Being Jewish in America today feels like walking multiple tightropes at once
After another antisemitic attack, American Jews are right to be unnerved — but not deterred from our values or our resilience
Flowers and a flag at the site of the attack outside the Boulder County Courthouse in Colorado. Photo by Getty Images
Contributing Columnist Jay Michaelson June 3, 2025
After the initial shock, my reaction to this week’s heinous attack on a peaceful vigil in Boulder, Colorado, was that it feels like American Jews are walking on a tightrope. Everything feels precarious and complicated — in Gaza, in Israel, in the Jewish community, in our relationships to a government exploiting antisemitism for political purposes, in how we understand our safety as Jews in this country.
Then I realized, we’re walking on multiple tightropes at once.
First, there’s the tightrope liberal Zionists have been on for 18 months: supportive of Israel, but opposed, especially now, to the brutality and endgame of the Gaza war. Nothing about that position changed after Boulder, and in fact, several of those who were marching (one of whom is an acquaintance of mine) still hold it.
But it is obviously more fraught. We still criticize Israel’s actions, but now also emphasize, again, that violence against innocent people — including Jews, or pro-Israel activists, or Israelis, or Palestinians, or pro-Palestine activists — is morally and ethically wrong. We still join hands with progressives, but now also demand that those progressives condemn attacks like the one that just took place.
And while we still refuse to go along with the weaponization of antisemitism, we agree that incitement from some self-styled progressives qualifies as stochastic terrorism, just like incitement from right-wing nationalists. When Donald Trump spreads lies about Haitian residents of Ohio, that leads to violence against Haitians. When a college student shouts “Globalize the Intifada,” that leads to violence against Jews, since rarely does a criminal carefully verify their victim’s political affiliations before committing a hate crime.
Words can incite violence, and condemnations after the fact are not enough, especially if they are not accompanied by accountability. And that includes the hyperbolic, rage-inducing online incitement that is a scourge on our society, whether it comes from left or right.
Whatever Israel is doing in Gaza, “complicity” in those acts is not a verdict to be handed down by an assassin who declares himself judge, jury and executioner.
The second set of tightropes is internal — about how we understand these attacks and how we respond to them.
Not all anti-Zionism is antisemitism, no matter what some people in power may insist. I know too many anti-Zionist Jews, who love their Judaism, to fall for that. Kal v’Chomer, how much more so, criticism of Israeli policies.
Yet the moment that Jews or Jewish institutions are targeted — whether a Holocaust memorial is defaced with paint or peaceful marchers are attacked by a would-be murderer — the line has been crossed. To deny that is incoherent.
At the same time, these terrorist acts are not solely acts of Jew-hatred, no different from pogroms in the pale of settlement or the mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue. This is not Kristallnacht in 1938, because unlike then, Jews are now being targeted because of something that is actually happening — Israel, claiming the mantle of the Jewish state, has a stated aim of exiling Gaza’s population and tactics that are designed to do so. And while those of us close to the conflict know that demanding to “Bring the Hostages Home Now” can be as much a critique of Israeli policies as some general “pro-Israel” statement, from the outside, it is still a political action.
To be absolutely clear, all of these acts of violence are evil, antisemitic, and utterly indefensible. But an act can be evil and still different from other acts of evil, and when we lump them all together, we may be unintentionally creating more fear, more anxiety, and more insecurity.
Obviously, American Jews are on edge. We feel unsafe. And we are uneasy with the ways in which those fears have been weaponized, exploited and hijacked by nationalist conservatives. And many of us trust neither the anti-Zionist far left nor the anti-antisemitic right. We are angry, and I know, firsthand, that many of us are afraid.
But fear doesn’t tell us what’s right or wrong, what threats are real, or what to do about them. On the contrary, when we act out of fear or anger, we go astray. Our tradition knows this well. Moses strikes the rock in the desert (and before that, kills the Egyptian oppressor). The Israelites build the Golden Calf. Saul slaughters the population of Nob. Dinah’s brothers massacre the population of Shechem.
And likewise today. One pundit on television said recently, “It’s extremely dangerous to be a Jew in America right now.” That may feel true, but it is not true. The risk of being victimized for being Jewish is still much, much lower than the risk of being in a traffic accident. (Using the ADL’s statistics, there were 9354 antisemitic incidents in 2024, in a population of 7.5 million Jews, a rate of 1 per 800. There were 5 million car accidents in a population of 340 million Americans, a rate of 1 in 68.)
Obviously, that objective reality does not match our subjective experience. But that is the work we need to do. For our own sakes, we need to look inward at our fear, and see how it is rooted in the trauma of our people (however we understand that phenomenon) more than in objective reality. It is not our ally. Whether in conversation, meditation, reflection, prayer, or psychotherapy, we need to see fear for what it is, accept that it is present, and not trust it for advice.
And we need to stop fanning the flames of fear and paranoia — amplifying stories without checking them or reposting some hyperbolic screed on social media that says Jews are being targeted simply because we are Jews, or that anti-Zionism is just a veneer over antisemitism. The attack in Boulder was an antisemitic hate crime. But it was not merely “Jew hate in activist language,” as a friend posted recently, and we are hurting ourselves and our children by falling into this way of thinking and feeling.
Obviously, I’m not suggesting that we should calm down because everything is all right. Everything is not all right, not with Israel and Gaza, or with America, or with the world. I’m only saying we should not trust fear or anger to be our guides. This may mean walking yet another tightrope: of vigilance but not paranoia, security but not panic, honoring our emotions without handing our lives over to them. To fear is human, but to find resilience, strength, and balance on the tightrope is what some mean by the Divine.
