How do you comprehend six million murdered Jews? One million murdered children?
The numbers are so large that the human mind struggles to grasp it. Six million becomes a statistic. A statistic becomes an abstraction. And an abstraction risks becoming forgettable.
For decades, Holocaust educators wrestled with that problem. Their answer was simple: stop counting and start remembering.
Programs such as Names, Not Numbers were created in Jewish schools to teach students that every Holocaust victim was an individual human being. Students interviewed survivors, recorded testimonies, learned family histories, and transformed statistics back into people. The goal was not merely to teach history. It was to restore identity to those whom the Nazis sought to erase.
The same idea appeared in the remarkable documentary Paper Clips.
In the film, students in a small town in Tennessee learned that six million was too large a number to understand. They discovered that Norwegians had worn paper clips as symbols of resistance to Nazi occupation and decided to collect six million paper clips – one for every murdered Jew.
As the clips accumulated, the students began to understand something profound. It was hard to gather millions of ordinary clips – it required enormous resources and participation of people and organizations far and wide. That millions of people could be exterminated deliberately was terrifying.
The educational programs also sought to do more than humanize the victims and demonstrate the scale of the atrocities.
Nazis literally transformed people into numbers. Upon arrival at Auschwitz, many prisoners were stripped of their names and tattooed with identification numbers. It was part of a larger project to erase individuality, dignity, and humanity. The Holocaust was not only a campaign to murder Jews. It was a campaign to reduce them to anonymous units in a machinery of extermination.
Jewish children display tattooed numbers that Nazis put on their arms during the Holocaust
The Holocaust was not simply a story within a war. More than one million Jewish children were murdered not because they were caught in a battlefield, not because they belonged to an opposing army, but because they were Jewish. The Nazi regime actively hunted them for liquidation. Jewish babies, toddlers, and schoolchildren were marked for death from birth.
They were not collateral damage. They were targets.
For decades, educators, museums, survivors, and Jewish communities worked to preserve those names and those stories. The idea that victims should be remembered as human beings rather than statistics became one of the defining themes of Holocaust education around the world.
The slogan echoes language that Holocaust educators spent generations developing. It draws upon a framework created to explain why victims of genocide should be remembered as individuals rather than numbers.
Palestinian Arabs are using a cruel tool in a flimsy attempt to wipe away their own guilt for launching a genocidal war with broad support, and for deliberately banning children from entering the tunnel infrastructure that leadership spent years and billions of dollars constructing. The Palestinian Authority is not merely making the dead children martyrs at someone else’s hands rather than their own, but deliberately lifting the campaign from an actual genocide. They have turned Holocaust remembrance against the Jewish state.
This is a moral perversion.
The Holocaust was a state-directed project of extermination whose goal was the disappearance of the Jewish people. Israel’s war against Hamas is a war against an armed movement that invaded Israel, massacred civilians, took hostages, and openly declares its intention to destroy the Jewish state.
Equating those realities with the Holocaust is not simply immoral but antisemitic. Borrowing the language developed to remember murdered Jews is not simply appropriation but sadistic.
Names, Not Numbers was created to ensure that the victims of history’s greatest campaign of anti-Jewish extermination would never be reduced to statistics. To take that language and deploy it as part of a campaign that casts Israel as Nazi Germany not only vilifies Israel unjustly but negates the Holocaust of its meaning and mocks the memory of a million murdered Jewish children.
I took this photograph at the 9/11 memorial in Westchester the morning after the Knicks’ victory. Above the memorial, two airplane contrails crossed in the sky. For a moment, the come from behind basketball victories and terrorist tragedies made time collapse. The memory of loss, the joy of victory, and the story of New York itself all appeared in a single frame.
No city I know lives more intensely between triumph and tragedy.
This is the city that stood at the center of the world, nearly went bankrupt, reinvented itself, endured the horror of September 11th, and somehow found a way to rise again. It is a place of breathtaking architecture, relentless ambition, and an economy that continues to attract dreamers from every corner of the globe.
It is also a city of contradictions. A city capable of extraordinary tolerance and extraordinary intolerance. A city that nurtured one of the greatest Jewish communities in history, yet today struggles with normalized antisemitism many thought belonged to the past. A city whose institutions remain among the world’s finest, yet whose values are constantly being tested.
For much of my life, I thought Sinatra’s line—“If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere”—meant New York was the ultimate destination. The summit. The place where success itself was measured.
Standing beneath this memorial, I wondered whether I had misunderstood the lyric.
Maybe New York’s greatest lesson is not that it’s the “top of the heap.” Maybe its lesson is resilience.
To make it in New York is to learn how to navigate uncertainty. To endure setbacks. To celebrate victories without believing they will last forever, and to face disappointments without believing they are permanent. The city rises, falls, and rises again. So do the people who call it home.
And if you learn to survive the waves here, you will never fear the next horizon.
The children who dominate New York’s Israel parade are no longer the children who dominate Jewish education.
Each spring, Fifth Avenue fills with students from Modern Orthodox and Religious Zionist schools waving Israeli flags, singing Hebrew songs, and celebrating the Jewish state. Yet these students represent only a small fraction of Jewish children in the New York metropolitan area. The largest group of Jewish children attends public and secular private schools. The largest group attending Jewish schools is Chassidic and Yeshivish.
Jewish yeshiva day school students and faculty march up Fifth Avenue in New York City’s Israel parade, May 31, 2026 (photo: First One Through)
That reality raises an important question about the future of one of American Jewry’s most visible public events.
The parade’s own history reflects the evolution of American Jewish identity.
When it was founded in 1964, it was called the Youth Salute to Israel Parade. The name reflected its era. Israel was only sixteen years old. The Holocaust was still within living memory. American Jews were not merely celebrating Israel; they were standing with it.
In 2011, the event became the Celebrate Israel Parade. Israel was no longer a struggling young state. It was a global technology center, a military power, and home to millions of Jews. The emphasis shifted from solidarity to celebration.
After October 7, the parade adopted a third name: Israel Day on Fifth.
The parade’s three names trace the evolution of American Zionism itself. The first generation saluted Israel. The second celebrated Israel.
Today, the challenge is different. Support for Israel can no longer be assumed, and Jewish unity can no longer be taken for granted. The question is whether Israel can continue to serve as a bridge connecting an increasingly diverse Jewish community.
The challenge is particularly visible when looking at Jewish children in the greater NYC area.
The best available estimates suggest that roughly 450,000 to 500,000 Jewish school-age children live in the greater New York metropolitan area. About 170,000 attend Jewish day schools and yeshivot.
Of those, roughly 130,000 to 140,000 attend Chassidic and Yeshivish schools, compared with only 20,000 to 25,000 in Modern Orthodox schools. Outside the day-school world are another 280,000 to 330,000 Jewish children attending public schools, secular private schools, Catholic schools, and other educational settings.
Yet anyone watching the parade could be forgiven for drawing the opposite conclusion.
The schools most visible on Fifth Avenue are overwhelmingly Modern Orthodox and Religious Zionist institutions. They are among the most committed supporters of Israel in American Jewish life. But they represent only a small share of Jewish youth. The fastest-growing segment of Jewish education is Chassidic and Yeshivish. The largest segment of Jewish children overall attends public and secular private schools.
The parade therefore showcases some of the most engaged Jewish children in America, but not necessarily the full spectrum of Jewish youth.
That matters because Israel remains one of the few ideas capable of connecting Jews across denominational, ideological, and educational lines. At a moment when Jewish attachment to Israel is increasingly challenged on college campuses, contested on social media, and questioned in parts of American public life, institutions that connect young Jews to Israel have become more important, not less.
If the goal is Jewish unity in the decades ahead, the parade may need to ask a different question.
Rather than “How do we celebrate Israel?” the question may be “How do we bring the Jewish people together around Israel?”
A future parade organized around Am Yisrael rather than a particular expression of Zionism could create room for every community to participate in its own way.
Charedi schools could march under banners celebrating Torah in the Land of Israel.
Public-school students could march through camps, youth groups, synagogue programs, and community organizations.
Modern Orthodox schools could continue expressing their Religious Zionist vision.
Israeli cultural groups, charities, universities, first responders, and innovation organizations would all still have their place.
This would be Am Yisrael Day on Fifth Avenue.
The original parade was created to demonstrate solidarity with a young Jewish state. The next challenge is ensuring that future generations of American Jews remain connected both to Israel and to one another.
Should the future of the parade remain with the niche schools that already fill Fifth Avenue, it will become a symbol of the fragmentation of Israel support even within the Jewish community, let around the broader world. That would not bode well for Jewish New Yorkers or Israel.
The first generation saluted Israel. The second celebrated Israel. The challenge for the third generation is to ensure that Israel remains a force capable of uniting the Jewish people.
Every modern humanitarian organization insists the same thing: suffering is not a business. The starving child is not a marketing asset. The bombed hospital is not a fundraising funnel. The crying mother under rubble is not a revenue generator.
Then the annual reports arrive.
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) / Doctors Without Borders crossed roughly €2.3 billion in annual revenue in 2022. Then roughly €2.35 billion in 2023 and €2.36 billion in 2024. Three consecutive years above €2 billion. Ninety-eight percent of funding came from private donors. More than seven million donors worldwide.
The organization presents this as proof of global compassion. It is also evidence of something else: misery has become one of the most effective fundraising products on earth. Especially if loaded with charges: “Genocide.” “Starvation.” “Ethnic cleansing.”
The humanitarian industry now operates inside the same emotional attention economy that drives political campaigns, cable news, and social media outrage. The more horrifying the imagery, the more morally charged the narrative, the more emotionally shattered the audience becomes, the faster the money moves.
And nobody understands this dynamic better than MSF.
MSF’s public communications increasingly fused emotionally maximalist language with direct fundraising infrastructure. A visitor no longer encountered merely medical updates. They encountered emotional conversion architecture.
The modern humanitarian sector has discovered what every digital platform already knows: emotionally devastating content converts. A dusty child under rubble produces more engagement than a policy paper. A charge of genocide and starvation moves directly into emotional reflex.
The uglier the images and explosive the charges, the healthier the fundraising pipeline becomes.
Doctors Without Borders is very selective in its explosive terminology regarding Israel. For MSF, Israel is the cause of all the ills in Gaza, not Hamas. Israel is directly called out, not the genocidal terrorist group that launched the war and hides in tunnels without letting civilians use them for protection. No excuse proffered by Israel will satisfy.
Doctors Without Borders doesn’t do this in other conflicts. Not in Sudan nor Somalia. Not in Syria nor Haiti. In those wars, either no one is called out or “all sides” are vilified.
And MSF takes its anti-Israel campaign on the road. Wherever Israel is dragged into a defensive war against those determined to annihilate it, like Lebanon and Iran, MSF is standing guard and pointing fingers.
MSF does not limit itself to smear campaigns against Israel. It is a full lobbying shop, taking out full page ads in newspapers to rally the public against Israel. It pushes governments to stop supporting Israel in its defensive war.
So it is no surprise that MSF has officially backed the entire Iranian proxy war against Israel, telling the world that it rushes to protect “Gaza, Lebanon and Iran” from Israel.
Doctors Without Borders: 1) runs to assist jihadists in their active war against Israel; 2) raises money claiming the belligerent parties are the victims; 3) lobbies to have governments stop supporting Israel and 4) calls for the masses to protest the Jewish State. It does all of this, uniquely in Israel’s war.
Doctors Without Borders is not a humanitarian organization but an active instrument in the war to destroy Israel.
Every May, “Nakba Day” protests erupt across Western cities under the claimed banner of justice and liberation. Organizers describe them as commemorations of displacement and suffering. Yet listen carefully to the chants, read the signs, and study the ideology driving many of these demonstrations, and a darker reality emerges.
Nakba Day events are not about building a future alongside a Jewish state. They are about keeping alive the dream that the Jewish state should never have existed at all, and must be destroyed.
That is why the rhetoric so often revolves around “resistance until liberation,” “from the river to the sea,” and “globalize the intifada.” The message is unmistakable. The war of 1948 is not viewed as tragic history. It is viewed as unfinished business.
For 78 years, generations of the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) and their supporters have been taught that the central injustice was not war itself, nor the suffering that war inevitably unleashed on all sides, but Jewish sovereignty. The catastrophe, in this telling, was that Jews regained independence anywhere in their ancestral homeland.
That poisonous premise has trapped both Palestinian Arabs and Israelis inside an endless cycle of bloodshed.
A movement built around the belief that Israel must someday disappear cannot produce coexistence. A political culture that teaches Jews are foreign colonial invaders rather than an indigenous Middle Eastern people returning to the land where Jewish civilization was born cannot produce peace. A worldview that refuses to acknowledge Jewish history in Jerusalem, Jewish ties to Hebron, or the sanctity of the Temple Mount to Judaism is rooted in antisemitism, not “anti-Zionism.” It is a deep “deformity” in Palestinian culture.
And so Nakba Day has increasingly become less a memorial to suffering than a ritual of perpetual war.
There is nothing wrong with mourning loss. Every nation remembers tragedy. The problem begins when remembrance becomes a doctrine that denies another people’s right to exist. To basic human rights. No peace movement can emerge from teaching generation after generation that coexistence itself is betrayal.
It is time to break that cycle.
Replace Nakba Day with Two State Day. A day dedicated not to reversing 1948, but to building 2048.
Imagine a new annual movement where Palestinian Arabs openly recognize that Jews are indigenous to the Land of Israel. One where activists acknowledge that Jewish attachment to Jerusalem did not begin in 1967 or 1948, but stretches back thousands of years. One where the Temple Mount is recognized not merely as a Muslim site built atop forgotten ruins, but as the spiritual center of Jewish civilization.
Imagine a Two State Day where Palestinian leaders finally say openly that Jews are not crusaders, not European interlopers, not temporary occupiers, but a people who originated in the very land they returned to.
And imagine Israeli Jews responding not with suspicion, but with an outstretched hand.
Imagine Israeli Independence Day celebrations where Muslim neighbors, Arab citizens, and Palestinians willing to embrace coexistence are invited to participate. Imagine Jewish speakers recognizing Palestinian suffering and aspirations, while Muslim speakers recognize Jewish indigenousness, Jewish history, and Israel’s permanence. Imagine both peoples publicly declaring that neither side is leaving and neither side’s history will be erased.
That would not erase either people’s narrative. It would humanize both.
The current version of Nakba politics freezes Palestinians psychologically in 1948, teaching generation after generation that justice means reversing history rather than building a future. It glorifies “resistance-violence” while discouraging reconciliation. It romanticizes intifada while Palestinians themselves continue paying the price in blood, corruption, isolation, and failed leadership.
This ideology has harmed Palestinians no less than Israelis.
Every year spent teaching children that Haifa, Jaffa, and Tel Aviv must someday be “liberated” is another year not spent building functioning institutions, economic opportunity, civil society, or genuine pathways to coexistence. Every rally that denies Jewish legitimacy hardens Israelis further against compromise and strengthens extremists on all sides.
The world has already seen where this road leads. October 7 was not born in a vacuum. It emerged from decades of indoctrination insisting that Jewish sovereignty itself is intolerable “in any part of Palestine” and that violence against it is inherently righteous “resistance.” The cheering crowds in Western capitals after the massacre exposed how deeply this toxic worldview has spread far beyond Gaza, chumming for the anti-Jewish horde.
But history is not destiny.
Two State Day could become something profoundly different. A day not of denial, but of mutual recognition. A day where SAPs mourn losses without denying Jewish legitimacy. A day where Jews acknowledge Palestinian Arab suffering without questioning Israel’s basic right to exist. A day where both peoples reject the poison of perpetual grievance and choose coexistence over endless war.
The future cannot belong to people still marching psychologically toward 1948. It must belong to those willing to build 2048.
A future where Palestinian children are not taught that Jews are foreign usurpers, but neighbors with ancient roots in the same land. A future where Jewish children no longer grow up expecting every concession to be answered with more violence. A future where the Temple Mount is not a symbol of exclusion, but proof that the land carries the sacred history of multiple peoples.
Real peace will never emerge from chants demanding the disappearance of one side or the other. It begins only when both peoples recognize each other’s humanity, legitimacy, and permanence.
The defining moral line of civilization is simple: civilians are off limits.
Once that line breaks, atrocity is no longer an exception. It becomes a method.
Over the last five years, some of the worst deliberate mass killings of civilians have come at the hands of jihadist movements and regimes built on political Islam.
In Sudan, militias tied to the Rapid Support Forces slaughtered an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 civilians, largely from the Masalit community. Whole neighborhoods were emptied through organized murder.
On October 7, thousands of Gazans crossed into Israel and hunted Jewish civilians deliberately—families in their homes, young people at the Nova Music Festival, children, the elderly. Terror itself was the objective.
In Iran, the regime’s 2025–2026 crackdown on protests has left more than 6,000 civilians dead, according to rights monitors, killed for dissent against an Islamic revolutionary order.
Across Nigeria and the Sahel, Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province continue village massacres, church bombings, kidnappings, and executions. Civilians are the intended victims.
These conflicts differ in geography and politics. Sudan is tribal and ethnic. Hamas is nationalist and religious. Iran is a regime. Boko Haram is insurgent.
What unites them is the same moral collapse: the civilian is no longer protected by being uninvolved. Civilian blood becomes a signal of conviction.
And here is where the West has developed its own moral blind spot.
For years, parts of the activist left have embraced an oppressor-oppressed framework so rigid that civilian status itself becomes negotiable. The first question is no longer who was killed, but who held power.
That inversion was laid bare after October 7, when elements within Democratic Socialists of America and allied activist circles framed the massacre in the language of “resistance” and “decolonization,” making slaughter politically understandable so long as it came from the “oppressed.”
The jihadist says civilians may die because ideology sanctifies it. The regime says civilians may die because dissent threatens power. The activist says civilians may die because power determines innocence.
Different justifications. Same result.
Once innocence becomes conditional, civilization becomes conditional too.
Because the moment civilians become fair game, everyone eventually becomes fair game.
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.
When rabbis portray Israel as a moral problem instead of a Jewish inheritance
Two progressive rabbis – Sharon Brous and David Ingber – sat before a packed Jewish audience in San Diego for a taping of the podcast Being Jewish with Jonah Platt, to wrestle with a distinctly modern Jewish dilemma: how does a tradition forged in exile process the return of Jewish power?
The subject was the rabbinate and Israel, but the deeper argument was Judaism itself.
The language was familiar: fear, shame, democracy, moral crisis. The question underneath it was older than the state and older than Zionism itself. What exactly is Judaism when Jews are sovereign again – and what does that mean for diaspora Jews?
That question is increasingly dividing Jewish life.
For years the pattern has been visible in polling, synagogue life, philanthropy, and communal politics. The further left a Jew moves politically, the more likely that Jew is to become publicly critical of Israel. The less traditional the Jewish framework, the more likely that criticism expands beyond policy into discomfort with Jewish statehood itself. Orthodox Jews criticize Israeli governments all the time, often fiercely, but they rarely place Jewish national existence itself in the dock.
That difference is not merely political. It is theological. It is civilizational.
Because traditional Judaism has always answered the question of Jewish identity in integrated terms: God, Torah, peoplehood, and land. These are particular to the Jewish people. They embody one structure. Remove one and the architecture strains. Remove the land and Judaism survives, but in suspension.
Diaspora Judaism became one of history’s great civilizational achievements, but it was always an adaptation to rupture. The prayerbook points toward Jerusalem. The festivals move according to the agricultural rhythms of the Land of Israel. The fast days mourn national destruction. The closing line of the seder and of Yom Kippur pushes in one direction only: next year in Jerusalem.
That was never metaphor. It was memory preserved as architecture.
For traditional Jews, Jewish self-rule is not simply politics. It is Jewish history restored. Such belief does not make every Israeli government wise or righteous. Jews argue bitterly over borders, settlements, courts, wars, and coalitions. But beneath those arguments lies a premise that remains fixed: Jewish political agency is indispensable.
Progressive – and especially non-Orthodox – Judaism increasingly begins somewhere else.
Its center of gravity is ethical universalism. Its first question is increasingly not what preserves Jewish continuity, but what satisfies universal justice. That instinct has deep Jewish roots. The prophets placed moral obligation at the center of covenantal life. But prophets do not run borders.
States do.
States defend territory, absorb casualties, deter enemies, and make violent decisions under imperfect conditions. Sovereignty stains the hands. Once universal ethics become the supreme framework, the Jewish state itself becomes vulnerable to indictment.
That is what the Brous–Ingber exchange revealed with unusual clarity.
And it was revealing precisely because it did not end in one room.
Their first conversation exposed a tension neither side could settle. Sharon Brous spoke from the prophetic register of progressive Judaism, where Judaism is primarily moral witness, conscience, and justice. David Ingber, while sharing much of that moral vocabulary, kept returning to something older and deeper: peoplehood, continuity, solidarity, historical necessity.
The disagreement lingered.
Brous later acknowledged discomfort with how the exchange unfolded, and the conversation resumed in a second round on Jonah Platt’s podcast. That itself was revealing. One debate became two because the argument underneath it could not be resolved by clarifying policy or refining moral critique. The disagreement was structural.
And in that second conversation, the divide remained.
Brous continued pressing the prophetic burden, insisting that Jewish moral credibility depends on confronting Jewish power when it acts unjustly. Ingber continued defending something prior to critique itself: the necessity of Jewish collective power in a world that has repeatedly shown its appetite for Jewish vulnerability, especially in light of the widespread antisemitism today.
One critiques Israel primarily as a moral actor, the other defends Israel first as a historical necessity and only then wrestles with its conduct.
It is the difference between inheritance and indictment.
And this internal Jewish struggle is increasingly being exported into the wider world, where it is eagerly consumed.
This week in the United Kingdom, leading progressive rabbis warned that Israel’s political direction poses an existential threat to Judaism itself, tied to the publication of their new book. The phrase was startling.
Israel as an existential threat to Judaism.
For two thousand years, existential threats to Judaism had names: the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, the Crusades, the Inquisition, pogroms, the Holocaust, Soviet repression, the expulsions from Arab lands.
Statelessness itself was the existential condition.
Now, for growing sectors of progressive non-Orthodox Jewish leadership, the Jewish state itself is increasingly being cast as the danger.
That is more than criticism. That is inversion.
And notice who was eager to amplify it.
The Guardian, a British publication whose editorial posture toward Israel has long been sharply critical, gave the book and its thesis prominent space. That matters because internal Jewish dissent carries unique public utility in anti-Israel discourse. Criticism from outside can be dismissed as hostility. Criticism from inside acquires the authority of confession.
Progressive Jewish critique often assumes its audience shares its covenantal investment in Jewish survival. The wider world often hears something simpler: if even rabbis are indicting the Jewish state, the case against it must already be proven.
That is one of anti-Zionism’s most valuable currencies: Jewish testimony against Jewish power.
Not because Jewish dissent is illegitimate. Jewish argument is one of Judaism’s oldest arts. But once internal critique detaches from internal solidarity, it stops functioning as family argument and starts functioning as prosecutorial evidence.
The family dispute becomes public exhibit.
And this is where traditional Jewish memory diverges sharply from progressive Jewish moral instinct.
Traditional Jews remember something progressive Jewish politics often struggles to metabolize: the central danger of Jewish history was never Jewish power: It was Jewish powerlessness.
The Holocaust was not a lesson in the abuse of Jewish power. It was a lesson in the consequences of Jewish defenselessness.
Then came 1948 and Jewish agency returned.
And within years, the map of Jewish history changed. Ancient Jewish communities across Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, and Morocco collapsed into expulsion, flight, and dispossession. Hundreds of thousands found refuge in Israel.
That memory disciplines judgment. It teaches realism.
Progressive Jewish consciousness inherited a different lesson from modernity: nationalism corrupts, power must be constrained, minorities must maintain moral vigilance.
There is wisdom in that inheritance – as a modifier, not as a ruling ethos. A beleaguered minority does not have the luxury of abandoning all rights and power to satisfy the mob.
That is what Zionism answered, not abstractly but operationally.
German Jews once believed they had solved history. They were cultured, integrated, patriotic, indispensable.
History did not care.
American Jews should similarly be cautious with assumptions of permanence.
Because beneath every synagogue fight, every anguished podcast, every progressive Jewish book tour, lies the same civilizational argument: is Judaism an inheritance to preserve, or a moral vocabulary to deploy?
These have become competing theories of Jewish survival.
For two thousand years Jews prayed toward Zion because history taught them exile was fragile. Progressive Judaism increasingly asks whether Israel deserves that loyalty, while traditional Judaism believes the land is central to Judaism and disagreements are best managed internally.
Whether in public or private discussions, the policies of Israel are becoming an exhibit in the philosophical rift between progressive and traditional Judaism.
There’s a fundamental difference between Yom HaZikaron and how most countries remember their fallen. In many places—think of Memorial Day in the U.S.—remembrance exists alongside distance. Time has passed, wars feel historical, and public life has moved on. The rituals are real, but they share space with long weekends, travel, sales, and barbecues.
In Israel, there is no distance.
Israel is small. Military service is near universal. Loss is not abstract or inherited from history books—it is current, personal, and interconnected. The name read on television is rarely just a name. It is a classmate. A neighbor’s child. A cousin of a colleague. And beyond the battlefield, the victims of terrorism—on buses, in cafés, in homes—collapse any illusion that war lives somewhere else.
There is no clean line between soldier and civilian. The same people who argue politics, build companies, and raise families are the ones who serve, and sometimes die, in uniform. The same streets that carry ordinary life have carried violence. So when the siren sounds, it is not symbolic; it is recognition. The cost of survival has been paid by people just like you—often people you actually knew.
Other countries observe remembrance days. Israel mourns.
In a synagogue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, far from the sirens of Israel, that truth took human form.
At Temple Emanu-El in New York City, before an audience of more than a thousand people, Rachel Goldberg-Polin sat in conversation with Dan Senor. The setting was the diaspora. The subject was the same wound.
Temple Emanu-El in NYC for talk with Dan Senor and Rachel Goldberg-Polin on April 20, 2026 (photo: FirstOneThrough)
Her son, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, had been injured during the October 7 Palestinian Arab attacks, taken hostage into Gaza, and held for more than a year before being killed in the tunnels. She had come to speak about a book she wrote in response to a question people kept asking her: how are you doing?
The answer was not linear. It was not hopeful in the way people expect hope to sound. It was precise.
Pain wrapped in love. Love wrapped in pain.
She described her life now in three periods: before October 7, the time of her son’s captivity, and the period after his death. Not stages of healing. Not steps toward closure. Distinct worlds, separated by something irreversible.
And then she said something that lands differently once you understand Yom HaZikaron.
She does not believe things should get better with time. She does not understand why much of the world holds that as aspiration. The wound is there. Permanent. The task is not to erase it, or soften it, or move beyond it. The task is to carry it—together with the love that created it—in full.
Forever.
That is not just a mother speaking. It is the emotional grammar of a country.
Yom HaZikaron is not designed to heal. It is designed to remember without dilution. To hold loss and love in the same space and refuse to let either fade. To insist that what was lost remains present, not as history, but as part of the living fabric.
In other places, remembrance days ask for reflection. In Israel, and for those bound to it, the day asks for something harder: to accept that some wounds are not meant to close.
A siren sounds. A country stops. And what fills the silence is not only memory.
It is love that refuses to let go, and pain that refuses to fade.
The talks in Gaza are stuck on a single question: when does Hamas disarm? Hamas wants Israeli withdrawal first. Israel wants the dismantling of Hamas’s military capacity. Gazans want Hamas to retain weapons. Every side is waiting and pointing.
So the sequence matters.
In Washington, the argument has hardened around pressure on Israel. Democratic senators like Bernie Sanders, Chris Murphy, Tim Kaine, and Chris Van Hollen have pushed versions of the same idea: use U.S. leverage to change Israeli behavior now. The assumption is clear. The U.S. can influence Israel. It cannot influence Hamas.
It is backed by far-left pro-Palestinian groups like J Street. It is juvenile, dangerous and devoid of critical strategic thinking.
J Street, once again, on the wrong side of history
If all the pressure is on Israel, Hamas learns the simplest lesson in negotiation: wait. Let outside actors squeeze your opponent. Hold your position. Time becomes leverage.
That is where the current approach sits and breaks. And everyone suffers.
A negotiation like this needs a visible incentive on both sides. Hamas has faced pressure only from Israel – military and economic – but almost no credible pathway that links its own actions to a reduction in the conflict.
That is the missing piece.
Set a clear rule: as Hamas verifiably disarms, Israel correspondingly reduces its military posture and need for resupply. Less threat, less armament.
Now the logic runs forward, and resets the debate in Washington. The current fight among Democrats—arm Israel or restrain it—misses the hinge. If Hamas is disarmed, Israel needs fewer arms. That is mechanics, not politics.
Using a pressure stick as the far-left senators are attempting, rewards the antisemitic genocidal terrorist group, ensuring the fighting never ends. Using a pressure carrot entices Hamas to give up its weapons, allowing the US to pull weaponry from Israel.
The world has long only thought of pressure as a stick with the only variable being to whom to apply it. It is time to imagine a pressure carrot, especially when the party with the greatest power believes it has no influence on the entity that blocks every path forward.
First One Through 