WhatsappWith growing Jew-hating antisemitism from all directions, there is something I believe every Jew needs to internalize right now:
Nothing we do, or don’t do, will make Jew-hating antisemitism disappear.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t defend ourselves against it. We absolutely must.
But we have to stop allowing Jew-hatred to define us and our conversations.
Look at what happened after October 7.
We had just suffered the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Jews were slaughtered, raped, burned alive and kidnapped from their homes and from a music festival.
And what happened?
Before Israel could even bury its dead, while we were still searching for jihadis who infiltrated from Gaza, people around the world were already demonstrating against Israel and celebrating or justifying the jihadi atrocities. This was happening already on Oct. 7, weeks before Israel begun the military offensive in Gaza.
Think about that.
Israel had not yet conducted the war in Gaza that our enemies would later use to rationalize their hatred.
The bodies of massacred Israelis were still lying on the ground.
And the Jew-hatred was already exploding.
That should have taught us something.
Yet too many Jews continue asking ourselves:
What did Israel do wrong?
What should Israel say differently?
What military policy should Israel change?
What politician should Israel replace?
What can Jews do to make them hate us less?
Stop.
Jew-hatred did not begin with Netanyahu.
It did not begin with settlements.
It did not begin with Gaza.
And it certainly did not begin in 1948.
Jew-hatred has followed our people through thousands of years of exile and persecution. Our ancestors even experienced it in America before the Holocaust, with communities and social clubs that were off limits to Jews.
For several generations, many Jews in the West were blessed to experience something historically unusual.
I call it the post-Holocaust bubble because it literally began after—and as a result of—the Holocaust.
The Western world had witnessed what one of Europe’s most sophisticated and cultured societies had become. Nazi Germany industrialized the mass murder of the Jewish people, and the horror of the Holocaust created a profound stigma around open Jew-hatred.
For a time.
Many Jews grew up believing this relative safety was normal. That Jew-hating antisemitism was gone.
Historically, it wasn’t.
And now that bubble has burst.
We are watching old hatred return in new packaging, from jihadi Muslims, from the “progressive,” really regressive, left, and increasingly from elements of the right.
Different slogans. Different political movements.
Same Jew-hatred.
So what do we do?
There is another uncomfortable part of this story.
While Jew-hatred itself is not caused by anything Jews or Israel do, that does not absolve the Jewish and Israeli organizational world of its responsibility to educate people about the ideological and geopolitical forces deliberately fueling it.
For decades, too many Jewish organizations have treated Israel’s information battle as though we simply need better talking points.
We need something much deeper: historical education—for ourselves first.
People need to understand how the Palestinian national identity was invented, cultivated, weaponized and internationalized during the Cold War—including the creation and through extensive Soviet support for the PLO and the broader Soviet campaign against Zionism. Moscow helped transform the Palestinian cause into a global revolutionary cause and promoted propaganda portraying Zionism as racism, colonialism and imperialism.
This evolved into what we now recognize as the red-green alliance, with historical precedents in Nazi collaboration with the jihadi leader Haj Amin Al-Husseini, and later Soviet cultivation of revolutionary anti-Zionism—the convergence of radical leftist, “anti-colonialist” movements with jihadi forces advancing jihad, united around common enemies: Israel, the Jewish people, America and the Western order.
The slogans change. The underlying targets remain remarkably familiar.
And today, the information battlefield has become infinitely more sophisticated.
Hostile states and enormously wealthy foreign actors, like Russia, China, Qatar, Iran and Saudi Arabia understand that they do not have to defeat America or Israel only on a conventional battlefield. They can exploit social media, universities, political movements, influencers and information networks to divide Western societies from within, all based on spreading lies to generate hatred towards Israel and the Jews.
Iran, Russia and China have all been documented conducting influence operations online. Qatar has poured extraordinary sums into institutions and influence in the West, particularly American higher education. Other foreign actors, including Qatar, have also invested heavily in shaping Western institutions and public discourse.
Add bots, coordinated accounts, algorithms and enormous social-media ecosystems, and propaganda that once required newspapers, radio stations and political organizations that can now reach millions of people almost instantaneously.
This matters enormously.
Because when millions of young Westerners suddenly begin repeating virtually identical claims, that Israel is a colonial state, Zionism is racism, Jews are foreign occupiers in Jerusalem, and the Palestinian struggle is part of a worldwide revolutionary struggle, we should at least teach people where these narratives came from and who has spent decades promoting them.
Yet much of the Jewish/Israel organizational establishment, and popular influencers, refuse to have that conversation.
Instead, we endlessly debate how Israel can improve its “messaging.”
That misses the point.
You cannot defeat an ideological war if you refuse to teach people the ideology, history and strategic interests behind it.
But here is the equally important distinction:
None of this means that if we expose every bot network, foreign influence campaign or historical lie, Jew-hatred will disappear.
It won’t.
Jew-hatred existed long before the Soviet Union, the PLO, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Qatar or social media.
These forces did not invent Jew-hatred.
They learned how to weaponize it.
That is why our response must operate on two levels simultaneously.
We must expose the propaganda, foreign influence and ideological movements attacking Israel and the Jewish people.
But our deeper response must still be to build something they cannot destroy:
Jews who know who they are.
Jews who understand their history.
Jews who recognize that Jerusalem is not some foreign colonial possession, but the heart of Jewish civilization for thousands of years.
Jews who understand that Israel is not an apology for the Holocaust, but the modern restoration of an ancient indigenous people to its ancestral homeland.
Jews who understand the miracle of our return.
And Jews whose faith and identity are strong enough that no bot army, campus protest, influencer or propaganda campaign can make them ashamed of who they are.
That is how we prepare the next generation.
Not through fear.
Through truth, identity, history and faith.
This is where I believe we have been making a terrible mistake.
Too much Jewish energy today is focused on fighting Jew-hating antisemitism.
We count incidents.
We document hateful posts and personalities.
We issue statements.
We organize protests and conferences to “fight antisemitism.”
Obviously, threats must be confronted. Governments must protect Jewish citizens. Criminals must be prosecuted. Lies about Israel must be exposed.
But fighting people who hate Jews cannot become the foundation of Jewish identity.
Because the Jewish national identity is not about antisemitism.
Being Jewish is not about those who hate us. It is about who we are.
And ours is one of the most extraordinary stories in human history.
We are an ancient people exiled from our indigenous, ancestral homeland.
We were scattered across the earth.
Empires rose and disappeared.
Civilizations that conquered us vanished.
Our people were persecuted, expelled and massacred again and again.
Yet we survived.
We preserved our Torah.
We preserved our identity.
We preserved our language.
We preserved our connection to Jerusalem.
For thousands of years Jews prayed toward the same homeland from which we had been exiled.
And then we came home.
Against every historical probability, the Jewish people returned to sovereignty in the Land of Israel.
We revived Hebrew.
We rebuilt Jerusalem.
We gathered Jews from across the earth.
And in less than 80 years, this tiny country became a military, technological, agricultural and medical powerhouse that contributes far beyond its size to humanity.
That is the story we should be teaching our children.
Not: Everyone hates us. We must protect ourselves.
But:
Look who you are.
Look where you come from.
Look what your people survived.
Look what your people rebuilt.
And above all:
Look at the miracles.
David Ben-Gurion famously understood something essential about this country:
“In Israel, in order to be a realist, you must believe in miracles.”
Exactly.
The return of the Jewish people to Israel cannot be understood merely through politics, diplomacy or military power.
There is something much bigger happening here.
I believe in God.
I believe the Jewish people are living through an extraordinary chapter in our ancient story.
And I believe strengthening our faith is not escapism from reality.
It is how we understand reality.
That doesn’t mean sitting around waiting for miracles.
We build.
We fight.
We serve.
We vote.
We defend our communities.
We strengthen Israel.
We expose lies.
We confront our enemies.
But we do all of it knowing that the Jewish story is bigger than today’s headlines.
This is why my message to Jewish parents today is so urgent.
Do not raise your children primarily to fear Jew-hating antisemitism.
Give them something infinitely stronger.
Give them Jewish identity.
Give them Jewish pride.
Give them Torah.
Give them faith in God.
Give them connection to Israel.
Teach them the truth about Jewish history.
Teach them that they belong to an extraordinary people.
And bring them to Israel.
Better yet, come home.
Because as Jew-hating antisemitism grows around the world, our greatest answer is not begging societies to love us.
Our answer is strengthening ourselves.
A Jew who knows who he is cannot so easily be intimidated into hiding his identity.
A Jew who understands Israel’s history will not abandon Israel because of social pressure.
A Jew grounded in faith will not interpret every frightening headline as the end of the Jewish story.
And a Jewish people sovereign in our ancestral homeland no longer has to depend entirely upon the goodwill of others for survival.
That is the revolutionary change of our generation.
Our ancestors dreamed about what we are living.
The coming years will be challenging.
I don’t know exactly what is coming.
None of us do.
But I know what will prepare us.
Not obsessing over how to make people stop hating Jews.
Not apologizing for Israel.
Not shrinking our Jewish identity so that someone else might accept us.
The opposite.
Strengthen your Jewish identity.
Strengthen your Jewish pride.
Strengthen your connection to Israel.
Strengthen your faith in God.
And teach your children to do the same.
Jew-hatred is ancient.
But so are we.
And unlike the empires that tried to destroy us, we are still here.
Not only surviving. But thriving.
We are back in Jerusalem.
We are sovereign again in our ancestral homeland.
We are rebuilding.
We are growing.
And we are witnessing the Jewish people return to history before our very eyes.
So don’t allow Jew-hating antisemitism to define your Jewish future.
Let the miracle of being Jewish define it.
Strengthen your faith.
Strengthen your family.
Strengthen Israel.
And never forget what a blessing it is to be part of the Jewish people at this extraordinary moment in our history. These are truly Geulah/redemptive times. Hold on to the positive, and try your best to properly compartmentalize the negative. Amazing times are ahead despite the bumps in the road.
Am Yisrael Chai!!!
