The World Cup’s final stages are being played in the United States, home to the largest Jewish community in the diaspora. Jews fill stadiums and gather in homes, bars, and public squares to cheer for their favorite teams. Many of the Jewish fans are descendants of families who fled persecution in the final four team countries, who found refuge in America.

By a remarkable twist of history, three of the four semifinalists are themselves home to three of the five largest Jewish communities in the diaspora: France (#2), the United Kingdom (#4), and Argentina (#5). Spain, whose once-great Jewish civilization was destroyed by the expulsion of 1492, today has only a small Jewish community.

The four teams were not traveling to America alone. Each arrived with ghosts.

England’s ghosts date to 1290, when King Edward I expelled all Jews from his kingdom. A Jewish community that had lived there for generations was driven out and would not officially return for more than three and a half centuries.

Spain’s ghosts carry the keys of 1492, when Ferdinand and Isabella ordered Jews to convert or leave. One of the world’s great Jewish civilizations disappeared almost overnight, scattering Sephardic communities across the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and eventually the Americas.

France’s ghosts stretch from repeated medieval expulsions to the Vichy regime, when French authorities enacted antisemitic laws and helped arrest and deport tens of thousands of Jews. They include the children rounded up in the Vel d’Hiv before being sent east.

Argentina’s ghosts are more recent. After World War II, the country became a refuge for Nazi fugitives, including Adolf Eichmann. Then, in 1994, the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires was bombed, killing 85 people. More than three decades later, those accused of orchestrating the attack have never stood trial in Argentina.

Now these four nations compete for soccer’s greatest prize before enormous crowds in the very country where so many descendants of those earlier Jewish communities ultimately built new lives.

Jewish fans cheer for England, Spain, France, and Argentina. They wear the jerseys, sing the anthems, and celebrate spectacular goals like everyone else.

But perhaps there are other spectators in the stands. Quietly observing.

The rabbi who clutched Torah scrolls as England closed its gates. A Sephardic mother who had cried as she locked the door of her home in Toledo for the last time. A Jewish child wearing a yellow star in Paris. Families standing outside the shattered AMIA building praying for loved ones.

Those ghosts would see something they could scarcely have imagined: not only the world’s largest Jewish diaspora community hosting the World Cup, but thriving Jewish communities once again in England, France, and Argentina. Against every expectation, Jewish life somehow endured.

ABBI ELI CHITRIK watches a World Cup match, wearing a traditional Orthodox Jewish hat, even as a Muslim wearing a keffiyeh is among the other fans sitting nearby.(photo credit: Rabbi Mendy Chitrik)

Then, they would whisper.

They would remind us that England, Spain, France, and Argentina were all, in their own time, places where Jews believed they belonged until history proved otherwise.

Their warning would not be that America is destined to follow the same path. History never repeats itself so neatly. Their warning would be simpler: antisemitism rarely arrives all at once. It begins with words, exclusion, indifference, and the comforting belief that it cannot happen here.

As the Jewish descendants cheer from the stands, they wonder if they are hearing voices directed at them above the roar. The whispering ghosts watch too, not only the game, but today’s generation of Jews feeling both at home and increasingly distinct from their home countries.

The soccer tournament will end on Sunday. And Jews will consider their jerseys in a very different way than every other fan, in the days and weeks after they take theirs off and have to consider life beyond the game.

Related:

Watching Jewish Ghosts (March 2018)

For most Americans, armed guards outside synagogues still look unsettling. For Jews, they have become background scenery. And increasingly, so has something else: being mocked for wanting the guards there in the first place.

Security cameras and hardened doors. Police details and lockdown drills. Volunteers scanning crowds during services. This is now ordinary Jewish life in America.

And yet, at the very moment Jews are hardening schools and synagogues because they are under threat, influential voices across media, activist circles, and politics increasingly frame Jewish fear itself as manufactured.

Federal authorities recently uncovered what prosecutors describe as an Iran-linked terror network targeting Jews and synagogues across the United States and Europe. According to the allegations, operatives connected to Kata’ib Hezbollah coordinated surveillance and attack planning against Jewish institutions in New York, California, Arizona, London, Amsterdam, and Toronto.

The response from much of the cultural left was not moral clarity about why Jewish institutions feel endangered. Instead, the familiar machinery of minimization immediately activated.

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver aired a lengthy segment mocking undercover counterterror operations and emphasizing cases where authorities supposedly manufactured extremists through entrapment. The timing could hardly have been more revealing. Jews hear about Iranian proxy terror targeting synagogues while elite comedy television reassures audiences that perhaps the greater danger is excessive concern about terrorism.

At the same time, activist organizations like CAIR and civil-liberties groups fought efforts to create limited buffer zones around synagogues facing aggressive intimidation and harassment. Senators questioning Jewish witnesses during campus antisemitism hearings increasingly sounded less interested in confronting hatred than in interrogating whether Jews were exaggerating it.

The pattern repeats constantly. Jews are under attack and ask for protection. Influential institutions respond by interrogating whether Jews are too afraid and therefore undeserving of any support.

No other minority group is treated this way. If Black churches increased security after racist attacks, nobody would accuse them of hysteria. If mosques hardened entrances after terror threats, commentators would call it prudent. If Asian community centers hired guards after targeted violence, politicians would praise vigilance.

Only Jews are routinely told their fear may itself be socially dangerous.

That is what makes this moment so disturbing. Jews are not simply confronting rising antisemitism. They are confronting a cultural elite increasingly uncomfortable acknowledging why Jewish security measures became necessary in the first place.

So instead of confronting the ideology threatening Jews, many commentators, activists, and politicians redirect attention toward the people trying to protect them. The synagogue barrier becomes controversial. The undercover operation becomes suspicious. The frightened Jewish parent becomes the problem – a Chaya/Karen – to deconstruct. Much as Israel’s security barrier built to stop West Bank terrorists has been labeled by the alt-left an “apartheid wall,” they are broadly inverting Jewish defensive measures into offensive ones.

Let’s be clear: a society that grows more skeptical of synagogue security than synagogue attackers has lost its moral bearings.

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When Jews Are Attacked, The New York Times Worries About Jihadists (March 2026)

Parshat Tzav centers on a single, stubborn image: a fire that must keep burning.
Day and night, without interruption, the flame is sustained. Wood is added. Ash is cleared. The rhythm continues.

No drama surrounds it. That is the point.

The Torah uses a precise word: tamid—continuous.
Rashi sharpens it further: continuous means that the fire burns through Shabbat. It burns even when conditions are imperfect. There are no pauses built into the system.

Continuity is not aspirational. It is enforced.

Continuity is fragile. It breaks in small gaps—missed days, skipped responsibilities, moments when no one shows up. Enough of those moments, and what once felt permanent disappears quietly.

Tzav eliminates the gap.

The tradition holds that the original fire descended from heaven—a moment of revelation. And then the responsibility shifts.

Ramban notes that even with that divine beginning, the command remains: keep it burning. What begins from above survives only through what is sustained below.

This is how permanence is built.

The Kohanim return each day to the same tasks. The altar is prepared again. The fire is fed again. Over time, repetition becomes structure. Structure becomes identity.

Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch sees in this a broader model. A people endures through daily acts that reaffirm what it stands for.

The fire becomes a signal:

Something is still here. The commitment continues. Yesterday carries into today.

In much of the worls today we have built a culture of moments. A flash of outrage. A declaration. A cause that surges and disappears as quickly as it arrived.

Tzav points in the opposite direction.

What matters is not who lights the fire. It is who keeps it burning.

The Jewish world speaks often about continuity. It invests heavily in beginnings—early education, bar mitzvah preparation, the moment a child stands before a community and reads from the Torah.

And then, too often, the system loosens its grip.

The years that follow—high school, when identity is tested, challenged, and reshaped—are treated as optional, as if the fire will somehow continue on its own.

It doesn’t.

As Adam Teitelbaum argues in Sapir, the drop-off after bar mitzvah is not a minor leak; it is the structural break. Jewish education often peaks at the moment it should begin to deepen, especially for boys.

The system celebrates ignition and neglects continuity.

The result is predictable: a generation trained for performance at thirteen, and left without reinforcement at seventeen—precisely when identity is challenged, not assumed.

Continuity cannot be front-loaded.

It requires reinforcement when the surrounding culture is strongest, when belonging becomes a choice rather than an inheritance. Those are the years when the fire must be tended most carefully.

Continuity is not sustained by intention. It is sustained by people who refuse to let the fire go out.

A single word can change the story of a war.

In its live coverage of the conflict with Iran, the New York Times warned that Europe was preparing for “Iran’s retaliatory attacks.” In the same reporting, the paper noted that Iranian drones struck Azerbaijan and that a missile headed toward Turkish airspace was intercepted by NATO defenses.

Neither Turkey nor Azerbaijan had attacked Iran, yet the strikes were still described as “retaliatory.”

This is more than sloppy wording. It subtly changes how readers understand who initiated violence and who expanded the war.

In ordinary language, retaliation means striking back at the party that attacked you. If A attacks B and B strikes A, that is retaliation. But if A attacks B and B launches missiles at C, that is something else. That is expansion of the war.

Other reporting on the same events makes this clear. Reuters described NATO defenses intercepting an Iranian missile headed toward Turkey, while Azerbaijan raised its military alert after drones linked to Iran struck near an airport in Nakhchivan. Those incidents marked the conflict spilling into countries that were not previously part of the fighting.
Yet the New York Times still placed these events under the heading of “Iran’s retaliatory attacks.”

That word does important narrative work. If readers repeatedly see the sequence framed this way, the implied storyline becomes simple:
Israel strikes.
Iran retaliates.

But the actual chain of events across the Middle East is far more complicated.

Iran has spent decades building a network of proxy forces across the region. Hezbollah in Lebanon, militias in Syria and Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen have all launched rockets, drones, and missiles at Israel and at U.S. forces. Israeli strikes on Iranian commanders, weapons depots, or missile factories often follow those attacks.

Yet the language describing the two sides differs. Israeli operations are commonly described as “strikes,” “attacks,” or “escalations.” Iranian missile launches are frequently described as retaliation, even when the missiles land in countries that were not the attacker.

Precision matters. A missile aimed at Turkey, a NATO member, cannot be retaliation against Turkey if Turkey did not attack Iran. A drone strike in Azerbaijan cannot be retaliation against Azerbaijan for the same reason.
Those are new fronts.

Iran may claim it is responding to earlier Israeli or American strikes. But when its missiles and drones land in countries that were not fighting it, that is not retaliation.
It is the widening of a war.

And when journalism blurs that distinction, the reader is left with the impression that the war began somewhere else.