After the Hamas-led terrorist attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, the world should have responded with moral clarity. Thousands of Hamas operatives and even ordinary Palestinians from Gaza carried out the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust; families slaughtered, children burned, civilians hunted and kidnapped.
Instead, across the West, we saw something else: justification, celebration and the rapid return of one of history’s most dangerous lies. That Jews cannot be trusted.
Today, it hides behind fashionable language: Zionist,” “colonizer,” “global influence,” “dual loyalty.” Strip away the slogans, and it is the same ancient accusation: that Jews are not fully loyal citizens, that they are suspect, that they are somehow different. I know this accusation well.
I am the son of a Holocaust survivor—the sole survivor of his immediate family, who endured multiple concentration camps, including Auschwitz. I grew up with my father’s warning: Do not think it cannot happen again. I wanted to believe he was wrong.
For more than three decades, I served the U.S. Army as a civilian engineer, developing technologies designed to protect American soldiers. I helped develop and led the work on the Light Armor Survivability System (LASS), designed to protect HMMWVs from roadside bombs. Before Iraq and Afghanistan, I warned that these vehicles were dangerously vulnerable and that soldiers would die if nothing changed.
Then I was accused of being an Israeli spy. Not because of evidence. Because I was an Orthodox Jew. At one point, the reasoning was stated plainly: Anything classified given to me would “go straight to the Israelis,” because, as it was put, “that’s what Jews do.” I was even referred to as a “Little Jewish spy.”
No investigation standard. No factual basis. Just a stereotype, spoken out loud. I was suspended. My security clearance was revoked. My home was raided by the FBI during Shabbat in front of my young children.
After approximately 16 months, I was fully cleared of any wrongdoing and ordered back to work. There was no apology. No acknowledgment. No correction. Just a directive to return, as if nothing had happened. But something had.
When I returned, colleagues I had worked with for years stopped speaking to me. Conversations ended when I entered the room. Doors closed, sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively. My “colleagues” saw me walking towards them and turned around and walked the other way. No one said anything directly, but the message was unmistakable: I was no longer to be trusted.
That is how this kind of accusation works in practice. It doesn’t need to be proven to be effective. Once it is said, it isolates. It distances. It turns professionals into liabilities overnight. My faith, my identity and my professional cooperation with allied Israeli engineers, which were standard in international defense work, had already been recast as suspicious.
The LASS program I developed and led was canceled. Years later, American soldiers were killed and maimed in HMMWVs by the very threats we had already identified and were working to prevent. This is what happens when antisemitism overrides judgment: It does not just destroy careers; it costs lives. The truth eventually surfaced. The U.S. Department of Defense Inspector General confirmed that I had been subjected to “unusual and unwelcome scrutiny” because of my religion and ethnicity. My security clearance was later restored and upgraded.
But years later, I was fired without cause, without justice and without any effort to correct what had already been set in motion. No one was held accountable. No one corrected the record. No one made it right. In many cases, those involved were promoted and even rewarded, reinforcing a system where consequences flow in the wrong direction. Because institutions protect themselves, even when they are wrong.
After Oct. 7, I traveled to Israel as a medical volunteer, supporting overwhelmed teams treating victims of the massacre. While I did not treat patients directly, I had undergone military medical training and stood ready to serve. I remain on call to return if needed. That experience made something painfully clear.
While Jews were stepping forward to save lives, the same old accusation was spreading globally—that Jews who stand with Israel are somehow less loyal, less legitimate, less deserving of protection. On college campuses, Jewish students and faculty are harassed. In professional spaces, Jews are quietly marginalized. In public discourse, the “dual-loyalty” smear is back, even more polished, repackaged and widely tolerated.
We have seen this before. The accusation is not just offensive, but historically lethal. It has been used to justify exclusion, expulsion and worse. And once it enters institutions, government, academia and the media, it gains power. Unchecked, it becomes policy.
My story is not an anomaly. It is a warning. If a Jewish American who spent decades working to protect U.S. soldiers can be branded a traitor because of his faith, then no system is immune. No institution is above this failure. So, what do we do now?
People ask that question constantly. They see what is happening on campuses, in workplaces, in public discourse. They feel something is wrong, but they are not sure where the line is. The line is much earlier drawn than most people think.
The first lesson I learned is this: silence is not neutrality. It is participation. When I was accused, the damage was not done by one individual. It was done by the absence of response, by people who knew better but stayed silent and by leaders who understood the implications but chose not to act. That is how institutions fail—not through dramatic decisions, but through quiet avoidance.
Antisemitism does not require universal agreement. It only requires enough people to look away.
So, the response must be equally clear: Speak early. Speak precisely. Speak when it is still uncomfortable, especially then. Because once the narrative hardens, it becomes almost impossible to reverse.
What is happening today is not new. It is the early stage of something very old.
Not exclusion yet, but justification. Not policy yet, but normalization. Not action yet, but permission. History has shown that once these stages are accepted, the next steps come faster than anyone expects.
My father warned me: Do not think it cannot happen again.
And if “Never Again” means anything at all, it must include here and now. Because when the world once again decides that Jews cannot be trusted, history does not repeat itself gradually. It accelerates.
