“Redemption through resistance,” Lisa Barr’s underground leader pleaded from the Mila bunker in her 2024 bestseller, The Goddess of Warsaw. “Our secret weapon is the element of surprise. We have only one shot at this. Don’t stop, don’t pause, don’t breathe, don’t retreat. No matter what.” Jews who are willing to stand up to tyranny by fighting against all odds.
We are here again. Not with our lives but in an existential fight for America’s Jewish identity.
We sincerely believed our fight for Russian Jewry typified that identity. For the civil rights of African-Americans. Against the Vietnam War. We fought valiantly with our presence, our money and our institutions for what Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize laureate Elie Wiesel urged us to do—causes that were universal, that spoke to helping those who were treated like strangers.
We weren’t wrong. American Jews defined by American causes.
History forgotten, history denied, history canceled.
It’s not that we don’t want to fight for ourselves; we don’t know how. Perhaps it’s too surreal, too frightening to believe we are under existential attack.
Mark Twain’s satirical political novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-Day, co-authored with Charles Dudley Warner, is often misquoted. It states that “History never repeats, but present combinations use old legends.”
Ancient legends murdered us in the past. These same legends, boosted by social media and AI, are of today. We dismiss them as lies, but the cunning and well-endowed enemies of American Jews have become a powerful coalition, consisting domestically of our fellow Americans, politicians, newspapers, media, schools—and us. Too many of us have subscribed to these legends. We are addicted to being Americans first, even when it weakens us.
We have two choices as we stand attacked with a familiarity previously lived through and died from: quotas keeping us out of colleges and universities, our professionals kept out of hospitals, law firms and companies, and they’re not publishing our books. Our “friends” have deserted us in a time of desperate need.
We join them against ourselves. By not fighting. By remaining silent. By fitting in. By saying, “We’ve [still] never had it so good.”
Many of our people have made aliyah and now live in the only country where Jews fight for themselves (and all Israelis, including Christians and Arabs, totaling in excess of 2 million).
It’s not something we expect American Jews to understand. The bomb shelters, service in the Israel Defense Forces, husbands away for months on end on reserve duty, wives shouldering the child-rearing responsibility, often with the assistance of grandparents.
The misunderstanding is mutual; Israeli-American Jews cannot understand the mass voting in our birth country for those who seek mayhem upon us. Our differences and divisions weaken us, emboldening those who seek to undercut first and then destroy.
The High Holidays approach. For American Jews to be included in the proverbial “Book of Life” in a way that will allow them to regain their collective footing, we turn from ancient legends to ancient wisdom. This historical moment begs us to look inward, individually and as a community.
It is time to privately confess the misdeeds that threaten us from within by adding to our prayers:
- For the iniquity of withholding the truth from our children, under duress or by choice, by failing to teach them that overwhelming evidence proves anti-Zionism is Jew-hatred.
- For the iniquity of hardening our hearts against other Jews for political reasons, by claiming that being pro-Israel is being pro-Trump—treating a political stance as a crime that divides us.
- For the iniquity of acting on harmful, unverified information by blindly accepting Hamas, Hezbollah and Iranian-cited death statistics because they are published in mainstream media outlets.
- For the iniquity of speaking untruths and slander against Jews, or failing to object to them, by accepting the lie that the world’s problems begin and end between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
- For the iniquity of fraud and cheating other Jews by refusing to purchase Israeli goods made in Judaea and Samaria while knowing that those companies create life-altering opportunities for Israeli Arabs and Palestinians.
- For the iniquity of allowing external deceptions to warp our inner thoughts by believing the lie that the Israeli government’s unprecedented movement of civilians in an existential war did not save tens of thousands of lives, especially those of babies and children.
- For the iniquity of wrongful thoughts and a lust for social acceptance by some Jews on college campuses, leading them to hide their identities under regrettable conditions.
- For the iniquity of giving in to peer pressure to turn against our own people by marching and chanting slanderous tropes used to justify violence against Jews.
- For the iniquity of disrespecting parents and teachers by not turning to them in this time of desperate need, thereby leaving students alone and confused when the wisdom of elders, together with the spirit and energy of youth, is needed in this existential fight.
- For the iniquity of inflicting physical or verbal abuse toward our own people, failing to see how collective shunning breeds self-hatred.
- For the iniquity of dishonesty in business or bribery by financially supporting charities or conducting commerce with those who fuel hatred and violence against Jews.
- For the iniquity of pride, mockery and looking down on others by believing that being “chosen” places us above anyone due to economic or professional status, rather than accepting that it demands a solemn responsibility, not a meritless honor.
- For the iniquity of mocking sacred traditions or serious things simply because they are ancient and for disregarding our duty to help our fellow Jews at a time when a post-modern world aches for the timeless lessons of history.
- For the iniquity of gossiping and damaging the reputations of those brave enough to reject our enemies’ chants, choosing the easier path of conformity rather than standing up to lies.
- For the iniquity of not taking what is ours by succumbing to the “dual-loyalty” trope, an accusation to which no other minority or immigrant group in the United States must respond.
- For the iniquity of refusing to change our ways in order to put Jews first, because it requires a collective self-analysis that seems difficult and nearly impossible.
As American politics seemingly begins and ends with Israel, we pretend.
As local, state and federal elections are filled with candidates running on a Jew-hating platform, we pretend.
As our children are unsafe at pre-schools to campuses because we refuse to rise up as a group against administration policies, we pretend.
As parents and grandparents with children living in Europe, Canada, Australia and across America desperately tell anyone who will listen that our children are safe and everything is wonderful, we pretend.
From the rivers to the seas throughout the world, we pretend that it can’t be happening again.
As Rabbi Alan Lew titled his book about transformation: This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation.
Jews’ search for meaning and redemption will begin in earnest when we stop pretending that conformity will bring societal acceptance. We have no answers—only facts we must confront from within. That will surprise our enemies, and then this fight against all odds can begin in earnest.
