Tag Archives: Jews

From Jesus the Jew to Gaza: The Vatican’s Dangerous Narrative

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For years, pro-Palestinian activists have promoted the false claim that Jesus was a Palestinian.

Jesus was a Jew, born to a Jewish family, living in the Jewish homeland, speaking to Jewish audiences, teaching from the Hebrew Bible, and making pilgrimages to the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. The word “Palestine” was not even the name of the province during His lifetime. The Roman renaming of Judea to Syria Palaestina occurred about a century after His death.

Yet the claim persists because it serves an ahistorical but political purpose: If Jesus can be transformed from a Jew into a Arab, then the central figure of Christianity can be detached from Jewish history and reinserted into a modern political narrative. Suddenly, Jews are no longer obvious indigenous people in the Holy Land, but Arabs – who did not arrive en masse to region for another six centuries – are the real Jews.

The recent Vatican News article about Gaza takes that process one step further.

The article does not explicitly call Jesus a Palestinian. Instead, it wraps a Gazan narrative in the language of Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection. Gaza becomes the tomb. The refugee becomes the suffering servant. The journey out becomes resurrection.

The symbolism is unmistakable.

For centuries, Christians looked to the suffering of Jesus as a uniquely sacred story. Increasingly, anti-Israel agitators are attempting to woo parts of the Christian world by recasting that story through the lens of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with Palestinian Arabs occupying the role once reserved for Christ Himself.

The war in Gaza did not begin with suffering descending from heaven. It began with decisions made by thousands of Gazans. Hamas invaded Israel, murdered civilians and took hostages. Hamas launched a war that it knew would bring devastating consequences to Gaza as it hid it tunnels and refused to let women and children enter the shelters.

Does that resemble Jesus?

Genocidal psychopaths are being transformed into the innocent sufferer. The political and military context disappears from view. Agency gives way to symbolism.

What makes this especially troubling for many Jews is that the institution promoting this narrative is no longer just fringe anti-Israel groups or university protest movements.

It is the Vatican itself.

For two thousand years, the Church has wrestled with the consequences of separating Christianity from its Jewish roots. In recent decades, Catholic-Jewish relations made enormous progress by reaffirming the Jewishness of Jesus and Christianity’s historical connection to the Jewish people.

That progress is undermined when contemporary narratives replace Jesus the Jew with a new symbolic figure: the Palestinian sufferer who cheered Jews being burned alive.

Let Israel Live

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Israel is home to nearly 10 million people.

They are Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze, Bedouin, and others. They are children going to school, parents going to work, soldiers defending their country, and grandparents hoping to see their families thrive. Like people everywhere, they seek safety, opportunity, dignity, and peace.

Those aspirations should not be controversial.

Yet few nations are asked to justify their existence as frequently as Israel.

That is why the phrase “Let Israel Live” matters.

At its most basic level, it is an affirmation of a simple principle: a people has the right to live in security in its homeland. Israeli children should not grow up under the threat of rockets, missiles, terrorism, kidnappings, or calls for their destruction. Families should not have to wonder whether a bus ride, a concert, or a holiday celebration will become the target of violence.

In October 2003 – well before there was a blockade of Gaza – 89% of Palestinian Arabs supported killing Jewish civilians in the West Bank and Gaza; 54% supported killing Jewish civilians inside of Israel. Gazans were much more blood-thirsty than West Bank Arabs.

Security is not a privilege. It is a right.

To say “Let Israel Live” is to recognize that Israelis are human beings rather than symbols in a political debate. Discussions about Israel often revolve around governments, borders, diplomacy, and conflict. Lost in those discussions are the millions of ordinary people whose lives are directly affected by them.

Member of Hamas in Israeli kibbutz after killing family

The phrase carries an even deeper meaning for the Jewish people.

For centuries, Jews lived at the mercy of rulers, empires, and majorities. Again and again they were expelled, persecuted, or denied the ability to determine their own future. Israel represents the restoration of Jewish self-determination in the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people.

To say “Let Israel Live” is therefore not merely a statement about physical security. It is an affirmation that the Jewish people, like all peoples, possess the right to govern themselves and shape their own destiny.

The phrase “Let Israel Live” asks for nothing extraordinary.

It asks that Israel be granted what every people seeks for itself: the right to live, the right to flourish, and the right to exist in peace.

The Missing Jews at Tikvah’s Celebration of America

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The Tikvah Society recently gathered in lower Manhattan to celebrate America’s 250th birthday and make the Jewish case for American exceptionalism.

It was an impressive gathering. Jonathan Silver moderated a conversation between Ruth Wisse, Bret Stephens, and Eric Cohen. Yet as the evening unfolded, a question lingered:

Who was missing?

Not from the audience, but from the conversation itself.

The answer matters because the people in the room represent a remarkably small slice of both America and American Jewry. Jews comprise roughly 6 million people in a nation of 330 million (1.8%). Within American Jewry, the Modern Orthodox and strongly Zionist non-Orthodox communities that dominate much of American Jewish intellectual life represent only a fraction of the next generation. And the attendees represented the most engaged of that small sliver.

The setting itself made the omission more striking. The discussion took place in the very neighborhood where some of the foundational events of the American Republic unfolded. Within walking distance stand the sites of Washington’s inauguration, the first Congress, and the earliest experiments in American self-government. Yet for an event dedicated to celebrating America, surprisingly little attention was paid to the place itself.

American flags on Fifth Avenue (photo: First One Through)

Instead, the conversation focused on the future of Jews, universities, religion, and politics.

The panelists disagreed on important questions. Wisse argued that Jewish unity is not paramount if unity comes at the expense of conviction: better a smaller community of committed Jews than a larger one saturated in ambivalence. Stephens returned to a theme he has emphasized before: stop obsessing over the haters and invest in Jewish education. Cohen broadened the argument, suggesting that both Jewish and Christian religious education are essential to strengthening America itself. The country’s experiment with secularism, he argued, has weakened the civic and moral foundations on which the Republic depends.

Jonathan Silver, Eric Cohen, Bret Stephens and Ruth Wisse address audience at Tikvah Society event on June 9, 2026 in New York City (photo: First One Through)

Both Stephens and Cohen spoke favorably about Chabad. It is not difficult to see why. Chabad has become one of the few institutions capable of reaching Jews across virtually every level of observance. The Rebbe’s army continues to grow because it understands something many institutions have forgotten: people are attracted to confidence, purpose, and personal relationships. Tikvah has absorbed this – it is curious how it plans on applying it.

Education

The discussion of education was compelling. Nothing is more important than good teachers, and few things are more destructive than bad ones. The panelists lamented the continuing flow of Jewish philanthropy into institutions such as Columbia University, where many faculty members and students openly disparage Zionism, America, and increasingly Jews themselves.

Yet the evening largely avoided a more uncomfortable reality.

In the greater New York area, roughly 490,000 Jewish students attend K-12 schools. Only about 40,000 (8.2%) are found in the Modern Orthodox and Zionist day-school ecosystem (“The 8%”) that forms the backbone of many organizations such as Tikvah. The largest and fastest-growing populations are elsewhere. The majority remain in public and secular schools. Even more significant is the extraordinary growth of Chassidic and Yeshivish communities, which now educate approximately 145,000 students (“30% and Growing”).

Those numbers matter.

Ultra-Orthodox

A strategy centered solely on strengthening the already committed may preserve one segment of Jewish life. It does not answer the larger demographic question facing American Jewry. The central challenge is will Tikvah and “The 8%” engage the overwhelming majority of Jewish children who are either in public schools or in the rapidly growing ultra-Orthodox world.

The same demographic blind spot appeared later in the discussion. Cohen argued that religious Jews and religious Christians should work more closely together to defend the values that built America. There is logic to that argument. Tikvah itself appears to be moving in that direction through its decision to award its Herzl Prize to U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, one of Israel’s most outspoken Christian supporters.

Yet there is a striking irony here. As Jewish leaders search for allies among millions of religious Christians, they overlook the “30% and Growing” communities. Leaders commend Chabad for successful outreach to the secular but don’t consider building bridges to the Chasidic and Yeshivish communities, and engaging the majority of students in public and secular schools.

Public Schools

The challenge facing American Jewry is therefore not simply how to build alliances with Christians who share Jewish concerns. It is also how to build relationships among Jews whose lives increasingly unfold in separate educational, cultural, and social worlds.

The same issue applies to America’s educational crisis. If America is worth saving, public schools matter. Any serious defense of American exceptionalism must include an effort to improve the institutions educating most American children. Reforming public education should not be viewed as somebody else’s problem. It is central to the future of both America and American Jewry.

American Jews need to become highly engaged in local school boards. They need to help moderate and defend the institutions form the worst influences which are overwhelming America’s public schools, poisoning America’s future. The evening was silent on this crucial point.

Universities

The conversation about universities also requires greater precision.

Harvard is not a monolith. Columbia is not a monolith. Administrations, trustees, faculty, students, and donors often have different interests and agendas. Too often Jewish philanthropists write nine-figure checks in exchange for buildings bearing their names. It is a poor investment.

The activists and professors who dominate many campuses are not impressed by another Jewish donor’s name on a wall. In some cases, they actively mock the very people who funded the buildings in which they teach.

A better approach would be to invest in people rather than structures: scholars, faculty, teachers, fellowships, civic education programs, and scholarships for students committed to the values that made America successful. Buildings create monuments. Educators create generations.

AreaTikvah ApproachRealityBetter Tactic
Ultra-OrthodoxIgnore. Focus on Christian groupsFastest growing population Engage, perhaps via important issues for both like public funding for religious schools
Public SchoolsUnaddressedLargest current segmentEngage school boards
UniversitiesDon’t fund or send students / make new onesStill prevalent and dominantRedirect contributions

Perhaps the most important lesson from the evening is that preserving American exceptionalism requires more than celebrating it.

American exceptionalism was never simply a belief that America was superior. At its best, it reflected an understanding that liberty is fragile and must be constantly renewed by citizens willing to sacrifice for something larger than themselves.

The people gathered in that room care deeply about America and about the future of the Jewish people. Their commitment is admirable. But commitment alone is not enough. The arithmetic cannot be ignored.

A movement centered on “The 8%” in a community of 1.8% of Americans (0.15%) cannot secure the future.

The challenge is larger than preserving one vision of Jewish life. It is rebuilding the institutions that form Americans in the first place: families, schools, synagogues, churches, civic organizations, and local communities. That is where outreach to BOTH Christian and Ultra-Orthodox groups matters.

And that work begins with Humble Faith. Humble faith built the America being celebrated in lower Manhattan. Humble faith may also be the only way to bridge the growing divides within the Jewish community itself. As we search for a better America, American Jews may first need to rediscover one another.

From Salute to Celebrate to Am Yisrael: The Next Chapter of New York’s Israel Parade

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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.

The War Against Jewish History. Will Come For Jews

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A lecture on the archaeology of ancient Israel and Judah was supposed to take place at the British Museum this month. Instead, it was postponed after organizers learned that protesters intended to disrupt the event.

The subject was not the Gaza war nor settlements nor Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

It was archaeology.

It has happened before. In 2014, UNESCO canceled an exhibition on the Jewish people’s 3,500-year history in the Land of Israel after objections from Arab states. More recently, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas repeatedly denied that the Jewish Temples stood in Jerusalem, at one point claiming they were actually located in Yemen.

These episodes share a common thread. The dispute is no longer simply about the modern State of Israel nor its policies or actions. It is increasingly about the history of the Jewish people themselves.

Yet the evidence is overwhelming. The kingdoms of Israel and Judah are among the best-documented societies of the ancient Near East. Their existence is attested through inscriptions, seals, coins, manuscripts, monuments, and the records of neighboring civilizations. The British Museum itself houses artifacts that tell this story.

Seal of King Hezekiah found in Jerusalem, around 700 BCE

That is why archaeology poses such a problem for those who seek to portray Jews as foreign interlopers – colonizers – with no ancient connection to the land. Artifacts cannot be pressured into changing their testimony. Every discovery points in the same direction: the Jewish story in the Land of Israel stretches back thousands of years, before the births of Jesus and Mohammed.

Few people would tolerate a museum debating whether ancient Egypt existed or whether Rome stood in Italy. Yet Jewish history is increasingly treated as uniquely negotiable.

Curiously and alarmingly, the protest at the British Museum had a much more immediate backdrop than the current war. This talk was to take place during Jewish Culture Month and the protestors were assembled by an anti-Israel group called “Jewish Artists for Palestine.” The museum’s efforts to highlight Jewish history in the land of Israel during a period of focus on Jewish culture brought out Jewish anti-Israel protestors.

Institutions are backing away from Jewish history and culture with the backing of fringe extremist Jews and anti-Israel Arabs. So basic history becomes debate, and the debate has moved from the policies of the Israeli government to Jews themselves.

The Nazis physically annihilated the Jews of Europe as it sought to place their culture as historical artifacts in museums. Now, museums and institutions seek to erase Jewish history and culture as a prelude to eradicating Jews in the Middle East.

The United Nations and International Law are Antisemitic

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The Temple Mount is the holiest site in Judaism.

For nearly two thousand years, Jews have ended prayers with the hope of returning to Jerusalem and rebuilding what once stood there. It is the location of the First and Second Temples. Jewish longing for Jerusalem is woven into daily prayers, holidays, weddings, and mourning rituals.

Yet major international bodies have passed resolutions referring to the site primarily through its Muslim names while minimizing or omitting its central place in Jewish history. Imagine a resolution discussing the Vatican without mentioning Christianity, or Mecca without mentioning Islam. The absurdity would be obvious.

The issue extends beyond language.

Official United Nations map labeling the Temple Mount as holy only to Muslims

The international community supports a protocol under which Muslims may pray freely on the Temple Mount while Jews are restricted from praying at Judaism’s holiest site. The result is extraordinary: the world’s only Jewish state is expected to enforce a policy under which Jews do not support a basic human right at their holiest location in favor of members of another faith.

The Temple Mount is not merely a religious site. It sits at the heart of a larger question: whether the Jewish people are entitled to the same rights afforded to every other people.

Around the world, international institutions celebrate indigenous peoples reconnecting with ancestral lands, reviving ancient languages, protecting sacred sites, and preserving cultural traditions. Yet only in the case of the Jewish people does a return to the place where their civilization, language, religion, and national identity were born become a form of “colonialism.“

International institutions routinely describe the Temple Mount and the Jewish Quarter as part of “occupied Palestinian territory.” Yet these are the very places where Jewish civilization was born, where the ancient Temples stood, and where Jewish communities lived for centuries.

Jordan’s capture of eastern Jerusalem in 1948 resulted in the expulsion of its Jewish population and the denial of Jewish access to the Western Wall, the Temple Mount, and the Jewish Quarter for nineteen years. It granted citizenship to residents as long as they weren’t Jewish. The UN seemingly liked this. International discussion of the Old City of Jerusalem begins after the expulsion of Jews, as though their absence were the natural condition and their return the disruption.

The same pattern appears in discussions of territory.

The Green Line was never intended to be a permanent border. The 1949 Armistice Agreements explicitly stated that the line was not a political boundary and would not prejudice future negotiations. It was a military ceasefire line drawn after a war.

Yet decades later, much of international law treats that armistice line as though it were a sacred border whose crossing transforms ordinary Jews into international criminals.

A Jew who moves across that line becomes a “settler.” An Arab who moves into the same building does not. The geography is identical. The identity of the resident is what changes.

International institutions frequently oppose changes to the “demographic character” of eastern Jerusalem. But demographic character relative to what date?

The answer is effectively 1949, the year after Jordan captured eastern Jerusalem and expelled every Jew from the Jewish Quarter and surrounding areas. Why should the demographic baseline for justice be the moment immediately following the ethnic cleansing of Jews?

Why not 1980? Why not 2000? Why not today?

Human beings move. Cities evolve. Neighborhoods change.

The only way to preserve a specific demographic snapshot forever is to decide that one particular population must be prevented from returning.

In Jerusalem, that population happens to be Jews.

Then there is the question of refugees.

The same international system that opposes Jews moving into neighborhoods beyond the Green Line frequently endorses claims that millions of Palestinian refugees and descendants should be allowed to settle inside Israel.

Movement in one direction is described as a right. Movement in the other direction is described as a violation of international law.

The asymmetry is impossible to miss.

Every era develops its own vocabulary for antisemitism. In medieval Europe it often spoke the language of theology. In the nineteenth century it spoke the language of race. Today it increasingly speaks the language of international law.

Around the world, international institutions celebrate indigenous peoples reclaiming ancestral lands, reviving ancient languages, protecting sacred sites, and restoring cultural traditions.

Jews have done all of those things.

They returned to the land where their civilization was born. They revived Hebrew from a language of prayer into a language of everyday life. They restored Jewish sovereignty to the city that has stood at the center of Jewish life for three millennia. They reestablished communities at many of their most ancient holy sites.

Yet only in the case of the Jewish people does this story become one of colonialism rather than return.

The Covenant and the Constitution

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As America approaches its 250th birthday and Jews prepare to celebrate Shavuot, two anniversaries separated by more than three thousand years arrive together.

One commemorates the acceptance of a covenant at Sinai. The other celebrates the creation of a constitutional republic in Philadelphia.

Different eras, different peoples, different purposes. Yet both rank among history’s most successful experiments in ordered liberty. Each rests upon the belief that freedom flourishes when people willingly bind themselves to enduring principles.

Shavuot marks the giving of the Torah. According to Jewish tradition, an entire nation accepted a shared framework of law, responsibility, and purpose. The defining moment of Jewish history centered on a covenant that applied equally to shepherds, merchants, judges, priests, and kings. Every Jew inherited both privileges and obligations. Every Jew stood beneath the same law.

America’s Founders pursued a similar aspiration. They sought to create a republic governed by laws rather than personalities, sustained by citizens willing to shoulder responsibility for the common good. The Constitution would provide the framework. The character of the people would determine whether it endured.

For American Jews, those two traditions have complemented one another for nearly two and a half centuries.

A Nation Built on Obligations

The Torah places responsibility at the center of communal life.

Parents teach children. Judges pursue justice. Business owners conduct themselves honestly. Communities support widows, orphans, and the poor. Neighbors help one another. Citizens participate in communal affairs. The Hebrew word mitzvah means commandment, reflecting a worldview in which obligation occupies a central place.

Jewish life developed around institutions that required participation and commitment. Synagogues, schools, charitable organizations, burial societies, study groups, courts, and community councils depended upon ordinary people investing time, resources, and energy into a shared enterprise.

Across centuries and continents, Jewish communities learned how to govern themselves, educate their children, care for vulnerable members, settle disputes, raise funds, preserve traditions, and maintain communal cohesion across generations. Those habits became deeply ingrained. They traveled wherever Jews traveled.

A constitutional republic depends upon many of the same qualities. Elections require voters. Courts require jurors. Communities require volunteers. Public institutions require trust. Civil society depends upon citizens who contribute more than they consume.

The connection between liberty and responsibility appears throughout Jewish tradition. The Exodus brought physical freedom. Seven weeks later, the Israelites arrived at Sinai and accepted the responsibilities that would transform a collection of former slaves into a nation. Freedom acquired meaning through purpose, discipline, and commitment.

That lesson remains profoundly relevant in every generation.

Why America Worked

For nearly two thousand years, Jewish communities navigated a recurring dilemma. Security often required accommodation. Opportunity frequently depended upon the goodwill of rulers. Rights expanded and contracted according to the decisions of monarchs, church authorities, political parties, and shifting public sentiment.

The American republic introduced a different model.

Rights flowed from citizenship.

The promise appeared almost immediately.

In 1790, George Washington wrote to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, home of Touro Synagogue, offering a vision unlike anything Jews had encountered in centuries of Diaspora life. The government of the United States, Washington wrote, gave “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” More importantly, he described Jews as possessing “alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.”

Those words represented far more than tolerance. Tolerance implies permission granted by those in power. Washington described Jews as citizens whose rights derived from the principles of the republic itself.

The distinction proved historic.

America offered Jews something extraordinary: equal citizenship while allowing them to remain fully Jewish.

By the early twentieth century, American Jews had produced judges, industrialists, labor leaders, scholars, entrepreneurs, military officers, and public servants. No figure better embodied the synthesis of Jewish identity and American citizenship than Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis.

At a time when some questioned whether Jews could maintain a distinct identity while remaining devoted Americans, Brandeis dismissed the concern entirely.

“To be good Americans, we must be better Jews.” – Louis Brandeis

Brandeis understood that Judaism and American citizenship drew strength from many of the same sources. Both relied upon educated citizens. Both depended upon moral self-restraint. Both valued participation over passivity. Both asked individuals to contribute to a larger community.

He also celebrated America’s ability to unite diverse communities while preserving their distinct identities.

“America has believed that in differentiation, not in uniformity, lies the path of progress.” – Louis Brandeis

That insight echoes one of the Torah’s earliest political arrangements. The tribes of Israel maintained distinct identities, histories, and responsibilities while participating in a common covenant. Judah remained Judah. Levi remained Levi. Ephraim remained Ephraim. Diversity existed within a framework of shared purpose.

America has often operated in much the same way. Citizens arrive from every corner of the globe carrying different languages, traditions, and family histories. They become Americans through allegiance to constitutional principles and civic participation. Unity emerges through commitment to a common enterprise.

America’s Founders understood the importance of civic character as well. John Adams famously observed that the Constitution was made “only for a moral and religious People.”

The statement reflected a practical reality. Institutions matter. Laws matter. Their effectiveness ultimately depends upon citizens capable of exercising self-restraint, accepting responsibility, and participating in public life.

Those qualities occupy a central place in Jewish tradition.

The Miracle of Compatibility

The story of American Jewry reflects something deeper than economic opportunity or social mobility.

America and Judaism developed complementary understandings of freedom.

Both traditions place law above rulers. Both value education. Both encourage active participation in communal affairs. Both rely upon citizens capable of governing themselves. Both recognize that liberty carries responsibilities.

The partnership has been extraordinarily successful.

American Jews have served in every war, sat on the Supreme Court, led major corporations, founded universities, advanced scientific discovery, built charitable institutions, served in elected office, and contributed to nearly every aspect of national life. At the same time, Jewish communities have built thousands of synagogues, schools, charities, cultural institutions, and communal organizations across the country.

The result has been one of the most successful relationships between a religious minority and a democratic republic in modern history.

As Shavuot approaches and America prepares to celebrate a quarter millennium of independence, the convergence feels especially meaningful.

At Sinai, freedom became joined to responsibility. In Philadelphia, liberty became joined to constitutional government.

Both moments reflected the same enduring insight: freedom survives when citizens willingly accept obligations to something larger than themselves.

Three millennia later, Jews celebrating Shavuot and Americans celebrating 250 years of independence continue to draw from that same well. A covenant and a Constitution, each in its own way, call upon free people to govern themselves, serve a higher purpose, and build a society worthy of being passed to the next generation.

Mamdani’s False Charge And the Echo of the Soviet Union

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New York City Mayor and Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani accused a synagogue hosting a West Bank real estate expo of facilitating “illegal land sales” and “displacing Palestinians.” It was an explosive accusation, wrapped in the language of international law, designed to sound precise and morally settled. But the facts—and the law—are far more complicated than that charge suggests.

The first fact Mamdani skips is the most important one: the buyers are Americans.

Not Israelis being relocated by the State of Israel. Not civilians transferred by military order. Not part of a government-directed demographic campaign. Americans, acting on their own, voluntarily exploring whether to buy homes.

That distinction is the legal center of the argument.

The international legal objection to “settlements” rests largely on Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits an occupying power from transferring parts of its own civilian population into occupied territory. The theory is about state conduct: a government moving its own people into disputed land.

That is not what is happening here.

Whatever one thinks of “Israeli settlements,” an American family independently choosing to buy an apartment is not the same legal act as a state transferring its civilian population. It is a private decision, made voluntarily, by people acting on their own behalf.

Brochure from Great Real Estate Event at Park Avenue Synagogue in New York City in May 2026

The second problem with Mamdani’s accusation is historical.

Much of the outrage centers on homes in the West Bank neighborhood of Gush Etzion, as though it were simply land taken from Palestinian Arabs after 1967. That telling requires erasing inconvenient history.

Jews legally purchased land in Gush Etzion in the 1920s and 1930s. Jewish communities were established there before the State of Israel existed. In 1948, those communities were attacked, destroyed, and their survivors expelled. These neighborhoods were not owned privately by Palestinian Arabs.

Even more, almost every single presenter at the event was marketing real estate inside Israel. As the event advertised on its opening page “from Jerusalem to Netanya, from Haifa to Eilat,” this was an event showcasing homes inside of Israel.

This event was not about “displacing Palestinians” as Mamdani charged. This was selling homes in the Jewish homeland to American Jews.

That 3,300-year old bond is at the heart of antisemites loathing Israel, much like Mamdani’s mentors in the Soviet Union attacking Zionists decades ago.

Normalized Violence

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This was the third assassination attempt against Donald Trump. He survived but the deeper story lies elsewhere. By the third attempt, the country barely pauses. The first attack should have shaken a nation to its core; the second should have deepened the sense of alarm. By the third, something more dangerous has taken hold: familiarity. Political violence begins to feel woven into the atmosphere, another storm system passing through.

That is the shift in American life. Political violence has moved from rupture to expectation. The country has grown accustomed to the possibility that power will be contested through force.

The evidence stretches across the last several years. There was the attempted kidnapping of Gretchen Whitmer, where executive authority itself became the target. There was the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, where proximity to political authority was enough to invite violence. There was the arson attack on the home of Governor Josh Shapiro. There was the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Each attack carried its own political coloration. Different grievances, different ideologies, different enemies.

Yet they share the same underlying grammar. The human being is transformed into an idea.

The governor becomes the state. The executive becomes capital. The politician becomes the regime.

That transformation is the hinge upon which violence swings. A person who stands as an abstraction for a hated system becomes easier to strike. Violence acquires moral clothing. The blow feels righteous because the target has already been converted into a symbol.

That is why the public reaction to United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s killing mattered so much. The killing itself was one event. The social response revealed the deeper current. The alleged killer, Luigi Mangione, became a hero in corners of the internet. Memes spread. Fundraisers appeared. Admiration followed. A killer became an instrument of vengeance against a hated system.

It felt like the movie Joker come to life. In Joker, an unstable man carries the plot forward, but the real engine is the crowd waiting to celebrate him. The mob grants moral legitimacy to the violence. The killer becomes a vessel for collective resentment.

That is the deeper American drift. Violence increasingly invites sympathy, reinterpretation, and applause. The act becomes secondary to the story society tells itself about why the victim represented something worth destroying.

This can be seen in the Middle East as well.

Palestinian political culture offers a longer and starker example of how this process unfolds. For roughly twenty-five years, polling by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research has repeatedly shown majority support for violence against Jewish civilians inside Israel. This stretches back before the Gaza blockade and before the present war. The permission structure came first.

PCPSR poll from October 2003 asking whether Palestinian Arabs supported armed attacks against civilians in Israel

Then politics followed.

In 2006, Palestinians elected Hamas to a parliamentary majority, fully aware of its openly antisemitic and eliminationist charter. October 7 emerged from that political soil. The massacre fit within a culture that had long accepted the killing of Jewish civilians as part of political struggle.

That is why it was celebrated.

And the celebration reached far beyond Gaza. American campuses, Western cities, and activist spaces erupted with demonstrations that folded the massacre into broader narratives of liberation. The same reduction had already taken place. Jews had been recast as symbols of systems: colonialism, finance, whiteness, Western power, institutional dominance.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) goes on antisemitic rant at Democratic Socialists of America conference, invoking Nazi imagery of Jews “operating behind the curtain… to make money off of racism.”

This is the ancient machinery of antisemitism. Jews become the human face of structural resentment.

The FBI hate-crime statistics show the physical consequences of that social logic. Americans often picture hate crime through property damage: a swastika painted on a synagogue, a church defaced, a mosque vandalized. Yet for more than a decade, the majority of hate crimes in America have been crimes against persons.

In 2019, 62.6 percent of hate-crime offenses targeted people. In 2020, the FBI recorded 7,750 crimes against persons, with nearly half involving direct physical assault. The figures jumped to over 11,000 in 2023 and 2024, with Jewish accounting for the vast majority of hate crimes by religion.

The reason sits in plain sight. Jews occupy a permanent place in political imagination as concentrated power: finance, media, institutions, influence. Even when stated softly, the accusation remains the same: too much influence, too much reach, too much control.

Once power itself is treated as morally suspect, violence against those imagined to embody it starts to feel cleansing. Society begins teaching itself that rage against elites is a form of justice. Institutions become enemies. Authority becomes corruption. Violence becomes political purification.

That moral structure echoes the French Revolution. The crowd gathers. The elite are marched into the square. Their status dissolves. Their destruction becomes public theater.

That is the destination of normalized violence.

The warning sign is larger than the incident. The warning lies in the crowd, in the cultural ecosystem that grants permission, supplies applause, and tells itself that the target stood for something hateful enough to justify blood.

Society has normalized violence as the media and school systems falsely rebranded America as a deeply unfair caste system. In the masses attempt for a complete redistribution of power and wealth, those with or with perceived power – politicians and Jews – will be open game for the angry mob.

Related:

The Broke-n Generation (December 2024)

When Jews Come Home from India and Are Called Colonizers

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There is something almost miraculous about Operation Wings of Dawn.

This week, Israel began bringing the first members of the Bnei Menashe community from northeast India to Israel, the latest chapter in one of the most improbable stories in Jewish history. These are Jews who have long understood themselves as descendants of the Tribe of Manasseh, one of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, exiled by the Assyrian Empire nearly 2,700 years ago. Across centuries, empires, languages, and continents, they preserved fragments of ritual, memory, and identity tied to ancient Israel. In modern times, after study, rabbinic engagement, and formal recognition, thousands have made aliyah. Hundreds more are now on their way. For the Jewish world, it is an extraordinary scene: a people scattered to the farthest reaches of the earth still finding their way home.

That is the Jewish story in miniature.

Exile was never meant to be permanent. The Jewish calendar, Jewish prayer, and Jewish memory are saturated with return. From The Hebrew Bible to the modern Zionist movement, the idea of ingathering has been the central thread of Jewish continuity. Operation Wings of Dawn is not an immigration program in the ordinary sense. It is the continuation of that ancient civilizational arc.

It is also a reminder that Jewish peoplehood never fit modern racial categories. Jews came back to Israel from Ethiopia, from Iraq, from Yemen, from Russia, from France, and now again from India. Different languages. Different appearances. Different histories of exile. One people.

That should be a remarkable human story.

And yet, in some corners of the media world, it became something else.

Quds News Network ran a story framing the arrival as a “settlement push” of “new colonizers” in northern “Occupied Palestine”, reducing the Bnei Menashe to instruments of a political project rather than recognizing them as Jews returning to join the Jewish people in the Jewish state. The framing is familiar: Jewish return is recoded as colonial expansion.

This is not an isolated habit of language. Across anti-Israel activist media and parts of the NGO ecosystem, Jewish presence in Israel is increasingly interpreted through a “settler-colonial” framework in “Occupied Palestine,” meaning anywhere in Israel. Amnesty International’s apartheid framework leans heavily on this vocabulary, turning Jewish sovereignty itself into a structural offense rather than a legitimate act of national self-determination. That language then migrates outward, shaping how journalists, activists, and political movements speak about Jews in Israel. The result is a moral inversion in which Jewish return becomes aggression by definition.

And this is where the word colonizer collapses under its own weight.

Colonialism has an actual meaning. It is when an imperial center sends its people outward to dominate foreign land for extraction and rule. Britain in India. Spain in the Americas. France in Algeria.

Operation Wings of Dawn is the reverse movement: A dispersed people carrying an ancient memory of Israel, choosing to gather into the one Jewish homeland.

Calling that colonialism empties the word of meaning.

And the asymmetry is impossible to ignore.

When Palestinian Arabs preserve the memory of villages lost 77 years ago, the world treats it as sacred inheritance, a claim passed from generation to generation. Even when those same Arabs live just a few miles away from their grandparents’ homes, in the same land, with the same people, language and culture, people advocate for their relocation.

Yet when Jews preserve the memory of exile in distant lands and act on it, the same world increasingly calls it colonization.

That difference tells you everything.

The issue has never been whether Jews are European or Middle Eastern, white or brown, indigenous or diasporic. The Bnei Menashe expose how flimsy those categories always were. Indian Jews arriving in Israel should shatter the lazy caricature of Zionism as European implantation.

Instead, the caricature simply repeats the mantra:

A Jew from Poland returns as a colonizer.
A Jew from Iraq returns as a colonizer.
A Jew from Ethiopia returns as a colonizer.
A Jew from India returns as a colonizer.

For those committed to denying Jewish belonging, even a homecoming from India must be rewritten as invasion.