In the mid-1800s, a rabbi was in the midst of making Kiddush on a bitterly cold winter Friday night in Poland, and stopped. Suddenly, he could not continue. His disciples around the table exchanged looks of concern. What was happening to their rabbi? What could make him so upset that he forgot the familiar words of Kiddush and could not go on?
The rabbi then blurted out, “Is there no fairness in this world? Is there no judge?!”
He threw down his Kiddush cup—wine spilling everywhere—and stormed up to the attic in his home, remaining in a state of seclusion for the next 19 years. Thus began the isolation and despair of the vaunted Chassidic master, the Kotzker Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Morgenstern.
What vexed this Jewish leader to the point of literally and figuratively wanting to leave this world? It was the notion that Jacob, upon returning to encounter his infamous brother, Esau, after some 20 years apart, incessantly bowed to him and referred to him as “my master,” obsequiously referring to himself as Esau’s humble “servant.”
Why is it, the Rebbe raged, that we Jews are always lowering and ingratiating ourselves to curry favor with our enemies? This isn’t what Divine justice should dictate, he felt; consequently, he bowed out of public life due to this historical injustice.
I am reminded of this today, in 2025, as a descendant of that Rabbi Morgenstern, because of a recent article I read in which a prominent member of the Jewish community used that very episode and example of Jacob and Esau as proof that he should engage, legitimize and dignify New York mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, a clear adversary of the Jewish people and the Jewish state. He argued that as mere “guests” in this country, we should never antagonize the governmental and civic leaders who allow us to live here by their good graces.
Well, I don’t know about you, but I am an American, and I am a New Yorker. And if there is an individual who promotes “globalizing the intifada,” wants to arrest the prime minister of Israel, believes that the religious yearning of Jews to make aliyah violates international law, refuses to recognize Israel as the nation of the Jews and espouses so many other offensive positions, I will not “bend the knee.” I will not retreat into my attic until the storm blows over. I will stand up for myself, my people, my country, my hometown and my homeland.
While retreat may have been the only option at certain points in history, there is another paradigm—the one when we learn not from Jacob, but from the man he ultimately becomes, and that is Yisrael (Israel).
Because right after his weak-minded overture to Esau, he is encountered by an adversarial angel. He doesn’t retreat. He stands his ground. He fights. And, eventually, he outlasts the angel, whereupon the angel blesses him as a man worthy of the name Yisrael, for he fights the good fight, engages in the struggle for our people and prevails.
Following the dark days of the Holocaust, it has been our mission to not just blend in and be tolerated as American Jews, but to identify and broadcast our identities as proud Jews, proud Zionists, proud New Yorkers and proud Americans. This is the ethos of American religious freedom, and it has been the calling card of American Jewry throughout my lifetime. That is, until the Hamas-led massacre of 1,200 people in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the kidnappings of 251 others, and the subsequent explosion of antisemitism and anti-Zionism in the United States and around the world.
This is what the danger of Mamdani-ism is all about. Sadly, all you need to do is look at what happened at Bondi Beach in Australia on Dec. 14, during Chanukah, to see where all of this leads.
If you’ve been paying attention, street mobs don’t have to chant “globalize the intifada” anymore. The intifada—the worldwide war against the Jewish people—has already been “globalized.” It is here: from Brooklyn to Bondi, from Manchester to Manhattan. And the question we must ask ourselves is: What are we going to do about it?
I can tell you one thing. The answer is not to start blaming ourselves, as some Jewish leaders are doing, to call for greater scrutiny of Israeli policies and government, or to question decisions made by the Israel Defense Forces. It is not to excuse and explain away the clear antisemitic fissures that are emerging on the American extreme right, as others may be tempted to do.
It seems to me that this moment in history calls for what the great Menachem Begin called “Hadar.” It is the notion that no matter what they do to try to break us or how hard they try to divide us, we don’t break, we don’t fracture. Rather, we stand tall, we stand united, and we stand strong in the face of what this is. It is not just antisemitism. It is evil. And it is an evil that threatens the very existence of society as we know it.
Who can we learn these lessons from? We can go all the way back to the Maccabean revolt in the Chanukah story, as they sought to shine a light on the ancient anti-Jewish darkness that was threatening us in ancient times. In our day and age, we don’t even have to go that far back.
We can look to the heroic hostages who have returned to us. People who refused to bow by reciting a verse from the Quran at the urging of their captors, even for another scrap of food, as they were starving and tortured. Incredible heroes among us, like Eli Sharabi, who talks about how we “all have a choice” in life. We can retreat, or we can stand our ground; the choice is ours. We can look to Edan Alexander, who, after suffering through grueling captivity in the dungeons of Gaza, put his IDF uniform back on and went back into the fight.
What a betrayal it would be to those hostages, those courageous IDF warriors and those we’ve lost over the past two years if we turn to appeasement, rather than to empowerment. If we choose to hide our Jewishness, tuck in our Stars of David, take off our kippahs and bow down to those whose rhetoric and actions seek to defame and belittle us. For if we do, then we risk becoming unworthy of their heroic efforts and sacrifices on our behalf.
Finally, we can look to Rabbi Eli Schlanger of Bondi Beach, a 41-year-old father of five who just a few weeks ago wrote an impassioned letter to Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, who has been weak in reacting to rising antisemitic hate in his country and is a frequent critic of Israel. He wrote the following: “As a rabbi in Sydney, I beg you not to betray the Jewish people and not God Himself … Jews have been torn from their land again and again by leaders who are now remembered with contempt in the pages of history. You have an opportunity to stand on the side of truth and justice.”
His last public act on this earth was lighting the menorah for all to see—with faith and pride in our people. Now, it’s our turn to stand for truth and justice. So let us not retreat into our attics and turn away. No hiding. For history will judge us for what we choose to do now. How we respond will determine the very fate of the Jewish future.
It is our turn to bring the light. May we be worthy of this moment.
