Tag Archives: Jews

Free Speech Is Not on Trial. Antisemitism Is.

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Every time antisemitism is called out on the left, the same dodge appears on cue:
“It’s just free speech.”

That response is not a defense. It is a red herring.

No one is arguing that anti-Israel speech is illegal. Under American law, almost nothing is. You can shout racist slogans. You can be misogynistic. You can mock religions. You can hold a Draw Muhammad contest outside a mosque. You can call for the destruction of a country. You can deny a people’s history.

All of that is protected speech. That has never been the question.

The question is what that speech is.

And much of what now passes as “anti-Israel discourse” is not political critique at all. It is hate speech, clearly, historically, and deliberately so.

Calling for the destruction of the Jewish State is not foreign policy analysis.
Denying Jewish history in the Land of Israel is not academic debate.
Declaring that Jews alone have no right to national self-determination is not progressive politics.
Passing a law that Jews cannot live somewhere and cannot pray at their holiest location is not a free exchange of ideas.

It is the application of a single moral standard to one people — and only one people — that says: you do not belong anywhere.

It is naked antisemitism.

Organizations like Democratic Socialists of America, Students for Justice in Palestine, Within Our Lifetime and Palestine Youth Movement are not tolerating this rhetoric. They are chanting it, platforming it, amplifying it, and treating it as virtuous. They deny Jewish peoplehood, erase Jewish indigeneity, excuse violence against Jewish civilians, and then insist this is nothing more than robust debate.

It is not.

It is hate speech — even if the Constitution protects the right to utter it.

And then there is Zohran Mamdani, who embodies the selective blindness at the heart of this moment. No serious person believes he would tolerate a mass of protesters outside mosques depicting Muhammad as a terrorist, screaming at Muslims as they enter prayer. That would be — correctly — labeled Islamophobia, regardless of whether it was technically legal.

Yet Mamdani casually removed buffer zones around entrances to synagogues, insuring his excited comrades can yell epithets at Jews.

When Jewish institutions are targeted, when synagogues are surrounded, when Jewish national identity is declared illegitimate, the alt-left response suddenly becomes procedural: free speech.

Free speech does not launder bigotry. The First Amendment protects the right to speak; it does not cleanse the moral content of what is said. When people accuse Mamdani and the DSA of promoting Jew-hatred, they are not confused about constitutional law. They are describing the reality of ingrained Jew hatred.

“Most Americans are familiar with the classic Western flavors of anti-Semitism: the Christian, European, white-supremacist and Communist types. But little attention has been paid to the special case of Muslim anti-Semitism. That is a pity because today it is anti-Semitism’s most zealous, most potent and most underestimated form.” – Ayaan Hirsi Ali, July 2019

Invoking free speech is an evasion. A way to avoid responsibility while continuing to normalize ideas that would be instantly condemned if aimed at any other minority.

The tragedy – and fear – is that liberals understand this perfectly well in every other context. They simply refuse to apply it to Jews. Or at least, when uttered by a community of preference, Muslims.

Free speech is not on trial, do not be confused by the misdirection. Antisemitism is, and it is winning.

The Golem of New York City

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In the legends of Prague, the Golem came into being when civic order failed Jews in predictable ways. Blood libels circulated, crowds gathered, and authorities hesitated at the decisive moment. Rabbi Judah Loew, the Maharal (c.1512-1609), recognized the pattern. He shaped a human form from the mud of the Vltava River—from the city itself—and animated it with sacred words. The choice of material mattered. The defender of Jews was made from the ground beneath their feet. Even if the city’s leaders would not protect Jews, the city itself would.

The Golem patrolled the Jewish quarter, broke the rhythm of violence, and restored deterrence. When the danger passed, it was deactivated and laid to rest in the attic of the Old New Synagogue, the Altneuschul. The legend recorded a hard truth: when the state falters, protection is improvised; when the state recovers, emergency power sleeps.

Altneuschul in Prague (photo: First One Through)

That memory traveled.

The melody of Hatikvah, the national anthem of the Jewish State of Israel, traces back through the musical world of that same Prague river Vltava, famously shaped by Bedřich Smetana (1824-1884). Exile and return share a river. The Golem embodies survival within exile; Zionism embodies the resolve to end exile. One guards a community where it stands, the other builds sovereignty so guarding becomes policy.

Yet the Golem never disappears. It waits for the moment when trust in authority thins again.

New York, Upper East Side

New York City holds one of the world’s largest and most visible Jewish populations. Jewish life here is open and proud. Synagogues, schools, and community institutions operate in public view, anchored by the assumption that their protection is a foundational duty of government.

That assumption has been tested.

On the Upper East Side in November 2025, an anti-Israel crowd swarmed a synagogue hosting a pro–Land of Israel event. The scene echoed an old shape: shouting at the doors of a Jewish house of worship, intimidation in a public park, the expectation that Jews would need to justify gathering openly as Jews. Instead of drawing a clear perimeter around the synagogue and condemning the mob, Zohran Mamdani, the incoming mayor of New York City, scolded the shul for holding a Zionist event, shifting the burden of restraint onto the Jewish institution.

For Jews who carry history close, the signal was unmistakable. Cities fail their minorities first through language, then through hesitation, and only later through force. When the synagogue itself surrounded by an angry crowd is framed as the problem, safety has become conditional.

Conditional safety never endures.

How the Modern Golem Forms

The Golem of New York does not rise from clay. It forms from memory.

Private guards appear where confidence once lived. Volunteer patrols lengthen into the evening. Parents coordinate entrances and exits. Institutions harden quietly, without ceremony.

These are the incremental steps of adaptation. Communities organize when clarity blurs. Parallel systems take shape when weak reassurance yields to experience.

Other minority groups get municipal funding and public declarations of support while Jews are only lumped into a general “other” category, as in White Plains, the capital of Westchester County just north of New York City. Jews learn that they must fend for themselves, because their basic protection offends many. Frighteningly, even for local politicians.

On the Upper East Side, a growing and proudly Zionist congregation bears a name heavy with inheritance: Altneu Synagogue. Old–New. It is a spin-off of the Park East Synagogue where the anti-Israel mob harassed and intimidated Jews. The echo of Prague’s Altneuschul may also prove prescient. Old dangers return wearing contemporary language. Rivers change. Cities change. But the logic persists.

Natan Sharansky, a famous Russian “refusenik” who was jailed for years before being allowed to leave to Israel, knows the dangers of antisemitic regimes. He came to Washington, D.C. in November 2023 to address 300,000 people about the need to fight back: “We, together, will fight against those who try to give legitimacy to Hamas. We will fight for Israel. We will fight for every Jew. We will fight against antisemitism. We will fight for the values and against corruption of those values which are at the center of our Jewish identity and American identity.”

Sharansky is coming to New York in January, soon after Mamdani takes office. He should come to the Altneu Synagogue and help shape and awaken a modern Golem as Jewish security appears vulnerable, and the current leaders of Jewish institutions appear unable to rise to the moment. New, unconventional defenders need to assume roles.

For the moment, things may be OK. Mamdani appointed Jessica Tisch as police commissioner, a role she has had for several years. She is Jewish and no-nonsense leader, widely supported by the city’s Jewish community. If she can do her job without anti-Zionist and antisemitic politicians limiting her mandate, Jews will be fine. Otherwise, a new golem will rise in the New World, hundreds of years after the Golem of Prague went to sleep in the attic of the Altneuschul.

Goshen and the Myth of Security

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When famine made Canaan (the land of Israel today) unlivable, Jacob’s family went down to Egypt. What began as a temporary refuge became something else entirely. Goshen (Genesis 45:9) was fertile, welcoming, and safe. The Jews prospered there. They built families, livelihoods, and a future. And for a time, it worked.

That is what makes Goshen so instructive. Unlike earlier famine detours in Genesis, this was not a brief excursion. Goshen was a one-way trip. It felt secure enough to settle into—and that comfort lasted generations. Until it didn’t.

Jews talk about it today as they ponder antisemitism’s historic trajectory. It has moved millions of Jews around the world for thousands of years, marking them as the “wandering Jew.” In 1900, most Jews spoke Russian, German, Polish and Arabic. In 2025, they almost all speak Hebrew and English, with French and Spanish covering virtually everyone else.

The land of Israel itself was not without Jewish migration. The land flourished, kingdoms rose, institutions formed. Then came division, exile, and destruction. First the northern tribes disappeared into history. Later Judah followed. The Jews did not just lose modern incarnations of Goshen; they lost their homeland for nearly two thousand years.

Parshat Vayigash is often used as the Torah’s first meditation on long-term diaspora. It offers no illusion that comfort guarantees permanence. Goshen was pleasant until a Pharaoh arose who no longer remembered Joseph. But the Jewish homeland was also strong until it fractured from within and fell to external powers. Neither place offered permanent security.

The lesson is not that exile is doomed or that the Jewish Promised Land is automatically safe. It is that where Jews live is often situational, not absolute. Prosperity can mask vulnerability. Stability can decay quietly. The obligation is vigilance—reading the environment honestly, assessing quality of life soberly, and understanding that history turns even when life feels settled.

Israel’s Security Barrier as seen from Jerusalem, built to stop terrorism during the “Second Intifada”

Goshen teaches that success today is not a promise for tomorrow. But Israel teaches the same. Awareness, not geography, is what determines whether a place remains livable.

You Can’t Launder Murder

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In October 2002, in a case before the Supreme Court, Justice Antonin Scalia did something characteristically disarming. In the middle of a commercial case—a dispute about representations, intent, and liability—he reached for an example so blunt that no one in the courtroom could miss the point.

“let’s assume that there is a Federal statute that makes discrimination because of, or failure to hire someone, or let’s say, let’s say killing someone solely because of his race a crime, a separate crime. And someone, let’s assume he kills someone who is Jewish, and he said, well, I didn’t kill him solely because he was Jewish; I killed him because I disagree with the policies of Israel. Does that get him out of the statute?” – Supreme Court Judge Antonin Scalia on October 8, 2002

The question was not theatrical. It was instructional.

Scalia was making a narrow, lawyerly point about intent laundering—the habit of rebranding a harmful act with a more palatable explanation after the fact. In commercial law, courts reject that move every day. You cannot sell a defective product and escape responsibility by calling the defect innovation. You cannot mislead customers and then claim a higher purpose. Labels don’t change outcomes; explanations don’t erase harm.

He chose that example because everyone understood it immediately. Not because it was exotic, but because it was familiar. People do, in fact, come for Jews with reasons. They always have. The reasons change; the target does not. That is why the hypothetical worked even in a commercial case. It required no ideological scaffolding, no speech doctrine, no moral hedging. The room got it.

Scalia wasn’t talking about protest or expression. He was reminding the Court that post-hoc justification does not transform reality. A Jew selected as a Jew remains a Jew, regardless of the banner the attacker waves. You cannot launder murder through geopolitics any more than you can launder fraud through branding.

What makes the moment unsettling two decades later is not that Scalia saw this clearly in 2002. It’s that today, society now pretends not to.

Today, the very maneuver Scalia identified is routinely indulged. Violence against Jews is reframed as politics. Targeting Jews is explained as resistance. The word “Israel” is treated as a solvent capable of dissolving antisemitism on contact. The act is dissected until the victim disappears into the explanation.

Scalia understood that this maneuver was not new. In the Middle Ages, it was radical preachers who performed the laundering. On Easter, from pulpits across Europe, Jews were accused of killing Christ, poisoning wells, murdering Christian babies. The charge was always moral, never personal. The violence that followed—pogroms, expulsions, massacres—was framed not as hatred, but as righteous response. The excuse sanctified the act. The victim was still Jewish.

“The crimes you are committing in Palestine by desecrating the sanctity of the holy sites – foremost among them the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque – you should expect reactions, not only from the Muslims, but rather from the entire world.” – Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ Advisor on Religious Affairs and Islamic Relations Mahmoud Al-Habbash on December 15, 2025 about the massacre of Jews in Sydney, Australia

The vocabulary has changed. The mechanism has not.

Today the laundering is done in different robes—through left-wing media narratives, academic language, teacher-union resolutions, and activist slogans. The Jewish state is branded unholy, colonial, imperial. Zionism is recast as original sin. Once that premise is accepted, Jews everywhere become legitimate stand-ins—symbols of something larger, targets by proxy. “Globalize the intifada” is not poetry. It is a call that travels, and it always knows where to land.

The laundering does not stop on the left. Figures like Candace Owens have vilified Jews across time itself—casting them as architects of the slave trade two centuries ago, as hidden hands behind modern social decay, as a people uniquely responsible for nearly every ill that can be stitched into a narrative. The effect is not historical inquiry; it is moral conditioning. When Jews are blamed for everything, they become appropriate targets for anything. The excuse differs. The permission is the same.

Candace Owens antisemitism reel by Canary Mission

This is why Scalia’s example mattered—and why he chose it so plainly. He knew that people come for Jews with reasons. He knew those reasons are never the point. And he assumed, reasonably at the time, that everyone else could still see the difference between explanation and absolution.

Decades later, that clarity is treated as controversial. Motives are said to cleanse acts. Ideology is said to transform targets. Murder is said to become discourse if the language is fashionable enough.

You can change the sermon.
You can update the slogans.
You can trade Easter blood libels for postcolonial theory.

But you cannot launder murder.

Time to Say Goodbye, With Love and Sorrow

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I was sitting in the audience at an Andrea Bocelli concert at Madison Square Garden in New York City, the lights dimmed, the hall hushed in anticipation for the encore “Con Te Partiro,” (Time to Say Goodbye), his most iconic song. He teased the audience with “New York, New York” and headed for the exit once more. The crowd cheered and he came back to sing the song they craved.

Andrea Bocelli at Madison Square Garden (photo: First One Through)

Beside me sat a close Jewish friend who grew up in Australia. We had come for the music, for the beauty of a voice that carries memory as much as sound. Yet, as the first familiar notes rose, I saw her mind was in another world.

She was thinking of her parents and brother’s family back in Melbourne.

Only days earlier, they had been at a Chabad Chanukah party—children, candles, singing, the ordinary holiness of Jewish joy. Then the news broke of the shooting in Sydney. Phones buzzed. Conversations stopped. Parents gathered children closer. And out. What had begun as celebration turned into a flight of urgency. They left with the unmistakable instinct that something precious had become fragile. Perhaps lost.

As Bocelli sang of leaving—of standing alone and dreaming of the horizon—the words landed differently. “It’s time to say goodbye,” he sings, not with bitterness, but with ache. He sings of departing lands once fully lived in, of moving forward while carrying love along. The song understands that some goodbyes are spoken precisely because the bonds mattered.

Time to say goodbye
Countries I have never
Seen and experienced with you

Australia has been such a land for Jews. Around 115,000 strong, the community was built in large part by Holocaust survivors and their children, who arrived determined to create lives of dignity and contribution. They succeeded. Jewish schools flourished. Synagogues filled. Jewish families felt Australian in the fullest sense—rooted, confident, woven into the national fabric. It was a beloved home.

That is why this moment feels so melancholy.

When antisemitism intrudes into Jewish life—when Chanukah gatherings require calculation, when news of violence travels faster than reassurance—something internal shifts. Families begin to think not only about safety today, but about continuity tomorrow. They listen closely for the voice of government, for the firmness of protection, for the sense that Jewish life is fully defended. When that reassurance feels thin – no, absent – dark history whispers.

Yes, I know there is no light in a room when there is no sun
If you’re not there with me, with me

For two years my friend had been speaking to her parents and brother about leaving Australia as antisemitic incidents surged and the government seemed unwilling to do anything. Now, the threats had crossed to violence. Murder. On a mass scale.

At the concert, Bocelli sang on. “With you I will leave,” he promises. The line felt written for this generation of Jews. Leaving does not mean erasing. It means carrying Australia forward: the beaches, the friendships, the generosity, the years of building a good life. Love will not dissolve at the airport gate.

For children, aliyah after moments like these is not politics. It is the air they breathe. It is the desire to grow where Jewishness fills the public calendar, where holidays are shared rather than guarded, where identity settles into the background instead of standing on alert. Israel becomes the horizon the song gestures toward—not as fantasy, but as alignment.

But they know some parents – many Holocaust survivors – will not be able to make the journey. They will stay behind in a land they thought of as home while their children and grandchildren head to their homeland.

When you’re far away I dream of the horizon and words fail
And I, yes, I know that you are with me, with me

As the music swelled, my friend wiped away tears. They were for her brother’s children, who should have stayed longer at a Chanukah party. They were for her parents’ generation, who believed Australia was the final chapter. They were also for something enduring: the knowledge that the Jewish story includes movement, discernment, and the courage to know when it is time.

I will leave with you
On ships at sea
Which, I know
No, no, they don’t exist anymore

The concert ended. The applause lingered. We walked out quietly, in a world darkly distinct from the thousands of other concert-goers heading to their homes.

Somewhere between Melbourne and Jerusalem, between a beloved home and a homeland, the song kept playing, softly affirming the discussions of long goodbyes that were taking place in Jewish homes throughout Australia.

Stop With the Hanukkah Miracle and Declare the Hanukkah MESSAGE

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The Book of the Maccabees lays out that the war against the Jews did not start with violence but with policy. The Syrian-Greeks initiated the battle by denying Jews their right to religious practice. Jewish life was made illegal through decrees and prohibitions, through the quiet insistence that Jews no longer have standing in their own holiest spaces.

The Temple Mount was seized. Jewish worship was banned. Foreign rites were imposed in its place. The text is precise and unsparing:

“And forbid burnt offerings, and sacrifice, and drink offerings, in the temple; and that they should profane the sabbaths and festival days…. They set up the abomination of desolation upon the altar, and built idol altars throughout the cities of Juda on every side.”
—1 Maccabees 1:45, 1 Maccabees 1:54

When the Maccabees returned to Jerusalem, the devastation they witnessed was total. The enemies of the Jews intended humiliation. A holy place was turned into a ruin so complete that nature itself began to reclaim it.

“They saw the sanctuary desolate, the altar profaned, and the gates burned. In the courts shrubs had grown up as in a forest.”
— 1 Maccabees 4:38

Judas and his brothers refuse to accept erasure as permanent and took action:

“Then Judas and his brothers said: ‘Behold, our enemies are crushed. Let us go up to cleanse the sanctuary and dedicate it…. They tore down the altar and stored the stones in a suitable place on the temple hill until a prophet should come to tell what to do with them.”
— 1 Maccabees 4:36, 44–46
“They purified the sanctuary and made another altar of sacrifice… and offered burnt offerings according to the law….They celebrated the dedication of the altar for eight days, and offered burnt offerings with gladness.“
— 1 Maccabees 4:48–56

And then memory was mandated.

“Judas and his brethren with the whole congregation of Israel ordained, that the days of the dedication of the altar should be kept in their season from year to year by the space of eight days, from the five and twentieth day of the month Casleu, with mirth and gladness.”
— 1 Maccabees 4:59

Why legislate remembrance? Why must it be done with joy?

Because danger does not end with victory nor complacency. The danger is forgetting how erasure begins—how denial of access precedes denial of life. Enemies rarely announce extermination at the start. They begin by declaring Jews illegitimate, unworthy of presence, unfit to practice their own traditions.

Guard blocks entry of a Jewish man onto the Jewish Temple Mount at the Cotton Merchant’s Gate, because he is a Jew, in November 2025. (Photo: First One Through)

The Maccabees understood something timeless: when Jews accept exclusion as normal, the battle has already been lost. When they are told to make do with less than basic human rights demand, they can never really have a full heart.

Hanukkah is the refusal to let others define Jewish legitimacy. It is the insistence that Jewish rights—to worship, to gather, to exist openly—are not privileges granted by empires or overseers, but as the opening lines of America’s Declaration of Independence state, “endowed by their Creator.”

So it was in their days. So it is in ours.

Bondi Attack: Can Jews Be Victims in the Media?

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There are moments when a headline tells you everything by what it refuses to say.

A mass shooting took place at a Hanukkah party in Sydney, Australia. A Jewish holiday. A Jewish gathering.

Yet when major global outlets reported the story, something curious happened.

The New York Times headline did not mention Jews. Only the sub-header caught the significance of the attack, but did not say Jews were targeted.

More disturbing, follow-up articles did not focus on the horrific spike in antisemitism in Australia these past two years. Instead, the Times posted an article about… Bondi Beach, and how beautiful and popular it is.

The BBC followed a similar path. So did The Guardian. So did others like CNN. The event was flattened into abstraction: a “shooting,” a “disturbance,” a “tragedy,” untethered from identity.

By contrast, The Telegraph named Jews. The Jerusalem Post did as well. The New York Post and CNBC, too. Al Jazeera did not. Actually, Qatari-owned Al Jazeera attempted to whitewash the entire incident that there was “no information.”

This divide is not accidental. It reflects something deeper and more uncomfortable.

Because at the same moment that major Western media hesitated to name Jewish victimhood, the global Jewish community had no such confusion. WhatsApp groups lit up within minutes. Videos circulated—not to sensationalize, but to bear witness. The injured were named, not as statistics but as people. Hebrew names were shared so strangers across continents could pray for them.

No one asked whether Jews had been targeted. They knew.

The only uncertainty discussed privately was not if the attack was antisemitic, but which strain of antisemitism it represented. Neo-Nazis? Radical Islamists? A lone actor steeped in online hate? Jews have learned, painfully, to recognize the pattern even before the authorities finish their press conference.

So why the hesitation in public framing?

Why is Jewish identity often erased precisely when Jews are attacked?

Part of the answer lies in a narrative trap the modern media has built for itself. Jews, especially Israeli Jews, are increasingly cast in a single role: power holders, enforcers, aggressors. In that framework, Jews are permitted to be actors—but not victims. Agents—but not targets. Perpetrators—but not innocents.

Victimhood, in today’s moral economy, is rationed. And Jews often find themselves disqualified from it in favor of victims of preference.

Naming Jews as victims complicates the preferred storyline. It disrupts the binary of oppressor and oppressed. It forces an uncomfortable reckoning: that a people portrayed relentlessly as powerful are still being hunted in synagogues, homes, and holiday celebrations—from Pittsburgh to Poway, from Paris to Copenhagen, from Jerusalem to Sydney.

And so the language softens. The identity disappears. The motive is delayed, blurred, or left unexplored. The story becomes about the setting, not the target. About the neighborhood, not the people. About ambience, not intent.

The question is not whether Jews are under attack. That is beyond dispute.

The question is whether the world’s most influential media institutions are willing to say so plainly—or whether Jews may only appear in headlines when they are accused, never when they are wounded.

Part of the answer to the disgraceful shrug to the barbaric October 7 massacre in Israel is the systemic brainwashing that has been going on, that Jews cannot be viewed as innocent victims. Even when they plainly are, half a world away.


The Gates of the Temple Mount

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Jerusalem is a city of gates. Stone thresholds worn smooth by centuries of feet. Arches that promise passage, and others that deny it.

Nowhere is this more literal—and more symbolic—than at the gates to the Temple Mount.

There are many gates along its walls. Some are sealed, some are ceremonial, and some are active. But in practice, Muslims ascend and descend freely through multiple entrances, while non-Muslims are funneled through a single ramp, tightly controlled, time-limited, and revocable at will.

Group of Muslim women come down from the Jewish Temple Mount at the Cotton Merchants’ Gate (photo: First One Through)

This is not accidental. It is policy.

Muslims enter through gates embedded naturally in the Old City’s fabric—the Cotton Merchants’ Gate among them. There, the walls are alive. Candy shops spill color onto the stones. Children’s clothing hangs in soft defiance of gravity. The scent of sweets mixes with dust and history. Life flows in and out, up and down, as it has for generations.

Jews, by contrast, are stopped.

They are turned away from nearly every gate. Not questioned. Not debated. Simply blocked.

Despite the Temple Mount being the holiest site in Judaism, Jews are told—by police, by signs, by precedent—that they may not enter as worshippers.

A solitary Jew is blocked from ascending the steps to the Jewish Temple Mount, the holiest location in Judaism, because he is a Jew. (photo: First One Through)

They are redirected instead to a single entrance ramp, detached from the Old City’s living arteries. The ramp rises from the edge of the Western Wall plaza, a vast open expanse that functions less like a neighborhood and more like a giant stone parking lot. From there, Jews may ascend only during narrow windows, under escort, forbidden to pray, forbidden to whisper, forbidden even to move their lips in devotion.

Jews are limited to prayer at the Western Wall, a supporting wall to the Temple Mount. The ramp to the Mughrabi Gate (top right) is the only gate of the ten operating gates where Jews can pass onto the Temple Mount, in limited numbers, at limited times. (photo: First One Through)

Jews are told to make do.

Make do with praying to a retaining wall of the Temple Mount.
Make do with history filtered through permission.
Make do with holiness at a distance.

This arrangement is often called the “status quo,” as if it were ancient, neutral, or inevitable. It is none of those things. It is modern. It is enforced. And it rests on a single premise: Islamic supremacy over the site requires Jewish silence at Judaism’s holiest place.

Muslims may ascend and descend at will. Jews may only look up.

The irony is almost unbearable. Judaism sanctified this mountain long before Islam existed. The Temples stood here before the Qur’an was written, before the Dome of the Rock was imagined, before the word “status quo” could be used to freeze injustice in place.

And yet today, Jewish presence itself is treated as a provocation.

Not violence. Not disruption. Presence.

The gates tell the story more honestly than any diplomatic statement ever could. Gates that welcome. Gates that redirect. Gates that close.

It’s a caste system familiar to Black Americans. “For Whites Only” is now “For Muslims Only” for 90% of the gates to the Temple Mount. “Negro Entrance” read “Non-Muslim Entrance” is plastered atop a ramp in the far corner of the Temple Mount. While racial Jim Crow laws ended in the U.S. decades ago, Jews remain subject to open religious discrimination at their holiest location. At the insistence of the United Nations.

In Jerusalem, everyone speaks of coexistence. But coexistence cannot survive when one faith ascends freely and another is barred from its own summit.

Vatican II – and the New Jew

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On December 8, 1965, a crowd of 100,000 spectators assembled in St. Peter’s Square to mark the closing ceremony of Vatican II. The three years of work was orchestrated to bring about Christian unity, hoping to bring non-Catholics and Catholics together in a joint mission. The sixteen documents that the council enacted were designed on the theme of aggiornamento (Italian for bringing up to date) the Catholic church, which had started to be viewed by many as fading in relevance.

Pope Paul VI greets the faithful during the closure of the Second Vatican Council in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican Dec. 8, 1965. (CNS/Catholic Press Photo)

The Second Vatican Council did not emerge in a Christian vacuum. It unfolded in the long shadow of Auschwitz, under the moral weight of a truth that could no longer be hidden: Christian Europe had stood by, silent or complicit, as the Jewish people were hunted, deported, and incinerated. The murderers were not pagan invaders; many were baptized Christians. The trains did not run through lands hostile to Christianity; they passed churches, crossed Catholic villages, glided along tracks laid in the heart of Christendom.

In 1961, the world could no longer avert its eyes. The Eichmann trial in Jerusalem forced every nation, every church, every conscience to watch. Survivors spoke in court with the clarity of witnesses resurrected from the grave: the collaborators, the bystanders, the bureaucrats, the bishops who said nothing, the priests who closed doors, the institutions that rationalized their silence. The trial tore away the last veil protecting Christian moral innocence. It was a moment when the Church had to confront not only the sins of individual Christians but the theological soil in which hatred had grown.

Trial of Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem, Israel in 1961 (Photo: Bettmann / Getty)

Against this storm of reckoning, another seismic event had already taken place: the re-establishment of the Jewish state in 1948. For nearly two thousand years, Christianity had preserved an image of the Jew as the wandering witness, condemned by God to homelessness so Christians could inherit the promise. But suddenly, the wandering stopped. The Jewish people returned to their ancient homeland. Hebrew was resurrected from liturgy into daily speech. Jewish sovereignty reappeared as if history itself had refused to obey the theological script.

Israel’s rebirth shattered the Christian narrative of Jewish exile more forcefully than any sermon ever could. It reopened questions buried since the early Church Fathers: What does it mean if God’s covenant with the Jews never ended? What does it mean if the Jewish people still live, still dream, still return? What does it mean when prophecy looks suspiciously like news?

Israel declares itself a new country on May 14, 1948, to take place officially the following day May 15, which was Shabbat, coinciding with Britain ending its mandate.

By the time the Vatican convened, the Church was wrestling with two cataclysms: the moral collapse of Christian Europe during the Holocaust and the miraculous revival of the Jewish nation that Christian theology had relegated to the margins of history. These two realities — failure and fulfillment — created an impossible tension.

One of the sixteen Vatican II documents, Nostra Aetate (October 26, 1965) was not merely a doctrinal correction. It was a confession, an apology, a theological revolution. It declared the Jews not rejected but beloved, not guilty but enduring, not a fossil but a living partner in covenant. It rejected antisemitism “at any time and by anyone.” For Christians, it was liberation from a poisoned inheritance. For Jews, it was an unexpected invitation to be seen — perhaps for the first time — not as shadows in another people’s story, but as a people with a story of their own.

And something else began in the wake of Vatican II, something few would have predicted: the rise of Christian Zionism in its modern form. Many Christians, freed from the contempt of supersessionism, looked upon the Jewish state not as an accident of geopolitics but as a fulfillment of ancient promise. Some of Israel’s strongest supporters today come from Christian communities shaped by the theological revolution Vatican II inaugurated. They see Jewish sovereignty as evidence not of colonialism but of covenant, not of power but of destiny. They stand with Israel not out of political calculation but out of spiritual gratitude — an act of repentance and solidarity woven together.

Christian leaders assemble at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, observing Jewish prayer in November 2025 (photo: First One Through)

For Jews, this support has been both a blessing and a riddle. After centuries of persecution in Christian lands, how does one accept the embrace of former adversaries? How does a people long defined by suspicion learn to trust a hand that once struck but now extends in friendship? The Jewish story, once shaped by surviving Christian hostility, must now grapple with receiving Christian loyalty. The sting of history meets the strange balm of reconciliation.

These questions unfold in a nation — the United States — whose own identity has been shaped by Judeo-Christian roots from its earliest days. As the country approaches its 250th birthday, Americans are rediscovering that its foundational ideas — human dignity, moral law, liberty of conscience — flowed from a biblical inheritance shared by Jews and Christians alike. The Founders read the Hebrew Bible not as relic but as roadmap. The Exodus shaped the imagination of revolutionaries and abolitionists. The prophets shaped the conscience of Lincoln and King. The Jewish story is woven into the American one, even when America failed to honor it.

Rabbi Meir Soloviechik leads a tour of Christians and Jews at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, discussing the Judeo-Christian roots of America through art, in September 2025 (photo: First One Through)

Now, as antisemitism again rises and institutions fray, the old alliance becomes newly urgent. Jews and Christians are bound not by accident but by destiny: two peoples who share scripture, share moral vocabulary, and share responsibility for sustaining a civilization built on covenant rather than empire. Vatican II made it possible for this bond to be spoken aloud again, freed from the hostility that had once obscured it.

December 8, 1965 created a new Christian. But it also created a new Jew: a Jew who could stand in relationship not only to Jewish history but to Christian history, not only in resistance but in dialogue, not only as survivor but as partner. A Jew whose identity could be affirmed by the very institutions that once erased it.

And perhaps, as America steps toward its 250th year, this renewed bond is not merely theological or historical. It is a reminder that the future of Western freedom may depend on the same truth Vatican II finally proclaimed: that the Jewish people are not a footnote in someone else’s story, but the root from which so much of our shared moral world has grown.

What Is A Moon In Jerusalem?

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People assume the moon is a universal constant. A simple shared celestial orb rising and falling across planet Earth.

At first glance, that seems right. The phases of the moon follow the same cycle for everyone. The waxing crescent in New York is the waxing crescent in Nairobi. The full moon bathing Buenos Aires is the same one brightening Beijing.

But the details betray the simplicity.

Because of Earth’s curvature and tilt, the angle of the moon changes depending on where you stand. In the northern hemisphere, the crescent opens to one side; in the southern hemisphere, it opens to the other. Near the equator, the crescent often lies on its back like a cup collecting light. The horizon line shifts the moon’s ascent and descent, making the same moon feel subtly unfamiliar across latitudes.

Phases of the moon in northern and southern hemispheres

So while the moon itself is constant, the human experience of it is not. Geography shapes perception.

Which brings us to a particular location: Jerusalem.

Why did ancient Jewish sages insist that the new month—the very heartbeat of the Jewish calendar—could only be declared there? Why could only witnesses standing in that one city testify that they had seen the first thin sliver of the new moon? It wasn’t because Jerusalem had the sharpest skies or the best astronomical vantage point. Other regions had clearer air, lower humidity, more favorable horizons.

The choice was not scientific. It was cultural.

The sages understood that if the Jewish calendar were anchored anywhere else—in Babylonia, in Alexandria, in Rome—it would become a local calendar. A diaspora calendar, and reflection of exile. Time would belong to the places where Jews merely lived, not the place where they belonged.

And so they declared: the Jewish month begins only where Jewish destiny begins.
In Jerusalem.

The moon in Jerusalem is not visually unique. It does not shine brighter, hang lower, or reveal a different pattern of craters. What is different is what it carries.

Elsewhere, the moon is a mechanism of light in the night. In Jerusalem, it is a messenger and message.

In the city, it rises over stones worn by millennia, over a city that has been destroyed and rebuilt and prayed toward more times than any other on earth. Outside of Jerusalem, generations of Jews looked to that moon to mark the days of their wandering. Prisoners in Soviet cells whispered its phases in the dark. Families in medieval Europe and North Africa opened their windows each month hoping for a sliver that someone in Jerusalem might already have seen.

For them, the new moon was a signal: Somewhere, in the city we lost, time is still ours.

The moon is the same everywhere, but meaning is not. For Jews, the appearance of the moon in Jerusalem was the moment when wanderers and exiles, merchants and mystics, shepherds and scholars all re-entered the same story, no matter how far they lived from its setting, regardless of their own particular vision of the moon.

The world sees a reflection of the sun’s light in the moon. Jews see a reflection of their unique common heritage, and permanent tie to Jerusalem.