Category Archives: Jews

After the Shofar, the Klezmer

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At the Beacon Theatre, Itzhak Perlman offered a reminder that Jewish memory is not only something Jews mourn; it is something they dance to.

Four days after New York marked the 25th anniversary of September 11, and just after Rosh Hashanah ushered in another Jewish year, Itzhak Perlman sat at center stage at the Beacon Theatre and played klezmer.

The concert celebrated Perlman’s 81st birthday and roughly three decades since In the Fiddler’s House, his landmark embrace of the music of his Jewish roots. Perlman said he wanted people “to dance in the aisles.”

Itzhak Perlman, with members of the Klezmatics and Andy Statman at the Beacon Theater September 15, 2026 (photo: First One Through)

That is where klezmer belongs.

The word comes from the Hebrew klei zemer – “vessels of song” – but klezmer was never simply a genre of music. It was music woven into the life of Eastern European Jews, played at celebrations and, most famously, weddings.

It sounds like the world that created it. The violin can plead like prayer. The clarinet can cry, tease and laugh. A melody can begin in longing and, almost without warning, become a demand to get out of your chair.

Klezmer can sound sad without being sad music. It carries memory into celebration.

Even more, klezmer turns Jewish memory into Jewish motion.

Much of the Eastern European Jewish world that created this music was eventually destroyed. Whether Jews fled pogroms of the 19th and 20th century or were wiped out in the Holocaust, the ground which birthed klezmer has lost almost all of its Jewish feet.

But the music crossed oceans and generations. Jewish immigrants carried it to America, where later musicians recovered and revived the tradition. Andy Statman, who joined Perlman on stage at the Beacon, became one of its great modern interpreters. Perlman’s In the Fiddler’s House brought klezmer to audiences who knew him primarily as one of the world’s greatest classical violinists.

That makes the choice itself significant.

Perlman could have celebrated his birthday playing Bach, Beethoven or Brahms. Instead, he gathered klezmer musicians at the Beacon to play the music of Jewish weddings and Jewish celebrations.

And there was something particularly striking about hearing it in New York at this moment in time.

The city outside the Beacon has been experiencing a terrible surge in antisemitism. Jews have been harassed and assaulted on New York streets, while antisemitic incidents have repeatedly represented a disproportionate share of reported hate crimes. America’s youth has largely moved away from Israel and the Jewish State, leaving the future very uncertain.

That was the world outside the theater doors.

Inside was a different New York.

The audience appeared predominantly Jewish and older. For many, these melodies likely carried associations extending beyond a night at the Beacon: to parents and grandparents, weddings and synagogues, holidays and communities. To the Yiddish language rarely spoken anymore – let alone sung by a woman in public.

But the audience was not exclusively Jewish or old. The handful of younger people mostly wore kippahs or were Asian. Some may have come for klezmer; others simply for the opportunity to hear one of the greatest violinists alive.

And then Perlman got his wish. People got out of their seats, filled the aisles and danced.

Crowd at the Beacon took to the aisles and started dancing around the theater as Perlman and the band played wedding music (photo: First One Through)

The scene captured something that yet another speech condemning antisemitism could not. Outside were the streets of a city where Jewish identity has increasingly been met with hostility and Jews hid their identity. Inside, an 81-year-old Jewish violinist who cannot walk himself, was playing unmistakably Jewish music inherited from communities that no longer exist – and Jews and Asians alike were on their feet celebrating it.

Dancing in the aisles at The Fiddler’s House to music by Itzhak Perlman and the Klezmatics at The Beacon in NYC, September 15, 2026

The timing made the scene still richer.

The Jewish year had just begun with the blast of the shofar. Rosh Hashanah demands reflection. Yom Kippur will demand repentance and fasting. But the Jewish calendar does not end there. It moves to Sukkot and then Simchat Torah, when Jews take the Torah from the ark, hold it in their arms and dance.

That progression says something essential about Judaism. It remembers the good and the bad. It prays. It fasts. It builds. It dances.

And it refuses to make sorrow the destination.

On a September night in New York, with antisemitism again confronting Jews on the streets outside, an old Jewish musical legend lifted his violin and played old Jewish melodies. And Jews clapped and danced in the aisles.

Itzhak Perlman and Andy Statman at The Beacon in NYC for Itzhak’s 81st birthday (made by First One Through with AI)

Related:

Time to Say Goodbye, With Love and Sorrow (December 2025)

The Audience Has Changed

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On May 21, 2025, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim walked out of a reception at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC. They were young Israeli Embassy employees and a couple. Lischinsky had bought a ring and planned to propose.

Alas, Elias Rodriguez, a pro-Palestinian anarchist, fired approximately 20 rounds at the couple shouting “free Palestine.” Inside the museum afterward, he allegedly said, “I did it for Palestine. I did it for Gaza.”

Rodriguez had brought an explanation with him.

His manifesto, Explication, dated the previous day, defended the “morality of armed demonstration.” He wrote that he had considered such violence justified during the 2014 Gaza war, but understood that most Americans then would have found it “illegible” and “insane.”

By 2025, he believed America was different. “I am glad that today at least there are many Americans for which the action will be highly legible and, in some funny way, the only sane thing to do.”

In his mind, the violence had not changed. The audience had.

Rodriguez described armed action as “theater and spectacle.” He had watched enormous demonstrations against Israel, accusations of genocide become commonplace and supporters of Israel portrayed as complicit in mass killing. Yet, he complained, “the rhetoric has not amounted to much.”

The violence would be the spectacle. The manifesto would tell the audience how to read it.

Especially because of the timing: May 20, 2025.

Rodriguez penned his manifesto on the same day that UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher told the BBC that 14,000 babies in Gaza would die within 48 hours unless aid reached them.

The claim was completely false. The comment was a distorted derivative of a report that approximately 14,000 cases of severe acute malnutrition among young children might occur over the next year. And he placed all of the blame on Israel.

The accusation spread quickly. That afternoon, CAIR issued a call for action after the UN said 14,000 Palestinian babies could die under what CAIR called Israel’s “forced starvation campaign.” Genocide supplied the larger charge.

Shortly before his murder the next day, Lischinsky reportedly shared criticism of Fletcher’s claim that called it a “blood libel.” The blood libel was much more than a charge of accusing Jews of killing children; it gave license to an audience to kill Jews in their defense.

Rodriguez had another word for encouraging the crowds to murder: Legible.

And he was right.

Eleven days later, in Boulder, Colorado, prosecutors say a man attacked a peaceful gathering supporting Israeli hostages with Molotov cocktails while shouting “Free Palestine.” One victim died.

In August 2026, popular pro-Palestinian podcaster Hasan Piker said that if American Jews continued publicly associating themselves with Israel, “eventually someone’s going to come around and take action, not against the State of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.” Keep associating with those falsely accused of genocide, and people will come for you.

Anger and frustration are being harnessed through podcasts and manifestos to inflame passions and violence. The audience is all too happy to join the spectacle these days.

Because the violence is legible.

So crowds cheer on the killer of a United Healthcare executive, gunned down in the streets. They listen to their alt-left congressman shout on the streets that the rape of Jewish women never happened, to turn the victims into aggressors. They watch an Ariane Grande video of a frustrated musician cutting old white men to pieces to rapture and applause.

Zeteo’s Mehdi Hasan at the alt-left Zohran Mamdani NYC mayoral victory party with Hasan Piker and Jamaal Bowman, November 2025. (start at 52:00)

Legible.

Once upon a time – say 2010 – the mass murder by an angry person was viewed through a lens of pity and disbelief. What did we do as a society that enabled isolation and frustration to turn into heinous violence? Pearl Jam’s Jeremy is a cry out of pain – for the victims and the shooter. There are no winners, just anguish.

No longer. The audience has changed. We revel in the spectacle. If the dead are cast as privileged and powerful, part of a caste that keeps people down, the revolution will celebrate the rolled heads.

More, they will want to participate.

There has always been violence, assassinations and terrorism. But we are no longer appalled universally, only selectively. The crowds have read the jihadi-socialist manifestos and they appallingly read “sane.” LEGIBLE.

James Zogby, President of the Arab American Institute, spoke to the United Nations in June 2023 – months before the October 7 massacre of Israelis by Gazans – and bemoaned “that a recent poll shows a majority of Palestinians rejecting moderate leadership, despairing of peaceful change and now favouring armed struggle? That tragic deformity in Palestinian political culture is the result of the continued brutality of the occupation.” He warned that the mob – his own people – had become so twisted that they were itching for Jewish blood.

That same deformity showed itself on American university campuses right after October 7. It has continued to spread outward to American streets as false charges of genocide and mass starvation make the violence “the only sane thing to do.“

And it is no longer just the alt-left drowning in the empathy swamp. All of those little screens that we carry every waking second make us an addicted audience, barraged by posts and podcasts, amplified by bots and armies of American foes. We listen to idiots and lies openly and frequently, and have lost our moral compass in the process.

We have reached a point where the reluctant assassin may become more willing to join the anarchy, believing the crowd might finally understand and appreciate mass murder as a noble cause, rather than a heinous crime.

We have crossed the tipping point of moral collapse. Sensing the panic, we point a finger at artificial intelligence as the problem, willfully blind that the toxin is already in the bloodstream. AI is just an accelerant, not the root of the sickness.

We are entering a new year in the Jewish calendar. As we read from the special Rosh Hashanah prayer book and ask God to have mercy on humanity, consider how many people have internalized very different – and deeply evil – texts and messages. Pray that the sound of the shofar will not only reach Heaven, but awaken the audience on earth from the hypnotic spell that has deformed their moral judgment.

Related:

The End of Old Politics: Attention Has Replaced Trust (August 2026)

Normalized Violence (April 2026)

The Broke-n Generation (December 2024)

The Asynchronous Audience At Jihadists’ Auto-da-Fe (November 2023)

Britain’s Only Acceptable Ethnic Cleansing

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Britain is suddenly alarmed about supposed “ethnic cleansing” in the West Bank.

The British government warns that Israeli policies could force Palestinian Arabs from parts of Judea and Samaria. It is sanctioning Israelis, condemning “settlements” and portraying demographic change in territory claimed by Palestinians as a grave moral offense.

Britain has seen ethnic cleansing in this territory before. Its reaction was very different.

In 1948, The Kingdom of Transjordan crossed the Jordan River and conquered Judea and Samaria and eastern Jerusalem. It then destroyed and expelled the Jewish communities that had lived across the territory. The ancient Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City was emptied of its Jews. Jews were then barred from their holiest sites, as synagogues were destroyed or desecrated.

Interior view of a ruined building with crumbling walls and debris, featuring an archway and a soldier standing amidst the ruins.
Jordanian soldiers destroyed the Hurva Synagogue in 1949

The result was remarkably complete: the territory Jordan occupied was ethnically cleansed of Jews. And less than two years later, Britain formally recognized Jordan’s union with the territory it had invaded and conquered, one of the only countries in the world to do so.

Jordan then made the demographic principle explicit. Its 1954 nationality law extended Jordanian nationality to former Palestinian citizens residing in the kingdom while expressly carving out “the Jews.”

Jordan expelled and excluded the Jews in its holy land, and Britain’s response was recognition.

In 2005, Britain would celebrate again, this time in Gaza.

Israel decided to dismantle every Jewish community in the Gaza Strip. Israeli soldiers physically removed roughly 8,000 Jews from their homes and twenty-one Jewish communities disappeared. A Jew-free Gaza emerged.

Britain did not describe this as ethnic cleansing. Prime Minister Tony Blair praised Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s “courage” and offered Britain’s “full support” for the withdrawal. His foreign secretary called it a hugely significant step toward peace.

Now consider 2026.

Britain warns against the possible displacement of Palestinian Arabs from Area C of the West Bank, territory that has remained under Israeli civil and security control under the Oslo framework pending a final agreement. It speaks of forcible displacement, imposes sanctions and treats the prospect of Palestinian Arabs losing their communities as intolerable.

The moral principle sounds admirable. It would be more convincing if Britain had ever applied it equally to Jews in the region.

When some Palestinian Arabs might be displaced from territory it hopes to use in a future Palestinian state, Britain suddenly discovers that removing a particular ethnic population from its homes is beyond the pale. Instead, England demands that the region be ethnically cleansed – of Jews – citing the antisemitic UN Security Council Resolution 2334.

There is a British consistency here: ethnic cleansing is only appropriate when Jews are removed.

For generations, British policy has treated the removal of Jews from disputed territory as compatible with peace. A Palestinian Gaza without Jews was progress. A Jordanian West Bank without Jews was acceptable. A future Palestinian state is still routinely imagined as a place where Jewish communities cannot remain.

Only the possibility of some Arab relocation produces moral outrage.

That exposes the deeper problem with the diplomatic vocabulary surrounding the conflict. “Two states” has quietly come to mean one multicultural Jewish state containing a large Arab minority alongside one Palestinian state expected to contain no Jews. One and one-half states for Arabs; half a state for Jews.

England understands the ethnic cleansing of Jews – it did it itself in 1290 – the only minority group to ever be expelled from the country. It seems to continue to only have a taste for that kind of hatred and ethnic cleansing, including in the Jewish homeland.

Names and Narrative: Antisemitism And Islamophobia

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We have a strange vocabulary for hatred.

Fear of Muslims is called Islamophobia. Hatred of Jews is called antisemitism.

One word announces fear (phobia) while the other focuses on hatred (anti).

Graffiti in London, England blames Jews on the September 11 terrorist attack that was committed by jihadi terrorists, in December 2019 during Hanukkah, or perhaps that terrorism was coming for Jews

Yet much of antisemitism has always been built on fear: fear of Jewish money, Jewish influence, Jewish intelligence, Jewish loyalty, Jewish networks, Jewish control. The classic antisemite does not merely dislike Jews. He believes Jews possess too much power and have things that do not rightfully belong to them.

That makes antisemitism, in a very literal sense, a phobia.

And comparing it with Islamophobia reveals something important about how the two prejudices work.

In Whole or Part

There are roughly 2 billion Muslims in the world and radical jihadists constitute a tiny fraction of them. Yet that fringe has caused extraordinary damage. Nineteen radical Islamic hijackers carried out September 11. ISIS murdered thousands and terrorized millions while representing a small share of the world’s Muslims.

That creates a fear rooted in uncertainty. The danger from jihadists is real; Islamophobia spreads that danger to innocent non-jihadi Muslims.

Antisemitism runs in the opposite direction.

There are only about 15 million Jews in the world. Their tiny numbers become part of the conspiracy. Jews constitute a fraction of one percent of humanity, yet Jews have achieved prominence in business, finance, academia, science, politics, media and culture.

The antisemite sees those accomplishments and converts disproportionate success into disproportionate power. Individual Jews disappear. There is only the Jews, a coordinated power.

Zero Sum Grievance Versus Sporadic Safety

There is a crucial difference between the fears.

Islamophobia begins with the violent actions of some Muslims and enlarges the circle of suspicion. Even the person consumed by fear of jihadism understands that every Muslim cannot be a jihadist. But the Muslim stranger becomes frightening because he might belong to the dangerous subset. There could be an attack at discrete moments in time.

Fear of Jews is about undeserved and evil coordinated power. It has an economic component which makes the fear especially combustible: Jews have something at the expense of others. The view of a zero sum game is that the Jewish power comes at the expense of your power; their wealth is taken from your wealth. If someone believes Jews control banks, corporations, universities, governments or the media, almost any personal grievance can acquire a Jewish culprit.

Movement

That difference in the fears makes its spread very distinct. Those disillusioned with their status in life can find a scapegoat in Jews. Poor or lost a job? Probably the fault of the Jews. Your favorite politician lost? Probably Jewish money and influence. Your culture going in a direction you don’t like? Jews control the media and Hollywood. Don’t have a functioning country? Must be the fault of the Jews.

Antisemitism takes fear and a zero-sum philosophy and allows it to travel to the corners of the world which don’t even have Jews. It is inherently portable.

But Islamophobia is a localized fear. It is not within your mind about everything that makes you upset; it is a tangible fear of your physical safety. It has an address.

Consequent Actions of Antisemitism and Islamophobia

With such orientation, the vectors to attack Jews become multiple. Remove them from positions of power: vote them out of office, get them off boards of directors, expunge them from teaching positions. Make it impossible for them to live nearby through banning kosher meat, circumcision, an eruv. Cast their lobbying group as uniquely nefarious compared to vastly larger and more powerful non-Jewish lobbying groups.

The Islamophobes’ battle against Muslims is not removal of a handful of people but placing a barrier from admitting billions of people. Limit immigration from Muslim-majority countries. Block mosques or Islamic centers from being built in the community. Keep the tsunami at bay before they overwhelm.

Between Fear and Hate

We readily describe fear surrounding Muslims with a word ending in phobia. It inherently carries the meaning “irrational.” There really is no reason to fear Muslims is the embedded argument – despite the global terrorism committed by jihadi terrorists. The language tells us that one’s fear is really a bias.

Antisemitism runs in a different direction.

There have been centuries obsessed with Jewish power, Jewish influence, Jewish wealth, Jewish loyalty and Jewish control without putting fear anywhere in its name. Doing so gives the hatred the comfort of being rational. There are data points – there’s a wealthy Jewish man! – and the cascade of evil thoughts that he must be responsible for anything wrong in your life is not a crazy leap but an endorsed component of a corroding society. The cure for this toxin is being promoted by teachers’ unions and radical politicians: that Jews must be stripped of any wealth, possessions, title, honor or business and their inherently illegal items given to victims of preference.

“Islamophobia” tells us to stop the irrational fear which leads us to hateful actions; “Antisemitism” is wired as an accelerant in a society whose foundation is grievance and victimhood.

We are arriving at the 25th anniversary of the September 11 jihadi attacks on the United States and subsequent War on Terror. It was a battle against the radical Islamic terrorist group al Qaeda, and the various sister organizations such as the Taliban, ISIS and Boko Haram to different extents.

We are also coming to the third anniversary of the October 7 jihadi massacre in Israel and its subsequent multi-front war with the Islamic Republic of Iran and its various proxies of Hezbollah, the Houthis and Hamas.

Lost in these anniversaries and large military battles against global jihadism is the softer war of words. Of civilian fear and hatred taking place on city streets and school campuses. Of the vastly disproportionate attacks on Jews than on Muslims in the English-speaking world.

There is no quick fix to stopping the torrent of attacks on Jews. But perhaps it is time to change the English term for Jew hatred to something like “Jewphobia” which forces people to confront their hatred as both irrational and anchored in fear. And then maybe the United Nations would finally recognize it the way it has elevated the less common “Islamophobia,” encourage governments and institutions to fight the scourge, as well as confront its own deep hostility for Jews around the world.

When the Covenant Changes Tense

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For most of the Torah, the covenant looks backward.

God remembers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Their children inherit promises made before they were born. The land before them was promised to their fathers.

Jewish history begins with memory.

Then, near the end of the Torah, the direction reverses.

Moses gathers the people on the edge of the Land of Israel and tells them:

“Not with you alone do I make this covenant… but with those who are standing here with us today before the Lord our God, and with those who are not here with us today.” (Deuteronomy 29:13–14)

The covenant changes tense. Until now, we are bound to people who came before us. Now people who do not yet exist are bound to us.

A Jewish father blesses his son at the Kotel in Jerusalem, as he puts on tefillin for the first time (photo: FirstOneThrough)

Abraham enters a covenant whose fulfillment he will never see. Generations later, his descendants stand together and accept a covenant for generations they will never see.

Genesis says: You are here because of those who came before you.
Nitzavim says: Those who come after you are part of what you do here.

And connecting them is the land.

Almost immediately after extending the covenant to generations yet unborn, Moses foretells that the Jewish people will be scattered among the nations. Then God will gather them and “bring you to the land that your fathers possessed, and you shall possess it.” (Deuteronomy 30:5)

The land comes from the fathers.
The covenant passes to the children.
Exile comes between them.
And still the chain holds.

It is a story that cannot begin at a convenient modern date. Jews do not suddenly appear in Europe, in Israel in 1948, or Jerusalem in 1967. Nitzavim describes a people moving through time, bound backward to its ancestors and forward to its descendants, with the land running through it all.

The New York Times Has Some Questions for the Jews

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The New York Times wants to know what New York Jews think about Israel.

Its new questionnaire asks Jewish New Yorkers whether they think about Israel more since October 7. Whether their opinion of Israel has changed. Whether they call themselves Zionists. Whether they have become more vocal or politically active.

The frame is revealing.

The Times wants to know how Israel has changed the Jews.

It does not ask whether October 7 changed their opinion of Hamas.

Did the murder, rape and kidnapping of Israelis change their understanding of the conflict? Did years of Israelis held hostage in Gaza change it? What have they learned about Hamas, its genocidal antisemitic foundational charter, Palestinian politics or jihadist movements committed to Israel’s destruction?

Those questions aren’t there.

Neither is another actor in the past three years: the New York Times.

Has its coverage changed your trust in the newspaper? Do you believe its reporting on Israel and Gaza has been fair? Has its treatment of antisemitism changed your relationship with the paper? Has its language surrounding “genocide”, “occupation” and “resistance” changed how you understand the conflict or how you perceive of the media?

The newspaper wants to know what changed the Jews without asking whether the newspaper helped change them.

Then there is the matter of which Jews.

The questionnaire asks whether you are a Jewish New Yorker. It does not ask whether you are 22 or 72. Orthodox, Conservative, Reform or secular. Democrat, Republican or independent. Progressive, moderate or conservative. Those differences may explain the answers, as discussed in many other polls.

More important, this is an open call published by the New York Times. It is not a random survey of New York Jews. For years, parts of the Jewish community have fought bitterly with the paper over its coverage of Israel and antisemitism. Many longtime Jewish readers have publicly canceled their subscriptions over that coverage. Thousands more privately.

The Jews most alienated by the Times may also be the least likely to see its callout, trust its reporter or volunteer their thoughts. Jews comfortable with the newspaper and its worldview may be more inclined to respond, biasing the poll results. It could collect hundreds of responses showing its Jewish respondents moving away from Israel without knowing whether the Jews moved or its sample did.

Then comes the missing questionnaire.

Where are the questions for Arab and Muslim New Yorkers?

Did October 7 change your opinion of Hamas? Do you consider Hamas a terrorist organization? Do you believe Jews are entitled to national self-determination? Should Jews be allowed to freely access and pray at their holiest site? Should Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups surrender their weapons? Has your opinion of Israel changed? Of Jews?

Those answers would tell New Yorkers quite a lot too.

And the timing is particularly ugly.

Hasan Piker has recently been asking his own version of precisely this question: How attached are American Jews to Israel?

Piker has called Israel “Jewish ISIS” and previously said Hamas was “a thousand times better” than Israel. More recently, he warned that if American Jews continue presenting themselves as deeply invested in Israel, eventually someone may take action against American Jews rather than Israel.

That is antisemitism dressed up as a warning.

And now the New York Times arrives with a questionnaire measuring whether Jewish New Yorkers still call themselves Zionists and whether their feelings about Israel have changed.

The disturbing convergence is the question itself: How attached are the Jews to Israel now? The New York Times wants to know. Millions of antisemites that follow Piker want to know.

ACTION ITEM

So answer the poll. But not their questions.

Tell the Times exactly how October 7 changed your thinking.

Tell it what you think about Hamas. Tell it what you have learned about jihadism, hostage-taking and fighters operating among civilians. Tell it whether Palestinian Arabs support for the October 7 massacre and Hamas have changed your understanding of the conflict.

Then tell it about the New York Times.

Tell it whether its coverage has increased or destroyed your trust in the newspaper—its language, its emphasis, its omissions, its telling of the Jihadi-Israel conflict.

Hasan Piker and The New York Times are polling Jews for their attachment towards Israel. Tell them what you think of the global jihad sweeping the world.

From Shut Up to Get Out

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There is a progression from intimidation and expulsion.

  • A heckler’s veto prevents you from speaking.
  • A chilling effect teaches you to remain silent.
  • Self-concealment teaches you to hide the identity that makes you a target.
  • Constructive exclusion makes the environment sufficiently hostile that you stay away or leave.
  • Forced expulsion completes the progression: someone else decides you must go.

American Jews have been moving through these stages over the last decade.

Don’t Speak

In 2015, Israeli philosopher Moshe Halbertal came to the University of Minnesota to lecture on the ethical obligations of militaries to protect civilians. Protesters repeatedly interrupted him, delaying his lecture for about half an hour as police removed them.

It was a classic heckler’s veto: make enough noise and the speaker cannot speak.

Eventually, Halbertal did.

Over time, intimidation becomes more efficient. People learn the consequences of speaking and begin censoring themselves. The expectation of the heckler creates the chilling effect.

Then the intimidation moved beyond speech.

Hide Who You Are

In May 2021, Hamas launched thousands of rockets at Israel and antisemitic incidents surged concurrently in the United States.

Aaron Keyak had served as Jewish engagement director for Joe Biden’s presidential campaign and would become the State Department’s deputy special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism. His advice to frightened American Jews was extraordinary: “If you fear for your life or physical safety take off your kippah and hide your magen david.”

The Jew walking down the street had given no speech and joined no protest. His Jewish identity itself made him a target.

The response from the highest levels of government was self-concealment: take off the kippah and hide the Star of David.

This was 2021, more than two years before the October 7 massacre.

Stay Out

After the October 7, 2023 massacre in Israel, the progression took over the Democratic Party.

Dana Nessel is Michigan’s attorney general, the state’s chief law-enforcement officer and its highest-ranking Jewish state official. This June she decided to stay away from the Michigan Democratic Party convention. “I don’t feel safe going,” Nessel said. She feared being chased, harassed, yelled at and booed because, she explained, “it’s been happening to me.”

Consider where the progression had reached: Michigan’s chief law-enforcement officer felt safer staying away from her own political party’s convention out of fear.

And Nessel is not alone.

Earlier in the summer, Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice David Wecht left the Democratic Party and became an independent. Wecht is Jewish, was elected as a Democrat and had once served in the leadership of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party. “Acquiescence to Jew-hatred is now disturbingly common among activists, leaders and even many elected officials in the Democratic Party,” he wrote. “I can no longer abide this.”

Nessel stayed away. Wecht walked away. Revulsed by what they saw happening inside the Democratic Party.

Get Out

The next stage has already begun.

In 2024, anti-Israel artists protesting at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts issued a list of demands. Among them: remove all “Zionist Board members and funders.” While the institution rejected the demand, its Jewish interim CEO, Sara Fenske Bahat, subsequently resigned, saying the climate surrounding Israel and Palestine in the Bay Area had become “untenable.”

The demand itself crossed the line into the final stage: Get them out.

If one needs proof, consider how the alt-left treated one of its own, NYC Mayor-endorsed politician Brad Lander. He was tossed from a far-left political rally in August 2026 because he was a “Zionist,” even though he is highly critical of Israel.

Democratic politician Brad Lander – supported by NYC Mayor, DSA’s own Zohran Mamdani – tossed from a rally because he is a “Zionist”

The heckler’s veto was already an assault on a basic American principle: everyone gets to enter the public square and speak. What has grown from it is far uglier and deeply un-American:

Don’t speak.
Don’t be seen.
Don’t come.
Get out.

This is intimidation being rewarded with territory. Each retreat gives the intimidators another piece of the public square: the microphone, the street, the political convention, the institution itself.

And this poison is now flourishing inside the Democratic Party.

A party that claims to champion minorities and protect people from intimidation now has a Jewish attorney general afraid to attend its own convention, a Jewish state supreme court justice who concluded that Jew-hatred had become sufficiently tolerated that he could no longer remain a Democrat, and an anti-Israel DSA-mayor-endorsed Jewish politician run out of the streets of New York.

That is disgraceful. It is frightening.

The American answer to intimidation is to protect the person being intimidated and confront the intimidator. Nobody should gain control of a microphone, a street, a political convention or an institution by making someone else afraid to enter it.

Leaders of the Democratic Party should understand what is happening inside its own tent. The heckler’s veto has metastasized into something deeply toxic and deeply un-American.

The hecklers no longer simply want to only decide what Jews may say. They want to expel Jews from the room.

Jews Never Left the Land Voluntarily And They Never Stopped Coming Back

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The Jewish story in the Land of Israel is often told with an enormous hole in the middle.

The script runs something like: there were ancient Jewish kingdoms and then Rome destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE. Jews were forced into exile, and then, nearly 1,800 years later, Zionists began arriving in Palestine.

That shorthand turns one of history’s longest relationships between a people and a land into an unexplained disappearance and sudden reappearance.

The actual story is more remarkable.

After the Destruction of the Second Temple

The destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE was catastrophic, but it did not empty the land of Jews. Six decades later, Jews launched the Bar Kokhba Revolt from Judea. After its defeat in 135, Roman repression devastated Jewish life in Judea and severely restricted Jews in Jerusalem.

Ancient coins minted during the Bar Kochba revolt

So Jewish life shifted north. The Galilee became its major center, particularly Tiberias and Sepphoris. Around 200 CE, Judah ha-Nasi compiled the Mishnah in the Land of Israel. Centuries later, Jewish scholars there produced the Jerusalem Talmud. Archaeology has uncovered synagogues across the country from this period.

The Jewish state was gone. The Jews were not.

Jerusalem, Tiberias, Safed and Hebron

The rulers changed repeatedly with new invaders: Roman, Byzantine, Muslim, Crusader, Mamluk and Ottoman. So did the size and location of the Jewish population.

Under early Muslim rule, Jews reestablished themselves in Jerusalem. The Crusader conquest brought another catastrophe, including killings and displacement.

Again, Jews returned.

In 1267, Nachmanides—Ramban—arrived in Jerusalem and helped rebuild its shattered Jewish community.

After the expulsion from Spain in 1492 and the Ottoman conquest in 1517, Safed became an international center of Jewish civilization, producing Joseph Karo, whose Shulchan Aruch became a foundational code of Jewish law, and Isaac Luria, whose teachings transformed Jewish mysticism.

Old synagogue in Safed / Tzfat (photo: FirstOneThrough)

Ottoman tax records make the population visible. Safed/Tzfat contained 233 Jewish households in 1525–26; by 1567–68 there were 945. Jews were also recorded in Jerusalem, Gaza, Nablus, Peki’in and elsewhere.

The Four Holy Cities

Over time, four cities became especially identified with Jewish life in the land: Jerusalem. Hebron. Safed. Tiberias.

Their Jewish populations rose and fell through war, disease, earthquakes, economic hardship and persecution. The communities kept being rebuilt, and Jews kept arriving.

Hundreds accompanied Judah HeHasid to Jerusalem in 1700. Hasidic Jews came from Eastern Europe in 1777. Beginning in 1808, disciples of the Vilna Gaon arrived in successive waves.

The cemetery in Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives has Jewish graves going back to the 15th century (photo: FirstOneThrough)

Follow the Population

By the nineteenth century, the continuity becomes difficult to miss. Moses Montefiore’s censuses recorded dramatic growth:

City18391875
Jerusalem2,91611,237
Safed1,3843,753
Tiberias8011,552
Hebron419939
Jaffa86660
Haifa138531

The communities covered by the census tripled from 6,173 Jews in 1839 to 18,672 in 1875.

Historical estimates differ because Ottoman-era demographic records were not modern censuses. But the trend is unmistakable. One reconstruction estimates roughly 6,700 Jews in the country in 1800, 42,900 in 1890 and 94,000 by 1914.

And Jews were not simply scattered individuals. By 1880, one reconstruction estimates Jews constituted approximately 57% of Jerusalem, 52% of Safed and 60% of Tiberias.

Modern Zionism Accelerated the Return

This is where conventional histories often begin. But it wasn’t the beginning; it was an acceleration.

Petah Tikva was founded in 1878, in part by Jews from the existing Jerusalem community. The First Aliyah began in the 1880s, helping establish and expand agricultural communities including Rishon LeZion, Zikhron Ya’akov and Rosh Pina.

The Second Aliyah brought another wave. In 1909, Jews founded Tel Aviv.

Meanwhile, something extraordinary was occurring: Hebrew returned as the everyday language of a society. A language preserved through centuries of prayer, scholarship and literature became the language of children, workers and shopkeepers.

What About the Land?

By the end of the British Mandate, Jews did not privately own most of Palestine. British statistics for April 1945 put Jewish landholdings at approximately 1.49 million dunams, or 5.67% of the total territory.

The remaining territory was not privately owned “Arab land.” It included state domain, desert, communal lands and other Ottoman and British legal classifications.

Jewish ownership was concentrated where Jewish society was developing. By the mid-1940s, historical land statistics put Jewish ownership at roughly 39% in the Jaffa/Tel Aviv subdistrict, 38% in Tiberias, 35% in Haifa, and 18% in Safed.

And much of this land had been purchased.

The British Survey of Palestine recorded a net 938,365 dunams purchased and registered by Jews between 1920 and the end of 1945 alone.

Presence, Memory, Return

The nearly 1,900 years between Rome and Israel can be understood through three words.

Presence. Jews continued living in the land, sometimes in substantial communities, despite conquest, persecution and repeated displacement.

Memory. Jews elsewhere continued facing Jerusalem in prayer, praying for return, remembering Jerusalem at weddings, ending Passover with the hope of being there the following year and financially supporting Jewish communities in the land.

Return. Ramban came in 1267 after the Crusades. Jews came from Spain after 1492. Many followed Judah HeHasid in 1700, the Hasidim in 1777, the disciples of the Vilna Gaon beginning in 1808, the First and Second Aliyahs, fleeing Russian pogroms and Nazism, and as survivors of the Holocaust.

The scale changed. The political objective changed. The ability to return changed.

1948 Was Not the Beginning

Beginning the story of Israel in 1948 – or even with Herzl in 1897 – fundamentally distorts Jewish history. Those were not years when Jews suddenly showed up. They were the times when Jews accelerated their return and became self-governing once again.

The Israeli flag waves in the foreground, with the white domes of the rebuilt Tiferet Israel and Hurva Synagogues in the center, and the grey Al Aqsa mosque dome to the right. In the distance, cranes build new residential towers in the western parts of the city. (photo: FirstOneThrough)

Related:

The Greatest Decolonization Story, Inverted (August 2026)

The Greatest Decolonization Story, Inverted

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The Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium (LESMC) has an ambitious mission. It calls for “anti-racist and decolonial pedagogy” in which students study imperialism and oppression, resistance movements and the struggles of peoples to reclaim their identity and agency.

By those standards, one extraordinary case study should sit near the center of the curriculum: The Jews.

Israel may be one of history’s greatest examples of successful decolonization.

Indigenous

Jewish civilization did not originate in Europe. It arose in the Land of Israel.

Israel, Judah, Judea, Jerusalem and Zion are not modern colonial names. They are ancient names embedded in Jewish history. Judaism developed there. The Hebrew Bible is centered there. Jewish holidays follow its seasons and agricultural cycles. Jerusalem became the religious and national center of the Jewish people.

1630 Map of the Israelite tribes in the holy land, together with images on the border from the life of the Jewish prophet Moses, and the Children of Israel’s exodus from Egypt

Even the people’s name—Israel—is ancient.

Colonized

Then came conquest. Jewish kingdoms were conquered by successive imperial powers, including the Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks and Romans.

The Babylonians destroyed the First Temple and carried many Jews into exile. Rome later destroyed the Second Temple, crushed Jewish revolts and accelerated the dispersion that would define Jewish existence for centuries.

The Jewish people lost sovereignty in its own homeland but never its connection.

Dispossessed—but Not Disconnected

Dispersion scattered the Jews without eliminating Jewish peoplehood. Jews in Poland did not simply become Poles. Jews in Morocco did not simply become Moroccans. Jews in Iraq did not simply become Iraqis.

Across continents, they retained a common religion, history, calendar and connection to the same ancestral land. They prayed toward Jerusalem. They ended Passover with “Next year in Jerusalem.” Hebrew survived as the language of scripture, prayer and scholarship.

And Jews never disappeared from the land itself. Jewish communities remained through centuries of foreign rule.

Resistance

Jewish history is also a story of resistance. The Maccabees resisted Seleucid repression and restored Jewish sovereignty. Jews later rebelled against Rome.

Judah the Maccabee, Wood engraving by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (German painter, 1794 – 1872), published in 1860.

After military resistance became impossible, survival itself became resistance. A small, scattered minority endured expulsions, forced conversions, discriminatory laws and massacres without surrendering its identity.

Eventually came Zionism: the modern movement to restore Jewish national self-determination where Jewish national history began.

A stateless people sought to cease being stateless.

Decolonization

And then something extraordinary happened. The dispersed people returned in large numbers.

There was no Jewish Britain or France directing an overseas colony. Jews came from Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere to the land at the center of their collective history.

They restored sovereignty.

And they accomplished perhaps their most astonishing act of cultural decolonization: they revived Hebrew.

Not Polish, Russian, German or Arabic. Their ancestral language became the everyday language of children, schools, newspapers, commerce and government.

They made Jerusalem their capital. They called their national movement Zionism, after Zion.

So apply LESMC’s vocabulary consistently: Indigenous. Conquered. Dispossessed. Resistance. Return. Cultural restoration. Self-determination.

The Jewish story fits remarkably well.

So What Happened?

Why does this seemingly perfect LESMC case study become almost its opposite when the curriculum reaches Israel?

Some of the people shaping the curriculum help explain the disconnect.

Samia Shoman, a Palestinian-American member of LESMC’s leadership, co-coordinates the Teach Palestine Project, which develops curricula for American schools. Her materials describe Israel as an “institutionalized system of oppression and apartheid.” After California rewrote its original ethnic-studies curriculum, Shoman blamed “Zionist and other rightwing lobbyists” for what she said was the destruction of its “anti-racist, decolonial and liberatory” approach.

Jody Sokolower, who is Jewish, co-coordinates Teach Palestine. Her student history says Britain promised Palestine to Zionists and describes Zionists as subsequently carrying out plans to push Palestinian Arabs and Britain out. The larger Teach Palestine curriculum explicitly seeks to put these perspectives into American classrooms.

Guadalupe Carrasco Cardona, a founding member of Liberated Ethnic Studies, has spent her career developing what LESMC itself describes as “critical curriculum” and helped build the Liberated alternative after the original California curriculum was substantially changed.

This isn’t a peripheral connection. LESMC lists Shoman, Cardona and Theresa Montaño among its leadership, while Teach Palestine produces lessons connecting the conflict to forced relocation, criminalization and a “culture of resistance.”

“Zionism is a nationalist, colonial ideology that, from the late 19th century on, has called for the creation and expansion of Israel as a Jewish state in historic Palestine by any means necessary. As support for Palestine and criticism of Israel’s apartheid policies have grown in the US and internationally, Zionist organizations have stepped up their efforts to silence
discussion of Palestine/Israel in movement circles, on college campuses, and now in K–12 education.” – Teach Palestine’s Understanding Zionist Backlash

Now the inversion makes more sense.

A framework supposedly built to recognize indigeneity, dispossession, resistance and decolonization encounters a people whose history contains all four—but influential architects approach Jewish national restoration through an anti-Zionist and settler-colonial lens.

So:

The indigenous become settlers.
The dispossessed become colonizers.
Return becomes colonialism.
National liberation becomes oppression.

The Jews should be a textbook LESMC case study: an ancient people conquered and dispersed, preserving its identity and ancestral language for centuries, returning home, reviving that language and restoring sovereignty.

Instead, one of history’s most remarkable decolonization stories is recast as colonization.

The history didn’t change. The ideological lens did.

ACTION ITEM

Be involved in your local school board and investigate the materials used in the classroom.

Judea, Long, Long Before Muhammad

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Long before the Islamic prophet Muhammad was born, long before Arab armies invaded Jerusalem, there was Judea.

It was called Judea in the Books of Maccabees. The Greek geographer Strabo called it Judea. Josephus called it Judea. The Roman historian Tacitus called it Judea. The Christian New Testament called it Judea. Rome governed a province called Judaea.

And when the Romans defeated the Jews there, they minted coins celebrating IVDAEA CAPTA — “Judea Captured.”

Roman coin from 71AD with Emperor Vespesian on one side and “Judea Capta” on the other

All of that happened centuries before Muhammad was born in Arabia and Arabs invaded the Jewish holy land.

Yet today WAFA, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, describes Israel’s use of “Judea and Samaria” as an effort to give its “bogus claims… a veneer of historical and religious legitimacy.”

Bogus?

The Romans weren’t Zionists. Tacitus wasn’t working for the Israeli government. Roman coins celebrating the defeat of a Jewish rebellion certainly weren’t designed to manufacture Jewish history.

They called it Judea because Judea was its name.

And Judea, Judah and Jew share the same historical root. The Jewish people carry the connection to this land in their very name.

So why does the Palestinian Authority choose to call that heritage and homeland claim “bogus”?

Perhaps because acknowledging Judea creates an enormous problem for the narrative the PA and WAFA promote every day, calling Jews living in the land of Israel as “colonists.” But colonizers are outsiders who arrive in someone else’s homeland. It becomes considerably harder to sustain that description while acknowledging that the people being called colonizers take their name from the very land in which they supposedly have no indigenous history.

This is antisemitic historical erasure—and it should be condemned as such.

It should be condemned at the United Nations. It should be condemned by governments that have chosen in recent years to recognize a Palestinian state. Britain, Canada and others should demand something elementary in return: recognition of the history and heritage of the Jewish people.

Because recognition cannot sensibly run in only one direction.

If the Palestinian Authority asks the world to recognize the local Arabs attachment to this land while its own official news agency dismisses the Jewish people’s vastly documented attachment as “bogus,” the problem is larger than terminology.

It goes to coexistence.

Two peoples cannot make peace if one insists that acknowledging the other’s history is itself illegitimate. A Palestinian state cannot be built on the proposition that Jewish history deserves international negation.

ACTION ITEM

Contact governments of Canada, Britain, France, Australia, Mexico and others that they demand that the Palestinian Authority stop calling the long Jewish history in the holy land “bogus.”