In July 2023 alone, 67,769 Gazans were allowed to exit Gaza through Israeli crossings according to the United Nations. In the entire year of 2023, only 50,098 Jews were allowed onto the Temple Mount — Judaism’s holiest site — in Jerusalem, the capital of the Jewish state according to Beyadenu a Jewish rights advocacy group.
One month versus one year. A border crossing versus a holy site in a nation’s capital. The comparison is damning.
The Jewish state allowed more Gazans to cross its border in one month before the Gaza leadership launched a war, than it allowed Jews to step foot on their holiest site over an entire year.
That is not security policy. That is civilizational self-sabotage.
Every country controls its borders. That is normal. What is not normal is a nation blocking its own people from their central religious site in their own capital city.
Jews face time windows, group limits, police escorts, and de-facto prayer bans to walk on ground their ancestors sanctified 3,000 years ago. The result is obvious: Jewish presence is suppressed by design.
Fifty thousand Jews in a year is not demand. It is managed scarcity.
Thousands of Jews congregate in the Kotel plaza on Passover, unable to ascend onto the Jewish Temple Mount
The Western Wall Plaza is sold as Jewish religious freedom. It isn’t. It is a containment zone — a consolation prize engineered to keep Jews away from the mountain that actually matters.
This is why the Gaza comparison cuts so deep.
Israeli policy makers allowed in more Gazans into Israel, during a blockade, knowing that the area is led by an antisemitic genocidal jihadist group sworn to destroy the Jewish State, than for Jews just seeking a basic human right of prayer.
A sovereign nation that polices Jewish prayer more aggressively than cross-border traffic has lost the plot. A capital that cages its own sacred history is not free.
Until Jews can walk onto the Temple Mount without escorts, quotas, and humiliation, the Kotel Plaza remains exactly what it is: an open-air prison with good lighting and a propaganda budget.
The blood libel begins with how the Book of Exodus is misremembered. Exodus is a story of Jewish liberation, yet antisemites preserve it as a story of punishment. That inversion is not confusion but tradition. Every generation dresses the libel in new language, while the structure never changes.
The plagues were directed at dismantling Egyptian authority with precision. The opening strike hit the Nile—Egypt’s god, economy, and source of life—and exposed a crime already committed there. Egypt had drowned Israelite infants in that river to erase a future it feared. The first plague named that bloodshed and stripped Egypt of moral order.
What followed was escalation with restraint. Egypt lost land, productivity, and cosmic claims. Darkness collapsed Pharaoh’s divine authority. What remained was the empire’s final refuge: the belief that continuity would return, that tomorrow would repair what today exposed.
The final plague took it. The death of the firstborn judged a state that had already made children expendable. It revoked Egypt’s claim on the future. Regimes that destroy children forfeit moral legitimacy. Measure followed measure.
The Israelites did not celebrate death. They marked their doors, stayed inside, and departed at dawn. Their defining act was escape from bloodlust, not indulgence in it. Freedom—not punishment—was the center of the story.
Antisemitism begins by erasing that fact.
Across centuries, Jews were remembered not as a people who fled violence but as a people who embodied it. Divine judgment on a tyrannical state was detached from context and reassigned as a permanent Jewish trait. Victims became perpetrators. Liberation became threat. From this inversion, the blood libel followed naturally, and not surprisingly, during Jewish celebrations of Passover when they left Egypt.
The charge did more than justify violence; it recoded Jews as a permanent danger. If society believes Jews possess bloodlust, then Jews must be watched, monitored, restricted, and scrutinized. They become an unwanted risk. Suspicion overwhelms citizenship. Surveillance replaces equality. In this logic, it is only a matter of time before Jews are assumed to act—and preemptive punishment becomes rationalized as self-defense.
This is how the libel works. It marks Jews forever as dangerous rather than as people who long for freedom. It recasts victims as villains and turns survival itself into evidence of guilt. The blood libel means that Jews are never trusted as equals, and never accepted as free.
That inheritance governs today’s rhetoric. Calling Jews “baby killers” is not a factual claim; it is the inherited reflex of a culture that never accepted Jewish freedom. The accusation is identity-based, not evidence-based. It exists to keep Jews outside the circle of legitimate humanity and to deny the moral standing of Jewish self-defense before it is even asserted.
Turkey fans the blood libel in Hamas’s latest war to destroy Israel
This mindset survives because it is passed down, laundered through new vocabulary, and presented as moral concern. But it is the same lie. It refuses to see Jews as a people who escaped societies that murdered their children and insists instead on seeing Jews as the source of murder itself.
The story that antisemitism started when Pharoah forgot Joseph and became worried about the growing number and power of Jews was the fear of a monarch. Antisemitism was instilled in the masses when the Exodus story was flipped that Jews had a bloodlust and didn’t deserve equality. Every society that accepted the libel eventually convinced itself that Jewish freedom was intolerable—and acted accordingly.
Modern political language compresses history into slogans. The United Nations speaks of “occupied Palestinian territory,” which it insists be Jew-free. The “pro-Palestinian” movements echo false claims of Jewish colonialism, as if Jews are newcomers.
Archaeology answers differently—through the infrastructure of everyday life.
Across Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the Galilee, ancient mikva’ot—Jewish ritual immersion baths—appear in homes, villages, farms, and neighborhoods. They date from the First Temple and Second Temple periods and into the Mishnaic era. Their construction follows strict Jewish law. Their distribution tracks permanent settlement. Their purpose is singular: Jews lived here as a rooted society, organizing life around inherited religious practice.
This is not an argument from ideology. It is a statement of fact.
Jerusalem—Including the East: A City Immersed
Jerusalem contains the highest concentration of ancient mikva’ot anywhere in the world, with hundreds surrounding the Jewish Temple Mount as people immersed themselves before entering. In the City of David—today known as Silwan, a village established by Yementite Jews in the 19th century—dozens of ritual baths are embedded in residential quarters dated from the 1st century BCE to 70 CE. North and east of the later city walls, mikva’ot appear in neighborhoods now called Shuafat and Sheikh Jarrah, including the Shimon HaTzadik complex. The ancient mikvahs are also found to the west and south.
Mikvah under the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem
“The widespread distribution of ritual baths in and around Jerusalem reflects strict observance of Jewish purity laws as part of everyday life.”
These installations predate Islam by centuries. They show a city whose rhythm followed Jewish law across its full geographic footprint—west and east alike.
Judea: Bethlehem, Jericho, Hebron, and the Southern Hills
South of Jerusalem, the Judean Hills—now routinely labeled “occupied”—were a Jewish heartland in antiquity. Around Bethlehem, archaeological surveys identify rock-hewn mikva’ot associated with agricultural estates and villages from the Hasmonean and Herodian periods. Comparable installations appear near Hebron and Tekoa.
“Ritual baths, agricultural installations, and burial caves indicate dense Jewish settlement throughout the Judean Hills during the Second Temple period.”
These were family communities organized around Jewish practice, embedded in the land over generations.
Samaria: Villages of Law and Land
In Samaria—today’s northern “West Bank”—mikva’ot appear in rural villages and estates tied to farming and household life. Near Shiloh, stepped pools carved into limestone meet halakhic requirements and date to the late Second Temple period.
These finds demonstrate continuity between biblical Israelite centers and later Jewish communities. They record a population living according to inherited law, rooted to fields and seasons, long before later demographic changes.
What Mikva’ot Prove
Mikva’ot appear only where Jewish law structured daily behavior. They require permanence, planning, and communal norms. They cluster where families lived and expected their children to live.
Plotted together, they form a map that predates:
Arabic language in the region
Creation of Islam
Medieval and modern political boundaries
They belong to a Jewish civilization indigenous to the land for centuries before the Arab conquests of the seventh century.
Conclusion
International bodies can rename the land and activists can repeat slander but archaeology restores history to human scale. Mikva’ot record where Jews prepared for worship, marriage, birth, and community life. They mark neighborhoods, not narratives.
Across all of Jerusalem and through Judea and Samaria, these ritual baths establish a simple historical truth: Jews are indigenous to this land, and their daily life shaped it long before later conquests and long before modern politics.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
First One Through 