One of my earliest memories is standing in Yad Vashem in Jerusalem at age 11, hearing how European Jews once believed that catastrophe could never touch them. They were successful, cultured, integrated—convinced that prosperity was protection. For me, the grandson of Holocaust survivors who lost more than 70 family members, that lesson was never theoretical.
I grew up in a home shaped by my mother, Penina Waga, born in a Polish Displaced Persons camp before immigrating to Israel, who taught not only what the Nazis did, but what Jews did and did not do in response.
Now, as an Israeli-American, a refugee from New York, I watch the city from afar and see a frightened, rudderless Jewish community. At Park East Synagogue, which saw violent protests respond days later with vigil number 10,000, each insisting “this cannot happen again,” though it repeatedly does. We see a counter-protest led by UJA-Federation of New York, which sends millions in food and relief to Gazans yet doesn’t even mention Zohran Mamdani, the incoming
mayor who is openly anti-Israel, for fear of offending the powers to be. Court Jews always bow to the new king.
Since the COVID pandemic, many Jews in New York Jews have fled to other states—namely, Florida—or to the suburbs seeking safety. But history whispers: In the 1930s, Berlin and Warsaw were also thriving Jewish centers. Prosperity is not protection.
Meanwhile, the political trajectory of the American Jewish community is deeply troubling. More than 33% of New York’s Jewish voters supported Mamdani. A growing portion of American Jews now hold views about Israel not just disconnected from Israeli reality but openly hostile to it.
Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove of Park Avenue Synagogue embodies this trend. For years, his public statements have put him at odds with a majority of Israelis. In 2017, he “joined the radical chorus of voices advancing the ‘Israel is apartheid’ slander.” At an event in his synagogue, he repeated his daughter’s claim that because Palestinians don’t vote in Israeli elections, Israel must therefore be an apartheid state. The falsehood itself was heightened by his choice to repeat it uncritically.
Cosgrove warned Israel that American Jewish communal support would erode. And he was right about one thing: American Jewish liberalism is collapsing, the two-state solution is dead, and Israelis will keep voting for what is good for their people.
Still, the American Zionist Movement invited Cosgrove to headline its Biennial National Assembly on Dec. 8. There, he widened his critique—now targeting American Jews themselves. Explaining Mamdani’s success among Jewish voters, Cosgrove argued that for “a liberal Zionist disillusioned by the Israeli government, Mamdani’s anti-Zionism is a difference of degree, not of kind.” His question: “What are we going to do about it?”
The rabbi urged attendees to reject “reductive and destructive tactics,” such as labeling ideological opponents “self-hating Jews or colonialist aggressors.” He insisted that “by making unconditional support for the Israeli government a litmus test for Jewish identity, we ourselves have inflicted harm on the Jewish future.”
And he blamed Israeli policy for Diaspora alienation: “The unresolved status of the Palestinians … forms a wedge issue between an increasingly liberal-leaning American Jewry and an increasingly right-leaning Israeli Jewry.” These radical left-wingers—responsible for the cultural and political decay of New York and other American Jewish institutions—now feel entitled to lecture Israelis on how to survive. That the American “Zionist” movement provides them a platform is disgraceful.
But the most glaring omission at the conference was no one spoke about aliyah. Not even one of these “leaders” has made aliyah. Not one “Zionist” leader invoked the core Zionist response to Jewish vulnerability. In similarly perilous times, Jabotinsky told the Hatzach Conference in Warsaw on June 13, 1936, that Jewish survival in Europe was slipping away. He was mocked for insisting on “Evacuation”—mass aliyah—as the only realistic solution.
His warning now echoes with terrifying clarity: “We must save the millions—many millions. I don’t know if the question concerns absorption of one-third of the Jewish race, to half of the Jewish race, or one-quarter of the Jewish race. This I do not know. But, it’s a question of millions.”
And he delivered the starkest truth of all: “If you won’t eliminate the Diaspora, the Diaspora will eliminate you.”
These were not slogans. They were prophetic warnings from a man who saw the storm before anyone else.
Yet in 2025, at a conference called “Zionism: Many Visions, One Dream,” Jabotinsky’s foundational idea of aliyah was conspicuously absent. Worse, the American Zionist Movement banned Betar, Jabotinsky’s own movement, until Israeli Zionist courts reversed it. And the Anti-Defamation League labeled Betar, the 100-year-old Zionist movement, along with slain conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, a hate group.
As they silence Jabotinsky, American Jewish leaders in an increasingly unsafe New York lecture Israelis about democracy, identity and morality. Over-represented Park Avenue liberals claim authority over a reality they do not live. They lament that Israel does not resemble American progressive ideology, even as their own communities dissolve through assimilation, intermarriage and ideological confusion.
It was Betar—Jabotinsky’s movement—that insisted on Jewish dignity, self-defense and national pride when others hesitated. That message resonates today.
When Knesset member Amir Ohana of the Likud Party spoke before critics like Cosgrove, he defended Israel’s need to strike Hamas without pause. Each rocket, he said, was meant to kill Israelis. And he declared: “If I will have to choose between losing more lives of Israelis … or losing you, I will sadly, sorrowfully, rather lose you.”
Jabotinsky taught that Jewish survival depends on clarity, courage and refusing to apologize for existing. His words remain piercing: “Our habit of constantly and zealously answering to any rabble has already done us a lot of harm. … We do not have to apologize for anything. … We are what we are, we are good for ourselves, we will not change, nor do we want to.”
And again: “The bitter root of our shame and our suffering is that we do not give our own people the full love of a patriot. … It would be better if we did not love our people at all … than that we should love it halfway which means to despise it.”
Count me among those who believe the Zionism of 2025 means making aliyah, not lecturing Israel from a dangerous Western city or from a woke, self-congratulatory “Zionist” conference.
