In the early years of the 20th century, Theodor Herzl grasped a truth that many of his contemporaries still resisted: Emancipation in Europe had failed to cure the Jewish condition. The pogroms, the humiliations and the periodic eruptions of hatred were not aberrations; they were structural. Herzl concluded that the only durable answer to two millennia of vulnerability was sovereignty in the Jewish homeland, backed by the capacity for self-defense.
That idea—once dismissed as utopian, radical or impractical—became the foundation of the modern-dat State of Israel.
At roughly the same time, the poet Haim Nachman Bialik responded to the 1903 Kishinev pogrom with a searing indictment, “In the City of Slaughter.” His rebuke was not aimed only at the murderers. It was aimed inward. He castigated a Jewish culture of passivity that had been shaped by centuries of exile: Jews hiding, pleading, enduring, surviving, but not resisting. His words were not gentle. They were meant to shock a people out of habits that had become existentially dangerous.
Herzl offered a political solution. Bialik offered a moral and cultural challenge.
What they saw then feels unsettlingly familiar now.
Since Oct. 8, 2023, just one day after the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel, Jews again encounter harassment, intimidation, vandalism, and, at times, violence—on campuses, in neighborhoods and outside communal events. Protests that purport to be about politics in the Middle East often spill into ugly rhetoric directed at Jews as Jews. Synagogues have become armed, fenced forts protected by machine-gun wielding paramilitary forces in full combat gear. Community gatherings are planned with contingency measures. Parents ask hard questions about where their children will be safe to wear a kippah or a Star of David necklace.
None of this is comparable to the industrialized antisemitism of the 20th century. But the pattern is recognizable enough to unsettle memory. And as Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize laureate Elie Wiesel taught us, memory matters in Jewish history.
In the New York metropolitan area and elsewhere, there have been multiple public violent riots connected to Israel that drew large, hostile crowds outside screaming for Jewish blood. Participants inside relied on police protection and hoped tensions would not spill over. The following day, conversations often focus on whether security was adequate, whether authorities were prepared, whether the system worked as it should.
Those are fair questions. But they are not the only questions. A harder one is whether a culture of communal self-confidence and lawful self-defense has kept pace with the realities of public life.
What does it mean for a community, after centuries of vulnerability, to internalize that it is no longer required to be passive? What does it mean to cultivate not aggression, but preparedness? Not vigilantism, but resilience? How is it possible that with the jihadi/woke mobs howling outside, husky young Jewish men in their 20s sit inside doing nothing?
Here is where Herzl and Bialik converge again.
Herzl’s insight was that Jews required sovereignty so they would never again depend entirely on the goodwill of others for their safety. Bialik’s insight was that Jews needed to shed the psychology of helplessness that exile had taught them.
In Israel, that transformation is visible in the existence of the Israel Defense Forces—young men and women who serve not because they relish conflict, but because they understand that Jewish survival now includes Jewish responsibility for defense. Whatever one’s politics, it is undeniable that a profound cultural shift occurred: Jews as protectors of Jewish life.
In the Diaspora, the situation is different. Jews are citizens of countries that promise equal protection under the law. They should expect—and insist upon—such protection. But expecting protections, and cultivating personal and communal readiness, are not mutually exclusive ideas.
What is often missing is clear public language around this shift. A language that says: Jewish safety is not only a matter for the police. It is also a matter of Jewish dignity. A language that emphasizes lawful self-defense, preparedness and confidence.
Leadership matters here. Voices such as Brooke Goldstein, executive director of the Lawfare Project, have been outspoken in challenging antisemitism in public discourse, as has ambassador Ofir Akunis, the Israeli counsel general in New York. But where are the voices of Jewish leadership for major Jewish organizations? The silence is deafening!
Where is the outrage toward New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is aggressively outspoken in his disgust with and desire to destroy Zionism, and his stated objective of destroying the Jewish nature of the State of Israel?
That outrage must reach schools, synagogues, youth groups and civic forums. It must teach young Jews not fear, but composure and self-respect. Not retreat, but engagement. We need to speak with one voice, loud and clear: Antizionism is antisemitism!
The central question, then, is not one of panic but of posture: What is to be done?
The answer is both simple and demanding. Jewish communities should invest in education that includes not only history and culture, but self-defense. They should speak openly about antisemitism. They should support Zionism not only emotionally but intellectually, understanding why its existence remains central to Jewish security and identity.
And for some Jews, Herzl’s conclusion remains compelling: that living in Israel offers a form of majority status and collective agency that Diaspora life, by definition, cannot provide. Aliyah is not for everyone, but it remains a powerful option in the Jewish story—a reminder that Jews today have choices their ancestors did not. “Everything has changed, but nothing has changed.”
Jews today possess sovereignty, political voice and the protection of democratic states. That is new. Yet the need for vigilance, unity and self-confidence is as old as Jewish history itself. Bialik’s rebuke was never meant to shame for its own sake. It was meant to awaken. Herzl’s vision was never meant to romanticize power. It was meant to normalize Jewish self-determination.
The challenge for the 21st-century Jewish community, especially in places like New York, is to internalize both lessons without losing balance: to reject passivity, to demand protection without surrendering agency and to remember that dignity is not only a matter of law, but also of self-defense and attitude.
In 2026, with the majority of Jews in the world living in Israel for the first time in two millennia, a Jew need not have trembling knees.
