Oct. 7: One year later — How has American Jewish life changed?
So as we approached the anniversary of the Hamas terror attack on Oct. 7, our brainstorming began with a big list of open-ended questions about how life has changed for American Jews.
Some of those questions turned into traditional stand-alone stories — how Israel has infiltrated dating apps, for example, and how the war has divided the Yiddish world. Others seemed unanswerable, or like they could be the subject of a dissertation or a book. In many cases, data was scarce or suspect, so we are left with anecdote, experience, perspective.
Below are 18 of the most urgent, poignant and relevant questions, answered by our reporters and columnists. If there’s a question you’d like us to answer, email us and we’ll try to address it in the coming weeks and months.
— JODI RUDOREN
Our journalists answered 18 big, pressing questions:
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Zionists were originally Jews who wanted to settle in the historic Land of Israel and believed that other Jews should do the same. But after Israel declared itself a state in 1948, American and Israeli Jews broadened the idea of Zionism to include those who supported the idea of the modern Jewish state financially, politically and emotionally.
A campaign against Zionism ramped up in the 1970s, when the United Nations declared it “a form of racism.” In recent years, and especially after Oct. 7, “Zionist” has been used as an insult by the political left.
Major Jewish organizations that support Israel often claim that 95% of American Jews are Zionists, making calls to kick Zionists off university campuses, for example, appear to be indistinguishable from antisemitic targeting of Jews. They point to polls that show most Jews have some positive feelings toward Israel, or who believe that opposition to the country’s existence is antisemitic.
But many activists on the left note that evangelical Christians are among the most virulent Zionists. They also point to polls showing that a huge share of Jews don’t support Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and that many — somewhere around 15% — don’t want a Jewish state in Israel at all. Other in the pro-Palestinian movement have been far less discerning over the past year, denouncing any Jew who has not come out as an anti-Zionist as a detestable Zionist.
Nobody has actually polled Jews on whether they personally identify with the term, because pollsters know its meaning is unclear. A a rare survey on the topic last year found that only 20% of all Americans had any opinion on the word “Zionist” — 8% of the total surveyed had a positive impression of Zionism, 12% had a negative one.
— ARNO ROSENFELD
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When protesters label President Biden “Genocide Joe” and yell, “you can’t run, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide,” they are invoking a legal term whose colloquial meaning may be changing.
The word was introduced by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who fled the Nazis, in the 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. It combines the Greek word genos, which means “race or tribe,” with the Latin cide, or “killing.”
“By ‘genocide,’” wrote Lemkin, a lawyer, “we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group.” He parsed what the word does not mean as well as what it does.
“Genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation,” he wrote. “It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.”
Lemkin’s focus on intent — and a “coordinated plan” to kill “all members of a nation” — has resonance right now.
Many Jews see such intent in the 1988 Hamas charter, which calls on Islam to “obliterate” Israel; “strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine;” and draws on a prophetic saying that says the Day of Judgement will only come when Muslims fight and kill Jews.
But the accusations of genocide during this war have mostly come against Israel, both among street protesters and in the International Criminal Court. South Africa’s petition accusing Israel of the crime contended that statements made by Israeli government officials showed “genocidal intent.”
The U.N. codified genocide meant, legally, in 1948 as part of the Geneva Convention. The definition includes elements like “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
“There must be a proven intent on the part of perpetrators to physically destroy” the group, the U.N. noted. “Cultural destruction does not suffice, nor does an intention to simply disperse a group.”
Outside the legal system, the term “genocide” has come to mean “mass killing” — of any kind, even if it does not meet the legal definition of genocide.
Kerry Whigham, a genocide expert at Binghamton University, said on the PBS News Hour earlier this year, that victims sometimes invoke the word “because it’s a way of drawing political and social attention to the harms that they’re suffering.”
Critics see this broadening of use of the term as a dilution and say it threatens to minimize the unique horror of the Holocaust, where an entire continent was transformed for industrialized killing, and the death toll was higher than any tragedies since. It’s worth noting that the re-definition of “genocide” is happening while the last Holocaust survivors are dying out, their voices fading into darkness.
— AVIYA KUSHNER
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Jewish leaders across denominations have for months been describing a profound religious awakening in their communities post-Oct. 7. A Jewish Federations of North America study describing renewed interest in synagogue membership called the phenomenon “The Surge” and anticipated a corresponding growth in day school enrollment. Membership in Jewish institutions has been falling for decades, leading to widespread synagogue closures. Were we seeing a reversal?
While anecdotal evidence abounds, the movements don’t have numbers yet to back up the hype. We asked the Union for Reform Judaism, the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, the Reconstructionist Movement and the Orthodox Union — none of them could provide year-over-year membership data.
Anecdotally, then: At Washington Hebrew Congregation, a 2000-plus-household Reform synagogue in D.C., the increase is less in membership than in participation, both by existing members and prospective ones. “Sometimes somebody doesn’t become a member right away,” said Lindsay Feldman, the synagogue’s executive director. “People tend to like to dip their toes in the water to see if this is it.”
— LOUIS KEENE
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The Jewish education nonprofit Prizmah, which counted 92,000 day school students last year, won’t have this year’s numbers until November. But chief executive Paul Bernstein said any post-Oct. 7 change wouldn’t show up overnight because school decisions tend to happen more slowly, and at particular grade intervals (e.g., when the child starts high school). In the next five years, though, Bernstein said he was anticipating another 10,000 Jewish day school students.
“We’re in a changed world, whose pressures are going to be on our community and on families for many years,” Bernstein said. “Over time, people will come up with new solutions to adjust to the fact that these very difficult circumstances are actually normal, sadly.”
The strongest indications of change are in congregational Hebrew school enrollment. David Bryfman, chief executive of the Jewish Education Project, said he’s hearing about enrollment increases of 20% to 30% at Hebrew schools, fueled by parents who like their kids’ public school but want them to be prepared to defend Israel when it comes up.
“They want their kids to know what to say if their 10th grade social studies teacher says something in public school,” Bryfman said. “It then doesn’t take very much for the parents to realize, ‘Hang on a second. If my kid’s learning this, and I don’t know, where am I going to learn it?’”
— LOUIS KEENE
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You can’t answer this question just by looking in a siddur, but that’s probably where you should start. While Jewish leaders across denominations rushed to create new prayers after Oct. 7, the most common additions to the liturgy came from inside the existing prayer book. Judaism already had plenty of things to say about communal trauma.
Since shortly after Oct. 7, many shuls have been reading Psalm 121 responsively at the end of weekday services, a practice in times of crisis dating back centuries. My Orthodox synagogue, B’nai David-Judea in Los Angeles, is one of many that now sing “Acheinu,” a 26-word passage manifesting God’s redemption of Jews in peril, on Shabbat mornings. There was already a prayer for captives in some prayer books, though new ones have been written that are less one-sided and weave in prayers for peace.
A year later, many of these temporary alterations have come to feel like central features of the service. The stirring rendition of Acheinu at B’nai David — with the ark open after the Torah has been returned — has supplanted Etz Chayim Hi as the emotional high point of Shabbat morning prayers. With Israel now opening a second front against Lebanon, it’s almost harder to see us not singing it than it is to see the war ending.
On Tisha B’Av, which more than any other day on the Jewish calendar is about grief and war, we saw very different religious additions from different quarters. Yagel Haroush, an Israeli musician, composed the kinnah for Kibbutz Beeri, a poem that explodes with grief. On the other end of the spectrum was a new Eicha reader published by Halachic Left, a group of observant Jews protesting the war; it situates the story of the Temple’s destruction alongside Palestinian anecdotes from the destruction of Gaza.
— LOUIS KEENE
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Immigration to Israel has dropped significantly so far in 2024 from the prior year, though the number of people making aliyah from Western nations including the United States has increased.
Overall, 23,283 olim, as immigrants to Israel are known, arrived between January and August 2024, according to the Jewish Agency, down 42% from the 39,857 who moved there in the first eight months of 2023.
The downturn reflects a steep drop in immigrants from Russia (down 48% to 14,514), Ukraine (down 63% to 693) and Belarus (down 64% to 546), places Jews had been fleeing in droves since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. At the same time, aliyah was up dramatically from France (a 76% spike, to 1,456 people) and the United Kingdom (up 55% to 433), and slightly from the United States (up 14%, to 2,202).
Reported rises in antisemitism in Europe and the United States related to the Israel-Hamas war are likely fueling immigration from those areas. But the fighting in Gaza may be cooling off aliyah from Russia and its neighbors, where thousands once saw Israel as a way to escape war or compulsory military service in their own countries. Earlier, larger waves of immigration have also decreased the pool of Jews who remain in those places.
The Jewish Agency determines eligibility for people seeking to move to Israel under the Law of Return, which grants people with at least one Jewish grandparent and their spouses the right to Israeli citizenship. Here is their country-by-country list of immigrants this year and last.
— BETH HARPAZ
RELATED: Number of Jews immigrating to Israel has dropped by nearly half since Oct. 7
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Birthright Israel has shrunk significantly since Oct. 7, with about 18,000 participants in its free trips to the Holy Land, compared to more than 20,000 in just the summer of 2023. Many of the recent visitors participated in new Birthright programs focused on volunteering.
The drop reflects a broader decrease in tourism to Israel overall, driven by both security concerns and politics. In a Forward article published in March, one parent said that his teenage son “can’t see a way to visit Israel as a tourist and not feel that such a trip condones in some way what the IDF is doing now in Gaza.”
Noa Bauer, Birthright’s vice president for global marketing, said around 8,500 young people have taken the group’s traditional 10-day trips since January (they were suspended after Oct. 7). Another 7,500 have joined the volunteer missions the group started offering in November.
In these programs, participants aged 18 to 40 volunteer six hours a day, helping pick produce, cook meals for Israeli soldiers or prepare homes so internally displaced evacuees can return.
The classic trips, known for days at the beach, shopping in the shuk and hikes up Masada, now also include service projects.
“Everyone has to volunteer,” Bauer said, “even if for a day.”
Organizers have also added more geopolitical programming, and a visit to “Hostages Square,” a collection of art installations outside the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.
“Post-Oct. 7, it’s easy to believe that every young Jew should come to Israel, volunteer and give back,” Bauer said. “We’re all in this together, and this is the country of the Jewish people.”
– SAMUEL ELI SHEPHERD -
American Jews have donated more than $700 million toward relief efforts in Israel, part of at least $1.4 billion that Jews around the world sent to support the country following Oct. 7. That money has flowed to more than 350 Israeli nonprofits providing medical services, mental health support and funding for businesses impacted by subsequent war. Nearly 60,000 volunteers also flew to Israel in the aftermath of the attack.
Adjusted for inflation, the total sum raised represents more than American Jews donated to Israel following the 1967 Six Day War, but less than they contributed after the Yom Kippur War six years later.
— ARNO ROSENFELD
RELATED: After 10/7, Jewish federations raised $850 million for Israel. 40% is unspent
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Groups like the U.S.-based Palestine Children’s Relief fund raised tens of millions of dollars in the weeks and months following Oct. 7. Very few Jewish groups have directly contributed to relief efforts in Gaza — and exception is the New Israel Fund, which raised $1 million this spring — but plenty of American Jews have reported donating and fundraising to help the Palestinian victims of this war.
A grassroots effort by a New Jersey rabbi, for example, raised $72,000 for World Central Kitchen after a group of its workers were killed in an Israeli airstrike. And some 200 Forward readers contributed a total of $13,000 to help a woman flee Gaza after our editor-in-chief wrote a column about her quest.
—ARNO ROSENFELD
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It is rare for any U.S. election to hinge on foreign policy. This year, American voters have told pollsters that they’re most concerned about the economy and immigration.
But that’s not to say the war in Gaza will have no impact. In fact it already has: Democratic Reps. Jamaal Bowman of New York and Cori Bush of Missouri, two of the harshest critics of Israel in Congress, were drummed out amid intense campaigns by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee PAC, which helped make Bowman’s race the most expensive in House history.
Critics of Israel also made their mark in the presidential primaries, with more than 700,000 voters marking their ballots “uncommitted” or “no preference” to protest President Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s military campaign. Democrats remain worried that these voters could hurt Vice President Kamala Harris in the swing state of Michigan, home to the country’s largest number of Arab and Muslim Americans — and 100,000 “uncommitted” primary votes this spring.
Harris met in August with leaders of the Uncommitted movement, and spoke sympathetically about Palestinian suffering in Gaza at the Democratic National Convention. But she has rejected the movement’s key demand: an embargo on U.S. military aid to Israel. Harris is betting that these liberal Democrats won’t vote for Trump; indeed, even in declining to endorse her, the movement’s leadership advised supporters not to do anything that would help elect him.
Jewish voters, like Muslim ones, are a small sliver of the electorate — about 2% nationally and not more than 3% in any of the seven key swing states. Some polls and news articles have suggested that some pro-Israel Jews who generally support Democrats are instead leaning toward former Preisdent Donald Trump because they consider him a better friend of Israel. But most American Jews are reliable Democratic voters, and most do not rank Israel high on their list of issues that will drive their choice at the ballot box.
Caveat: Israel’s intensification of the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Iran’s ballistic missile strike on Tuesday, revive the possibility of Gaza expanding into a destabilizing, regionwide conflict. That wouldn’t play well for Harris, who is part of an administration that has tried but failed to broker peace. And it would likely inspire Trump to double down on his boasts that current conflicts never would have happened were he still in the White House.
— LAUREN MARKOE
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Almost everyone agrees that antisemitism increased following Oct. 7, as it almost always does during conflict in the Middle East, but it’s very difficult to accurately measure the specifics. Are you tracking negative feelings toward Jews or only incidents where something antisemitic actually happened? How do you compare a tweet to a physical assault?
The Anti-Defamation League’s count is often quoted by news outlets, politicians, rabbis and other Jewish leaders. Not always mentioned is that ADL significantly changed its methodology following the Hamas attack to count anti-Zionist demonstrations as antisemitic incidents, regardless of what was said at them, making it problematic to compare their estimate to previous years.
The FBI reported a 63% increase in hate crimes against Jews in 2023 compared to 2022. Anti-Muslim crime also increased.
In a survey last fall, American Jews said they were experiencing roughly the same level of discrimination as in past years: 25% said they’d been the target of an antisemitic incident in 2023, compared to 26% in 2022, a difference well within the margin of error. But they reported far more concern about antisemitism post-Oct. 7: 53% said it was a serious problem, up from 43% in 2022 and 37% in 2020.
— ARNO ROSENFELD
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The art that has emerged since the Oct. 7 attacks has included a touring exhibition of the Nova festival massacre, a work of docu-theater, exhibitions in Israeli museums featuring graffiti art and paintings responding to Hamas’ assault on southern Israel. In the plaza outside the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, artists set up a Shabbat table with an empty seat for each hostage soon after the attack; others added their own meditations on the plight of the abducted, and the plaza was renamed Hostages Square and became a site of weekly vigils and a common stop on the itineraries of visiting American Jews.
But much of this art has been ephemeral, meant to address its exact moment, not speak to history. Or it’s extremely literal in a way that is unlikely to land once its historical moment has passed; the faces of the dead will fade from our memories and installations of their portraits will, for most, no longer feel so poignant.
Indeed, with rare exception — Picasso’s Guernica or journalistic photography — art that emerges immediately in the wake of tragedy has a short shelf life.
In the case of this war, much of the art so far is more activism than anything else, and the greater cause can be seen as diminishing the work’s standalone merits. All art is political, but one can’t escape the suspicion that much of what we are seeing is more part of a propaganda war than a body of work about the concept of war.
That doesn’t mean that no high-quality, enduring art will come from the trauma. The psychic scars of the attack and the war that followed, like the 1973 Yom Kippur War or the Shoah, are likely to inform art — by Israelis, Palestinians, diaspora Jews and others who have simply watched from afar — for years to come. With distance, artists will be better able to judge the full implications of that day, dig into its deeper impacts, and be better able to make a statement about it.
What the war has succeeded in doing, at least a bit, is raising the profiles of some little-known Palestinian artists like Sliman Mansour and Samia Halaby. Their work is not necessarily about the war — much of it was made before it began — but it is reaching an audience it may not have otherwise.
— MIRA FOX and PJ GRISAR
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Disagreement at cultural institutions and organizations, however upsetting, is not surprising during this tumultuous year of war and protest. But some organizations have been significantly impacted by the fallout from the war, which has resulted in total staff turnover, blows to their reputation and, in at least one case, apparent closure.
At 92NY, the Jewish arts and culture powerhouse formerly known as the 92nd Street Y, a reading by Pulitzer Prize-winner Viet Thanh Nguyen last fall was canceled due to Nguyen’s criticism of Israel and support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Numerous other authors pulled out of events in protest, and the entire three-person staff of the Unterberg Poetry Center, which was hosting the talk, all resigned, forcing the organization to put its entire literary series for the year on hold.
Only in May did 92NY hire a new executive director and begin to get the poetry program back on track. Whether the Y’s reputation will rebound, and again draw a broad range of authors, is unclear; the organization’s site features a mission statement, added after the Nguyen debacle, saying that it welcomes diverse viewpoints on Israel, but speakers must “not actively call for” its destruction “or question its legitimacy.”
Artforum, a magazine founded in 1962 that provides in-depth coverage and analysis of the art world, fired its editor-in-chief after he published a pro-Palestinian letter in October; in response, hundreds of contributors signed a letter promising to cease writing for the magazine, and four of its editors quit. Though Artforum has since hired a new top editor, who ran a Palestine-themed issue over the summer, writers and artists jeered at it online, calling contributors scabs.
And Guernica, a well-known left-leaning literary magazine, imploded after its March essay in which an Israeli translator reflected on the complexities of the war and her hopes for coexistence. At least 10 of the magazine’s volunteer editorial staff quit in protest of what they called “an apologia for Zionism and the ongoing genocide in Palestine.” The magazine removed the essay from its site, which set off another wave of resignations.
The only thing Guernica has published since March is an apology for the essay, which seems to have ended the publication’s 15-year run.
—MIRA FOX and PJ GRISAR
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BDS itself has faded from relevancy in recent years, even as its core demand — that consumers and institutions should pressure Israel until it dissolves itself as a Jewish state — has become fully integrated into a much larger and higher-profile pro-Palestinian movement.
Some of the American organizations on the frontlines of the most strident demonstrations against Israel, like the Palestinian Youth Movement, have chafed at what they consider to be an older generation of leadership running the boycott movement. The committee in charge of the boycott, meanwhile, has condemned activism that it sees as straying from nonviolence.
But nobody in the pro-Palestine camp is suggesting that people shouldn’t be boycotting Israel, and demands for universities to divest from Israel or cut ties with peer institutions in Israel have not only picked up. Ad hoc boycotts of speakers and event cancellations, which have spiked since Oct. 7, are generally not part of the formal BDS Movement, but reflect a similar ethos.
— ARNO ROSENFELD
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Yes. San Francisco State University, a public institution in California, announced in August that it would withdraw its investments from four companies that do business with the Israeli military: Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar and two software companies, Leonardo and Palantir.
That move followed a May declaration by Sacramento State, another California public university, that it would stop investing in companies that profit from “genocide, ethnic cleansing, and activities that violate fundamental human rights.” The Sacrament chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine claimed this as a victory, but it’s unclear what actual impact it will have.
The only university to agree to a more thorough set of demands from protesters was Sonoma State University, where the school’s president, Mike Lee agreed in May to review investments, introduce a Palestine studies curriculum and accede to a partial academic boycott of Israel. Lee was promptly suspended and then resigned.
Several other schools agreed to consider divestment demands as part of their own deals to end protest encampments this spring. The board of trustees at Wesleyan University voted last month to reject the demand to divest some $20 million of its $1.5 billion budget that protesters say is in companies tied to the Israeli military. Other schools that have rejected divestment demands include Chapman University, Oberlin College, Occidental College, Williams College and the University of Minnesota.
Brown University is set to decide on a divestment proposal next month; one of its trustees, Joseph Edelman, resigned in protest over the vote, calling it “morally reprehensible.”
— ARNO ROSENFELD
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There is no data tracking the number of conversions to Judaism across the United States or the world, but many rabbis say they have seen a surge of interest since Oct. 7. Some of these seekers have Jewish partners or Jewish ancestors, others have different reasons.
Like Michael Fiebig, 26, who said he first became interested in Judaism as a “skeptical kid” in suburban Detroit during catechism class, where Catholics learn the doctrines of their faith. His teacher said that Jews believe a lot of the same things as Catholics, but not that Jesus was the son of God.
Michael Fiebig during a quiet moment before his wedding on Oct. 14, 2024 in Newberry, Michigan Courtesy of Debrah Miszak While an undergraduate, at the University of Michigan, Fiebig started church hopping with his girlfriend, Debrah Miszak, who was also raised Catholic but interested in finding a new spiritual home. Fiebig said he went along to support her, and was not really looking for himself.
But when Miszak discovered Judaism, Fiebig was surprised to find he also enjoyed its rituals and felt aligned with its values. He liked the way Jewish people were encouraged to interrogate their own beliefs.
Fiebig and Miszak, who spent much of the last year as a Forward intern, were married Oct. 14 and had their official conversion ceremony, including dunking in a mikvah, or ritual bath, on April 11. She went first, and the couple likes to joke that they were an interfaith couple for 15 minutes.
On Oct. 7, they were visiting Miszak’s parents outside of Detroit. Fiebig said news of the slaughter did not sink in immediately.
In college, he said, he felt strongly about the Palestinian cause, and did not believe a Jewish state had a right to exist. His views evolved before Oct. 7 — he still empathized with Palestinians, but had come to think of anti-Zionism as “pretty extreme.” While he remained critical of Israel, he saw “the importance of it being a state.”
After the Hamas terror attack on southern Israel, his feelings evolved again.
Fiebig pointed to a a video he saw on Reddit that paired scenes of Oct. 7 carnage with music by Sacha Baron Cohen, a Jewish comedian whose Borat persona parodies antisemitism. The song had the lyric “throw the Jews down the well,” Fiebig said. Baron Cohen had intended it to mock antisemites, but the Reddit post seemed to be using it to denigrate Hamas’ victims.
This upset him “in a way that I never expected,” Fiebig said. During his conversion classes, he had come to accept that he “didn’t feel that connected to the state of Israel.” But the cruel pairing of the lyrics and the Oct. 7 footage “kind of showed me the opposite,” he said. “That there is some connection.”
–LAUREN MARKOE
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Writing and publishing a book typically takes at least two years minimum, but a number of journalists, rabbis and others rushed to get works out in time for the anniversary. Here are a few worth reading:
Amir Tibon, a reporter for Haaretz, lived on Kibbutz Nahal Oz with his wife and two young daughters. Sounds of mortar woke them on Oct. 7 and they dashed to their safe room. Outside, Hamas terrorists killed and abducted their neighbors.
When Tibon’s father Noam, a retired major general, heard about the attack, he and his wife, Gali, raced to rescue their family. As they drove through the chaos, Gali began helping people get to the hospital. When Noam reached the safe room at about 4 p.m., after battles with terrorists, Amir Tibon’s 3-year-old famously said, “Saba higiya” — Grandpa arrived.
Tibon’s The Gates of Gaza: A Story of Betrayal, Survival, and Hope in Israel’s Borderlands is a first-person account of the day and, more broadly, the failings of the Netanyahu government.
Another Haaretz journalist, Lee Yaron, interviewed eyewitnesses for 10/7: 100 Human Stories, a collection of intimate profiles of hostages and some who died that day. The book’s afterword is written by her husband, Pulitzer Prize winner Joshua Cohen, who compares it to a Yizkor book written by Holocaust survivors to memorialize those that perished.
(Yaron will be in conversation with the Forward’s editor-in-chief, Jodi Rudoren, in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 7.)
Some other books to check out:
- The October 7 War: Israel’s Battle for Security in Gaza by Seth J. Frantzman, the author of two previous books about the Middle East
- Black Saturday: An Unfiltered Account of the October 7th Attack on Israel and the War in Gaza by Trey Yingst, Fox News’ chief foreign correspondent
- Saving Abigail: The True Story of the Abduction and Rescue of a Three-Year-Old Hostage by Liz Hirsh Naftali, the girl’s great-aunt
- Testimonies Without Boundaries: Israel: October 7th 2023 by Alon Penzel, a University of Haifa student
- For Such a Time as This: On Being Jewish Today by Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, Park Avenue Synagogue
— BENYAMIN COHEN
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For American Jews, life after Oct. 7 is a series of contradictions.
We have never had better means to defend ourselves — institutions, political clout, money — and yet we feel defenseless.
We created dozens of organizations to counter antisemitism and spent millions of dollars, yet we’ve seen the greatest increase in Jew hatred in generations.
We have never had more powerful allies — politicians, law enforcement, government agencies — yet we’ve rarely felt so alone.
Social media has given us a powerful mechanism to tell our story and raise our concerns — and it has also been weaponized against us.
We have a Jewish state whose army can shoot missiles from the sky, set 2,000 pagers aflame and assassinate clandestine leaders, yet we fear each day for its very existence.
Unprecedented Jewish power has not removed our sense of Jewish precariousness.
And it never will.
Jew-hating, like racism and other forms of prejudice and hate, was born before us and will survive long after us. It ebbs, flows, shapeshifts, dissipates and regroups.
It is ineradicable.
But it is not invincible.
Over the last year, the most effective ways to counter antisemitism’s resurgence have become clear: Using the legal system to hold institutions and individuals accountable. Creating coalitions and enlisting allies among other minority groups. Speaking out, especially within our own groups and political parties. Holding social media companies, and their antisemite-adjacent owners, accountable. Educating non-Jews—and Jews— about our faith and culture—and not making our situation worse through panic, overreaction, needless provocation, or political gamesmanship.
And, to briefly step on the third rail of antisemitism discourse, fighting against Israeli policies that ultimately weaken the Jewish state and make Jews everywhere more vulnerable.
The answer to the paradox of post-Oct. 7 American Jewish life, in other words, is to replace the fear with the fight.
—ROB ESHMAN