while women are enclosed spaces. Objects are never just objects. They are carriers of something deeper, something shared.
Freud did not invent symbolic thinking. He revealed that we are already immersed in it.
And once that realization entered European culture, it transformed how artists saw their role: not as imitators of reality, but as revealers and interpreters of the unconscious.
The Dream Made Visible
Surrealism emerged from collapse.
World War I shattered Europe’s faith in reason. The same systems that promised progress delivered mechanized death. Logic, order, and scientific advancement had not restrained violence but refined it.
Into that rupture stepped André Breton (1896 France -1966 France). In 1924, his Surrealist Manifesto defined the art movement as “pure psychic automatism,” an attempt to express the true functioning of thought, unfiltered by reason or convention. It was a deliberate rejection of the structures that had failed and a search for truth in the raw, unmediated currents of the mind.
Surrealism was not escapism. It was rebellion against a reality that could no longer be trusted.
Artists like Giorgio de Chirico (1888 Greece – 1978 Italy) created haunting spaces – empty plazas, long shadows, objects placed together without explanation. These works do not resolve into meaning. They create a feeling of dislocation, of being suspended in a waking dream where logic loosens its grip.
Piazza d’Italia by Giorgi de Chirico (1913)
Jane Graverol (1905 Belgium – 1984 France) made the point plainly, saying that her canvases are “waking, conscious dreams.”
René Magritte (1898 Belgium – 1967 Belgium), strips away ambiguity and addresses the viewer directly. His 1929 painting The Treachery of Images confronted viewers with the bold statement “This is not a pipe” that what they were seeing was not an object but the symbol of an object.
The Treachery of Images by Rene Magritte (1929)
The statement is instructional.
Magritte is not playing with illusion. He is teaching a fundamental principle: that art is inherently symbolic. The painted pipe is not a pipe but a representation of a pipe. A constructed stand-in for reality. The viewer’s instinct is to collapse that distinction, to treat the symbol as the object itself. Magritte interrupts that instinct and forces recognition.
This is not just a lesson about art. It is a lesson about perception.
Before and After the Abyss
Then came World War II. And the question of perception became far more dangerous.
Before the war, Surrealism destabilized reality with intellectual daring. It exposed how fragile meaning could be, and how easily the mind imposed order where none existed. De Chirco expressed this when he said “although the dream is a very strange phenomenon and an inexplicable mystery, far more inexplicable is the mystery and aspect our minds confer on certain objects and aspects of life.”
After the war, the issue was not mystery. It was blindness.
The European Holocaust was not carried out by a primitive society. It was executed by one of the most intellectually advanced cultures in the world – Germany and Austria – lands of philosophy, music, and scientific achievement.
Civilization did not prevent barbarism. It coexisted with it.
And in that realization, Surrealism’s inquiry deepens.
Consider Magritte before and after the war.
In The False Mirror (1928), the eye is open—wide, consuming the sky. There is a sense of total perception, of a world fully visible, even overwhelming.
The False Mirror by Rene Magritte (1928)
By 1964, in The Son of Man, the face is obscured by a green apple.
The Son of Man by Rene Magritte (1964)
The shift is profound.
The apple is not arbitrary. It carries centuries of symbolic weight: knowledge, intellect, the pursuit of understanding. It evokes Eden, the awakening of consciousness, the belief that human reason elevates and refines. And simultaneously leads to destruction, despair and the loss of paradise.
Here, that very symbol blocks the face.
What if the world’s admiration for European intellect – its reverence for German philosophy, Austrian culture, scientific brilliance – functioned as a kind of blindness? What if our advances in science and knowledge was ultimately too much responsibility for our minds to handle and yielded ultimate weapons of mass destruction to end all life?
A society’s fixation on knowledge obscured the capacity for evil.
The world saw the body and the apple. It saw a society of culture, sophistication, refinement. It did not see the face – the person, the emotion, the intent – behind it. And that face? It saw nothing at all, blinded completely by knowledge.
Magritte’s post-war image reads as indictment of willful misperception. The failure was not that reality hid the truth. It was that humanity chose not to see it.
Myth as Reconstruction
In the aftermath of this rupture, some Surrealist artists turned to mythology, a common history and culture of a now divided Europe. Myth offered what history cannot: a structure to process loss.
Consider Orpheus.
He descends into the underworld to retrieve his lost wife, Eurydice, only to lose her forever when he looks back. The story is not about failure of effort; it is about the finality of loss.
Jane Graverol paints this in 1948, as a Belgian artist from a country invaded and devastated in a war it did not seek. As Europe begins to absorb the reality of the concentration camps – the industrial killing, the desecration of bodies – the imagery becomes unbearable.
The Procession of Orpheus by Jane Graverol (1948)
A woman fused into a chair – half human, half object – evokes not abstraction, but transformation of person into material. A world in which the boundary between human and furniture was grotesquely violated.
This is not simply Orpheus losing Eurydice, disappearing as they emerged from the underworld. It is Europe recognizing that what was lost cannot be restored.
Now consider Ulysses.
After the Trojan War, Ulysses (Odysseus) spends ten years trying to return home to Ithaca. His journey is long, disorienting, and filled with trials – temptation, destruction, loss of companions, divine obstacles. When he finally arrives, he is not recognized. His home has been overtaken. He must reclaim it, rebuild it, reassert his place within it.
Return is not restoration. It is confrontation.
Giorgio de Chirico captures this in The Return of Ulysses.
The Return of Ulysses by Giorgio de Chirico (1968)
The painting is divided.
On the left, a framed work from decades earlier sits beneath a heavy red chair. It anchors the past.
On the right, a frail white chair sits beneath an open window – exposed, stripped, uncertain. The solidity and comfort of the past gives way to fragility.
And in between, Ulysses. Small. Reduced. Rowing across water inside a room forcing the viewer to confront the symbolism.
Water, the symbol of birth, of transition, of beginning again.
He is not standing in triumph. He is navigating between worlds—between what was and what might be.
And then, something unexpected. An open door.
Not the past. Not the fractured present. But a third path.
Ulysses rows toward it. The hero moves toward something new.
The artist, from a country aligned with Germany during the war, was not focused on loss but a chance for a new future within his homeland, inside the familiar surroundings of his room.
The Jewish Path: Beyond Myth
And yet, there is a story that does not fit neatly within this framework of the Surrealist artists of the Allies and Axis. Because the Jewish people after World War II were neither and both.
They were the decimated. A people shattered, displaced, nearly erased – and forced to ask how to return, where to return.
There was no home to reclaim in the way of Ulysses.
No possibility of retrieving what was lost, like Orpheus.
There was only one path forward. Rebirth, in a new land.
And in a way unparalleled in history, they achieved it.
The reestablishment of the State of Israel was not simply political. It was civilizational. A people dispersed for nearly two thousand years, speaking different languages, living across continents, reconstituted sovereignty in its ancestral land.
Here, myth gives way to reality.
In 1968, Salvador Dalí – the master of dream imagery – was commissioned to create a series of 25 watercolor paintings for the Hartford Museum to mark Israel’s 20th anniversary. The timing was not incidental. It came just one year after the Six-Day War, when Israel not only survived existential threat but reunited Jerusalem, returning Jews to their holiest sites in the Old City.
If Theodor Herzl declared, “If you will it, it is no dream,” then Surrealism—an art form built on dreams—became the perfect language to express that transformation.
Aliyah, the rebirth of Israel by Salvador Dali (1968)
Dalí’s Aliyah: The Rebirth of Israel, the centerpiece of the series, captures this moment.
A figure rises, draped in the Israeli flag. And what is more symbolic than a national flag?
Two blue stripes evoking both the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, the geographic bounds of the land, while simultaneously recalling the tallit, the Jewish prayer shawl. Nationhood and spirituality fused into a single image.
The figure is not merely standing. He is emerging naked and staring at the heavens.
This is not return. This is creation.
The Arc of Surrealism
Surrealism begins as an education, an attempt to translate Sigmund Freud’s insight into visual form, to show that human beings do not simply see the world, but interpret it through symbols, through dreams, through layers of meaning that sit beneath the surface. It teaches the viewer to slow down, to recognize that an image is not the thing itself, that representation is constructed, that what feels obvious may be anything but.
At its inception, it is a project of illumination, shaped by a Europe that still believed in its own intellectual coherence. From Paris to Brussels to Rome, it carries the confidence of a continent trying to understand itself through deeper, more elusive truths.
But that confidence does not survive World War II.
When Europe fractures, Surrealism fractures with it. The symbolic language remains intact, but it begins to tell different stories depending on where it is spoken.
In Belgium, through Jane Graverol, myth becomes a language of irreversible loss. The world she paints is one in which the human can be reduced to object, where dignity can be stripped away, where what has been taken cannot be restored. The symbols haunt.
In Italy, through Giorgio de Chirico, the question shifts. It is no longer about loss alone, but about return—about what it means to come home when home itself has changed. The past lingers, heavy and inescapable, while the future appears fragile, uncertain, barely formed. And yet, within that uncertainty, there is movement—a quiet insistence on choosing a path forward, even when the destination is unclear.
And then there are the Jews.
Not aligned with either side of Europe’s divide, but decimated, displaced, and exposed. They are not asking how to interpret what has been lost, or how to return to what was. Those paths are closed to them.
They are asking whether anything can be built again at all.
And it is here that Surrealism, for all its depth, turns to the Jews for answers.
Because the Jewish people did not need to be taught how symbols work. They had lived within that framework for centuries—through ritual, through memory, through stories that transformed objects into meaning and meaning into continuity. What Surrealism sought to uncover as theory had already been sustained as practice.
The Passover seder has been educating Jewish children for three thousand years about symbols, about the birth of a nation, and about the dream of Jerusalem.
Surrealism’s arc from the 1920s to 1960s was a story of Europeans wrestling with the mind and meaning before and after the war. It ends when those long familiar with symbolism left their nightmare and made their dream a reality.
There is something striking about Parshat Vayikra.
Just weeks after the drama of Exodus – splitting seas, revelation at Sinai, a nation coming into being – the Torah seemingly turns inward. The focus shifts to offerings, detail, repetition, and discipline. It feels quieter, but far more demanding.
Because the Torah is no longer telling the story of a history of a people. It is shaping the inner life of a person and framing a community.
Korban: The Work of Drawing Close
The word korban comes from the Hebrew word karov, to draw close.
This is the Torah’s language for repairing distance. Every lapse in judgment, every compromise, every moment we fall short creates space between who we are and who we are meant to be. That distance accumulates. It dulls awareness. It reshapes identity over time.
Korban is the act of closing that gap through deliberate engagement.
The Offering as Mirror
The individual places hands on the offering before it is brought forward. The gesture is direct and personal.
The animal reflects the instinctive layer of the self: of impulse, appetite, anger, ego. The act forces recognition: this energy exists within me. It must be directed, refined, elevated.
The fire on the altar becomes the mechanism of transformation. What is raw is lifted. What is uncontrolled is shaped into something purposeful.
Responsibility leads to possibility.
Atonement Requires Engagement
Vayikra establishes a system built on participation. Atonement unfolds through action, awareness, and presence.
A person must recognize the failure, step toward it, and engage with it. That process creates movement. It slows the instinct to gloss over mistakes and replaces it with something more durable: change that is earned.
The Hidden Becomes Visible
As important, korbanot were not private moments.
They took place in the open, at the center of the community. A person brought an offering in full view; sometimes for something no one else knew, a failure that could have remained hidden.
That public act carries a dual force. It is a form of confession. It acknowledges that private actions shape a public self.
It also reshapes how we see each other. Everyone comes forward. The composed, the successful, the admired, all stand at the same altar. They, too, confront failure. They, too, seek repair.
The system dismantles the illusion of perfection and replaces it with something far more stable: a community built on shared imperfection and ongoing effort.
The World We Built Instead
Today, we have constructed the opposite system.
Our lives are increasingly public, yet carefully edited. Success is broadcast. Struggle is concealed. Identity becomes something managed rather than lived.
Platforms reward the appearance of control, clarity, and achievement. Failure is filtered out. Weakness is reframed or hidden entirely.
The result is a quiet distortion.
People begin to believe that others are living more complete, more resolved lives. The gap between appearance and reality widens. Struggle becomes isolating rather than connective.
In a world like this, growth becomes harder. Without visibility, there is less accountability. Without shared imperfection, there is less permission to confront what is broken.
The Measure Is Intent
The mincha, the simple grain offering, carries the same weight as more elaborate offerings.
A handful of flour stands beside an animal offering because the Torah measures sincerity. The system resists performance and centers intention, reinforcing that what matters is the internal work, not the external display.
The Real Offering
At the center of Vayikra is a simple idea: the offering is the self, refined over time.
The challenge today is not understanding that idea. It is living it in a world that encourages concealment over confrontation.
Vayikra describes a life where people engage their shortcomings directly and are willing to be seen in that effort. The question that remains is whether we can build lives that allow for that kind of honesty again.
Broadway has always returned, in one form or another, to Jewish life. For decades, those stories were carried by memory, infused with struggle, displacement, and loss, yet grounded in continuity, humor, and the stubborn persistence of a people that refused to disappear. What has changed is not the subject matter, but the center of gravity. The stage has shifted from portraying how Jews lived to confronting how Jews are targeted.
The Past: Life in the Foreground
Fiddler on the Roof (2018 in Yiddish) remains the defining example of how Jewish life was once presented. The audience is drawn into a village that feels intimate and alive, filled with arguments between generations, negotiations between tradition and change, and the quiet dignity of ordinary people trying to hold their world together as it begins to shift beneath them.
The violence arrives but it does not dominate the story. It lingers at the edges, a reminder of fragility rather than the force that defines the narrative. What stays with the audience is the humanity that precedes it: the sense that Jewish life contains richness and meaning even as it is repeatedly uprooted, and that something essential survives the disruption.
The Present: History Without Distance
Vienna, and the Illusion of Safety
Leopoldstadt (2022-3) opens in a world that feels secure, even enviable in contrast to the humbler scenes from the Pale of Settlement in Fiddler – assimilated Jews in Vienna who have embraced culture, intellect, and national identity with the confidence of people who believe they belong. The early scenes are filled with warmth and the easy assumptions of permanence.
As the story unfolds, those assumptions dissolve with unsettling speed. Families thin, names disappear, and what began as a portrait of belonging becomes a study in erasure. The audience is left confronting how completely a thriving world can vanish and how little warning the people inside it seemed to have.
America’s Own Reflection
Parade (2022-3) brings that realization into the American setting through the story of Leo Frank. His life in early twentieth-century Atlanta ends in a spectacle shaped by rumor, media amplification, and a public willing to accept accusation as truth.
The discomfort of the story lies in its familiarity. The mechanisms feel recognizable, the escalation disturbingly plausible. The setting removes any remaining sense that antisemitism belongs elsewhere or to another time, placing it squarely within the American experience.
A Present That Refuses to Stay Quiet
Prayer for the French Republic (2024) unfolds in unmistakably contemporary terms, following a French Jewish family as they debate whether their future still lies in the country they call home. The conversation revolves around schools, neighborhoods, and the quiet calculations that shape daily life.
What emerges is not a single defining incident, but an accumulation, a steady normalization of hostility that makes departure feel less like a rupture and more like an eventual step. The question is no longer abstract. It is logistical, immediate, and deeply personal.
Hatred with a Familiar Face
Giant (2026) centered on Roald Dahl, shifts the focus from overt violence to something quieter and, in many ways, more unsettling. Here, antisemitism resides within a figure celebrated for imagination and storytelling, revealing how prejudice can coexist with cultural admiration.
The discomfort lies in how easily such views can be absorbed into environments that otherwise pride themselves on sophistication. Hatred does not require a uniform or a slogan when it is permitted to live comfortably within admired voices. It persists not despite acceptance, but often because of it.
A Pattern Taking Shape
Seen together, these productions trace a continuum across time and place – Vienna, Atlanta, Paris, and the cultural circles of modern Britain – linked by a recurring dynamic. Each begins with a sense of stability, moves through unease, and arrives at rupture. The details differ, but the trajectory remains strikingly consistent.
This repetition carries its own message. It suggests that the issue is not confined to a specific moment or geography, but reflects a pattern capable of reappearing in new forms, shaped by local conditions yet driven by familiar forces.
The Audience and the Mirror
The audiences filling these theaters are often educated, affluent, and deeply engaged with cultural life. They watch these stories unfold, absorb their lessons, and respond with admiration for the craft and the performances.
Yet there is a tension that lingers beyond the applause. The same cultural spaces that elevate these narratives often struggle to confront their contemporary parallels with equal clarity. The distance between stage and reality narrows, but the response to each is not always aligned.
The result is a kind of dissonance: an ability to recognize antisemitism when framed as art, while hesitating to address it with the same urgency when it appears in present-day discourse.
Why This Moment Feels Different
This shift on Broadway reflects a broader change in perception. The conditions once associated with distant history no longer feel entirely removed. The sense of safety that allowed earlier generations to treat persecution as context has given way to a more immediate awareness, one that resists easy separation between past and present.
Recent events have reinforced that awareness. The resurgence of openly hostile rhetoric, the normalization of extreme positions in public discourse, and the willingness in some circles to rationalize or reframe acts of violence have all contributed to a climate in which these stories resonate with a new intensity.
Art does not create that reality, but it reveals how widely it is being felt.
The contrast with earlier eras becomes difficult to ignore. Where once the stage offered a portrait of Jewish life shaped by external pressures, it now presents environments in which those pressures define the experience itself. The richness of daily life is increasingly overshadowed by a sense of vulnerability that cannot be pushed to the margins.
This evolution reads less like a natural progression and more like a recalibration, one that places the question of security at the center. The stories no longer unfold at a comfortable distance. They press closer, asking the audience to consider what they mean beyond the confines of the theater.
Broadway continues to tell Jewish stories, but the tone has shifted in a way that carries unmistakable weight. The warmth that once framed these stories has given way to something sharper, more immediate, and more raw.
The audience is no longer only staring ahead at actors; the Jews attending Broadway turn to the right and left to consider their own lives as living theater.
Are we entering a world where the outrageous spreads faster than the beautiful? Where algorithms reward anger more than humor and shouting carries farther than laughter?
These questions feel new. The forces behind them are not.
Human beings have long been drawn to danger more than calm. Psychologists call this “negativity bias.” In a landmark paper, psychologist Roy F. Baumeister and his colleagues summarized it simply: bad is stronger than good. Negative events imprint themselves more deeply than positive ones. We notice threats faster than beauty.
For most of human history this instinct helped us survive. Ignoring a sunset had no consequence. Ignoring danger could be fatal.
Technology did not create our darker impulses. It simply gave them speed. In the digital age that ancient instinct has found a powerful amplifier.
The platforms that shape modern conversation—Meta Platforms, X (formerly Twitter), and TikTok—are built to maximize engagement. Their algorithms reward what provokes reaction. Anger drives comments. Outrage produces shares. Conflict spreads faster than reflection.
Researchers studying millions of posts have found a consistent pattern: anger spreads more quickly than joy. The algorithms did not invent hatred. They simply discovered how easily it travels.
Another force quietly reinforces the cycle: incentive. In a fragile and uncertain economy, the fastest path to attention, influence, and sometimes income often runs through the anger storm of social media. Outrage attracts followers. Followers attract status and advertising. The system rewards those who inflame rather than those who illuminate.
The result is a distortion of public life. Rage becomes highly visible while ordinary decency remains largely unseen.
Martin Luther King Jr. captured the difference between what spreads easily and what sustains a society. “Hatred paralyzes life,” he wrote in Strength to Love. “Love releases it. Hatred confuses life. Love harmonizes it.”
Yet the digital public square increasingly rewards the paralysis.
Elie Wiesel warned of a deeper danger: “The opposite of love is not hate. It is indifference.”
In the endless scroll of online outrage, indifference becomes hatred’s silent partner. Cruelty becomes spectacle. People react and move on.
History suggests that hatred has always been loud but rarely durable.
During the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln asked a question that still resonates: “Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?”
The Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn offered a similar warning: “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”
Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks expressed the same moral challenge in modern terms: “The supreme religious challenge is to see God’s image in one who is not in our image.”
Such insights are uncomfortable in a digital culture that constantly divides humanity into enemies and allies.
The deeper problem today may not be that hatred is stronger than love. It may simply be that hatred is easier to distribute, easier to amplify, and increasingly profitable.
Algorithms reward immediate reaction. Beauty requires attention. Humor requires context. Reflection requires time. Outrage requires only a spark.
The digital public square begins to resemble a hall of mirrors. The loudest voices dominate the room while the quiet majority disappears from view. It becomes easy to believe that everyone is screaming.
Tristan Tate and Andrew Tate in 2023.Credit : AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda
But outside the algorithmic storm the world still runs on cooperation. Families care for one another. Strangers help strangers. People build communities, businesses, schools, and hospitals together every day.
If hatred truly governed human behavior, civilization would collapse within weeks.
The danger is not that hate is winning. The danger is that the systems we built to connect the world reward the worst parts of human nature.
And at the very moment those systems amplify anger, the qualities that restrain anger may be weakening.
The path away from hatred has always depended on patience and trust. Both are under strain.
Technology has shortened attention spans and conditioned us to expect immediate satisfaction. Judgments are rendered in seconds. The slow work of understanding struggles to survive in an environment built for speed.
Trust is also eroding. Artificial intelligence can generate images, voices, and entire narratives that blur the line between the real and the fabricated. As that line fades, people begin to doubt what they see.
A society without patience reacts before thinking. A society without trust suspects everything.
That makes this a particularly delicate moment. The engines distributing information reward outrage, the incentives encourage it, and the habits that resist it grow weaker at the same time.
The critical question of the day is whether we will recognize that danger in time.
The modern Paralympic Games began far from the grandeur of an Olympic stadium. Their origin lies on the grounds of a British hospital, shaped by the vision of Ludwig Guttmann, a Jewish refugee physician who transformed both medicine and sport.
Ludwig Gutmann (1899-1980)
Guttmann was born in 1899 in Breslau, then part of Germany. He rose to prominence as a neurologist specializing in spinal cord injuries. With the rise of Nazism, Jewish professionals were pushed from academic and medical institutions, and Guttmann lost his post as antisemitic laws narrowed the space for Jewish life. During the “Kristallnacht” violence of 1938, he reportedly used his hospital authority to admit Jewish patients and shield them from arrest. Soon after, he fled Germany with his family and rebuilt his career in Britain.
In 1944, the British government asked him to lead a new spinal injuries unit at Stoke Mandeville Hospital. At that time, severe spinal cord injury often led to early death. Patients were confined to beds, vulnerable to infection, and frequently treated as beyond recovery. Guttmann rejected that assumption. He believed survival required more than medical stabilization. It required discipline, ambition, and restored self-respect.
He introduced sport as a core part of rehabilitation. Archery, wheelchair polo, and organized competition became structured therapy. Training cultivated strength and focus. Competition rebuilt identity. Patients who had been defined by injury began to see themselves as athletes preparing for events.
On July 29, 1948, the same day the 1948 Summer Olympics opened, Guttmann organized a small archery competition for sixteen wheelchair athletes on the hospital grounds. He called it the Stoke Mandeville Games. The symbolism was intentional. As Olympians competed in London, injured veterans competed at Stoke Mandeville. Each demonstrated excellence within their arena.
The event became annual and soon attracted international participants. In 1960, following the 1960 Summer Olympics, Rome hosted what is widely recognized as the first official Paralympic Games. A hospital initiative had grown into a global movement.
1960 Rome Paralympics
Guttmann’s work carried deeper resonance because of the era he had survived. Nazi racial ideology had targeted Jews and people with disabilities as unworthy of life. The regime’s euthanasia program murdered tens of thousands of disabled individuals before the broader genocide unfolded. As a Jewish physician forced into exile, Guttmann understood the danger of systems that ranked human worth by race or physical capacity.
The opening of Stoke Mandeville Stadium by Her Majesty the Queen in 1969
His response was constructive and public. He placed disabled athletes on fields of competition and invited the world to witness their performance. Strength, in his framework, was measured by discipline and achievement rather than conformity to an imposed ideal.
Britain recognized his contributions. He became a citizen in 1945, was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1950, and was knighted in 1966 as Sir Ludwig Guttmann. Within medicine, he is regarded as the founder of modern spinal injury treatment. Within sport, he is honored as the father of the Paralympic movement. During major Games, particularly the 2012 Summer Paralympics, his story has been prominently commemorated.
Today the Paralympics stand as one of the world’s largest sporting events, watched by millions. Their origin traces back to a Jewish refugee doctor who believed that dignity could be restored through competition. From the trauma of exile emerged an institution that reshaped how the world understands disability, excellence, and human worth.
The Torah’s first image of Moses is of a man split against himself. Born a Hebrew and raised in Pharaoh’s palace, he lives between worlds. When he kills an Egyptian beating a Hebrew slave, the act is instinctive. Yet when another Hebrew confronts him—“Who made you ruler and judge over us?” (Exodus 2:14)—Moses has no answer. He cannot say who he is or why he has the right to act.
So he runs.
The flight is explained as fear of Pharaoh because the attack was discovered. A deeper cause is identity fracture. Moses is caught between Egyptian and Jew, insider and outsider. When identity is unsettled, even a disgraceful question feels existential. Retreat becomes the reflex.
That pattern did not end in Egypt.
Today, for much of the diaspora, Jewish life has carried a similar split. Jews learned to survive by blending, qualifying, and softening. Identity became situational. Answers changed with the room. When questioned—about history, belonging, or the land of Israel—the instinct has often been Moses’ instinct: explain carefully, hedge, or leave the room. Running becomes habit when the self feels divided.
Israel changes that equation.
Israeli Jews do not experience Jewishness as a negotiation. It is civic, cultural, linguistic, and historical all at once. There is no internal argument to resolve before answering an external challenge. Questions that unsettle diaspora Jews rarely destabilize Israelis because the identity beneath them is settled.
Kotel Plaza with Israeli flag (photo: First One Through)
The philosophical approach even applies to non-Jews in Israel. Consider Quentin Tarantino, who married an Israeli, lives in Israel, and raises his children there without explanation or apology. His life models something diaspora Jews are rarely encouraged to try: resolve the split by living a whole integrated self rather than defending it. Belonging practiced instinctually requires no justification.
That clarity was shown clearly in Tarantino’s 2003 film Kill Bill: Vol. 1. In the film, O-Ren Ishii responds to an attack on her heritage immediately and violently. She recognizes the move as an attempt to diminish her and rejects the premise entirely. The table turns the instant she stops answering the charge and starts judging the judge.
For diaspora Jews—and for anyone of mixed heritage—the lesson is continuity. Identity settled internally removes the need for fleeing externally. When the self is whole, interrogation loses its force. Disgraceful questions do not deserve better answers; they deserve exposure and repudiation.
Moses ran because his identity was divided while modern Israelis do not. O-Ren stands because she knows exactly who she is and will not entertain accusers.
Diaspora Jews today should not need to relive Moses’ uncertainty of self. The work now is not to run, but firmer clarity. Better education and rootedness. Firmer responses.
Stop running. Stop defending. Condemn the question—and the room will follow.
Jewish tradition returns again and again to the image of the tree. Sometimes it appears strong and fruit-bearing. At other moments it is reduced, cut back, or left without water. The image endures because it carries history within it—growth shaped by interruption, life that continues through constraint.
The prophets reached for this language when ordinary description failed them.
“They shall be like a tree planted in the desert, that does not sense the coming of good.” – Jeremiah 17:6
“Let not the barren one say: ‘I am a dry tree.’” – Isaiah 56:3
The statement reframes the moment. What looks final and foreboding is often incomplete. The future has not yet spoken.
That tension—between appearance and essence—finds a physical echo in the hills west of Jerusalem, where Yad Kennedy rises from the forest. The memorial marks a life interrupted mid-growth. John F. Kennedy’s presidency and life ended before its natural arc could unfold, and the monument holds that sense of unrealized promise. Surrounded by trees planted in rocky soil, it resembles a tree stump, and invites reflection on lives cut short and on continuity carried forward by those who remain.
Yad Kennedy in Jerusalem Forest
Jewish history has unfolded along similar lines. After the destruction of the Second Temple, Judaism reorganized itself without sovereignty or familiar institutions. Across centuries of dispersion, it adapted under pressure, preserving learning and community in constrained forms. Growth did not disappear; it compressed, waiting for conditions that would allow it to expand again.
This persistence appears vividly in the work of Dr. Mark Podwal (1945-2024). His drawings return repeatedly to the Jewish tree—scarred, truncated, shaped by time. The branches rise unevenly, carrying memory in their grain. Life continues without erasing what came before. Growth is real precisely because it bears the marks of history.
That image resonated deeply with Rabbi Yehuda Amital (1924-2010), founding Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshiva Gush Etzion. A survivor of the Holocaust, Rav Amital rebuilt his world through Torah that could hold rupture and responsibility together. His leadership reflected patience, moral seriousness, and a belief that renewal emerges gradually from damaged ground.
Podwal once gave Rav Amital a drawing of a truncated Jewish tree—reduced in form, yet unmistakably alive, blooming with the promise of a renewed Judaism. The rabbi transformed the image into a small sticker and placed it inside the books of his personal library. Every volume bore the same mark.
Drawing by Mark Podwal about Jewish life springing forth from Jewish texts, used as a sticker in the library of Rav Yehuda Amital (photo: First One Through)
The image spoke directly to his life’s work. Rav Amital played a central role in rebuilding the Gush Etzion community after it was destroyed in the 1948–49 War of Independence, a war in which he fought shortly after moving to the land of Israel after his family was slaughtered in Auschwitz. In the hills south of Jerusalem, homes had been razed, residents killed or expelled, and the area left barren. The return after the 1967 Six Day War was careful and deliberate, rooted in learning, faith, and responsibility. A community grew again where one had been cut down.
Each time Rav Amital opened a book, the image reinforced that lesson. Torah study itself became an act of regrowth.
Rav Amital had the original Podwal drawing framed and placed on the wall of his home. (photo: First One Through)
That insight extends far beyond one community.
In the Land of Israel, Jewish roots run beneath history itself—through exile and return, ruin and rebuilding. Torah and Jewish presence were never uprooted from this land. They were compressed, covered, narrowed to fragments. Learning continued in small circles, in whispered prayers, in constrained spaces. At times the surface appeared barren. Beneath it, roots remained alive.
This is why Jewish life and learning in Israel carry a distinctive quality of reemergence. Yeshivot rise where silence once prevailed. Communities form on ground that held ruins. Torah is studied again in places where the chain of learning was abruptly broken. To the unobservant eye, it can appear improbable—as though life has emerged from wood long dried. To those who understand the depth of Jewish connection to this land, to the Jewish texts which form the basis of Judaism, it is recognition rather than surprise.
The dry tree was never dead. It was waiting.
Jewish continuity does not require ideal conditions. Where roots reach deep enough, water is eventually found. Growth resumes in forms shaped by everything that came before.
First One Through 