As such, while promoting An American Pickle, Rogen remarked that the State of Israel “makes no sense”. He despaired that, “as a Jewish person, I was fed a huge amount of lies about Israel my entire life”. But he was also fed pickles: proper, New York, dill-and-garlic, half-sour, girthy, lacto-fermented pickles. Not the small, wrinkly, saltier-than-the-Dead-Sea variety you get in Israel, locked up in austere metal cans. No, it is in these old-world, Pale of Settlement pickles, the sort you’d find in a good pastrami on rye or speckling lumpy chopped liver, that Rogen invests his Jewishness. It is to this pickle that he writes his Jewish love-letter.

He is not the only one. The American actress Hannah Einbinder caused a stir when she said “Free Palestine” at the Emmy Awards last year. Her speech rapidly became a symbol of a much-touted rupture between American Jews and Israel, or else the pro-Israel old guard in America, who still think wistfully about their years on kibbutz in the Sixties, and the younger “anti-Zionist” whippersnappers, for whom Israel is an irrelevance at best and a painful embarrassment at worst. Einbinder is adamant that her activism, including her rejection of “liberal Zionism”, is rooted in her Jewish values and upbringing. “Something actually Jewish to cleanse the stories,” she captioned a picture on Instagram of a handsome platter of pickles: pickles, you see, are actually Jewish, while Zionism is not. “Lotta Zionists sayin im not Jewish,” she posted on a different occasion in gratingly Zoomer style; “well then explain why im drinking electrolytes out of a pickle jar ive been reusing for half a year!”

Now consider, against this vibrant, self-confident culture, the pickle of Anglo-Jewry. Our haimisha cucumbers, delicious though they are, wither at the comparison. They sexed her up, Mrs Elswood, a few years ago; and in so doing, I am sorry to say, they made her appear less Jewish. The gherkins are drenched in vinegar instead of being allowed to ferment in their own fluids: it is like making champagne with a SodaStream. There is no fresh, citrusy dill in those glass jars. There are only indeterminate “flavorings”, and a handful of mustard seeds wafting around pointlessly like dust caught in the light.

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When the English ate the rich

By Samuel Rubinstein

It is a perfect symbol of Anglo-Jewry. There is no nostalgia in Britain for the early-20th-century pickle vendor, and still less for the shtetl; there is no great longing for the old times. It is no accident that the “Els” in “Mrs Elswood” comes from Elstree, the apogee of Jewish embourgeoisement. Elstree is a leafy, affluent, commuter-belt suburb, only a 25-minute train ride from St Pancras, but tucked away safely in the Green Belt, out of Sadiq Khan’s maw. Nothing interesting has ever happened there: even Elstree Studios, where bits of Star Wars and the music video for “Bohemian Rhapsody” were filmed, is really in Borehamwood. Elstree suits the purposes of a parochial, inward-looking community; 18% of all working Jews in Britain work professionally for a Jewish organization, and there’s no shortage of Jewish organizations nearby. It would be quite pleasant, I think, to begin one’s life at Barnet Hospital and end it at Bushey Cemetery; to be always tethered to this stolid patch of the world, where London meets Hertfordshire, except maybe for three enervating years studying politics at Nottingham. Britain gave its Jews all the good parts of shtetl life — the gossip, the match-making, the comforts and excitements of community — without any of the persecution and penury. It gave the Jews Elstree, and the Jews are grateful.

“I like Britain”, says Anglo-Jewry’s Nestor, Lord Finkelstein, “and its suburbs and its boring democracy and its middle class gentility and its small ideas”. What makes Britain a great place for Jews is its “bourgeois complacency”. The heartbreak of the recent antisemitic attacks in Heaton Park and Golders Green and the wider rise in hate crimes is compounded by the sense that this complacency is no longer possible. Jewish suburbia will endure, but it will have to be more vigilant, more suspicious of the outside world.

England’s bourgeois life has always appealed to Jewish immigrants. The great historian of Tudor England, Geoffrey Elton, born Gottfried Ehrenberg in Twenties Germany, dedicated his last book to The English, whose bourgeois ways had convinced him that he “had arrived in the country in which I ought to have been born”. Tom Stoppard, born Tomáš Sträussler, did not, like so many of his fellow writers and artists, go berserk in the summer of 1968: “I was too old, too self-conscious, too monogamous, too frightened of drugs, too much in love with England, and too hung up to let it all hang out.”

It is interesting that, where Anglo-Jewry does produce genius, it tends not to be avant garde. Elton was an old-fashioned historian, and Stoppard quite an old-fashioned playwright. Both men had a soft spot for Thatcher, whose own affection for British Jews is well known: many Jews numbered among her constituents in Finchley and her colleagues in cabinet. Elstree’s seat is Conservative and always has been. There have been Jewish socialists in Britain too, of course: Isaac Deutscher, Eric Hobsbawm, Ralph Miliband. But as Britain’s Jews shifted Rightwards, they became peripheral to the community. In 2015, only 15% of British Jews wanted to make Ralph’s son Ed Prime Minister, only slightly more than would vote for Jeremy Corbyn a couple of years later. (He is probably even less popular among British Jews today, in light of his policies as Foreign Secretary.) The paradigmatic Jewish public intellectuals of this era were rather men like Keith Joseph and Nigel Lawson, nobody much to the Left of Isaiah Berlin. The historian William Rubinstein (no relation) wrote in his 1982 book, The Left, the Right and the Jews, that, once British Jews had entered the upper-middle class, “the old Leftist enthusiasms of the shtetl are abandoned for the warm security of the center Right”.

Anglo-Jewry flourishes in the warm security of the suburbs, and it flourishes in a suburban kind of way. The British rabbi Lionel Blue once quipped that “The Jews are just like everyone else, only more so”. Among British Jews there is a high degree of characteristically British social anxiety, tending towards conformism. This probably is not conducive to creativity and artistic experiment. Except, perhaps, for Howard Jacobson, British letters lack a Philip Roth or a Norman Mailer. Roth himself seemed to grasp why. His alter ego in Deception complains about the English character of England’s Jews. England was missing something that he was accustomed to in New York: “Jews with force…, Jews with appetite. Jews without shame. Complaining Jews who get under your skin. Brash Jews who eat with their elbows on the table. Unaccommodating Jews, full of anger, insult, argument, and impudence.” He finishes on that familiar American note: “New York’s the real obstreperous Zion, whether Ariel Sharon knows it or not.”

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that when British Jews chafe against this bourgeois conformism — or when they express disdain, in particular, for its attachments to Israel — they are quick to look to obstreperous America. If the Jews are just like everyone else, only more so, and the British middle classes on the whole are “America-brained”, then British Jews are the most America-brained Britons of all.

In his much-discussed polemic Jews Don’t Count, David Baddiel testily declares that he does not care about Israel “more than any other country, and to assume I do is racist… my Jewish identity is about Groucho Marx, and Larry David, and Sarah Silverman, and Philip Roth, and Seinfeld, and Saul Bellow, and pickled herring, and Passovers in Cricklewood in 1973, and my mother being a refugee from the Nazis, and wearing a yarmulke at my Jewish primary school…” None of these things, he concludes this rant, “has anything to do with a Middle Eastern country three thousand miles away”.

Most of the things on Baddiel’s list — six, by my count — do, however, have something to do with a North American country 3,500 miles away. For those British Jews who wish to forego Jerusalem, New York is the only possible alternative. It’s an increasingly attractive proposition. However Right-wing British Jews may be, four in five dislike Benjamin Netanyahu; looking only at Israel’s demographics, the trends that Netanyahu embodies are only going to get stronger. Nine out of every 10 Jews in the world live either in America or in Israel. The rest of us, the one in 10 Jews who don’t live either in America or Israel, simply choose which of those poles to look to.

If Netanyahu can be said to represent one pole, then perhaps Larry David, who appears twice in Baddiel’s list, represents the other. One thought kept coming to me while reading Blake J. Harris’s weighty new tome, Emperor of Nothing: The Making of Larry David: there could be no Larry David in Britain. Perhaps that is why British Jewish comedians like David Baddiel admire him so much. Bourgeois conformity is not kind to “social assassins”. Elstree’s no place for eccentrics.

The biography doesn’t dwell much on David’s Jewishness, but it doesn’t have to: it is simply self-evident that David is a product of a quintessentially Jewish world. Before he made his name with Seinfeld and then Curb Your Enthusiasm, David was best known to the American public for playing an Orthodox rabbi on the sketch show Fridays in a fictional low-budget TV show called Matzoi!. The premise is that he is some kind of kung fu master, who shouts out “Oi!” in place of “Eee-ya!”; he is protecting the world from a sinister group called “Global Organisation of Young Irrational Maniacs” (GOYIM).

Curb (much more than Seinfeld) is chock-full of Jewishness. Its soundtrack is infused with klezmer. Plotlines often involve Passover seders, Friday Night Dinners, shivas, minyans, and bat mitzvahs. There is lots about the Holocaust: the classic “Survivor Fight”, or the scene where Larry steals a pair of shoes from an exhibition at the Holocaust Museum.

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And yet what is striking about Larry David’s Jewishness, in Harris’s biography as much as in Curb, is the conspicuous absence of Israel. Only one episode of Curb features Israel prominently, “Palestinian Chicken”, and it ends with Larry stuck in the middle between a pro-Israel crowd on the one side and an anti-Israel side on the other. He, like Baddiel, is basically indifferent to this “Middle Eastern country three thousand miles away”. David is not anti-Israel, by any means: he recently irritated some of his fans by mocking the anti-Israel politics of the DSA. But it seems that Israel does not play an especially significant role in his Jewish identity.

Now compare him with the British Jewish comedian Sacha Baron Cohen — at whose birthday party (one learns from the new biography) David was introduced to his now-wife. Here Israel is inescapable. Often, while playing his characters, Baron Cohen slips into Hebrew. He also has an enduring fascination with the Mossad, exhibited in The Spy (2019) and his character Col. Erran Morad, now starring in the new Ali G film. Larry David’s Jewishness is American and diasporic. Baron Cohen, on the other hand, looks to Israel.

That is quite typical of British Jews. There is, in Britain, extremely little home-grown Jewish “anti-Zionism” to speak of. While 37% of American Jews identify themselves as Zionist, 66% of British Jews do. Even among young British Jews “anti-Zionism” is practically non-existent: one is far more likely, in my experience, to be regaled with tales about “antisemitism on campus” than to encounter young Jews saying words like “genocide”, “apartheid”, or “Ben Gvir”. It is telling that the main Jewish spokesperson at the now-proscribed Palestine Action, Max Geller, is American.

The independence and assertiveness of America’s Jewish community is something that Jews in Britain have historically envied. British Jews may cling to the warm security of its boring suburbia, but they have also always admired America’s capacity for promoting Jewish flourishing. It was a British Jew, Israel Zangwill, who coined the term “melting pot” to refer to American multiculturalism. “Ah, Vera”, says a character in his 1908 play of the same name, “what is the glory of Rome and Jerusalem where all nations and races come to worship and look back, compared with the glory of America, where all races and nations come to labor and look forward!”

But even in America, pickles and “anti-Zionism” won’t be enough. There are pickles aplenty in Curb Your Enthusiasm — there is even “the pickle boy” — but there are not only pickles. Larry David’s Jewishness draws from deeper sources. It helps that he is old enough to remember the old-timey “Noo Yawk” Yiddishkeit in its pomp. It is not clear that younger American Jews have inherited much of this, nor that their attachment to the superficial trappings of Jewish culture, abstracted to such a degree that it could be practically any Eastern European immigrant culture, can sustain a community indefinitely. America’s Left-wing Jews also face a steep demographic decline. Zangwill envied America for “looking forward”, but the “anti-Zionist” American Jews today seem to prefer looking back: at the shtetl, the Bund, the Yiddish-speaking pickle man. The Jewish community in Britain today is frightened, its suburbs most of all, and less sure of itself than usual. But it is, in its humdrum way, resilient and durable.

Amid the noise, one question remains unanswered: where did Andreessen pick up this strange idea? He gives some hints in his ensuing “crash-out”. Defending the claim that “great men and women of the past were not sitting around moaning about their feelings”, he encouraged his 2.3 million followers on X to “read your Adler, Cuddihy, and Nietzsche, ffs”. He elaborated on the second of these in a follow-up tweet, this time with the assistance of “my sociology professor Claude”.

John Murray Cuddihy, we learn in typical AI speak, provided “one of the most corrosive critiques of therapeutic culture ever written – and it’s corrosive precisely because it doesn’t attack therapy on its own terms. It attacks the genealogy. It asks: where did this whole enterprise come from, and whose interests does it serve?” Alas, Andreessen and Prof. Claude fall short of answering their own question. “Here is the brutal Cuddihy take, assembled fully”, the tweet concludes: “[Details removed to protect the reader.]”

Who was John Murray Cuddihy? Whose interests did he think “introspection” served? What made his ideas so “brutal”, so “corrosive” — so subversive, even, that they apparently risk upsetting or scandalizing the faint of heart?

John Murray Cuddihy, an American sociologist who died in 2011, is hardly a household name. His book The Ordeal of Civility (1974) would set you back £294 on Amazon; there is not even a single copy of No Offense: Civil Religion and Protestant Taste (1978) to be found in the exhaustive collection of Oxford’s Bodleian Library. But Cuddihy has always enjoyed a small cult following. When The Ordeal of Civility was published, James Burnham described it as “one of those few books likely to change history” and Cuddihy was invited to promote it on William F. Buckley’s talk show, Firing Line.

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Half a century later, his star has at last begun to rise again. Anna Khachiyan, of the Red Scare podcast, is probably his most prominent cheerleader. Just the day before l’affaire Andreessen commenced, the notorious Right-wing troll Captive Dreamer — whose 80,000 followers on X include Vice President JD Vance — was dipping into the Cuddihy œuvre. “Have you taken the Cuddihypill?”, asks fellow chud, Bronze Age Pervert. Let us take the Cuddihypill, now, and see the Matrix for ourselves.

In The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Lévi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity — to use its full subtitle — Cuddihy traced the ideas of his triad of Jewish thinkers to a “Kulturkampf” which accompanied the emancipation of the Jews in the 19th century. As the Jews emerged from their cramped, smelly shtetls and ghettos, they had to adjust to a “Protestant Etiquette”. They couldn’t cope, says Cuddihy; they couldn’t abide by the code of bourgeois life. They relapsed into their old tribalism, their inwardness, their vulgar “Yiddishkeit“. They were deviant. And then — here one can see why Cuddihy’s ideas have a reputation for being transgressive, even offensive — they concocted elaborate theories to explain away their deviance, usually as some kind of “symptomatic behavior”. For Marx it was a symptom of economic exploitation; for Freud a symptom of psychosexual regression. The ideas of Marx and of Freud were Jewish ideas, according to Cuddihy, because they originated in a specifically Jewish experience — a specifically Jewish “ordeal”.

The Ordeal of Civility is principally a book about Freud. 100 pages are devoted to Freud — three times as many as are spent on Marx and ten times the paltry section on Lévi-Strauss. The book is in effect an answer to a famous question Freud once put to his friend Oskar Pfister, a Swiss pastor: “Why did none of the devout create psychoanalysis? Why did one have to wait for a completely godless Jew?” Cuddihy’s answer is that Freudian psychoanalysis was, from the start, an attempt to “make sense of the Jewish emancipation experience”. He came up with a Dr Seuss-style ditty to summarize his argument: “the id of the ‘Yid’ is hid under the lid of Western decorum”. The struggle between the id and the superego reflected, in miniature, the struggle between Yiddishkeit and the strictures of bourgeois respectability.

So, if we are to steelman Andreessen’s argument, Freudian “psychologism” — the set of ideas that the venture capitalist was attacking as introspection — served a particular set of interests. By uncovering the id lurking within the minds of all men, Cuddihy argued, Freud engineered a “moral equalizer legitimating social equality between Jew and Gentile”.

It’s an eccentric argument, to say the least, and it is natural to wonder about Cuddihy’s motivations in devising it. Certainly, it appears at first glance to carry strong antisemitic implications. His work is peppered with overfamiliar Yiddishisms: kvetsches, tsuris, and an awful lot of goyim. An uncharitable reader might find something sinister here; but one might instead interpret this as a sign of Cuddihy’s personal identification with the Jewish community, bordering even on what one reviewer called a “remarkable affection for and indulgence in old Jewish culture”. Cuddihy was a lapsed Catholic of Irish heritage and he shared with the Jews a feeling of alienation from the WASP “core culture” which still prevailed in America. He, like the Jewish thinkers surveyed in his book, struggled to socialize himself into modernity — because modernity was a creation of “Calvinist Christianity”, from which he and the Jews were perennial outsiders.

It is often difficult to discern what exactly Cuddihy was aiming for. His essay of 1987, “The Elephant and the Angels: The Incivil Irritatingness of Jewish Theodicy”, doesn’t explain why Jewish arguments about the nature and origins of antisemitism are wrong — only why they are liable to strike non-Jews as “irritating and incivil”. Rabbi Yitz Greenberg caught on to the slippery, double-edged nature of Cuddihy’s arguments. Was he telling the Jews that they were “incivil” and “irritating” as a piece of friendly advice from a well-intentioned outsider — or as a petty jab at a people for whom he felt genuine disdain? When, in No Offense, he reflected on Jewish “chosenness”, was he arguing for the Jews to hold true to their ancestral beliefs, including those which the “Protestant Etiquette” found chauvinistic or ill-mannered — or was he warning the rest of the world that the Jews really do believe in their own superiority?

Many of Cuddihy’s Jewish critics were quick to assume the latter. “Cuddihy aims to be revolutionary”, begins one review of The Ordeal of Civility; “he may merely be revolting”. Still, it would be wrong to think that his arguments have only ever appealed to antisemites. There can’t be many intellectuals who have been cited approvingly both by the antisemitic conspiracy theorist Kevin Macdonald and by the late Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks.

Nor can Cuddihy’s arguments be dismissed outright. A celebrated passage in The Ordeal of Civility concerns the “tale of two Hoffmans”: Abbie Hoffman, the ringleader of the anti-establishment “yippie” group the Chicago Seven; and the judge Julius Hoffman, who sentenced him. (The drama plays out in Aaron Sorkin’s movie The Trial of the Chicago 7, with the Hoffmans played by Sacha Baron Cohen and Frank Langella respectively). This, in Cuddihy’s hands, becomes an “intra-Jewish fight” acting out an “ancient scenario: the socially unassimilated Eastern European Jew versus the assimilated German Jew who ‘passes’ among the goyim”.

Each Hoffman was ashamed of the other. Julius was ashamed of Abbie for misbehaving, Abbie of Julius for behaving. It may seem a bit far-fetched to view this exchange purely through the Jewish prism; clearly there were other things at stake. And yet, “of all the material I’ve read dissecting the trial”, Abbie Hoffman confided in his memoir, “none captures my own attitude better” than Cuddihy’s. Another socialist Jew of the Sixties, Mark Rudd, also thought that Cuddihy had hit on something profound. Cuddihy was fascinated by “the curious, secret, adversary relationship of the secular Jewish intellectual to the Jewish bourgeoisie”, according to which “the intellectual is sensitive and refined; the bourgeoisie, obviously, is vulgar”. Why, I now think to myself, I am a sensitive and refined Jewish intellectual — and I feel nothing but love for the Talis and Yonis of Edgware, with their IDF jumpers and flashy Magen David necklaces!

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So sometimes, it must be conceded, Cuddihy was on the money. He understood the peculiar neuroses of the Jewish diaspora better than many Jews understand themselves. But that is not the reason The Ordeal of Civility is enjoying its modest resurgence. Andreessen holds it up as a source of secret knowledge, and gets a kick out of the idea that it’s blasphemous and controversial. He thinks it offers a convincing theory about the origin of this pernicious idea of introspection. He thinks, in his own words (or Claude’s), that “therapeutic culture” serves some Jewish interest, and that Cuddihy demonstrated this by reference to Freud. This argument is plainly wrong. Cuddihy’s analysis doesn’t even work as an interpretation of Freud. How can it work as an interpretation of the entire phenomenon of Jewish intellectualism? The argument falters on a single point: Freud did not emerge from the shtetl. His “id” had nothing at all to do with the “Yid”: not even the rhyme works in the original German. Freud’s thought was not the product of a clash between the Jewish “Middle Ages” and bourgeois modernity. His father was Germanized, much as Marx’s had been. Unlike Abbie Hoffman, he felt no real compunctions about that fact. Nor was there any wrenching “struggle” with modernity. Freud was in Vienna by the time he was a toddler.

Cuddihy’s mode of analysis is a kind of ham-fisted determinism. Any thought which has ever been had by a Jew is by nature a Jewish thought, produced solely by its thinker’s Jewishness. The Jewish dog, in Cuddihy’s telling, salivates at some suitably self-serving Jewish ideology whenever the bell of modernity is rung.

Such an approach is astonishingly unscientific, but it is unscientific less in the manner of conspiratorial antisemitism, than in a manner unfortunately characteristic of “social science”, which reduces all human ingenuity to the products of hazily-defined “environmental factors”. “To make any kind of sense”, Cuddihy warns his readers at the outset, The Ordeal of Civility “should be placed in the context of my interests and convictions, and a certain indulgence will be asked, allowing me simply to assert these convictions and interests, rather than to argue them”. Well, this will not do. One of Cuddihy’s affected Yiddishisms springs immediately to mind: this is a work of chutzpah. Cuddihy’s critics held him to be an antisemite, and his latter-day admirers, Andreessen among them, have squeezed a certain frisson out of that fact — all the more in a moment when antisemitism is gaining ground. I do not think that Cuddihy was an antisemite. But he was something worse: a sociologist.

The Young Vic’s current revival of Arthur Miller’s 1994 play Broken Glass and Howard Jacobson’s latest novel Howl seem at odds. One is a tragic portrait of desperate denial in the shadow of Kristallnacht in 1938, the other a dark comedy that unravels the absurdity of socio-political fault lines in present day London. The same question lies coiled at the heart of both: how do Jews process, survive, and make meaning of the antisemitism that is again becoming eerily ubiquitous? 

Broken glass has a deep resonance in the Jewish psyche. At the end of a wedding ceremony, the groom stamps on a glass, its shattering symbolizing the fate of the Temple in Jerusalem. The melancholy of destruction and exile haunts us even at the happiest moment of our lives. Then there’s the broken glass of Kristallnacht, the opening salvo of anti-Jewish violence perpetrated by Nazi paramilitaries — and it’s that image that lingers in the backdrop of Arthur Miller’s 1994 play of the same name.

In Broken Glass, Sylvia Gellburg, a Brooklyn housewife in 1938, wakes to find her legs paralyzed with no physical cause to be found. She has been reading the news obsessively, unable to look away from stories of anti-Jewish violence from Germany. Her paralysis, her doctor diagnoses, is psychosomatic, her body symbolically absorbing the collective trauma that American Jews around her choose to ignore. 

But Miller resists cookie-cutter moralities. He suggests something more multifaceted. Sylvia’s husband Philip is a self-hating Jew, proud of being the only Jewish employee at his firm, but secretly longing to sublimate his Jewishness and blend into WASP New York. He would rather not be Jewish at all. All the while, Sylvia’s paralysis becomes the symbolic expression of a community that cannot contend with its inability to recognize and stop its own persecution. Barbarism begins at home.

Theater’s greatest strength is always its audiences. There is no mediation, no screen to look away from or book to clasp shut if things get too intense. We cannot help but be confronted by what we watch. We are in the same room, breathing the same oxygen as the world conjured before us. But it is a two-way street. All the background noise melting in our minds from our daily lives echoes onto what we see on stage. It is what allows us to revisit and revive plays year after year, finding new meanings in what we watch. As the world changes, so does the art. 

There is usually a sense that when a theater dredges up a lesser-known work from the back catalog of a famous writer the play will need to prove its relevance. Death of a Salesman, for example, is a bona-fide classic whose dramatic worth speaks for itself and can be wheeled out without much directorial intentionality. The less popular ones need to reel its audiences in and Broken Glass’s hook is obvious.

British Jews have been destabilized not only by October 7, but by the subsequent rise in antisemitism, violence in Gaza, and the shrugging shoulders of indifference from non-Jewish friends and colleagues. Many sense a gulf between the duality of Anglo-Jewish identity and the question their future in Britain. So a new production of Broken Glass at the Young Vic should rattle all of us to the core. Why doesn’t it? 

The antisemitism of 1938 and 2026 may share ostensible similarities, but the fundamental strands of its DNA have evolved. To the modern antisemite, the image of the Jew is not one of wandering alienation, or of shtetl poverty. It is one of colonial violence, racism, insatiable blood lust. How would the Philip Gellburgs of 2026 try to assimilate and win the affection of their gentile colleagues? Perhaps they would drape a keffiyeh around their necks and declare themselves anti-Zionists, just as Philip must performatively distinguish himself from the other Jews as if to say there are Jews it is permissible to abuse, and they are not like me.

In 2026, then, Sylvia’s paralysis metastasizes into something more provocative. Perhaps Broken Glass chides us for failing to recognize burgeoning antisemitism in our own time. Or perhaps Sylvia’s paralysis can be flipped on its head: instead of images of dead Jews beaten up and bloodied on Berlin streets, we are bombarded with images of dead Palestinians, stuck in wrecked buildings or hounded out of their homes by gun-toting settlers. Like Sylvia, we, collectively, might be paralyzed, unable to prevent more horror, more bombs, more war, the death count always ticking up. The guilt persists, but now it is inverted, no longer about the suffering of Jews but about that of others.

We can find a sturdier answer to what Miller would make of antisemitism today not in Broken Glass but in The Crucible. His masterpiece has served as a theatrical Rorschach Test since it premiered at the height of McCarthyism. Its central mechanism maps the hysteria of accusation, the social contagion of fear, the destruction of the individual who refuses to collaborate. But its eternal relevance lies in how it applies with equal force across the political spectrum, wherever mobs bay for violence and crowds swarm with the thrill of self-righteous violence. 

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Humor is the tried and tested Jewish mechanism of metabolizing pain, and Miller for all his brilliance was not renowned for his sense of humor. His plays are anchored with unrelenting gravity, offering no door through which the audience might open to catch some air. Even Shakespeare understood the necessity of comic relief: the gravedigger in Hamlet who cheerfully philosophizes about death while digging Ophelia’s grave, or Macbeth’s porter, who drunkenly ponders the relationship between alcohol and erectile dysfunction whilst the meat grinder continues whirling. Shakespeare uses humor, not as ornamentation but as a structural necessity to release just enough pressure so that the tragedy can hit harder. 

Jacobson, by contrast, utilizes humor not as relief from the weight of darkness but as a way of exploring it. He is one of Britain’s foremost comic novelist, recognized with the Man Booker Prize for The Finkler Question in 2010, a novel that used wit as a scalpel to dissect the neuroses of British-Jewish identity and the self-consciousness of assimilation. His comedy reaches beyond examining the meaning of British Jewishness, to encompass modern masculinity, multiculturalism, intellectual vanity, and the stories we delude ourselves with to avoid confronting who we really are. Howl is an organic extension of that project, except the stakes feel higher now, and the silences after the laughter has passed echo louder. 

Howl directly grasps the nettle of post-October 7 anxiety and blurs the line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Behind the protagonist Ferdinand Draxler, a Jewish headmaster of a South London school, looms the inheritance of trauma from his mother’s survival in Nazi death camps, and ahead of him is his own daughter, a pro-Palestinian activist. At a chance encounter between opposite sides of a demonstration, she denounces her father as a colonialist Zio pig. Draxler starts to unravel into madness, crumbling under the weight of both history and the future. 

For Jacobson, the unbearable can be survivable precisely by refusing to treat it as such. One episode sees Draxler chance upon protesters gluing their hands to a portrait of Peter Paul Rubens’s Samson and Delilah at the National Gallery. Samson famously pulled down a Philistine temple, collapsing it upon himself and his captors, and is therefore complicit in genocide. That or, Draxler wonders, the protesters might have conflated Rubens, the Flemish artist, with Reubens the kosher deli on Baker Street. Soon it is clear that Draxler relies on wisecracks as medicine to soothe the pain of his fracturing relationship with his daughter. The pain of a family split down the middle has cleft his heart in twain, not just because they disagree politically, but because the gap between them is too insurmountable. 

The ancient Greeks insisted on pairing tragedy with comedy because they are two faces of the same truth. The truth for Miller and Jacobson is that the gravest danger antisemitism poses is not only violent persecution, but the splinters that shatter the self from within. Philip Gellburg destroys himself trying to dissolve into a society that will never fully accept him. Ferdinand Draxler is the mirror image, destroying himself by retreating from a society he refuses to accept. 

Or maybe the lesson from the Greeks is that however bleak it gets, we can always find room for silliness. Mel Brooks has a joke about Greek tragedians: a tailor asks an ancient Greek “Euripides?” The Greek replies: “Yeah, Eumenides?”

Jews have lived on the Iranian plateau for more than 2,600 years, constituting one of the oldest continuously existing religious communities in the world. The Babylonian monarch Nebuchadnezzar II brought them there by force after he destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple of Solomon in 586 BC. This exile, known as the Babylonian Captivity, lasted until 536, when Cyrus, the founder of the Persian empire, conquered Babylon and allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem. (See the Book of Ezra.) Some chose to remain in the regions of modern-day Iraq and Iran. And these Mesopotamian Jewish communities of late antiquity were not idle. Their rabbinic academies produced the nearly two-million-word Babylonian Talmud, the crowning intellectual achievement of Jewish thought to this day.

The Book of Esther is set during the reign of the Persian despot Ahasuerus (better known as Xerxes), who in 480 BC led his massive invading army to epic defeat at the hands of the Athenian-led Greek cities. Read aloud on Purim, and celebrated in a carnivalesque atmosphere of mime and mimicry, the story of Esther expresses diaspora Judaism’s great wish: to triumph over neighbors who would annihilate them, but in such a way as to make them friends. This is the accomplishment of young Esther and her uncle Mordechai, who lived under Ahasuerus’ reign. On Mordechai’s advice, Esther conceals her Jewish identity, becomes Ahasuerus’s queen and cleverly maneuvers him into executing Haman, a Persian Heinrich Himmler. Mordechai then takes Haman’s place as prime minister. Something like this has in fact been the general strategy for Jewish survival in the diaspora: benefit the ruler (as Joseph did Pharaoh), enter the ranks of the elite, and use economic and political power to protect the Jewish community. But as the fate of European and Middle Eastern Jewry showed in the mid-20th century, this strategy, called shtadlanut (“intercession”) in Yiddish, entails considerable risks, and seems to have outlived its usefulness.

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How Evil is normalised

By Jacob Howland

The reality of Jewish life in Persia has been neither as perilous nor as glorious as in the Book of Esther. Until the arrival of Islam in the seventh century made them second-class citizens distinguished from Muslims by special clothes and yellow patches, Jews “participated freely”, as the historian Houman Sarshar notes, “in every sphere of society, from the army to the courts”. Subjected to further economic, social, and physical restrictions after the ascendancy of Shi’ite Islam in the 16th century, they regained their ancient freedoms in 1906, when Iran adopted a new constitution. Iranian Jewry enjoyed a golden age under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a Westernizing ruler who became Shah in 1941 and later extended de facto recognition to the new state of Israel. When political turmoil forced Pahlavi into exile in 1953, an Iranian Jewish merchant issued him a blank check drawn on a Swiss bank account. Jews subsequently assumed leadership roles in key Iranian industries.

But history is full of ironies, and one long in the making finally caught up with the people of Iran. The Greek victory over Xerxes in the Second Persian War saved Athenian democracy, and thereby the West, from perishing in its infancy, but the equally despotic Ayatollah Khomeini used Greek philosophy to defeat Western values when he established the Islamic Republic of Iran in the 1979 revolution. The medieval Shi’ite thinker Alfarabi argued for an Islamic version of Callipolis, the city ruled by philosopher-kings in Plato’s Republic, that would be ruled by a Muslim prophet and lawgiver who was also a philosopher. A millennium later, Khomeini looked to the Republic in founding his totalitarian theocracy, in which power is concentrated in a Supreme Leader and a Council of Guardians composed of clerics.

The Shah had grown increasingly authoritarian and repressive in the Seventies, and Iranian Jews supported the revolution in the hope of a more progressive government. Instead, the Ayatollah exacted a heavy price for their policy of shtadlanut. The new regime almost immediately charged Habib Elghanian, a wealthy businessman and president of the Tehran Jewish Society, with corruption, Zionism, and contacts with Israel. He was executed and his family’s property was confiscated by the state. Most Jews subsequently fled Iran, and the community, which numbered 100,000 under the Shah, now has perhaps 9,000 members.

It’s hard to know what the Jews of Iran are thinking right now, because the regime monitors their communications with the outside world, strictly prohibits direct contact with Israel, and treats Zionism as a serious crime that can be punishable by death. Little wonder that they “dodge questions”, “talk in code”, and use fake names on social media; that they participate in Al-Quds Day rallies expressing solidarity with Palestinians; and that, when Israel and the United States bombed Iran last year, the Jewish communities of Tehran and Isfahan issued public statements condemning the “Zionist regime’s” brutal aggression. There’s no doubt that Iranian Jews feel great pressure to make such declarations. But after the Hamas pogrom of October 7, 2023 unleashed a worldwide wave of anti-Israel sentiment and Jew-hatred, diaspora Jews in general, who are increasingly suspected and accused of having more loyalty to Israel than to their home countries, have felt a similar (if less intense) social pressure to denounce Zionism. This is a cruel predicament, for that very pressure underscores why the existence of Israel — the ultimate guarantor of Jewish safety in the post-Holocaust, post-Soviet world — is so necessary.

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Revenge of the Kurds

By Matt Broomfield

Why haven’t the remaining Jews of Iran left for greener pastures? For one thing, Iran has historically restricted Jewish families from emigrating together. It’s also unclear whether her Jewish communities know enough about the situation of Jews in other countries to make a realistic assessment of their alternatives. Then, too, it’s very difficult to give up one’s home, business, and way of life in order to become a stranger in a strange land, compelled to learn another language. Finally, Iranian Jews, including those who left after 1979, feel a strong and genuine attachment to the land where their ancestors have lived for millennia. Some even believe that, if the Americans succeed in toppling the regime, they might be safer in Iran than anywhere else, even Israel.

The Jews of Iran are surely anxious about the current war, and they’re by no means alone. Between 40,000 and 50,000 Persian or Tehrani Jews live in Los Angeles, and they are currently experiencing a “mix of jubilation and dread” as events unfold in the Middle East. One member of the community expressed a fear that many American Jews are feeling: “If this war doesn’t have a positive end result, it will only further increase the resentment that Americans have of Israel. And that is not good for Israel. It is not good for American Jews.” Nor would it be good for any of the world’s other Jewish communities, to say nothing of the beleaguered Iranian people, who have repeatedly shown great courage in opposing a malignant ideological tyranny. This year, it’s not just the Jews whose hopes of safety are reflected in the story of Purim.

Of course, the trial will reveal further details about Pittman and the attack on the Beth Israel Congregation. For now, though, we may sketch out the following picture. The teenager’s alleged actions seem to have been premeditated: members of his gym claim to have heard him say that he wanted to set fire to a synagogue. It appears, moreover, to have been the culmination of the suspect’s increasingly erratic and threatening behavior: his mother has told the FBI that she had recently considered locking the bedroom door during the night. It should go without saying, too, that the attack was antisemitic in nature: Pittman has apparently admitted that he went after the synagogue for its “Jewish ties”.

Crucially, there is good reason to suspect a religious motive. Pittman is said to have referred to his target as “the synagogue of Satan”, a staple of Christian anti-Judaism going all the way back to the 4th-century homilies of John Chrysostom. On social media, he describes himself as a “follower of Christ”; when read out his rights he said, “Jesus Christ is Lord”. It would not be the first time, as it happens, for this synagogue to have been attacked in an act of terror by extremists of the Christian Right: in 1967, it was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan.

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The Mystery of Britain’s Orthobros

By Cosmo Adair

There is a powerful tendency to regard modern, racial antisemitism as a phenomenon fundamentally distinct from an earlier, religious anti-Judaism. This is seen most clearly in discussions of Nazism and the Holocaust. “Nazism owes nothing to any part of the Western tradition,” Hannah Arendt asserted: Auschwitz marked a total break from the course of Europe’s Christian civilization. In 2000, more than 220 Jewish intellectuals and rabbis signed a document called Dabru Emet, “Speak the Truth”, affirming that “Nazism was not a Christian phenomenon”. All this complemented a certain view of Nazism, making it the very antithesis to Christianity, and instead either atheistic to its core, like Soviet Communism, or else pagan and esoteric — perhaps even amounting to a religion in its own right.

The notion that the Nazis had nothing in common with the fanatical, Christian Jew-haters of earlier centuries is no longer tenable. There was no straightforward transition from “religious” to “racial” thinking: in fact anti-Judaism had already long had an important “racial” component. Jews were identified as a group in the Middle Ages not only on the grounds of their rejection of Christianity, but also by their immutable physical characteristics. A Jewish handbook, Sefer Nizzahon Yashan, written in Germany in the early 14th century, tells us how Christians would often taunt their Jewish neighbors by asking, “Why are most Gentiles fair-skinned and handsome while most Jews are dark and ugly?” Around the same time, Jews were already being depicted with hooked noses.

Moreover, modern racial antisemitism, epitomized by National Socialism, was more fundamentally religious — more Christian — than has often been supposed. An influential book by Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich, argued more than 20 years ago that there was a “religious dimension to Nazi antisemitism, which coexisted with and in some ways even informed the racist dimension”. Much of Nazi Christianity was built atop the fancy that Jesus had really been an Aryan. “I can imagine Christ as nothing other than blond and with blue eyes,” said Hitler in 1921; “the devil, however, only with a Jewish grimace.” Seeking to keep the SS from fracturing along religious lines, even the pagan Heinrich Himmler forbade “any attacks against Christ”, including the attack, “without doubt historically false”, that Christ had been a Jew. Some Christian Nazis hoped to reform their religion by jettisoning the Old Testament from the Biblical canon. But still there were plenty of others who were perfectly conventional and orthodox in their beliefs.

In Michael: A German Destiny in Diary Form, Joseph Goebbels’s strange semi-autobiographical novel, the protagonist insists that “Christ is the genius of love, [and] as such the most diametrical opposite of Judaism, which is the incarnation of hate”. The Nazi struggle, thought Goebbels, was one “between Christ and Marx”, to be waged “until victory or the bitter end”. Hans Schemm, the head of the National Socialist Teachers’ League, put it more succinctly when he declared that “Our religion is Christ, our politics Fatherland”. The law of race did not need to contradict the revealed law of Christianity; race, after all, could be construed as an integral part of God’s Creation. “We, the racists, are the only ones who render to Christ the homage that is his due,” wrote the Nazi lawyer Herbert Meyer. Whatever his private beliefs, Hitler too presented himself as having been charged with a religious mission. As he wrote in Mein Kampf: “I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.”

Those who emphasize the distance of Christianity from the theory and practice of Nazism are often, it would seem, committing a No True Scotsman fallacy: no true Christian would be an antisemite, because Christianity is really a religion of meekness, self-sacrifice, and neighbor-love; and no true Christian would be a Nazi, because no true Nazi would ever wish to be a Christian.

Christianity also played a part in the development of modern antisemitism closer to home. The British Union of Fascists had several churchmen in its ranks. George Henry Dymock, vicar of St Bede’s in Bristol, inveighed against the Jews in 1935 for engaging in “vile usury”. The Reverend M. Yate Allen, influenced perhaps by the religious declarations of Hitler’s top brass, thought that Nazi Germany was “truly on the side of Christ”. The newspaper British Fascism came up with a pithy formula in 1930: “There can be no true Fascism that is not Christian, for Fascism is military Christianity.” An earlier group produced a “Children’s Fascist Creed” in 1925, whose opening is unmistakably Nicene: “I am a Fascist. I believe in God, the Father Almighty, and in Jesus Christ His only Son Our Lord, and in the Holy Spirit…”

Under the leadership of John Tyndall — and under the spell of postwar neo-Nazi mythmaking — the BNP was broadly anti-Christian. When Nick Griffin set out to “modernize” the party, he therefore had to Christianize it. He succeeded. In 2008, the party underscored the point that “Christianity is so large a part of our identity that to give it up would mean giving up that identity”. In the European elections of 2009, in which the BNP won two seats, the party (much to the dismay of the established church) ran an expressly Christian campaign. A poster cites John 15:20: “If they have persecuted me they will also persecute you.” “What would Jesus do?,” it goes on to ask. The answer: “Vote BNP.”

Shortly before the attack in Mississippi, an account belonging to Pittman posted the “happy merchant” antisemitic meme. This account also promotes a website called “One Purpose”, which advocates “scripture-backed fitness” and “biblical nutrition”. He would seem therefore to belong to a subculture familiar to any young man who has spent time on the online Right — one which mixes edgy internet humor and aspirational self-improvement with an ultra-reactionary, identitarian version of Christianity. The antisemitism draws from both these sources. Sometimes, these cohorts are written off as “nihilistic”, their religion as mere “LARP”; but here, again, the No True Scotsman rears its head. “Christ is King”, sounds the battle-cry of the Groypers. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that the “trad” Catholicism of Nick Fuentes and his ilk is anything other than sincerely felt. Indeed, it underpins everything they say and do. It is central to their entire narrative about the decadence of modern liberal, secular society — which, predictably, is imagined to have been engineered by the “perfidious Jews”.

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Jews don't feel safe anywhere

By Samuel Rubinstein

For all this, we ought not to miss the wood for the trees. It remains obvious that the major threat to Jewish life in the West comes not from Christian, but rather Islamic, religious extremism. The attacks in Manchester and Sydney amply demonstrate as much. Insofar as the blood libel — an English invention — is alive and well in modern Britain, it has principally sustained itself as a more recent import. Muslim antisemites, as Christopher Hitchens once put it, often “have to borrow — when they want to be anti-Jewish — the rubbish of medieval Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox antisemitism”; though Hitchens was quick to add that they equally possess a vigorous antisemitic tradition all their own. Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ is probably the 21st century’s most concerted effort to revive the kind of Catholic antisemitism or anti-Judaism that was de rigueur prior to Vatican II and Nostra aetate. Not for nothing did it prove a smash hit across much of the Arab world.

The institutions of mainstream Christianity deserve credit for opposing antisemitism on theological and moral grounds. Fuentes might hold Jews collectively responsible for the death of Christ, and advance an extreme form of supersessionism, dictating that the New Testament replaced, rather than fulfilled, the Old. But when he does so, his fellow Roman Catholics can appeal to the contrary pronouncements of another Chicago native, Pope Leo XIV.

Indeed, Christianity has always possessed strong tools for opposing antisemitism. In the medieval Rhineland, itinerant preachers launched crusades against Jews — yet local bishops also offered sanctuary to the victims. It may well be that Protestant Christianity was not incidental to Nazi ideology; that Jozef Tiso, a Catholic priest, oversaw the Holocaust in Slovakia; and that the ratlines which conveyed several high-ranking Nazis to Latin America ran through the Vatican. But none of this can dampen the Christian courage of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemöller, or the Scholl siblings. Their courage might now serve as an encouraging example, much as the attack in Mississippi ought to serve as a warning. There is, so to speak, a homegrown strain of antisemitism which is quickly gaining ground. If we are now witnessing a resurgence of antisemitism in the West, we should not be surprised to sometimes find it clad in its ancient, Christian garb.

Several years previously, I’d gone to Shabbat Services in Deauville. The synagogue door was burnt black and blistered from the fire that had been set the previous Yom Kippur, and the shul members decided to preserve it as a reminder. Back in the Seventies, the reminder was constant. Every day we Jews in Chicago and New York saw tattoos on the left arms of our neighbors.

These days, Holocaust Remembrance Ceremonies, however well intentioned, are inert. For, in the Diaspora, young Jews unaffected by antisemitism, and removed from living reminders of outrage, were invited to express sympathy for what were, to them, historical characters. (Israeli Jews, of course, spent and spend entire lives facing the reality of savagery.) We American Jews mouthed “never again”, but did nothing to prevent the reoccurrence. Our comfortable, old-school liberal attitude of “we must change the narrative” was essentially sedative. We did nothing to “change the narrative”. This was not indictable as there was no “narrative”. There was simply the endorphin of permitted brutality.

This year’s Erev-Chanukah, the day before Chanukah, broke with the news of the slaughter of Sydney Jews. That evening, when we first heard of the murder of Rob and Michelle Reiner, we assumed that it was more antisemitic savagery, and, at our Chanukah table, our actual Holocaust Remembrance was that husband-and-wife conference which has been going on intermittently for 2,000 years: “Oh my God, is it time to move…?” The traditional Jewish conference was intermittent as, with most potentially vast changes, it is always too early, save when it is too late.

At its release in 1982, someone wrote of Sophie’s Choice that it was “Mandingo for Jews”. I have always loathed the film subgenre of Jew Porn, allowing folk to feel they are experiencing Good Will for watching actors portray “The Other” being thrown into The Oven.

The inescapable notion that Jews are The Other inspires and allows us to be treated as other-than-human. The crocodile sympathy of moviegoers, and devotees of Anne Frank, Fiddler on the Roof, and so on, is expressed for Jews as victims. And only as victims. The Jew, here, given an award for passivity. Not only is the award moot, it is not even extended to a real Jew.

Forty thousand firearms were taken from the Jews of Warsaw before the Nazis exterminated them. The Jews, of course, hoped to better their position by acquiescence. Hope is the placebo of the powerless. But it is not a strategy.

Violence is a constant and universal possibility. That it can be deterred by Good Feelings was disproved, rather dramatically, by the slaughter of young Israelis at a music festival on October 7.

Some years back I was tasked with taking my niece on a college tour of Brown. The student guide showed us this and that on the beautiful campus, and pointed to a phone kiosk. “There’s one every hundred yards,” he said. “Which will summon our gloriously unarmed Campus Police.”

I thought, at the time, that the University must be a congeries of fools. Not so much as their cops were unarmed (that was, to my mind, simply a dereliction of common sense, understandable in an institution largely engaged in make-believe), but that its representative was selling to prospective buyers, the notion that to be unprotected was laudable — an attitude certainly of interest to the violent. To announce to the world that campus cops were unarmed was merely stupid. To praise that folly was delusion on the order of “changing the narrative”.

A few years back, three Presidents of the Ivy League were called to Congress to testify about their schools’ passivity about antisemitism. Each was asked if the calls on campus for the murder of Jews were antisemitic, and each responded: “it depends on the context.”

Why would any Jewish parents then allow their kids to attend these schools? I’d be pleased to term it a “mystery”; but it is no mystery, it is a horrible passivity — not even the (understandable) dismissal of danger as statistically remote, but something finally much worse — a sort of death wish.

That Jewish parents send their Jewish children to institutions which allow, encourage, and so ensure, antisemitism is an act of sacrifice. It is an endorsement of the majoritarian’s right to oppress the Jews, in the hope the gift will forestall further violence. For the Warsaw Jews it was the surrender of their guns, in the Ivy League, the offer of our children.

These institutions offer Jew-baiting as an extra-curricular activity. What possible benefit could our children derive there which would offset the trauma of their abandonment?

The beleaguered Jewish student there can either embrace passivity as a necessary survival strategy, or — horribly more likely — march with the antisemites calling for the eradication of Israel — an apostasy which would spare them as little as did the Warsaw surrender of firearms.

Jew Hatred isn’t caused by Jews.

The Chanukah celebrants at Bondi Beach, the dancing kids on October 7, the Ivy Jews sheltering in Hillel, neither these nor those they’re persecuted for resembling did anything to inspire hatred. That something in their DNA, appearance, or religious beliefs excuses their persecution is delusional. It’s not a hatred of Jews, but a love of hatred.

Is antisemitic speech and violence a Hate Crime? All crime is hate crime; there is no such thing as Love Crime. To mete out justice based on the ethnic or religious status of the victim or the prejudices of the perpetrator is insanity. We’re all human beings as equal in our legitimate desires for safety as we should be in accountability for our acts.

Jews have been persecuted for 2,000 years because we were defenseless. Since the establishment of the Jewish State, we’ve been reviled because we asserted our right to exist, independent of permission.

Moses fled Egyptian luxury not alone because he slew the taskmaster, but because he was denounced by the Jew he saved. He was heartbroken. After the appearance of Moses, most of the Jews in the Torah plead, scheme, and betray in order to return to Egypt, which is to say, to the security of slavery.

Slavery is the sole possible state of that which the liberal mind celebrates as “equality”. To aspire to it is not merely wrong, it is immoral. For, in preferring subjugation to self-determination, we not only choose for ourselves, but provide example to those groups of which we are members.

My Brown graduate niece, now 43, wears a Free Palestine t-shirt; and the Jews of the world’s largest Jewish city have just elected an antisemite mayor.

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Harvard University has no shame

By David Mamet

On Erev-Chanukah, last Saturday, we neighborhood Jews gathered, as planned, to light candles. But the day began with the slaughter on Bondi Beach, and ended with the murders of our Community members, the Reiners.

We were grieving, which is to say, in a state of Cognitive Dissonance. Nothing made sense save that nothing made sense. The last thing we wanted to do was to abandon the safety of our grief for a “religious celebration”. Then an elder explained the Miracle of Chanukah.

We all knew that the desecrated Temple had to be rededicated, that the resanctification required illumination of the sacred lamps. We knew, from childhood, that there was Only Enough Oil to burn for one day, but that the Jews lit the lamps and they burned for the required eight days. We all knew the persistence of the lamps was a miracle; but the Rabbis wrote that the true miracle was not the length of the lamps’ illumination, but that the Jews, knowing the oil was insufficient, lit the lamps in any case. As commanded.

After we heard the story, and, still grieving, we lit the lamps.

As Chanukah is, finally, the Festival of Lights, I’ll end with this note: in Sydney, at the Great Synagogue, I was in line, waiting to be frisked, and a man behind me said, “Aren’t you David Mamet?” I admitted I was. He wished me an easy fast, and a Good Inscription in the Book of Life, and said he was honoured I’d come to his shul.

I asked his name, and he told me. He was the shul’s Rabbi. The line had moved up, and the armed guard saw us talking and asked, “Rabbi, shall I just pass him in…?” “Nah,” the Rabbi said, “frisk him.”

Happy Chanukah.

The presence of death has become more tangible in recent years. The first thing a Yom Kippur shulgoer will notice now is the security. There may be a police car or two in sight, and watchmen at the door, eagle-eyed for suspicious behavior. In order to enter a Yom Kippur service at a synagogue in Germany earlier this year, I had to present my passport to a gruff Israeli bouncer. He was satisfied by my Jewish name and countenance; another man in the queue behind me was patted down.

Over the years, Jews have had to grow accustomed to such inconveniences and precautions. Jewish schools have tight security, and they have emergency procedures in place, in case that security were to fail. They run drills and “invacuations”. In 2015, after a spate of antisemitic attacks on the Continent, it was reported that children at Jewish primary schools were being trained to play “sleeping lions” when the alarm sounded.

But Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the calendar, is both a moment of heightened vigilance, and a moment Jews have their guard down. The Arab states worked this to their advantage in 1973; and vigilance was proved necessary, again, by Jihad al-Shamie at Manchester’s Heaton Park synagogue earlier this year.

Hanukkah is the opposite of Yom Kippur: it is frivolity. Some Jews gripe about its commercialization, the way religious Christians do over Christmas. But Christmas was the birth of the Messiah, the Incarnation of God; Hanukkah celebrates a historical event, the Maccabean wars, which do not even merit mention in the canon of Jewish scripture. It is widely admitted that Hanukkah attained its prominence, both among Jews and in the non-Jewish cultural imagination, as an explicit counter to Christmas. Shorn of long prayers and arbitrary restrictions, and bringing with it a bounty of gifts, doughnuts, and chocolate coins, it is naturally the festival that children most look forward to.

This was the jubilant mood, blessed with Antipodean sunshine and golden sands, that a father-and-son pair of Islamists, Sajid and Naveed Akram, saw fit to desecrate. The attack at Bondi Beach on the first night of Hanukkah was the deadliest terror attack in Australian history, and the second-deadliest mass shooting. It was an attack on a robust Jewish community, with the largest per-capita population of Holocaust survivors anywhere outside Israel. One of those Holocaust survivors, Alexander Kleytman, was killed while shielding his wife of sixty years, Larisa, from the bullets. Another of those murdered was Eli Schlanger, a rabbi born in London. It speaks to the smallness of the Jewish world that one of Rabbi Schlanger’s relatives served as rabbi at Heaton Park.

Jews are frightened and angry, and they recognize where the threat is coming from. Of course they are concerned about the far-Right, and the Pittsburgh attack in 2018 gave them ample reason to be — not to mention the subsequent rise of Nick Fuentes. They have reason to worry about the far-Left, too: when Aaron Bushnell set himself ablaze for the sake of Palestine, it was feared that such propensity for violence would soon turn itself outwards; and so it did when Elias Rodriguez killed a young couple working at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. But Jews in the diaspora perceive Islamist terror as the principal danger. They saw what happened in Israel on 7 October 2023, and they now see similar occurrences closer to home. The rap sheet is long. The Jewish school in Toulouse. The Jewish Museum in Brussels. The kosher supermarket in Paris. The Great Synagogue in Copenhagen. The synagogue in Colleyville, Texas. The synagogue in Manchester. Bondi Beach in Sydney.

A report published earlier this year by the Counter Extremism Group — “Islamist Antisemitism: A Neglected Hate” — found that, in Britain, “speakers in certain mosques have promoted the idea that Allah is pleased by the killing of Jews, led prayers for the Mujahideen (without directly naming Hamas), and promulgated conspiracy theories about the 7 October atrocities”. Plenty of those who recite the slogan “globalize the intifada” on London’s never-ending Saturday marches do so out of conformity and ignorance. They might prefer not to give much thought to what it means in practice; but others take the precept very seriously indeed.

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By Tanya Gold

The modern Hanukkah may be a frivolity, but it imparts a powerful message. Partly that is one of hope, of light in the darkness: hope found, in Sydney, in Ahmed al-Ahmed, the heroic fruit-vendor who disarmed one of the attackers.

The Hanukkah story is not just a generic “festival of light”, however: it has teeth. It is the classical expression of Jewish defiance. No matter that it is uncanonical: the story is known to every Jewish child. It is the story of Judah Maccabee — Judah the Hammer — and his brothers redeeming their homeland, by force of arms, from the Seleucid Empire. It is, in a sense, a national epic, whose heroes win the day through sacrifice, valor, and divine favor. There is an episode, in the first book of Maccabees, when Eleazar Avaran, one of Judah’s brothers, charges at a Seleucid war elephant, and stabs it at the belly; he brings the beast down but is crushed beneath it. Al-Ahmed clearly possessed that Maccabean courage.

The Maccabees story is rousing stuff. Emma Lazarus — the poet best known for her sonnet “The New Colossus”, now inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty — was much moved by it: “Wake, Israel, wake! Recall to-day / The glorious Maccabean rage, / The sire heroic, hoary-gray, / His five-fold lion-lineage.” So was another, lesser-known 19th-century Jewish woman poet, Marion Hertog: “And still the Festival of Lights / Recalls those deeds of yore / That make our history’s page sublime / And live for evermore.” Probably the most consequential echo of the Maccabees story occurs at the crescendo of Theodor Herzl’s clarion-call for Zionism, Der Judenstaat. “A wondrous generation of Jews will spring into existence. The Maccabeans will rise again; the Jews who wish for a state will have it.”

Jews know well what Maccabean defiance looks like: it looks like Israel. If each Jewish holiday will now be seen by antisemites as an opportunity for terror, then the prognosis for diaspora Jewry is bleak. There will be fewer public events, and, generally, less fun. There will be more drills, more alarms, more bag checks at doors; there will have to be more security and more police. There will, for all this, be more attacks and more deaths: no matter how much security is tightened, something will always slip through the cracks. There will be a lamentable turning-inward. Some Jews may choose, this Hanukkah, not to put their Chanukiah on the windowsill, lest it be seen by malevolent passers-by. Unless things change, Jewish life in the diaspora will come more closely to resemble Israel: sealed off from the world, armed to the teeth, and terrified, with some justification, of the enemy at its doorstep.

More than two millennia later, Judaism’s spiritual reserves endure. They caught flame in recent decades among the Bnei Menashe (Children of Menasseh) of northeast India, a group of roughly 9,000 Tibeto-Burmese people of the Chin-Mizo Hmar tribe. The tribe’s rituals and legends echo very ancient Jewish priestly practices as well as the story of the Exodus, down to the pillars of cloud and fire and the parting of the Red Sea. 19th-century missionaries convinced these former animists, whose ancestral patriarch was named Manmási, to adopt Christianity. They now believe they are descended from Menasseh, one of the Ten Lost Tribes that conquering Assyrians sent into exile in 720 BC. After 1951, when a tribal leader had a dream that Israel was their ancestral homeland, they began to learn prayers and observe Jewish rituals. In the Eighties, they started moving to Israel, where the government has just announced plans to help the remaining 5,800 immigrate by 2030.

The story of the Bnei Menashe raises fundamental questions about Jewish identity, questions which have been debated since the time of the Talmudic sages. Who is a Jew? What does it mean to be a Jew? And, not least, why would anyone want to remain, let alone become, a Jew? These are matters of existential import,  in which both Jews and their enemies have always had a say. The unusually harsh proclamation that excommunicated Spinoza from the Jewish community of Amsterdam in 1656 — assailing him for his “abominable heresies” — declared that “the Lord shall separate him unto evil out of all the tribes of Israel”, nullifying even his ethnic identity. Conversely, unimpeachable ideological orthodoxy was not enough to save ethnically Jewish citizens of the USSR from persecution under Stalin.

Jewish identity, then, is clearly complex, framed as it is by ethnic, national, religious, and political components. The Book of Exodus relates that the 12 sons of Jacob — the Israelites who settled in Egypt — grew from a family and tribe into the Hebrew nation, a people that Pharaoh enslaved and ultimately sought to destroy. These slaves became Jews when Moses led them out of Egypt and they accepted the Torah given by God at Mount Sinai. In the Land of Israel, God ruled through intermediaries: first judges, then kings, and, in the Second Temple period, through high priests subject to various imperial governments. The Maccabean Revolt was thus politically as well as religiously significant.

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Politics played little role in Jewish identity over long centuries in the Diaspora, when the affairs of local communities were administered by rabbis whose authority derived from their knowledge of scripture and the religious tradition. Writing in the 17th century, Spinoza believed that other nations’ hatred of the Jews prevented them from assimilating, and so preserved them as a people apart.

But identifying as a Jew, and being recognized as one, became two separate things after the wave of political emancipation that began with the French Revolution. Emancipation destabilized Jewish identity by making it, by turns and in shifting combinations, both voluntary and compulsory. Jews could choose to be religiously unaffiliated, yet identify, for example, as “culturally” Jewish. Nor did conversion guarantee that one was no longer considered Jewish: Benjamin Disraeli, who was baptized as a child and bought up in the Anglican church, was “hounded and reviled throughout his life — and beyond — as an oily, devious, dishonest Jew.” Then there are those horrors of the 20th century, with both the Nazis and Soviets persecuting and murdering many ethnic Jews who had zero connection with the religion.

Since its foundation in 1948, meanwhile, the State of Israel has had a say in determining who is a Jew, and therefore eligible for the protections and benefits of Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return. Interestingly, Jews who have converted to another religion are not eligible for immigration, presumably because they don’t feel the connection with the ancient Jewish homeland on which the Law, and its assumption of patriotism, is based. For the same reason, Palestinians do not enjoy a right of return. As part of its effort to filter out opportunistic migrants who have no commitment to Judaism, meanwhile, the government has obliged the Bnei Menashe to undergo conversion under the authority of the Orthodox rabbinate, a process that involves demonstrating their knowledge of Jewish religious law and practice. In 2008, indeed, some Messianic Jews were denied on the ground that they sought to enjoy the legal benefits of Jewish status while practicing Christianity.

Tests aside, though, and unlike the persecutors of Jews in the 20th century, it’s surely telling that the Bnei Menashe chose to be part of the covenantal community, coming to Judaism in an act, if not of rediscovering their past, at least of giving themselves one from which they wished to be descended. And after the October 7 pogrom it somehow seemed permissible — yet again — to gang up on Jews in public, that free choice seems particularly meaningful.

Jews have long been criticized for claiming to be God’s chosen people, which implies their superiority to other groups. But devout Christians and Muslims, too, believe they are God’s elect, and it would be strange if they did not. More to the point, election is not so much a privilege as an obligation — often an onerous one. “I know, I know. We are your chosen people,” Tevye famously laments in Fiddler on the Roof. “But once in a while can’t you choose someone else?” Judaism survives today not because God chose the Jews, but because the Jews persist, through thick and thin, in choosing God. As the German theologian and Holocaust survivor Leo Baeck wrote, “Israel is elect if it elects itself” — if, as he understood it, it embraces its vocation of being a “light unto the nations” by trying to mend the world through exemplary righteousness and charity.

Baeck’s “ethical monotheism”, which embraces the moral core of the rabbinic tradition in a way that is attractive even to unobservant Jews, understands Jewish particularism as a necessary condition of its universal mission. Of course, this contemporary understanding of what it means to be a Jew is only one of many. But common to all is a sense of obligation internal to what the Israeli national anthem, Hatikvah (The Hope), calls the “Jewish soul”. This sense of obligation is a constant, even if its perceived source — God, family, polity, one’s ancestors — varies widely. The theologian Emil Fackenheim famously derived the obligation to remain Jewish from the moral imperative not to give Hitler any posthumous victories. In our day, antisemitism is no longer sufficient, as Spinoza supposed, to preserve the Jewish people. Still, one wonders: do Jews remain Jews in spite of the persecution they’ve suffered, or because of it? In the Bible, both Moses and God call the Jews “a stiff-necked people”, and many have felt more solidarity with their brethren after October 7. The greatest massacre of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust renewed old questions about the meaning of Jewish suffering. Who among us is willing to say that it was all for naught?

Here is where the perspectives of two very different groups of people — educated Westerners like me, who come from a long line of Jews, and third-world Easterners like the Bnei Menashe,who want to become Jews — find common ground. While it would be strange to suppose that antisemitism would make one want to convert to Judaism, one suspects that the survival of the people of Israel over more than three millennia is, for the Bnei Menashe, an argument in favor of conversion. For it testifies to the Jews’ vitality, adaptability, toughness, and so bodes well for the future of anyone who wishes to join (or return to) them. Similarly, admiration for the noble accomplishment of countless generations of forbears, who kept the faith under the most difficul conditions, is, for many Jews today, a source of increased resolve in the face of widespread hostility.

As the philosopher Leo Strauss has suggested, the Jewish soul is, at bottom, characterized by fidelity or loyalty to one’s ancestors, “piety in the old Latin sense of the word pietas.” That virtue, which opposes every instinct of modernity, is by no means unique to Judaism. It is exemplified by Virgil’s Aeneas, a Trojan who carried his father Anchises on his shoulders out of the burning city of Troy when it was razed by the conquering Greeks. The homeless Aeneas would later become a progenitor of the Romans — whose belief that the future belongs to those who cherish the past was reflected in their worship of Janus, the god of gateways (jani) whose two faces look back and forward simultaneously.

Through long experience as a people in exile, the Jews, too, have learned what it means to inhabit liminal spaces, and to stand on the threshold between a known past and a deeply uncertain future. The festival of Hanukkah commemorates their remarkable capacity to begin anew by drawing on old resources, and so to recover what would otherwise have been lost. That capacity is reflected in the rebirth of their ancient language, the restoration of their ancient homeland, and now, either the return of a long-lost tribe or the ardent self-election of unlikely Jewish wannabes. And the fact that neither the orthodox rabbinate nor the Israeli government care which of these is the case tells us that, unlike ethnic or national identity, a deep and serious attachment to Judaism is universally sufficient to make one a Jew. As an Israeli rabbi who has helped to prepare the Bnei Menashe for conversion and immigration vividly put it: “They want to be Jewish, and so they will be.”

Just recently, however, its members have been feeling considerably less secure. Zohran Mamdani — a socialist, a Muslim and a fierce critic of Israel — is the city’s likely next mayor. His emergence is eliciting palpable concern among the club’s members. “We are being erased in our own city,” says Sam Abrams, club member and prominent political scientist. At the Harmonie, as in various less illustrious Jewish institutions, the talk is of rising antisemitism and anti-Zionism, and an increased feeling that the city is turning against its Jewish communities. Elliot Cosgrove, rabbi at the generally liberal Park Avenue synagogue on the Upper East Side, sees Mamdani as a lethal threat. “If there’s a celebration of Israel and 10,000 people show up, will they be safe under Mamdani?”

New York’s Jews have suffered periods of exclusion, as they have elsewhere. Indeed, that’s one reason why the Harmonie was founded in the first place: Jews were largely unwelcome at the immaculately WASPish Union Club. But never before has New York had a mayor who is so apparently anti-Zionist; who has accused Israel of “genocide” and “apartheid”; who has defended the phrase “Globalize the Intifada”; and who has appeared to celebrate terrorists and their supporters. All this in a city that, for most of the 20th century, hosted the largest Jewish community in world history.

Not that New York has always been welcoming to Jews. The first to arrive came in 1654, fleeing the Spanish Inquisition. They were a cause of consternation for Dutch colonial administrator of the time, Peter Stuyvesant, but the refugees had enough connections in Holland to force him into allowing them to stay. The first synagogue rose in 1682. The American Revolution brought full citizenship, while through the 19th century, New York welcomed thousands of largely German-speaking Jews: it’s no accident that the Harmonie was originally called Gesellschaft Harmonie. By the American Civil War, the city was home to 150,000 Jews, yet the largest influx came around 1900, when over two million Jewish migrants, including my own grandparents, arrived from Eastern Europe.

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Having traveled the filth and stench of steerage class, these immigrants did much to shape the 20th century city. It is frankly hard to imagine a successful, prosperous New York without Jews — just as it is hard to imagine New York culture without Philip Roth, Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow; George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein; Barbra Streisand and Stephen Sondheim; Stan Lee and Diane Arbus; Woody Allen and Mel Brooks; the Beastie Boys and Lou Reed; Fran Leibovitz and Lena Dunham. Jews are critical players in the philanthropic structures of the city, from the Metropolitan Opera to the Philharmonic to the New York Historical Society near Central Park. They have been prominent among the big donors to the city’s great universities, notably NYU and Columbia.

It was New York’s Jews who, for better or worse, founded Goldman Sachs and the Lehman Brothers, and the modern mafia too. “In New York,” suggests Yeshiva University historian Jeffrey Gurock, “you could feel like the whole world was Jewish.” Even on the streets, the Jewish heritage persists: besides selling falafel and kebabs, the ubiquitous halal vendors also hawk knishes and kosher hot dogs. The essayist Milton Klonsky was only half joking when he called the Big Apple the “Ghetto of Eden”.

But New York’s Jewish character has been waning for decades. In 1950, the city was home to 40% of America’s Jews. Now, it represents well less than 15%. When I was growing up in the late Fifties, New York had some two million Jewish inhabitants; today the population is slightly less than half that. Much of that population headed to the suburbs through the Sixties and Seventies, an era of marked urban decline in New York as elsewhere.

The million or so Jews who remain in New York are still a largely affluent community. Yet they inhabit a city with new cultural influences, from the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia — and the Middle East. The city’s Muslim population has grown to roughly 750,000, and may soon match or exceed the Jewish population. All the while, New York’s institutions have also become less culturally Jewish. Saudi Arabia and Qatar have poured money into Manhattan’s universities, and its campuses have become flashpoints of anti-Zionism. The current holder of the Herbert Lehman chair at Columbia University, established in memory of the financier, a dedicated Zionist who served New York as both senator and governor, is none other than Mahmood Mamdani: Zohran’s virulently anti-Zionist father.

Nonetheless, New York’s large Muslim population is not Mamdani’s most critical constituency. His remarkable rise has come by appealing to well-educated, but often moderately paid, professionals. Like everyone else, New York’s Jewish middle classes find the city too expensive. Many continue to leave, particularly young families. The ones who remain are hemmed in by costs that reduce their quality of life on a daily basis. There remains a large group of young people, usually long-term renters, often single and/or childless, mostly concentrated in progressive enclaves, who want to stay — but look to Mamdani to help curb rising housing, food and transport costs.

Mamdani’s promise to make New York more affordable appears to cut across any concerns voters might have about his anti-Zionism — some polls have him winning a third of the Jewish vote, though more recent surveys are less enthusiastic. Whatever the exact numbers, they imply a new version of the class divide that has long separated New York’s Jewish populations. “There’s more than one Jewish New York,” says Rabbi Cosgrove. “Things look different on the Upper East Side than in parts of Brooklyn or Washington Heights.” Many families are divided, he laments. It’s not just progressive activists who are backing Mamdani but in many cases the children of the sorts of moneyed families who might frequent the Harmonie Club.

Indeed, New York’s Jews are turning on each other. The most staunch defenders of Israel accuse Mamdani’s Jewish supporters of being, like the old Jewish Bolsheviks, “Jews in Name Only” — choosing progressive bona fides over the deepest traditions of the tribe. For many of Mamdani’s champions, it suffices to call pro-Israelis “Zionists”, which many consider slur enough.

The frightening prospect for New York Jews is that antisemitism will become more commonplace, as it increasingly appears to be in Europe, reinforcing the notion that, as the Jewish political consultant Hank Sheinkopf put it, “every galut (place of exile) ends up in tragedy.” In Europe, demography favors a growing and far larger Muslim population, as well as their allies in established progressive parties.

As Muslim power, awkwardly allied with the secular Left, grows, an increasing number of Jews feel they can no longer count on protection from what were once considered friendly states. Some American Jews have noted the vicious antisemitic murders in Manchester — are they justified as part of the “global intifada”? — and conclude they can no longer count on the British sense of fair play. In the violence that accompanied the football match between Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv in Amsterdam last year, Dutch police were notably lax in protecting both visiting football fans and Amsterdam’s Jewish residents. Even Amsterdam’s progressive, anti-Israel Green mayor, Femke Halsema, was forced to admit that the attacks resembled Nazi pogroms.

Rather than restrict openly antisemitic acts, then, it’s Jews who are now being restricted: witness the ban on Israeli soccer fans being enforced in Birmingham. When the keffiyeh crowd is out in force, it’s a “no-go zone” for British Jews. Many New York Jews worry this is their future too, with community leaders fearing that Mamdani’s election will accelerate Jewish flight from the city: both to surrounding suburbs and further afield. Florida remains one popular option here. But as Ira Sheskin, a University of Miami demographer explains, Jews are also heading to cities as varied as Dallas, Raleigh, Austin, Atlanta and Las Vegas. All these places now have among the fast-growing Jewish communities in the nation.

Of course, this will be a slow process. New York is not about to lose its Jewish character overnight. Nor will the city’s economy collapse, at least immediately, if Mamdani is elected. Life goes on. Surging tourism and the Wall Street boom keep Manhattan as frenetic as ever.

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But, for all this, the city has clearly changed, its inequalities all too evident in an economy where almost all job growth is in low-wage sectors like tourism. Indeed, low wages and high rents have proved a boon to Mamdani, whose gaggle of proposed rent freezes, higher minimum wages and free childcare offer succor to the over-extended. New York also continues to attract the largest pool of the world’s ultra-rich, but Gothamites typically spend over 40% of their incomes on rent — the highest proportion of any large US city.

Yet if that explains the popularity of Mamdani’s economic positions, his radical political views may help explain why a growing number of American Jews are taking their religion more seriously. These trends favor more conservative branches of the faith, with nearly two thirds of New York Jewish children now raised Orthodox. Chabad, the most prominent Jewish traditionalist movement, and based out of a handsome neo-gothic house in Brooklyn, is ubiquitous on campuses and storefronts. Rabbi Mottie Seligson, Chabad’s public relations officer, points out that while temples are closing in much of the city, his movement continues to build new synagogues right across the five boroughs. For those younger Jews who eschew Mamdani’s anti-Zionism, Seligson adds that Friday night Shabbat attracts over 1,000 participants.

Altogether, Seligson argues that attachment to Judaism must replace the “religion of the Ivy League”. Young Jews, if they embrace their identity, will increasingly send their kids to Jewish schools and organize such things as local volunteer patrols: which may yet become necessary given many police officers are threatening to quit should Mamdani win.

As for the traditionally liberal Jewish establishment, frequenting spots like the Harmonie Club? It will take more than one term of anti-Zionist radicalism to overcome centuries of achievement. The great Jewish real estate families — the Zeckendorf, Rudin and Tishman — have their vast fortunes invested in the city. For many Jewish New Yorkers, there is nothing like Gotham, not just for making money but living a fully-rounded life.

In the near term, meanwhile, New York’s Jews may also turn to their own considerable resources, riding out the storm until reality impinges on Mamdani’s socialist dreams. “When you feel under attack, and you feel the city will no longer protect you, you need a sanctuary,” says Sam Abrams. He’s presumably thinking of places like the Harmonie — outposts of Jewish life over almost two centuries of upheaval, and which will surely endure long after Mamdani leaves the scene.

It’s odd sitting in a mansion listening to anti-Israel rhetoric, while inside they pretend they cannot hear. It is still, perhaps, the most British experience of my lifetime. Beyond the host offering to have me removed from the city — someone would take me for a drive, she said — no one had a thing to say about it. I made small talk about J.K. Rowling. That was my second mistake. I must have said something kind about her, because an amateur harpist chided me. They did have opinions.

This story is sequential, and divided into three stages: the first, from when Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party in 2015 to the October massacre of 2023; the second, from the massacre in Israel to the attack in Manchester on Yom Kippur last week; the third, the five days since. For me, they have one common emotion. Rage. Not for myself, but for the murdered Jews of Europe, and Jewish children today, told to remove their blazers outside school because the badges identify them as Jews.

Where does it end? Zalmen Gradowski, the Sonderkommando who buried his testimony in the ashes of Birkenau, called the crematoria in Poland a mechanism to soothe an insatiable god, “who is hungry for their flesh and thirsty for their blood”. That feels right: Nazism was a religion, and antisemitism is a subconscious act, which comes from a place beneath thought. In The Zone of Interest, the best Holocaust novel, Martis Amis called Nazism a “Walpurgisnacht”.

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If this sounds morbid, this is my cultural inheritance. I’m a British Jew, fortunate and haunted, a member of one of the only intact Jewish communities in Europe. But the British love for Jews is heavily caveated. The blood libel was invented in Britain, in 1144, in Norwich. There were pogroms in London in 1189, and in Stamford, Bury St Edmunds and York in 1190. In 1290, all Jews were expelled from England. Ancient history, you may say. There’s no such thing. But, since our return to England in the 17th century, we have called ourselves lucky, even if England locked the gates to European Jews in 1938, leaving them to die. As a young woman, I thought British Jews pallid and uninteresting. I understand us better now. Anything not to be noticed, anything to demonstrate loyalty — our prayers for the royal family are gaudy; Bevis Marks, our famous synagogue, looks like a Wren church — but that was then.

The pause ended with Corbyn, who has absorbed the antisemitism (the anti-Zionism) that emerged from Stalin’s Russia. Its creed is: Zionism is racism. As ever, Jew hate is absolution of a kind; for a faction of the Left, it is absolution from colonialism and smaller personal failures. The journalist Vasily Grossman wrote: “Tell me what you accuse the Jews of, and I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of.” In 2016, I covered The World Transformed, the Corbynite conclave in Liverpool, and attended a debate asking whether the Labour Party had a problem with Jews. It was the best attended event of the week, even with a world to transform, because the hard-Left thrive on aggrievement, not thought, and need an enemy — the Zionist Entity! — to explain their calamities to themselves. Afterwards, I found an organiser and told him, like a credulous child: you’ve got a problem. Can I help? Apparently not. They’ll take the Walpurgisnacht.

Those years were pre-shocks. I left the Labour Party, or, rather, it left me because it was understood that Jews had murdered the last hope of modern British Socialism in toppling Corbyn, who really toppled himself. It was a new charge — or variation on an old charge — on a long sheet.

Until October 7, 2023 was the time before; everything else was the time after. When there were celebrations on London streets, I was shocked, and I was not shocked at all. My non-Jewish friends exuded embarrassment, boredom and, above all, cowardice. Write about it, non-Jewish journalist friends told me. No, I thought, you write about it. It’s as much your story as mine: no, more so. Besides, Jewish testimony is suspect. Philip Roth wrote a novel about Anne Frank: The Ghost Writer. Anne survived the war, but pretends she is dead, so people will read her story. The death holds the magic, and the power. People listen harder when we’re dead.

“You’ve got their sympathy when you’re being shoved in the oven,” a Hungarian-born survivor told me. I’m not sure I’d call it sympathy. “A bit blunt,” he says, “but I’m afraid this is it. The only time I did not feel the world was antisemitic was when the gates of hell opened up in 1945 until Israel started winning the war [in 1967]. Back to the old fashioned.”

I was mesmerized by the protests: I thought I could read our future in them. On the first great march for Palestine, I saw a woman with a sign: “resistance by all means necessary”. Is this what Manchester was? I found a first draft on the back of a sign in Trafalgar Square, a failed attempt, abandoned, as its writer was: “Israel is like my ex [boyfriend].” I thought of Jean-Paul Sartre’s words: “If the Jew did not exist, the antisemite would invent him.” Is this Sartre’s mirror?

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I stood with counter-protesters too: a group called Stop the Hate. As the marchers passed, they swelled towards us and gesticulated: the finger for “fuck you” most often; a cut-throat sometimes; the Hamas triangle, made with fingers, once. They come from all social classes, though young Muslims and bourgeois Leftists are overrepresented. This is an internal, and a proxy, war: partially a war on themselves, because their movement is anti-democratic, with a loathing of dissent.

I went to another Stop the Hate rally on a grim arterial road in inner London. Interview after interview was the same. “Just anger,” a woman told me. “Pure anger.” She works in a school, she said, and, playing football, Jewish children were told they should be gassed. A young Orthodox Jew told me antisemitism is now, “a trend. A cool trend.” That is, young people find it fashionable now. A man with a boombox played Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive”. Men laid tefillin — it’s a form of prayer — by the boombox, but only middle-aged women knew the words. Things have changed, but not that much.

Opposite us, a man stood on a traffic island holding a sign that says: “Israel kills more children than all other countries in the world combined.” He wore a suit and tie, and his expression was one of triumph amid fumes.

Again, on Yom Kippur five days ago, I was shocked, and I was not shocked at all. British Jews are a news story now, and we aren’t used to that. History has caught up with us. I went to Stamford Hill, where the Charedi live, and marveled at how odd their civilization — old Jewish Poland remade in London — felt that day. Some fear to wear the Star of David, or yellow hostage ribbon in public. Others do so, explicitly. Some of us go to synagogue more. Some of us go to synagogue less. Some of us have retreated into Jewish silos. Others have abandoned Jewish life. Some need Israel more. Some need it less.

The future security of Jews in Britain does not depend on Jewish denunciations of Israel. That is a feint and, when the Right has used us to attack Muslims — then what? It depends, rather, on the behavior of the impartial majority: what historians call the bystanders. I hope for solidarity. I expect silence.

Libman’s book begins with a family photo taken at Vienna Hauptbahnhof on 16 September 1938, just six months after the Anschluss, the Nazi annexation of Austria. In the window of a train shortly to depart are the author’s great-grandparents, Anna and Eugene, and their two daughters, Ada and Eva, all of whom escaped Europe for North America. Standing on the platform below them are 10 family members who stayed behind, and of whom only four survived past 1945. “This is the last photograph they’ll take together,” Libman writes. He recounts his own journey back to Vienna in his early 20s to meet a distant relative of his grandmother Eva, a woman from whom he receives a large bundle of photographs, letters, and other documents that had once been in possession of Eva’s uncle Max’s widow.

And yet The Third Solitude resists telling the author’s family history, tempting though it must have been to commit what W. G. Sebald, in The Emigrants, calls “a wrongful trespass”. The terrible, uncertain fate of Max, Libman’s great-grandmother’s sibling, practically calls out for novelistic speculation. All that can be ascertained is that he was arrested by French police while trying to reach Spain and put on a train to the Majdanek concentration camp. Libman learns as much from a 1947 “act de disparition“, a sort of belated death certificate issued by the French government. It reads: “Interned on 26 February 1943 at GURS; Transferred on 2 March 1943 to DRANCY; Deported on 4 March 1943 in the direction of LUBLIN-MAJDANECK (Poland).” As Libman explains, the vague “in the direction of” represents an official uncertainty about the location and manner of Max’s presumed death. He is not recorded (as he would have been) as having ever arrived at Majdanek. He “disappeared in the worst way imaginable”, Libman writes: “vanished in a question mark, in the space between one railway station and another, in the black ink of the words ‘in the direction of’.”

Libman’s restraint here is impressive. “Some memories are better left undisturbed,” he writes, adding: “How to stop speaking to our artifacts, stop breaking the shell for the sake of the nut, and instead let them speak to and through us: that is the challenge.”

It is a challenge he lives up to by wandering down a series of intellectual cul-de-sacs instead, chapter-length reflections on the varieties of nostalgia (“nostalgia is a defense mechanism against the ruthlessness of time’s passage”); on the self-mythologization of Québécois nationalists; on the peculiar history of the Jewish day school in Montreal that Libman, like his brothers and his parents, attended. What unites these seemingly disparate considerations is a skepticism towards the uses and abuses of history. The way, for instance, Québécois nationalists have feigned ignorance of the historical forces that brought them to Canada in order to see themselves as a kind of indigenous nation always threatened by the Anglo-canadien.

But, of course, the “black hole” at the center of The Third Solitude is the history of Zionism and the problem of Israel, a country Libman’s great-grandmother, Anna, described as a miracle, but which the author can only view with shame. Libman’s book is thus a contribution to a long tradition of intellectual rebellion, a millennial Jewish writer’s reckoning with the pieties and shibboleths of his education and the capture of Jewish life by political Zionism. Why, Libman asks, was it necessary for students at a Canadian Jewish day school to sing the Israeli national anthem or participate in the annual Israeli Independence Day rally? Why did almost all of the students, Libman included, visit Israel as part of a high-school fellowship? And why were Palestinians, let alone the Nakba, never mentioned?

The Third Solitude is a forceful protest against this seizure of Jewish life by Israel and political Zionism. And while Libman is never as rude or irreverent as Philip Roth, I was nevertheless reminded at times of Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman who, in The Counterlife, describes Israel as a militant escape from traditional forms of Jewish life: “All over the world people were rooting for the Jews to go ahead and un-Jew themselves in their own little homeland. I think that’s why the place was once so universally popular — no more Jewy Jews, great!”

One of The Third Solitude’s most memorable moments is Libman’s account of the time he went on the March for the Living, which every year brings Jewish students from around the world to Poland and Israel to study the history of the Holocaust. In Libman’s telling, however, an ostensibly important educational experience becomes a bizarre historical pageantry. It involved students singing old Jewish songs at the top of their lungs in the middle of a residential area in Kraków, as though Poland remained stuck in 1939-1945. “It was like going to the United States and insisting that everything was as it had been during the Civil War,” Libman writes. Later, during a trip to the Buczyna woods, where 10,000 people, most of them Jews, were killed and buried in a mass grave in 1942-43, Libman notices a plaque displaying the opening lines of the Israeli national anthem, the “Hatikvah”, as well as an Israeli flag. What, he wonders, has Israel got to do with the horrors that befell European Jewry back then?

This is organized remembrance, the monopolization of memory. “Holocaust is perpetually yesterday and tomorrow,” Libman writes, adding that this could just as well be the motto for the State of Israel, mired as the country is in a “presentist ideology” that cannot let the past be past, let alone dare to imagine the future. At the end of the book, Libman returns imaginatively to the arrival of Anna and Eugene, his great-grandparents, in North America in 1938, at a moment when different futures were still possible. “Concretely,” he writes, “they were the visions of Jewish life that had yet to be captured and assimilated into political Zionism: pluralistic belonging in North America, for example; or a global, secular socialism in which traditional cultures and languages were nurtured as syndicates; or even, in a bid to divert the already moving colonial-Zionist project toward a more humane direction, a non-theocratic, multi-national, democratic state in Palestine.”

Libman emphasizes the need to resuscitate some of those “vanished visions of the future”, not in the sense of turning back the clock, but as a reminder that the future, no matter what the presentist ideologues may claim, is something that can yet be created. What exactly this future might look like is beyond the purview of The Third Solitude, as perhaps it lies beyond the scope of any single person’s imagination. To recognize this is simply to accept that imagining a better future is one of our shared responsibilities, and that any political project that consigns us to a doom loop is not worth having. As Louis MacNeice once wrote: “What we are about to do / Is of vastly more importance / Than what we have done or not done hitherto.”

The Charedi community is one of the most devout among the Jews and almost every one of their acts is bound by law, tradition and rules. On the Sabbath, before eating bread, there is a hand-washing ritual governed by specific instructions. Cold water is poured from a cup twice over the right hand, then twice over the left. These rules are beyond question, but Fletcher decided that rather than wash her hands, she would only pretend to, then see if God struck her down. “God was not only revered,” she says, “he was the shape of everything we did.”

Heart pounding, Fletcher “went ahead and did it anyway”. And so the die was cast for a rebellious life within a community that refuses women any personal autonomy. Now 37, an avowed lesbian and feminist, she has been disowned by her family, sexually abused by her foster father and abused by both her husbands — all devout Charedim. And yet she refuses to flee her community. Instead, Fletcher has found a way not only to remain within her Jewish faith, but also to be openly critical of practices such as forced marriage and the overlooking of the secular. Now, in a further act of rebellion, she has published Chutzpah!: A Memoir of Faith, Sexuality and Daring to Stay, a book that takes a close look at those issues she has faced.

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Why Scotland's 'witches' fought back

By Julie Bindel

Before Charedi girls are even out of their teens, they enter arranged marriages, where they have, on average, seven children. Driving, working outside the home, and disobeying their husbands is frowned upon, and once they are married, they are obliged to wear a wig known as a sheitel. Their clothes must cover collarbone, elbows and ankles, and sex segregation is so strictly enforced that many families don’t even allow brothers and sisters to play together.

The daughter of a rabbi, Fletcher has spent much of her life in this intensely insular world. She recalls a childhood that she spent at a Lanarkshire school wearing opaque tights. And then, aged 14, she and her younger sister — their four older siblings were already married — moved from Scotland to Israel with their parents to make aliyah (the settling of Israel by the Jewish diaspora). Life there was even stricter than in Scotland: at schools she was described by one teacher as “anthrax” — a bad influence to everyone else. Fletcher was so miserable that she overdosed on Ibuprofen, and ended up on a mental health ward for six weeks. Hospital was preferable to home. After that, she was admitted to foster care.

If anything, however, things would get even worse. After only a year in Israel she was sent back home to live in Manchester with family friends. She was 15 when she started lodging with a Jewish scholar, Todros Grynhaus. In her book, Fletcher describes him as an “authoritarian who locked his kids in their rooms for days at a time”. Then, one night, he began sexually abusing her: “He shoved two fingers inside me. I felt no pain because I wasn’t in my body any more.” These assaults continued nightly for six months, until they were discovered by his wife and he threw her out. She moved in with another family, unable to tell her parents to whom she was virtually a stranger now. And when Fletcher eventually reported him to the local rabbi, he just told her husband to go to therapy. Her testimony was worthless without a male witness.

So she returned to Israel to learn “how to be a wife” at a seminary. By the time she was 18, a shidduch (match) had been found and she was pressured into an arranged marriage with Danny.

Right from the start, the union was marked by regressive gender attitudes, something Charedi girls are taught from childhood. Having to devote their lives to housework, children and the Sabbath, Fletcher recalls her mother saying that even doing the laundry was holy. “Fuck off,” she laughingly responds. “The laundry gets done because the laundry needs to get done. The idea that men do holy things in the synagogue and women do holy things with laundry is just patriarchy.”

Sex was framed in similar ways. “If there is an expectation that you have sex on a certain night at a particular time and if you’re not in the mood,” Fletcher explains, “it’s like you’re saying no to God, not even just your husband.” But Fletcher’s husband was also violent, and when she found him in bed with another woman, she abandoned the marriage. Barely a year in, she left. Her parents needed to get shot of the 19-year-old divorcée, and six months later, she married again, this time to Zvi, 29. As she tells me, “I knew he wasn’t going to hit me.” And though he wanted sex constantly — he started saying the prayers that were to be recited before sex in the car home after the marriage so as not to waste any time — the marriage lasted for over a decade. She left the day before her 31st birthday with her three children.

At this point, Fletcher had known for a long time that she was a lesbian. She had suspected as much at school in Israel and came out to a rabbi at 17. His response: “All the girls are doing it but it goes away when you get married.” Ironically enough, all that sex segregation provided ample opportunities for experimentation.

Her coming-out story is also bound up with her discovery of feminism. In her early 20s, she stumbled upon a feminist book, Harriet Harman’s autobiography. “I read it on the train, and by the end of the journey I’d signed up as a member of the Labor Party. I went into work after I read it and started rabble rousing and talking to the other women in the office about, like there’s a thing called maternity pay. And this is how it works.”

In 2019 Fletcher enrolled for a degree at the University of Salford. “I had been taught that they were forbidden spaces for us,” she says, but nevertheless went ahead without seeking permission to do so.

When she wrote a paper on forced marriage, it was covered on Radio 4, as well as on TV in America and India. At that point, though, she was careful not to talk about her lesbianism for fear her critics would claim it informed her critique of forced marriage.

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By Julie Bindel

When she eventually came out to her family, in 2021, she was roundly rejected. As Fletcher continues, leaving the Charedim is like being a refugee in your own country, with many members ultimately put off by how hard it is. Remarkably, though, leaving her husband wasn’t followed by departure from the Charedi community more generally. She calls staying a “revolutionary” act, arguing that “My existence is resistance. I feel that it is an act of service to the future of this community for it to include visible feminist lesbians.” No one, she adds, “should have to choose between staying and staying safe.”

Describing life in the Chasidic community, she tells me, “Every single moment of the day is mapped out. So as soon as you get out of bed there are rules that you follow before you even walk and, for many people, what that does is give a freedom or absolution.” But this has a terrible downside for girls and women as Fletcher explains: “Personal autonomy is dictated, particularly sex when sex is so ritualized and dictated by external authority. Not only does it diminish it, but it pretty much removes capacity for consent.”

Fletcher’s decision to stand and fight, to show how women are harmed within her culture, has already led to material change. Her campaign against forced marriage led her to co-found Nahamu, the first UK think-tank to tackle religious extremism in the Jewish community. “It’s not about burning down the house,” she says, “it’s about infusing a community with informed consent, with knowledge of what we’re entitled to as women.”

You might say the same about Fletcher personally. She once worried about being spotted in public with a partner and was terrified of putting anything on the record; she lived a public life in which she was campaigning as a feminist but hiding her sexuality.

But wanting a more integrated life, she came out and now lives with a partner openly. Fletcher has also been gratified to discover that though some people “will take offense on seeing me in the kosher shops, especially if I’m wearing one of my rude t-shirts”, others “have capacity for it”.

Perhaps that helps explain why, despite everything, Fletcher has always loved her culture and could never leave it behind. Most Friday nights, she hosts dinners for up to 25 lesbians, gay men and trans people, all from the Charedi community, all around a single table in the heart of Manchester’s Orthodox community. “For me,” she says, “to live a Charedi life — it’s the food that I like to eat and it’s the songs that I sing and it’s where I feel comfortable. It’s my heritage.”

It has helped, too, that Fletcher has fought to reclaim her own past. The code of mesirah prohibits Jews from handing over other Jews to secular authorities, and usually prevents anyone from reporting crimes against women and children. But, in 2015, Fletcher helped convict Todros Grynhaus for sexual assault against her and another girl, waiving her right to anonymity. The case led the Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, to state that sexual abuse must always be reported to the police, with Fletcher herself continuing to condemn those Charedis who actively cover up abuse within the community.

As for the future, Fletcher is clear about what must happen. Like most Charedi women, she received effectively no education until she went to college. With that in mind, and at risk of “sounding neoliberal”, Fletcher argues that “education, education, education is what makes a difference.” And rather than turn her back on her community, she is striving to make it a better place. “No one,” she adds, “gets to throw me out”. Given everything she’s achieved so far, we should probably take her at her word.

These selection processes are composed of physical tasks, but designed primarily to test the applicants’ will. For, however challenging the test, had they been applied not to Olympic-grade athletes, but to regular folk whose lives depended upon their completion, it’s possible the pass-fail ratio might not be drastically different.

The training memoirs all cite the magnificent physical specimens who opted out during some phase of training when other less likely men persevered. Which was the purpose of the training: to select those who could learn to make the body do the mind’s bidding.

***

Israel’s secret weapon, as Golda taught, was Ain Brera: No Alternative. A companion phrase is Herzl’s Im Teratzu, ein zo Agadah. This is generally rendered “If you will it, it is no dream.” A better translation: “It is no fable (or tale).” The tale to which Herzl refers is The Torah. I understand him to mean that it is not merely a tale, that it is a promise: that God will return the Jews, from the ends of the earth, to their homeland. Herzl’s phrase is a reminder that the promise will be fulfilled, but we must act to fulfil it. That, as the age of miracles is past, God can only act in the world through human agency.

The handiest and most destructive phrase for the challenge begins “I wish”. No desire framed as a wish can ever be fulfilled. For who would fulfil it, if not the utterer, whose plea is actually a confession of failure? The replacement of the introductory “I wish…” with “I will” is Herzl’s instruction.

Through the Five Books of Moses — the Jews repeatedly face the lesson of the SAS: the test does not begin until one is assured the test is over and he has failed.

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The self-delusion of secular Jews

By David Mamet

The escapees from Egypt found themselves wedged between Pharaoh’s murderers, and the Red Sea. They cried to God, and cried out against Moses: “Weren’t there enough graves in Egypt that you brought us out here to die? It would have been better to be slaves in Egypt than to die in the desert.”

Moses told them to stand firm and see what God would do to rescue them. He continued in what, to me, has been a most instructive verse: “The Egyptians you see today, you will never see again.”

I’ve found this a reliable comfort in a life with a sufficiency of both challenges and failures. I understand it thus: not that trust in God will bring about a foreseen resolution, but that although it may not, it will bring about God’s intended ends, which are finally, unknowable, save that we should trust.

The verse promises that acting on such trust will eradicate our fear; and, so, inspire courage in the subsequent trials we will surely encounter. But that the Egyptians — that is, the trial confronting us today, faced today — we need never face again.

Our lives are short, and we are often affronted, and often confused. The Torah acknowledges our insufficiencies as the human condition: that we, unaided, are incapable of facing, let alone surmounting, tasks beyond our understanding. Because our understanding is limited.

The alcoholic is addicted to both alcohol and to doubt, which he understands as certainty. That he cannot go through life without alcohol is the surest thing he knows, in fact, it is the central belief of his life. He tells his sponsor in AA that he can’t imagine life without a drink and is told no one can; and is asked to do something quite different: to go through the next 24 hours without drinking. Like the Jews at the Red Sea, he is challenged to enter a state, which he can only understand as death. But without death, there is no rebirth.

The Special Forces ordeals are designed to break the mind, so that it can be reformed first to imagine then to accomplish that which, prior to the reconstruction, the applicant would have been considered impossible.

The Rededication of the Temple in 165 B.C.E. required oil sufficient for eight days of purification. The Maccabees only had enough for one day. They did not, however, wish that God would perform a miracle, but listened to God, who told them to proceed in any case. They did so, preferring God’s understanding to their own — an event worthy of consideration.

Happy Hanukkah.

For Jews, Temple Mount is where God ordered Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. As Abraham set out to obey God’s instruction, an angel appeared to stay his hand. A ram is caught and sacrificed instead — a founding event of Jewish theology. This place would later become the site of Solomon’s Temple, the spot where God was called down to be among His people, and where priests made daily sacrifices for the atonement of the people’s sins. Even before the Babylonians destroyed this First Temple in 587 BC, violence and religion sat side by side here.

In 70 AD, the Romans razed the so-called Second Temple as punishment for Jewish rebellion. They built a shrine to Jupiter on the site of Jewish sacrifice, and slaughtered pigs there as an insult. Later, Christians would use the site as a rubbish tip, doubtless for similar reasons. It became a holy space again only with the Arab conquest of Jerusalem, where the Al-Aqsa Mosque was built in the seventh century. It remains the oldest surviving example of Islamic architecture. This was where Muhammad was said to have landed on the back of a winged horse to lead Abraham, Moses and Jesus in prayer. For Muslims, then, this is the spot from where Muhammad ascended to heaven.  

Ever since the Crusaders were ejected from Jerusalem by Saladin, the hill has been administered by Muslims. But when Israeli paratroopers re-took East Jerusalem during the Six-Day war, in 1967, they raised the Israeli flag over the Temple Mount compound. Watching with his binoculars a few miles away, Defence Minister Moshe Dayan ordered the soldiers to take the flag down. “Do you want to set the Middle East on fire?” he apparently barked down the radio. The flag was removed. For a brief moment, Jews had taken back control of Temple Mount. But even in the midst of victory, Dayan knew this was a step too far. The third-holiest site on earth to Muslims, the Star of David had the potential to engulf the region in an apocalypse of Biblical proportions. 

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To this day, Temple Mount is administered by Jordan. Even the Rabbis have been remarkably consistent in forbidding Jews from climbing up the hill. The place is just too holy, and without being properly purified according to ancient custom, the very act of walking on the site constitutes an act of defilement. Last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a very direct statement to his Security Cabinet that there has been no change to the status quo regarding Temple Mount — nor would there be. Even Netanyahu knows how dangerous such a prospect would be. 

But the very fact the prime minister felt forced to clarify Israel’s position is worrying enough. 

After the Babylonians destroyed the original Temple, the prophet Haggai urged his people that rebuilding was an absolute priority: “Is it a time for you to live in your panelled houses, while this house lies in ruins?” He then explains why things haven’t been going well for the people of Israel. “Because my house lies in ruins, while all of you hurry off to your own houses. Therefore the heavens above you have withheld the dew, and the earth withheld its produce.” 

There have always been Jews who believe this instruction applies to the present as well as the past. Until the Temple is rebuilt, they think, God will not act with favour towards his people. This Third Temple movement has long existed as an extremist fringe. But the Hamas war has emboldened it. 

“Bless the state of Israel, God almighty, please unite our hearts to rebuild your temple,” proclaims Yehuda Glick, a US born rabbi and the most prominent of the leaders of the movement. Previously arrested for trying to go up to the Temple Mount to pray, now he walks there freely with groups of settlers, protected by the very police who would once have arrested them and encouraged by those at the highest level of government. Powerful people are now saying openly what was once one said quietly. As Yitzhak Pindrus, a member of the Knesset, said earlier this year: “We are hoping that soon the Third Temple will be built there, and that we’ll be able to eat there from the Passover sacrifices.”  

Most powerful of all is Itmar Ben-Gvir, the National Security Minister and leader of the far-right Jewish Power party, a man who hands out rifles to settlers and has a picture of mass-murderer Baruch Goldstein on his wall. Talking of Temple Mount he recently stated: “If I could do anything I wanted, I would put an Israeli flag on the site.” Since taking office, Ben-Gvir has visited the site at least half-a-dozen times.

Repeatedly challenged if he wanted to build a synagogue there, Ben-Gvir finally admitted he would. Less messianic members of the Israel cabinet have been quick to oppose him. Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said: “Challenging the status quo on the Temple Mount is a dangerous, unnecessary and irresponsible act. Ben-Gvir’s actions endanger the national security of the state of Israel.” The head of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, said Ben-Gvir’s actions would “lead to much bloodshed and will change. The face of the state of Israel beyond recognition.”

Yet an article in Haaretz reports that Ben-Gvir and others are secretly planning for a Third Temple. According to biblical instruction, only someone suitably purified can walk up to the Temple Mount to begin the task of rebuilding the Temple. And the ancient ceremony of purification requires a perfect red heifer to be burnt. Today, though, the heifers are being bred, the altar has been built, priests are being recruited, and messianic extremists are gathering: first to pray, but with a longer-term aim of flattening Al-Aqsa and building a Jewish temple in its place. And the people who believe this are the same people with whom Netanyahu has gone into coalition, and together they are running the country.

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By GIles Fraser

This November, The Third Temple by Yashai Sarid, will be published in English. Set in the future, Sarid’s original is narrated by someone whose father “removed the mosques from the top of the temple” — and where, in retaliation, the coastal cities of Israel are destroyed by a nuclear fire. His novel highlights the huge division in Israeli society, symbolised by the contrast between secular Tel Aviv and an increasingly zealous Jerusalem. These imagined future divisions could be seen recently, however, as tens of thousands of mostly secular Israelis protested on the streets of Tel Aviv, furious about the way the Netanyahu government, and their religiously zealous acolytes, seem to have put the messianic narrative about Israel’s place in the world above the desire to make peace with the Palestinians. With men such as Ben-Gvir undermining much of the sympathy many of us have for Israel’s legitimate defence by casting the story of Israel’s purpose as being one of fulfilling some greater messianic calling — rather than as a safe haven for the Jewish people.

This is not to abandon any sense of theology when thinking about Israel. But what many zealots fail fully to register is that peace is the ultimate symbol of the messianic age: the lion laying down with the lamb, as the prophet Isaiah put it. Written after the first destruction of the Temple, Isaiah experienced the full horror of a devastated Israel. “Our holy and beautiful house, where our Fathers praised you, has been burned by fire and all our pleasant places have become ruins.” Sarid’s dystopian novel is a terrifying prophecy of this happening once again.

The book he was promoting was called The Invention of the Jewish People, which argued that the concept of Jews as a distinct people with a shared lineage, culture and homeland didn’t exist until the arrival of 19th-century nationalism. The exile from ancient Israel in 70AD, a central event in Jewish tradition, he called a “myth”. These sorts of claims were, he wrote, thrown together to give the Jewish people a cohesive national identity and, inevitably and tediously, to justify Zionism.

Leaving aside that the phrase “Next year in Jerusalem” (“L’Shanah Haba’ah B’Yerushalayim“) — recited at the end of both the Passover Seder and Yom Kippur — dates at least from the Middle Ages, and that the book was intended to provoke, its objective was clear: the delegitimisation of Jewish nationhood and, by extension, any Jewish claims to the land of Israel. It was desperate stuff; even The Guardian’s reviewer wasn’t convinced.

And so, we come to his latest book Israel–Palestine: Federation or Apartheid?. Here, Sand “explores” two political solutions for the current conflict: a bi-national federation or what he terms an apartheid-like reality. There is, glaringly, no option of two states. The idea of a state for Jews, the state of Israel, is a non-starter.

It is from this bogus binary that we begin. What follows is expected: the first chapter opens with Sand quoting the Right-wing Zionist thinker Vladimir Jabotinsky, allowing him to make the case for Zionism being an entirely colonial endeavour. Predictably, there is no mention the continuous Jewish presence in the land since the defeat of the Jewish prince Simon Bar Kochba in AD135 and the fact that, apart from a brief period in the 18th century, the Palestinians who lived there did so as subjects of foreign rulers.

Jabotinsky, by the way, is more comprehensively dealt with by the other Israeli revisionist historian Avi Shlaim, in his book Iron Wall. I have my own issues with Shlaim’s work, but he is a harmless man and possessed of magnificent hair. I once sat in a lecture of his at university, marvelling at how it corkscrewed out of his skull in all directions, so white and flocculent you could stuff a duvet with it.

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Sand is a more aggressive polemicist, but he does make some valid points. His youthful activism was, he said, filled with hope that “the Israelis would see that, logically speaking, they simply could not expand their country at the expense of others while continuing to live in peace with them”. Few would disagree with that. He then goes on to lament that the articles he wrote and the marches he attended didn’t succeed in drilling this notion into the establishment — a sentiment also shared by many Israelis.

He fails to properly interrogate the degree to which the Palestinian side is culpable for the failure to reach peace. But again: fair enough. He’s far from alone in this. No, the bigger problem here is one of intellectual dishonesty. Take this — frankly pretty important — paragraph:

“And then October 7 came upon Israel, with Hamas’s brutal attack on areas next to Gaza. This horrible massacre bears certain similarities to the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, which was carried out by Christian Phalangists while the Israeli Defence Forces under Ariel Sharon stood by, allowing the attack to take place. It was the same Ariel Sharon who, later, in 2005, evacuated the Gaza Strip and contributed to Hamas’s rise to power, further exacerbating the discord within the Palestinian leadership.”

It doesn’t take much effort to parse this sort of guff. The biggest single massacre of Jews since the Holocaust is perfunctorily dealt with in a single line, before Sand moves on to invoke a massacre committed by Lebanese Christians almost half a century ago. As it happens, the two events “bear certain similarities” (mark the weasel phrase) to the degree that almost any acts of horrific violence do — and this illuminates nothing. He then castigates Ariel Sharon for literally doing what Sand says he spent most of his youth calling for: withdrawing from occupied Palestinian land. Sand goes on to describe how October 7 “came as an utter shock to the Israeli public”. I’d argue it came as a “shock” to any right-thinking person – unless you believe that Palestinians are savages, which I do not.

He then asks: “So what was the source of this raging hatred that translated into such terrible war crimes?” It was “convenient”, he says, “for many Israelis to explain the massacre in terms of the traditional hatred of Islam towards Jews, thus ignoring the long history of Muslim–Jewish relations since the Crusades and Salah ad-Din”.

Well, ok. It’s true that Jews tended to fare better in Muslim lands than in Christian ones, but they did so as dhimmis — religious minorities under Islamic rule who could not bear arms, hold various public offices, were generally forced to wear distinctive clothing, and often subjected to pogroms. And then there is the question of Jew-hatred.

Unlike most armchair pundits, I have been to both the West Bank and Gaza. There I have met countless Palestinians who impressed me with their charm, their stoicism in the face of undoubted suffering, and their hospitality. Many Palestinians are absolutely not antisemitic.

But there are also a lot who are; and they tend to be in Hamas. The conditions in Gaza will inevitably create resistance, but October 7 was about something else. Just weeks after the atrocity, I was shown footage of a jubilant Hamas terrorist calling his father after the attack. “Father… I killed 10 Jews with my bare hands,” he roared. “Check your WhatsApp. Father, be proud of me!” In Khan Younis, a member of Islamic Jihad told me that Jews are the descendants of pigs and apes and should be killed.

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By Howard Jacobson

These people are of little concern to Sand, whose sophistry leads him to his central concern: “Given these circumstances, can an exclusively Jewish state in the Middle East have any secure future?”

Again, to be fair to him, Sand understands the geopolitical Molotov cocktail that one state would be. But, he says smarmily, “as Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist idea, once said [of the idea of a Jewish state]: ‘If you will it, it is no dream.’”. Sand correctly points to the systematic settler theft of Palestinian land in the West Bank, and the reprehensible legal architecture that has sprung up to enable it, giving many incontestable examples of both. These “facts on the ground” make two states no longer viable, he argues. The reality, however, is that there is no “solution” to this nightmare other than compromise, and certainly not self-erasure by one side. Because in the end, when you strip away all the rhetoric, hate, and endless debates about history, the only germane fact is this: the land has two peoples, and neither of them are going anywhere.

Let’s be clear: the one-state “solution” is not an alternative for Israel but an alternative to Israel. To expect the only Jewish state in the world to voluntarily extinguish itself is fundamentally unserious. My family lived as Jews in Iraq for centuries — possibly even before the advent of Islam. But none of that mattered: a few years after Israel was founded, they were forced to leave for fear of facing violence or worse. This is why Israel exists. Against that there can be no retreat.

In a recent update to his book Jerusalem, the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore proposes a different mental formulation for thinking about the future: “Two nations, two republics.” Two peoples living in two separate sovereign states alongside each other. This is the only viable future. Yes, the settlements must be dismantled (or equivalent land given from Israel). Yes, it will be an immense political (and indeed physical) undertaking, but it happened in Gaza, albeit on a smaller scale. It just takes political will. And for now, that is lacking on both sides.

Even so, we must hope that it will come because “one state” is not just delusional, it is dangerous. It helps to keep the conflict alive by making Palestinians believe that no compromise is necessary, which emboldens Israel’s fanatics and undermines its moderates. In the interim, both sides are condemned to interminable suffering. This is what matters. Not that people in Europe or the United States, which really do have long traditions of meting out colonisation and genocide, get to feel better about themselves.

Sand is an Israeli — though he has publicly declared that he no longer wishes to be considered a Jew — so he does have skin in the game. But in the end, one has to ask: what’s the difference between him and Netanyahu? Both are living in an alternative reality, talking about different variations of a one-state “solution” that, practically speaking, will only bring civil war, which the Israelis would win, as they have an army, navy and Airforce. Look around the Middle East and consider how non-Muslims fare in society. Look at Lebanon to see how trying to cram various confessions into a single entity has worked out.

So “two nations, two republics” it must be. It is the only hope of real justice for two peoples who are, however much they might wish otherwise, manacled to each other forever. The road will be long and incredibly hard — but remember, Shlomo, if you will it, if you truly will it, it is no dream.

I was recently invited to a presentation by IDF veterans wounded in Gaza after October 7. The organiser, a friend who taught at West Point, brought several of his cadets to hear the stories too grim to make the news, from the soldiers they might soon be fighting alongside. There were other guests; they were older Los Angeles Jews, like me.

When the floor was opened for questions, there was little more for the veterans to say; they fought to protect their country from savagery, and they were wounded. The questions, in any case, coming from Jews like myself, were predictably statements. They were expressions of outrage, followed by suggestions: the state of Israel must be helped by “Changing the Narrative”, which invariably meant “changing the minds of others”.

I don’t know how one changes the minds of others. Through 50 years of writing, I’ve regularly heard that film and drama should be enlisted in the service of good works; but no one has ever had his mind changed by a play or movie. That’s not how they function — they’re entertainment, with as little ability to alter one’s thinking as does a meal. Exodus no more reduced antisemitism than tacos clarify the border crisis.

All the guests at the presentation were enraged at the eruption of American and international Jew hatred. The World Court, whatever that is, had indicted the Israeli Prime Minister as a war criminal; our President and Vice President pointedly insulted him on his visit to Congress; the administration withholds the release of arms voted by Congress for Israeli defence in contravention of the Constitution; and so on. The affronted Jews each proclaimed what he considered a solution, but which I understood as cries of anguish.

Islamists at home and abroad have been demonising the Jewish State since 1948: why would a bunch of septuagenarian Jews in Hollywood conclude they could be defeated by “changing the narrative”? The answer: they did not conceive of them being defeated, they merely wanted peace, which, to their minds, might be achieved, rationally, without war, through mere dialogue, as if murderous savagery were the result of misunderstanding.

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Why the Left failed on October 7

By Hadley Freeman

The proximate solution to Jewish vulnerability — which I saw but did not say — was not in persuading others to think differently, but in so-persuading oneself. The problem that day was not to be found in “world opinion”, but in that room. We Jews, without a country for 2,000 years, have always been second-class citizens, where we were not “guests”, which is to say “visitors on suffrage”. The assimilated successful German Jews of the 19th century embraced reform de-accesionism (divestiture of language, observance, and tradition) and assimilation, which included an indictment of the other: their poor co-relgionaries in the East, whose arcane practices, they agreed, explained much of the hatred leaching over onto “Civilised Jews”. They offered their reasoned betrayal of their brothers as part of the initiation fee into the liberal world, a process we find repeated today. (See: Noam Chomsky, George Soros, Bernie Sanders, Tom Friedman, Anthony Blinken.)

We American Jews, traditionally, vote for the Democrats, since we look around and see social ills — and believe it is the job of the government to eradicate them. But this concern with social justice is a warped understanding of the Biblical injunction to do justice. The Bible admonishes us not to respect the claims of the rich, nor of the poor, but to pursue justice. It can be pursued, we learn, only through application of previously determined rules: set by, for example, the Torah, the Talmud and the Constitution.

“Social Justice”, though, is the appeal to the sentient to assert that the rules are insufficient, and that “surely there must be a better way”. But there is not. A dedication to law, as untidy and indeed absurd as it may sometimes be, is the firewall between peace (even precarious peace) and anarchy.

“You cannot spill a drop of American Blood without spilling the blood of the whole world,” wrote Herman Melville in 1849. “Be he an Englishman, Frenchman, Dane or Scot… We are not a narrow tribe of men, with a bigoted Hebrew nationality — whose blood has been debased in an attempt to ennoble it, by maintaining an exclusive succession among ourselves.”

Melville might have stuck to his whales, but he also trots out his antisemitism, turning his proclamation of an American Brotherhood into an oxymoron. Jews are despised for enforced separatism and for attempted assimilation; as we are loathed as a minority up until the moment when minority status is preferred but is denied us, and we concur that that’s fine, too. Our problem is not public opinion — but denial.

Today, the Democrats have become the party of antisemitism. Obama and Biden’s policies have given money and arms to Iran, and withheld congressionally mandated military aid to Israel — and yet Jews vote Democratic. Charles Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader, is a Jew, representing a significantly Jewish constituency. He pointedly insulted Prime Minister Netanyahu, on his visit to Congress, refusing to shake his hand. For whom was Schumer performing his discourtesy? Who does he think he is, and what does he think might defend him, and his constituents, should the Caliphate come knocking?

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The self-delusion of secular Jews

By David Mamet

Kamala Harris, as Vice President, is President of the US Senate. It was both her responsibility and her honour to preside over the Joint Session of Congress convened to hear Netanyahu. Instead, she chose to attend a reunion of her college sorority. Can one imagine a more appallingly calculated slight? Her absence announced that, under her administration, the United States will abandon Israel. And yet American Jews will support her.

I believe that a Jew who votes for the Democrats is a damned fool. I know that no one ever acts for any reason other than “it seemed like a good idea at the time”. What is the idea good enough to induce Jews to side with antisemites? It may be called liberalism, but it contains the unavowed fear of demonisation. The good news is that the Jew need not worry, as he has already been demonised.

As Rebecca West writes in her masterpiece, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: “There are better things in life than fighting, but they are better only if their doers could have fought had they chosen.”

What are we seeing? Are the terrible scenes from Gaza the projections on a bloody screen of one brutal and clumsy man’s baffled obstinacy — the last days of a demented Roman Emperor — or do they show, as anti-Zionists would have it, indeed as anti-Zionists have had it ever since the Jewish longing to return to Zion gave itself a name and the anti-Zionists called it colonialism, that something is rotten in the soul of Israel?

It’s hard right now, if you are a Jew who has always believed the founding of Israel to have been necessary and in many ways miraculous, to hold your nerve. Jews are a contradictory people, at once certain of themselves and faint-hearted. “The Jewish ability to internalise any critical and condemnatory remark and castigate themselves”, said the Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld in an interview with Philip Roth, “is one of the marvels of human nature”. We can outface so much criticism and then no more. Will the gathering storm of rage be too much for us this time? Or will we feel obliged to go on salvaging the truth from the noise and cacophony of war, even as those who don’t want to hear us — the libellous, the malevolent, the misinformed and now the usually friendly who are running out of patience — grow in number and in volume?

Some truths aren’t hard to save from the moral fog that fell on southern Israel six months ago, a six months that have been like no other, collapsing a half year into a seeming sleepless day and night, not simply because shock unravels time, but because along with the horror of the massacre itself came the horror of its delighted reception. King Duncan’s horses were said to have eaten one another the night Macbeth had their master murdered. It was nature’s way of telling us that something unfathomably horrible had happened. The cries of “Kill Jews!” that were heard around the world in the aftermath of the murder of more than 1,000 Jews on October 7 exceeded in unfathomable horror the cannibalism of Duncan’s horses. Did we know that humans could openly rejoice in the rape and murder of people they did not know? Isn’t dancing in the blood of others itself a species of cannibalism?

To borrow from Macbeth again, tears were meant to drown the wind. But all we heard was cheering. The Hamas massacre inverted the norms of pity.

And here is another of the truths we save from that most terrible event. That we do our humanity a great wrong when we let theories of power rule our politics and politics rule our hearts. Nothing that Zionism had done or ever could do would justify this glorying in the torture of individual Israelis. That so many of those doing the glorying were, on the face of it, highly educated put paid to our sentimental faith in education as our final and most reliable bulwark against the hysteria of race-hatred. Voice for voice, the educated out-sang the ignorant in bigotry and bloodlust. As did the highly principled out-sing the more ideologically easy-going when it came to such causes as the inviolability of a woman’s body.

Hadn’t the teaching of the past half-century warned against even tentative intrusion into a woman’s space? Yet here, confronted by the grossest intrusion of them all, rape — brutal rape — the same preachers against the most micro of microaggressions refused to voice even the faintest disapprobation. Some, high up in the world’s great universities, wanted to “contextualise” what had happened. Others, wary of falling into that absurdity, asked for more proof, though had any woman other than an Israeli Jew so much as cried foul, they would have been believed because the prevailing ideology holds that to doubt a rape is to violate a woman a second time.

Let’s not beat about the bush — Israeli-Jew hate trumped all other academic considerations. When all was said and done, the great absolutes of the gender-playbook turned out to be contingent and crawled under the desks of the committed like dormice.

In the long sleepless day and night following the massacre, in which Jews of different nationalities and political persuasions, orthodox and unorthodox, tried to make sense of what had happened, the terrible realisation, that “Never Again” meant nothing, dawned. There would never be a “Never Again”. Those we imagined would be our allies — the informed, the progressive, the liberal — were not progressive when it came to us.

Ironically, it was Israel — our bolthole, the country that gave us the stability of self-worth, our old, all-embracing home — that now felt insecure. With uncanny prescience, Hamas understood that to make Jews feel unsafe in Israel was to weaken them in their own and in others’ eyes. More than ever now, it seemed to me, was it imperative to reaffirm the founding necessity of Zionism. The more empowered the lettered illiterate felt to trash Zionism, the more important was it to wrest the story back from them. A great lie had been allowed to prevail for too long. The lie that Israel had no legitimate rights or ties to the Holy Land. The lie that Zionists had stolen it from defenceless Palestinians. The lie that Zionists had turned up not as refugees from the pogroms of eastern Europe but as colonist-settlers hell-bent on getting every Palestinian out.

Is that to say I understand nothing of Palestinian forebodings in those early years as Jews continued to arrive? No. And while I think history bears out good and even utopian intentions on the part of the first Zionists, pioneers who wanted only peace and safety, without doubt there were also those who dealt less than even-handedly with their neighbours. Whether in sufficient quantity to justify Palestinian fears that a takeover was imminent, and that their Holy Places were soon to be over-run, history cannot decide. But, with whatever justification, Palestinians could not let the new arrivals live in peace. There were raids and counter-raids, running battles and massacres. The 1929 massacre by Palestinians of pre-Zionist, scholarly Jews, long resident in Hebron, was not a blueprint for the massacre of nearly 100 years later, but it was, by all official accounts, brutal.

I don’t want to be sentimental about Israel, but it’s enjoyed no peace from the beginning. It is a country that has lived under arms since before its declaration of independence. And on the very day independence was granted it was attacked once more. No, no, and no again. No to Jews. Not here. Not ever. No, no, no.

For Israel to have thrived in the face of a hostility with no end is remarkable. But there can be no denying that the fighting, the conscription of almost all its citizens, the having to live cheek by jowl with a people who cannot and will not accept its presence anywhere “between the river and the sea” has been a toughening, not to say desensitising, experience.

In defence of last year’s massacre, it was argued that it could not be understood independently of the circumstances that led to it. Hamas’s attack, its apologists insisted, was the child of the Israeli occupation. I have always resisted the word “occupation” because it suggests a pre-planned policy, rather than — as I see it — the consequence of all the wars between the two people, most of them instigated by the Palestinians, after which Israel found itself with territory it needed to demilitarise for its own safety. But alright — an occupation it became. After which, what were Palestinians expected to do?

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By Ben Judah

The elusive two-state solution was presented to them several times. Not equitable enough, they said, even when it was the United Nations that had done the divvying up. “Don’t accept,” the cosmopolitan Palestinian writer Edward Said urged from the comfort of his home in North America. “Demand more.” Was he right? Wouldn’t an inequitable divvying up have given Palestinians better if not perfect lives? Well, it’s not for one person to tell another what’s fair. But right or wrong, there was to be no deal.

And so the bloody impasse — a tragedy, as Amos Oz saw it, of two rights. Later, a tragedy of two wrongs. For calling it a tragedy, Oz’s erstwhile Palestinian supporters deserted him. Tragedy meant there was no villain. And the Palestinians needed a villain.

Netanyahu fitted the bill. Netanyahu put his hand out and took. In retaliation for which — though nothing in the history of the two people would ever justify its extreme and twisted violence — the massacre of October 7. But if Israel must take some blame for the massacre, the Palestinians must, by the same token, take some blame for Netanyahu, the lumbering, unsubtle child of unrelenting war, a man hardened in suspicion and fear who does not know the difference between justice and revenge.

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To hold out against the Palestinian narrative of dispossession, while allowing that not all of it is fantasy or self-pity, has necessitated, these last few years, more flexibility of mind than dedicated anti-Zionists are willing to try. That’s how we know they are wrong: they do not attempt to understand their enemy and do not cry for him. Did Gazans — educated in their schoolbooks to loathe Jews — dance in the streets on October 7? Whatever the truth, may Israelis never dance the dance of blood.

The heart breaks, seeing the destruction of Gaza. But seeing the destruction of Tel Aviv will hurt no less. Do I fear that? Yes. I sense a change of mood. The constant chanting on the streets of London and elsewhere has, to a degree, contributed to that change. One lie, endlessly retold, can weaken the cause of truth eventually.

But, all on his own, Netanyahu is enough to try the patience of the West whose leaders have little appetite for sticking to a mission. There is a flaw in our natures that leads to our growing bored with even the noblest causes, let alone those grown stale in their own complacency. Oh, what the hell. Enough of them. So those are swastikas. So what? It’s all just a matter of context.

I fear they — papers and commentators and politicians — are losing interest and sympathy at the same rate. They’ve heard it all before. We Jews need to find other ways to make our harrowing history compelling. We’ve tried losing. We’ve tried winning. I’m not sure what’s left.

The Neturei Karta are around 5,000-strong, at most 0.03% of the world’s Jewish population, although only a fraction of the group attend such rallies. They are not the only anti-Zionist Jews to join these protests, but it is their presence which seems to attract the most support in anti-Israel circles. The reason is obvious. People who are not part of a specific minority often seek to paint an easy picture of what that minority “looks like” — and, to the non-Jewish eye, the Neturei Karta look like stereotypical Jews. Male members will wear a shtreimel, the round fur hat worn on the Sabbath and Festival days, and a bekishe, the black frock coat. They will grow beards and peyos — long sidelocks. The message they propagate also chimes closely with what many extreme anti-Israel ideologues believe: that they are against Zionism, not Judaism, and that the two things are not simply unconnected, but antithetical.

For these reasons, pictures of the Neturei Karta are widely shared, with the suggestion — openly encouraged by the signs they carry — that they are “real” Jews, and the majority of the world’s Jews who support Zionism are in fact fake. When, for instance, someone shared a picture on X of the Neturei Karta at a London protest, William Dalrymple, historian, podcaster and co-founder of the Jaipur Festival, responded saying “They are heroes” (a statement he later deleted). Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu, the lawyer and academic, shared a video of a Muslim man thanking this group at a New York protest “for condemning Israel [sic] genocide of the Palestinians”.

It seems highly likely that many of those who believe this group deserves praise do not understand the underpinning of their beliefs or are aware of the full range of their actions. It seems a worthwhile task, then, to clarify who the Neturei Karta are and what they believe.

Perhaps we should begin with a news report from last month, citing the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight. It detailed how one “Aharon Cohen”, a Neturei Karta member, addressed the extreme Nationalist “New Right” group in London, led by former National Front member Troy Southgate. Lady Michelle Renouf, best known for strident support for some of the world’s most infamous Holocaust deniers, including David Irving, was reportedly also present.

One member of the New Right group subsequently described the meeting, saying: “While the Zionists use antisemitism as a big club to batter the goyim over their heads, for the devout Torah-true Jews it is a sign that they are doing something wrong. The Rabbi [sic] differentiated what he said was the ancient bigotry of antisemitism with the response particularly in the Muslim world to Zionist atrocities, and said the actions of the Zionists endanger Jews everywhere.”

If that sort of language sounds familiar, that is because — apart from the word “Goyim”, a Hebrew term describing non-Jews which the far-Right sometimes refer to themselves as — you could hear it word-for-word from “anti-imperialist” fans of the Neturei Karta as well.

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At its heart, the group’s worldview is that if someone expresses strong opposition to Israel — no matter what else they may believe — they are natural allies. In 2006, for example, members of the Neturei Karta flew to Tehran as guests of the regime to participate in what was euphemistically termed a “Holocaust Review” conference, attended by an international array of Holocaust deniers. The Anti-Defamation League, America’s foremost organisation confronting antisemitism, noted that representatives of the group attended a similar 2017 conference in which Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei called the Jewish state a “fake country”, “a dirty chapter in history”, and a “cancerous tumour” that should be confronted “step by step” in order to achieve “the full liberation of Palestine”. In the past, Neturei Karta representatives have also met with senior Hezbollah and Hamas leaders. US-based representatives of the group have regularly appeared on Al Jazeera and Iran’s Press TV, where they have been presented as authentic Jewish voices opposing Israel and Zionism.

This is, however, not quite the reality. Today, while an overwhelming majority of the world’s Jewish population can be said to be Zionist, approximately 15% of the global Jewish community falls into the grouping often described as “strictly orthodox” — and support for Modern Political Zionism among strictly orthodox Jews has never been strong. The Neturei Karta was established in 1938 as an offshoot of the strictly orthodox Agudas Israel movement, which was seen as warming to the idea of

Zionism. Perhaps the best-known opponent of Zionism from within the strictly Orthodox sub-section of the Jewish community was Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, the Grand Rabbi of the Satmar Hassidic sect, which was based in Eastern Europe prior to the Second World War. While Rabbi Teitelbaum managed to escape the Nazis, his followers were decimated by the Holocaust. Emigrating to New York in 1946, he rebuilt Satmar to such an extent that, today, it is the largest of all Hassidic sects. It is still hostile towards Zionism, which is why people often incorrectly associate Neturei Karta with Satmar.

Yet last November, one of Satmar’s religious leaders, Rabbi Zalman Teitelbaum (the great-nephew of Rabbi Joel) made it clear how wrong such an association is. He described the Neturei Karta as “those who do not have any ancestral tradition… we see how far they have strayed from the path. They are walking around the world together… in broad daylight with the Shtreimel and the Hasidic clothes and shout together with the haters of Israel and murderers of souls. This is a terrible desecration of the name of heaven, to strengthen murderers in the name of the Holy Torah and in the name of heaven.”

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The grim irony is that the Neturei Karta are very much in favour of a Jewish state in the Holy Land. They believe, however, that such a state can only be established once the Messiah comes. Their bitter opposition to Israel (most of its members actually live in Israel, although there are also communities in the US and UK) is rooted both in its premature nature and because it falls far short of the theocratic paradise they wish to see instituted.

In this, in their extreme religious views, in their willingness to associate with some of the world’s worst antisemites and in their happiness to wave signs around, they are sometimes referred to as “the Westboro Baptist Church of the Jewish community”. It may seem a crude comparison, but it captures a truth: the Neturei Karta do not stand for everyday Jews. They are an assortment of unsavoury characters — and those who wish to tokenise them could soon come to regret it.

On October 7, the world and Jews were once again reminded that the Jews remain the chosen people. As Saul Bellow wrote in To Jerusalem and Back, we are the only people in the world still unable “to take the right to live as a natural right”. The perpetrators may be different, but the script remains the same: once again, Jews were killed simply for being Jews.

The existential reality of not having the right to live has inevitably shaped Jewish identity, making it very easy for Jews to demand recognition as the world’s perennial victims. After all, we are just that.

But this would be a fatal embrace. Most obviously, the rise of identity politics has sacralised victimhood, where Jews who allegedly benefit from “white privilege” are now at the wrong end of the intersectional hierarchy, and thus deserve no special treatment or recognition. Indeed, it is this sense of victimhood that fuels much of today’s antisemitism: in our new moral universe, Jews, not Hamas, are blamed for the October 7 pogrom while the perpetrators are excused as victims of Israeli oppression. We are no longer victims, but the perpetrators of victimhood.

Yet there is an even more insidious dimension to the fantasy of Jewish victim identity, one that cedes to the antisemite control over Jewish destiny. Being defined by antisemitism, as Hannah Arendt argued in The Jew as Pariah, is a fatal deception because it can only exist through the continued existence of antisemitism. This is why external and internal threats have always dogged the struggle for Jewish emancipation. The notion of the existential Jew — the Jew defined by others — is irredeemably self-defeating because it cannot escape being complicit in preserving and perpetuating hostility.

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For Arendt, the only escape from the “disgrace” of being a Jew was “to fight for the honour of the Jewish people as a whole”. And for her, such a fight meant a political battle for the right of Jews to live as Jews, not a Jewish existence defined by antisemitism. The failure to do so results, as we’re seeing today, in the deadly fatalism of despair, condemning Jews to know only what to be against rather than what to be for — to act as objects rather than the subjects of history.

This dilemma of being objects lies at the heart of the Jewish condition. Jews have not only been at war with antisemitism. They have also been in a perpetual internal war — between those who have embraced fatalism and those who aspire to be the subjects of history.

When Jews refused to be victims, and instead looked up from the Talmud and engaged the outside world, they helped to move humanity towards an age of reason, contributing so much to our collective culture. With just 0.2% of the world’s population, we have produced 32% of the world’s Nobel laureates. That’s got to count for something.

Unfortunately, and perhaps understandably, many Jews are loath to embrace this history. The existential fatalism of being defined by antisemitism is undoubtedly an obstacle, opening up Jews to the seduction of normality when they aren’t being slaughtered. But this self-delusion of assimilation has led only to disaster. Sometimes, the chosen people choose poorly and become part of the problem rather than its solution.

After the Holocaust, many Jews outside of Israel were quite happy to be alive, to merely exist and get on with life. This was my experience, growing up in apartheid South Africa in a non-religious family of Lithuanian and Latvian descent. I never experienced antisemitism directly, though that antisemitism existed in South Africa was beyond doubt. The alignment of the Afrikaner Nationalists with Nazi Germany against Britain during the Second World War was proof enough. Indeed, the fact that my father felt it necessary to change our surname from Chakelowitz attested to the fact that being easily identified as Jews was not good for business.

But for the most part, life was remarkably carefree and prosperous. The only cruel thing about being Jewish was that I had to suffer the “oppression” of having a bar mitzvah (because my grandmother was still alive), which meant attending Hebrew lessons, which I hated, and, horror of all horrors, going to Shul every Saturday, which meant missing football.

As I grew older, however, disturbing questions arose, especially as I learned about the Holocaust and read the banned books in our house about apartheid oppression. How was it possible that Jews, after the Holocaust, could go along with, let alone thrive from, apartheid — the worst system of racial oppression in the post-war world?

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This moral dilemma was one faced by every Jew in South Africa. Many, to their credit, could not reconcile their existence as Jews with apartheid and left the country, settling abroad in Israel and other countries like Australia or the United States. A few, like me, who took the “never again” slogan to heart, entered the political struggle for freedom and equality, and some were imprisoned for their beliefs. But we were the exceptions. Shamefully, many Jews silenced their moral alarms and took advantage of their white privilege, enriching themselves off the backs of the brutally oppressed black majority. Many sent money to Israel; we joked at the time that a Zionist was a wealthy white South African Jew who gave money to Israel so they could enjoy the right to life as a natural right under apartheid.

Behind the joke, however, was a serious point about Jews thinking that they could escape the Jewish condition. Not surprisingly, antisemitism never died in South Africa. It is being mobilised today to keep an embattled ANC government in power. The spectacle of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa spearheading the global charade of accusations of Israeli genocide in Gaza is nothing more or less than the resurrection of scapegoating for narrow self-interest. He is consciously banking on — indeed, mobilising — antisemitism in the land that apparently banished apartheid as a crime against humanity.

Will he succeed? It’s not guaranteed: after all, October 7 and its aftermath should be a wake-up call not just in South Africa, but for Jews globally. Once again, the right to exist as Jews in Israel, or even in the liberal West, can no longer be taken for granted. Once again, Jews have been revealed as the perpetual guests of Hotel California: we can check out when we like, but we can never leave.

Thus, for the chosen people, there is little choice but to learn to live with the burden of the Jewish condition. Those who seek safety and decry the fear they now feel living among antisemites need to stop wallowing in self-pity. After all, the founding of the State of Israel was not just an endeavour against antisemitism following the gravest genocide in human history. It was also a vehicle for creating a sovereign nation-state capable of making things that would make the world better: drip irrigation, seawater desalination, Intel processors, the world’s first USB flash drive, a cure for multiple sclerosis, and hundreds of other beautiful inventions.

This is what Arendt saw as Jews fighting to live like Jews, to live as universalists, and to embody civilisational impulses. Or as Mort Zuckerman put it, we need to behave like the 92-year-old Jew being sued in a paternity case: “He was so proud, he pleaded guilty.” In other words, being chosen not to have the natural right to life means having no choice but to be the lodestar of human perfectibility, of being morally ambitious like no others, of living up to or surpassing the double standards demanded of us by our detractors. As Jews like to tell each other on every religious national holiday: “We are here to remember the day they tried to kill us. But we won — so let’s eat!”

I would veer into the dark alleyways of the Old City, find myself at the Western Wall, flooded with light, then turn into the tunnel-like paths of the Muslim Quarter. Here, I met with some of the more committed boys from the tougher, stricter yeshivas. We would clamber onto roofs, to find new places to see the Temple Mount. They would take me deeper into the warren, full of excitement, to their synagogues filled with song. They would pray by the tombs, speaking at dawn of David, Solomon and their lovers in the Book of Kings, as if they could see them.

Criss-crossing Jerusalem like this — its street names recalling biblical heroes, prophets and saints — is to imagine an ancient, continuous city. But this is an illusion.

The real Jerusalem, as noted by the Israeli historian Yair Wallach, is not only a capital of ancient sites but a city in which over 99% of its buildings date from after 1900. This makes Jerusalem, with its almost a million people, younger than both New York and London.

Archaeologists navigate Israel by way of mounds, tels or tells in Hebrew or Arabic, where successive civilisations lie on top of each other. Modern Jerusalem is not dissimilar. Over the past century and a half, it has been at least three very different cities: Ottoman Jerusalem, British Jerusalem and Zionist Jerusalem. Today, by contrast, we have an increasingly Haredi-Palestinian conurbation that reflects a one-state reality — a place where Israeli thinkers see either a dystopian future or signs of hope.

Arriving in Jerusalem, usually by traffic jam, is to pass red-roofed suburbs, densely packed over the wooded valleys on the hills. The land, you feel, is full. But it is hard to stress how small and remote it once was.

In 1856, my great-great grandfather’s brother Rabbi Shlomo Yahuda set off from Baghdad, to build a yeshiva in Jerusalem. He travelled for 40 days on camelback, and he was not alone. For millennia, the prayers of the Jewish people had been directed there, but only with the beginnings of secure travel, in a world of Victorian shipping lines, did it stop being an idea — and become a real, reachable place. These pious dreamers arrived in a poor town of less than 20,000 people.

Rabbi Shlomo’s Jerusalem was a walled village. Years later, his son-in-law would recall the “the desolate and forlorn state of the city” in the mid-19th century. There was nothing beyond its Ottoman walls and within them life was marked by hunger, brigands and a lack of work. Months would go by without matches.

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Though it quickly acquired a pious Jewish majority, life was dominated by Muslim notables such as the al-Husaini and the Nashashibi families. Progress was slow but steady until the turn of the century. Palestinian diarists, such as Khalil Sakakini, recall a city of cafes, photo shops and literati circles opening to the world thanks to its new railway. Yet this Ottoman Jerusalem horrified Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism. It was, for him, a place of “hideous, miserable, scrambling beggary” that he fantasised about turning into an “airy, comfortable, properly sewered, brand new city around the Holy Places”.

Within two decades, British Jerusalem, formed abruptly by war, created another place entirely. No longer growing chaotically, in a way that might have come to resemble any other Middle Eastern city, the colonial authorities gave it its enduring design restrictions and its faux antique, stone-clad look. Herzl would have approved.

Rabbi Shlomo’s family tells the story of a Jewish community transformed. His grandson, David Yellin, shocked his rabbis by entering the secular Alliance Israélite Universele school. He then switched from Arabic and Yiddish to Hebrew at home and moved from the Ottoman Parliament to the Mandate’s Jewish Assembly, becoming a champion of Hebrew education. His story and Jerusalem’s was the same: secularisation.

This created a sociologically new city. Where late Ottoman Jerusalem had been a place of Ladino and mostly Yiddish-speaking Jews, the Mandate’s Jerusalem would be dominated by secular, Hebrew-speaking Jews. This was the city of novelist Amos Oz’s childhood, where Jewish immigration brought first the bookish high culture of Central Europe, then a new Hebrew University of Jerusalem co-founded by Albert Einstein, before a rush of refugees from Nazism. A city not only of refugee intellectuals such as Martin Buber, but of a growing modern middle class with cinemas and children’s clothes stores.

It was also becoming a violent city. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict truly began in Jerusalem when Arab riots and killings erupted in 1929. Their cause was a growing Jewish presence at the Western Wall, where Muslims believe Mohammed tied his steed before ascending to heaven from the mount above. Jews, many felt, had no right to it. But Palestine was transforming into a new country as Jewish refugee immigration surged.

This stirred the great Arab Revolt in 1936. Something had ruptured. Rabbi Shlomo’s grandsons paid the price. David Yellin’s son was murdered, while his cousin Abraham Shalom Yahuda found his Ottoman-era friendships powerless in the face of violence.

By now, literatis such as Khalil Sakakini who had once been exiled by the Ottomans for sheltering a Jewish immigrant, now praised violence, writing to his son after an attack on civilians: “Who would believe there are such heroes in Palestine? What a great honour it is, my Sari, to be an Arab in Palestine.”

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British Jerusalem was tense, but no warzone. It was still deeply Levantine and cosmopolitan, where the city’s Arabs, some 20-40% of its population, had its own large bourgeoisie. This made a different kind of city from the occupation-walled, isolated and fiercely Muslim Palestinian East Jerusalem of today.

This was the city of the childhood of Edward Said, where Arab merchant families like his own set the tone. These had wide horizons and occasionally socialised with and often employed Jews, such as the midwife who delivered Edward Said in 1935. It was also still a very Christian city, where being Arab was far from synonymous with being Muslim. Roughly half of the Arabs in the city were Christian like the Saids. Today, they make up less than 2%.

But from a distance, neither were the worldly Said or Yahuda families that different. Life was separate, not segregated. As late as the war, a bourgeois address book contained a few names from the other side one might call. Nor did the city have an Arab East and a Jewish West. In fact, tens of thousands of the wealthiest Arabs lived in what is now the core of elite West Jerusalem and many Jews lived in poor neighbourhoods now firmly in East Jerusalem.

In 1948, British Jerusalem ended as abruptly as it began. Its fate unfolded differently from in the rest of Palestine. Whereas great victories secured the Galilee and the Negev for Israel, causing more than half of all Palestinians to become refugees, the Zionists were defeated in Jerusalem. What happened there explains why the Jews thought it was a war of annihilation: Arab forces conquered the Old City, expelling its Jews and destroying all but one of its synagogues.

For the Arab bourgeoisie, 1948 was a war of liquidation. In the wealthy Arab Christian neighbourhoods of West Jerusalem that fell to Jewish forces, where Said grew up, these families fled amid frenzied looting. Entering the abandoned mansions, Israeli soldiers were astonished by the pianos, carpets and beautiful chandeliers.

Khalil Sakakini was one of those who lost his home and his expansive library. His left-behind volumes ended up with 40,000 other “abandoned” books in the Israeli national library. But Sakakini’s departure to Ramallah was part of something bigger. The war set in train the terminal decline of Arab Christian Jerusalem, whose numbers began to plummet as its great Levantine trading families emigrated. Edward Said ended up in Manhattan.

Barbed wire divided Jerusalem into two severed almost monoethnic cities. On one side, West Jerusalem, the new capital of Israel, but mostly in name only as the Israeli economy and army were now run from Tel Aviv. And on the other, Jordanian East Jerusalem, pointedly not the capital of the Hashemite Kingdom it was promptly annexed to.

Zionist Jerusalem began in this enclave city, now cut off from the Old City by the new border. If this Jerusalem is summed up by anyone, it is by Teddy Kolleck, its mayor of 28 years. This man is what liberal Zionism was. Wearing a long topcoat and tie, Jerusalem’s mayor often looked more like the West German Chancellor Willy Brandt or Austria’s Bruno Kreisky than an Israeli politician. This Hungarian-born protégé of David Ben-Gurion, a social-democrat with European manners, became mayor of West Jerusalem in 1965 and oversaw the Zionist project for the city after the Six Day War when the Israeli cabinet, in a swell of emotion, annexed it.

Kolleck’s beautified Jerusalem is what many of Israel’s supporters imagine the country still is. But neither his city, nor his kind of Zionism, still truly exists. Demographically and sociologically, his Jerusalem has disappeared. Kolleck’s was a Left-leaning and secular Jewish Jerusalem, where ultra-orthodox Hareidim and Palestinians were a small minority. Its politics was dominated by the Israeli Labour Party, running the municipality alone.

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This city no longer exists because Jerusalem, like Israel, is different from the West: it has grown more religious. By Kolleck’s death in 2007, it was evident that the post-1967 Zionist project for Jerusalem had failed. Despite the airy beauty of his Hezlian promenades, the city was neither united, internationally recognised, nor calm. And for all of Kolleck’s pride in his enlightened occupation, the policy of administering the Palestinians of East Jerusalem as “residents” without automatic citizenship had failed. The second intifada had begun with riots in their areas.

A cascade of suicide bombings reflected a broader defeat. Israel’s policy to maintain a decisive Jewish majority had failed. Demographically, the Palestinian population had soared, from 25% in 1967 to over 30%, not only despite great efforts to attract Jews to the city but the construction of 10 large neighbourhoods over the Green Line, the size of small cities elsewhere in Israel. In response, the Palestinians clung to their slum-like neighbourhoods — trapped by the occupation.

At the time of Kolleck’s death, more than a third of Jerusalem’s population were Haredi. Kolleck’s old mentor, Ben-Gurion, in the deals he struck to exempt the ultra-orthodox from mandatory military service, had viewed them as a fragment of a lost world that would fade away. Instead, their numbers and power surged. Zionism found itself facing a problem it had failed to address: the extreme difficulty of making a cohesive or functional nation with Jews.

Today, this unease is not only mirrored in the Israeli press, but in its television shows. The nostalgia for a vanished, Levantine, cosmopolitan Jerusalem, of Arab gentleman and British officers, can be found in The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem, which tells the story of a Sephardic family in the Old City. And to understand the Jerusalem that replaced it, we have Shtisel, a family drama set in the city’s Haredi world. Both befuddled leads are played by the same secular Tel Avivian actor, Michael Aloni, as if he is exploring both the city’s uncanny past and uncomfortable future.

In different ways, both confirm that the old Zionist Jerusalem is gone. Secular Israeli hegemony is over: the city is now 40% Palestinian, 35% percent Haredi and only a minority secular. Teddy Kolleck could never be elected here, in this Haredi-Likud bastion. But neither would Edward Said recognise it. Once associated with a certain refinement, Jerusalem is now the poorest city in Israel, where almost 40% of residents live below the poverty line, double the national average. It has gone from being a place secular Jews aspired to, to being a place they leave. Rabbi Shlomo’s walled-village has vanished and many of his secular descendants have left the city.

Nowhere do you feel the nature of today’s Jerusalem — a mostly Haredi-Palestinian conurbation — than trying to reach Ramallah by bus, when on the other side of the wall, the urban area, here tightly packed concrete, just continues. There were less than 350,000 people living in this land in the mid-19th century. Today there are roughly 14.5 million. In 40 years, there will be 30 million.

High-tech, secular Tel Aviv is the face Israel projects to the world, yet Jerusalem remains its true face. Not only the country’s biggest city but the one that reflects the state of the land. In “the bubble” of Tel Aviv, there are neither Haredim nor the occupation — whereas in Jerusalem, you feel them every day. More than this, though, it is the only place where Israelis and occupied Palestinians live together. This makes Jerusalem the inescapable site of its future.

The debate over what this might look like has been playing out in the pages of the country’s liberal newspaper Haaretz, where “Why I’m leaving Jerusalem” is the equivalent of the New York Times’s “Why I’m leaving New York” column. The writer Chaim Levinson, for instance, sees Israel’s future dystopia in Jerusalem’s present. The city, he writes, once had DJs, alternative nights, notable restaurants and intellectuals. Now, it is “poor, ugly, boring, bereft of hope and a future”. For Levinson, Jerusalem’s drab and dirty Haredi neighbourhoods, where only synagogues and religious schools matter, is a foretaste of a failed start-up nation, sinking into Haredi poverty and fundamentalism. A place of fanatics trying to start a war over the Temple Mount.

This is not the view of Nir Hasson, for whom there is a “quiet revolution” underway in the city. From the corridors of the Hebrew University and David Yellin college to the wards and operating theatres of Hadassah hospital, life has become desegregated. The walls have fallen down. Palestinians from East Jerusalem are studying or working alongside Jews.

For Hasson, then, Israel’s shoots of hope can be found in Jerusalem. Instead of increasing religious coercion, there are now more restaurants and shops open than ever before in the city on Shabbat. Instead of seeing the Haredim in black and white, Hasson believes that the growing population is becoming more complicated and consumerist and many are secularising — which detailed demographic research in fact confirms. For him, Jerusalem shows coexistence is not a lost cause. Both Haredim and Palestinians are becoming “Israelised” — but in a way that does not conform to Zionism.

Jerusalem is both of these cities. But there are extremists trying to tip the scales, with some 3,000 settler-like activists, embedding around the Holy Basin, trying to bend the arc of the conflict towards conflagration.

Night after night in the Old City, I came to see it differently. It wasn’t the theme park for which tourists mistook it. This place was a chessboard of control — a battlefield of scuffles and brawls, title-deeds and court cases — where the kippah-wearing boy handing out tea under a camp light on the road to the Damascus Gate all night long was really a look out; where the new mezuzah, affixed to the door post on another Palestinian house these groups had purchased, was another blue dot on the board “reclaimed” for Israel.

This speaks to a growing seam of fundamentalism in Judaism — yearning for the Temple Mount. In 1967, the nation’s Rabbinate reaffirmed an ancient ban on Jews ascending lest they desecrate the ruins of the temple and Jewish prayer was formally discouraged by officials. But this is no longer a liberal Zionist Jerusalem. Today, a growing number of Jews are now visiting and praying at the site.

As Jewish extremists have focused on the mount, so have Palestinians. Over the past few years, a pattern has emerged of Arab rioters, fearful of half-imagined Jewish plans to erect their Third Temple, barricading themself in the Al-Aqsa Mosque only to be stormed by Israeli police. This, for Hamas, is central. Al Aqsa is at the heart of their message, ambitions and ideology. The war launched on October 7 was launched in the name of saving it.

Jerusalem is where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict began. The city today is where either a much darker one could start, or where it could end. That the streets of Jerusalem are still quiet after months of devastation is revealing. If there is any hope, it is that Arabs and Jews — in hospitals, malls and in offices — continue to work side by side. Normal people can turn, before their politicians, against violence.

On a winter’s night in 1920, Abraham Shalom Yahuda, the grandson of Rabbi Shlomo Yahuda who reached the holy city by caravan, gave a speech in the highest, most ornate, literary form of his native Arabic. Introduced by the city’s Palestinian mayor as a son of one of the most esteemed families in the city, his subject was the legacy of Jewish-Arab coexistence in Muslim Spain. A better future was only possible, said Yahuda, “when the spirit of tolerance and freedom that prevailed in the golden age of Arab thought in Al-Andalus will return”. At the time, he was dismissed by nationalists of all sides. But for me, he was the true realist. And only the people of Jerusalem — by wanting it — can open the way.

One of Berlin’s first hits was the 1911 “Alexander’s Ragtime Band”, whose lyrics were rewritten during the Vietnam War. “You can hear a bugle call like you never heard before / So natural that you’ll want to go to war.”During the Vietnam War, Berlin rewrote the lyric: “So natural you’ll want to hear some more.”

I recall, similarly, how the lyrics of the old Ashkenazi melody about Hanukkah — “One [candle] for each night, they remind us of fights” — were updated for delicate baby-boomer ears: “One for each night, they shed a sweet light”. Hanukkah, however, is a commemoration of the Jewish martial victory, in 168 BCE, over the Syrian armies of Antiochus Epiphanes, who desecrated the Temple.

In 1883, the Hebrew Union College, the first Reform Seminary in America, graduated its first class of Reform Rabbis. The ceremonies concluded with a banquet of lobster, shrimp and pork: the famous Trefa Banquet. What were the Rabbis celebrating? A commencement, we know, means the beginning of a new thing. The new thing here was not the commencement of a life of service to the Jews — but of freedom from Judaism’s constraints.

The Reform Movement began in 19th-century Germany among those members of the despised race who were honoured by their admittance, and intent on maintaining the exemption. What is it that Jews cannot do? We can’t stop passing for white. Instructive here is Nella Larsen’s masterpiece, Passing (1929), which tells the story of several light-skinned black women facing the conundrum of racial identity and solidarity versus wider opportunity. The women’s dilemma is not only practical, but social, as, however they may pass among white people, they cannot escape their content in being black among black people. They meet in white society, recognise each other, and exchange advice and sympathy. But everyone in the black community, sympathetic or not, knows they are black. The novel’s women neither think they are, nor desire to become, white. Their blackness is not a curse, but an ineluctable identity.

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Among us Jews, however, it is quite different. Like the new lyrics of the Hanukkah song and the emergence of the Hanukkah Bush, Reform Judaism itself and its dedication to an antisemitic Democratic Party are attempts at self-delusion.

In “Scarlet Ribbons (For Her Hair)”, a hit Christmas song from 1959, the little heroine wants only red ribbons for Christmas. Nothing else will do, so the mother prays hard enough for the unnamed power to relent and supply them on Christmas morning. The assimilative urge of Jews is the prayer for Scarlet Ribbons. First, they ain’t a-coming. Second, if they did, we would tire of them instantly. And lastly, who, then, would “believe”, let alone feel awe, for a deity which concerned itself with our prayers for ribbons?

Since the readmittance of Jews into Germany, and our success there, we have been praying to be spared the weight of Judaism. The impulse dates from our Exodus from slavery. We were free, Moses went up the mountain to receive the Law from God, and we, at the foot of the mountain, began our preemptive counterstrike: the creation and worship of an inanimate object. We feared the Word we knew Moses was bringing us, rioted, and called our panic Reason. Just as we do today.

The assimilated Jewish worship of Good Works and Right Thinking has been requited, for 2,000 years, by our slaughter. Implicit in our murderers’ worldview was the belief that “you can fool yourselves, but you can’t fool us”. For the Jew Haters were and are neither interested in our “accomplishments” nor outraged by our supposed misdeeds — but only interested in killing us.

The assimilative urge is thus a delusion: since we can’t actually fool ourselves, how in the world might we fool our enemies? This delusion can only persist through a universalism that holds our murderers actually aren’t our enemies, but are misunderstood, or abused, or legitimately angry — and, thus, finally, not subject to the same laws and expectations as the rest of humanity. Further, as we see in today’s “pro-Palestinian” demonstrations, the aggressors are understood as incapable of sin. What being is capable of violence but incapable of sin? Only an animal. This is how the anti-Jewish Left understands Hamas’s murderers — as animals untainted by conscience.

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Inseparable from this is the notion that something must have inspired this hatred. What, the assimilated Jew thinks, could this be? And then he answers: other Jews. These, the trouble-provoking Bad Jews, were anathema to the assimilated. Their outlandish old-world practices drew notice to all Jews, and, thus, endangered the tenuous-as-factitious emotional security of the assimilated.

“Look,” the Reform Western Jew traditionally held, “I deserve consideration for my sacrifices. I have sacrificed my ‘Jewish’ name, my practice of prayer, of Kashrut, of endogamy, of religious instruction of the young: what more could anyone want?”

The answer, of course, is: “Your lives.”

Which brings us back to the basic question: why? Christians often ask me why the Jews are so hated. The traditional Western Jewish answers are, however, a finessed attempt at exculpation. They describe various antisemitisms as the result, however misguided, of our enemies’ human reason and aspiration. But the true, horrific, Biblical answer is that they are the work of the Devil.

We are told, in the Torah, that Amalek — the ineradicable force of Evil — is with us in every generation. But how can this be, and how can a modern man actually state it in a world we know is based upon human reason? I can state it, because I observe it; and I do not observe the rule of reason most anywhere — neither about me, nor in history. We human beings are cursed with the capacity for thought, which means for self-delusion. (For how little else is it ever employed?)

Western Jews have traditionally voted for liberalism, which is to say for inclusion in some imaginary coalition of the right-thinking. We support the United Nations, a Potemkin village of remittance men hired to denounce Israel, and we elect politicians who kowtow to murderous antisemites. We send our children to elite universities, which teach antisemitism and support anti-Jewish demonstrations, and then advise them to “stay safe”. Can you name another group which behaves similarly?

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After the liberation of Dachau, citizens of Munich were marched through the camp and forced to look. The 45-minute Hamas-filmed montage of bestiality should be aired continuously on all media, so that no one can say: “I didn’t realise.” Shelby Steele said that his beloved fellow black citizens have been confused by 400 years of slavery. As have my fellow Jews, since the eradication of the Temple, by life on sufferance.

Slavery creates a slave mentality — to survive or die. Black Americans survived the Middle Passage, chattel slavery and segregation through reliance on the family and religion; the Diaspora Jews had our cultural contiguity and The Torah. But that necessary and inescapable cohesion was shattered by the bright promises of acceptance; and our reference to religion as a guide broken by the Enlightenment (the Haskalah) in the 19th century.

Afterwards, the re-establishment of the Jewish State in the Levant offered a home to the tortured remnant of European Jewry, but their return exacerbated the antisemitism of the Arab world, and did nothing to expunge the seed of slave-thinking in the diaspora. The seed also flourished in a largely secular Israeli Jewish Left, still concerned with a curious inversion of reason called “fairness”. The utter fatuity of this view was seen on October 7.

Mike Tyson remarked that everyone has a plan until they get punched in the nose. Diaspora Leftist Jews have tried to escape punishment by staying out of the ring — and acknowledging our enemies’ right to an opinion, and our responsibility as Jews to defend that right at whatever cost to our interests. The American Civil Liberties Union stands up for the right of protestors to demonstrate — that is, to “act out” — in favour of genocide, much as their co-religionary Aaron explained to Moses: “What could I do? They took the gold and threw it in the pot and this calf came out, and we worshipped it.”

Jews were not instructed to worship fairness (a human concept, incapable of absolute determination), but to worship God and keep his ordinances. Indeed, a devotion to God and the Word of God is the sole protection we poor weak humans have against doing evil. Our devotion will not protect us from the evil others do, however — and that’s why we have armies.

© 2023, D. Mamet

Otherwise, the retrospective is admirably respectful of the artist’s work and the people who come to see it. There are none of the admonitions against colonialist and sexist looking, for example, that marred The Rossettis at Tate Britain. Guston looks at whatever he wants to look at and — barring that brief allusion to antisemitism and the Ku Klux Klan as you enter — we are left in peace to do the same.

If anything, it is a bold curatorial stroke to begin the exhibition, not with examples of the young Guston’s early forays into social realism and surrealism but with a single full-blown, late-style comic-book canvas — “Legend” — in which the sleeping painter lets his nightmares spill across a flat mental plane so messy you can see why he has no desire to get out of bed. Here are objects that will become familiar as the exhibition continues: cigarettes, empty bottles of booze, bricks, a baton, a hoof, but also himself, the dreamer and hallucinator, all but crowded out of his own painting, wrapped up against the waking world, his brow rumpled, one boxer’s ear attached to his head like a can-opener, his spidery eyelid shut tight. Disturb him if you dare.

The artist’s mind rendered as a kitchen in which nothing has been washed or put away is more beguiling than disturbing, for all the violence of the brush strokes and the delusional pinks and scornful reds of the palette. I cannot explain the spindle-shanked horse running out of the picture, brandishing his tail like a scourge as he leaves, unless he’s a she — quite literally a nightmare. But the artist sleeps on, for all the sound of hooves smashing broken glass. “A world in turmoil,” the note on the wall comments. Yes, turmoil within and without — but too intriguing, not to say comic, for the turmoil to turn to anguish. However deranged the painter, the painting is all very bearable — a sort of joyous bonfire of the madnesses, as though Guston were painting himself sane. And then, having got you “emotionally prepared” for what’s still to come, the exhibition sweeps you back in time to Guston’s many false starts, that’s if it’s fair to call the means by which an artist discovers what he really wants to paint “false”.

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Guston was good at this and that. Dipping his toe into the Italian Renaissance, surrealism, social realism, muralism, abstract expressionism — you name it, he could do it. He was born Phillip Goldstein, a name he changed for the usual reasons, to parents who had fled persecution in Ukraine. Just when or where is it a good time or place to be born a Jew? His reclusive father hung himself when Guston was still a boy, though what part the anti-Jewishness of early 20th-century America played in that — the alienation, the restricted opportunities (collecting junk was the best job he could find), the threats from the KKK — is a matter for speculation. But the Klan doesn’t haunt Guston’s imagination for no reason, and depression, in his greatest works, is only a dive under the covers away.

Not long after his father’s suicide, his brother died in a horrific car accident, after losing both his legs. The recurring motifs of nooses and twisted limbs need no more explaining than do the hoods of the Klan and the mountains of anonymous shoes. And maybe the name-changing accounts for the atmosphere of obsessive guilt. A bad start in life for the boy was a good one for the painter.

Crises of confidence and conscience nudged Guston from one sort of art and artistic commitment to another. He painted and won acclaim, but not from himself. “What kind of man am I,” he asks, “sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything” — he means Vietnam and the brutality of the world in general — “and then going into my studio to adjust a red to blue?”

He isn’t the first artist to have asked himself that. And it could have been the end of him as a painter. Political engagement had already taken up much of his time; what would another bout of engaged solemnity have yielded? As it happened, the artist in him found a way to make the refined aesthetics of “adjusting a red to a blue” a means of confronting the unrefined brutality he saw everywhere. As though to recreate the exhilaration of that creative resolution, the exhibition ushers us, along a narrow corridor, from the self-questioning Guston of earlier rooms, to the blazingly confident pink light of “Dawn”, a sublimely airy comic-strip send-up, firstly of the Ku Klux Klan and, by implication, Guston’s own early fear of them. Can there really be anything to be afraid of in these gormless hooded figures out driving in the early morning like children in a toy car, pointing out the sights of the city to each other, seeing the world for the first time, a lollipop sun just rising, candy-floss clouds floating in the sky, birds kissing on the telegraph wires.

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It’s a glorious painting of the world waking up to wonder. So innocent does the jaunt feel that we can’t bring ourselves to ask whose twisted feet are sticking out of the boot of the nursery car. The Klan’s latest victims? Guston’s brother? Every menace and pained remembrance are grist to the mill — but ask what, in fact, is so illuminating about the painting and we have to root around in our own untidy kitchen of words to find the right ones. The painting takes the strain, let’s try that for starters. The painting disburdens — but disburdens whom of what?

There follows, in the next four rooms, one magnificently disburdening painting after another. “City Limits” depicts three hooded Klansmen hugger-mugger in another children’s car with giant Swiss-roll wheels, staring ahead in a bemused sort of way, excited to be out and about for all that their masks limit what they can see, if they can see anything. One is, of course, smoking, in the style of Groucho Marx, which doesn’t seem to bother the others. The painting is gorgeously claustrophobic, suggesting that the Klansmen enjoy one another’s company so much that being cramped is a pleasure to them. If the car is a prison, they are too stupid to mind and too impotent to do anything about it.

What world is this? Laurel and Hardy? Keystone Cops? The cartoonist Robert Crumb’s Keep on Truckin’?

Guston famously said of the Klansmen that “they are self-portraits” and in “The Studio” he goes the whole way with that fancy, standing a hooded figure at the artist’s easel, puffing black smoke, painting himself. It’s sublimely funny — the painter as Klansman engrossed in painting the painter as Klansman, an infinity of perpetuation, the crazier for the painter-Klansman having only two prison-door slits in his hood to see through, but reproducing those prison-door slits on the canvass with loving care. If Guston is somehow redeemed in the act of seeing himself behind the hood, is the hooded Klansman redeemed in the act of seeing himself as Guston? I don’t even know what sort of question that is. Does it bear on the nature of art or the nature of evil?

Here is the joy of the show, anyway. We look, muse, laugh, speculate, writhe a bit, which might be our own redemption from solemnity. How seriously to take Guston’s further identification with the Klansman — “I almost tried to imagine that I was living with the Klan…what would it be like to be evil?” — I don’t know. Is Guston a metaphysician of evil? Is he Dostoevsky with red paint on his hands? Or are we closer to Chaplin guying Hitler?

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I have to say I don’t experience the fear and trembling before these works that others report. Guston has so successfully eviscerated all horror from the Ku Klux Klan, so sublimely, if you like, made them himself in the course of making himself them, that we are taken to another plane of visionary delight. Not of aesthetic insouciance — there is no opting out of seriousness in these paintings — but of quizzical exuberance, as if to cast seriousness in a new light. Each of these late canvasses is a kind of obstacle course of memory, in which victory over evil is achieved by celebrating the absurd plasticity of evil’s presence, a random and yet purposive inclusiveness that takes in the artist and his perturbations, for the act of worrying is now his subject too.

Even “Flatlands”, which appears to show the artist’s imagination after the Flood — the scattered real and delusional detritus of his thoughts and associations: clocks telling different times, books, pointing fingers, legs without a body, a setting sun, Klansmen losing their way like malfunctioning robots, what might just be the chimney of an Auschwitz oven puffing its own cigar smoke — is calming, perhaps because it’s all over now, mastered in its random, godless profusion. Not “Look, I have come through,” but “Look, I am still looking.”

Almost the last painting in the exhibition is “Couple in Bed”. I don’t know if any artist more frequently painted himself asleep, but none surely painted a more poignant study of sleep and love in the service of art. Clutching his quiver of paint brushes for dear life, the painter buries himself into the safety of his wife. It’s a bed the poet Donne might have imagined — one little space an everywhere of devotion and achievement, a place of peace but not forgetfulness.

It is not unusual for art to make us happy. Mellow vistas and golden sunsets do the trick every time. What is far more rare is for happiness to be conjured out of horror.

***

The Philip Guston exhibition is on at Tate Modern until 25 February 2024.

Two months ago, I would have dismissed this as mere paranoia. To be a visibly Jewish is to live with a constant, low-grade fear that people are judging you, but more often than not, in my experience, that fear turned out to be unfounded. But these days, I believe any Jew who says they feel scared.

In recent weeks, thousands of people have marched through the streets of New York City chanting “from the river to the sea”; posters of those kidnapped in Israel — including babies and the elderly — have been torn down from city lampposts. At a university in downtown Manhattan, pro-Palestine demonstrators beat on the locked doors of a library where Jewish students were holed up. Over the past few days, stickers have appeared on mailboxes in my neighbourhood that read: “Resist the occupation by any means necessary.” What is meant by this, I can only surmise, is that killing children like mine is justified.

Meanwhile, we’ve seen our places of employment and our alma maters issue mealymouthed statements about the October 7 attacks. A friend of mine runs a small business that often donates proceeds to local causes such as food banks — causes that, despite having nothing to do with the conflict in Israel and Palestine, have felt it necessary to state their allegiance on social media. (No prizes for guessing where that allegiance lies.) “I don’t know what’s more painful,” she told me. “Being sad about the actual attacks, or seeing everyone you thought cared about you just disappear.”

We are on our own, we say repeatedly. The feeling is familiar. “It is not because you are the most numerous of peoples that God grew attached to you and chose you — indeed, you are the smallest of peoples,” it says in Deuteronomy. Our vulnerability is part of the package; it has, so far, failed to diminish our indefatigability. “All things are mortal but the Jew,” Mark Twain wrote in his 1899 essay “Concerning the Jews”: “all other forces pass, but he remains.” In these last weeks, Jews have rallied to help one another, cooking meals for families with a parent serving in the Israeli army, bussing visitors to those sitting shiva for victims of the October 7 attacks, sending truckloads of supplies.

My family and I are part of a Modern Orthodox community, which is dedicated to the principle of Torah Umadda, which combines the best of both secular knowledge and Jewish practice. A synonymous label, “social Orthodoxy”, has been proposed, because Modern Orthodox Jews have high levels of civic engagement: while we largely keep kosher and shabbat, we also usually attend university, excel in professional fields, and have more diverse social circles than our brethren in the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) world. Trying to walk the razor’s edge between tradition and modernity, as a neighbour once put it, is challenging under normal circumstances. But lately it’s become a nightmare. “The way things are now, I would never send my children to college,” the mother of one of my eldest son’s best friends — herself a graduate of a prestigious secular university — whispered to me while our children played in the yard at synagogue.

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Not that this would necessarily make them safe. Our Jewishness is on display, obvious from the clothing we wear and the languages we speak; we gather together frequently in synagogues, send our children to Jewish schools, and often live in clusters. If someone wanted to hurt Jews, they’d aim for maximum impact, and target one of these places. Multiple times a week, while shopping or praying or even just ordering something to be delivered (a mezuzah on my door means anyone can tell that Jews live here), I think to myself: “We’re sitting ducks.” Perhaps I sound paranoid, but these things of course do happen.

This feeling of being at risk isn’t entirely new. It’s been three years since we moved to our fairly Orthodox neighbourhood, and this is not the first time the police have been stationed outside my children’s school since then. They appeared in early 2021, for instance, around the time that a local man was arrested for throwing bricks through the windows of synagogues in the dead of night. But this feels bigger, scarier, more isolating. A kosher restauranteur wonders if he needs to hire formal security for his tiny cafe; a friend who describes herself as a “lifelong anti-gun person” has decided to apply for a permit. I was recently thinking about taking my sons for a day out in the city, but then caught myself: what if someone sees their kippot? What if someone says something to them, or God forbid, worse?

Walking down the street recently in a different area of New York City, my infant son in tow, I watched as two well-dressed 20-somethings ripped the posters of the kidnapped off a building’s scaffolding, and I shrunk into myself. A black man stood next to me with his young family. “What are they doing?” he said, enraged. “They don’t have a right to do that!” I said nothing to him, afraid of calling any attention to myself and my baby, and I’ve regretted it every day since. Maybe it’s safer to stay home.

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By Ben Judah

I don’t know how to talk to my sons about this. I was born a non-Jew into a non-Jewish family. I knew only a handful of Jews growing up in the WASP strongholds of suburban Connecticut, and they seemed exactly like me, only with bar mitzvahs: what hardships could they really face? Some of my Jewish friends speak of being harangued by grandparents, throughout their childhoods, to remember that antisemitism lurks around every corner, but until my conversion eight years ago, I had no idea what it was like to live as a member of a visible, hated minority. Even now, I worry that I carry less of the burden than other Jews: for professional reasons, I go by my maiden name, which isn’t identifiably Jewish.

It wasn’t even my conversion that woke me up. Back then, I was living in a fun bubble of quirky Orthodoxy in Brooklyn: attending kosher supper clubs, women-only dance parties and Torah-infused yoga classes. I could be Jewish and modern. Instead, my realisation was like a slow-burn horror film: when we moved to London, we attended a synagogue that checked passports upon entry; after we moved back to Brooklyn, swastikas were chalked onto my neighbours’ doors one night. One day, my son’s Jewish preschool director showed me the new door camera they had installed after a shooting at a kosher grocery store in nearby Jersey City. A few years back, so many Orthodox Jews were being randomly beaten up on the street in New York City that a march was organised across the Brooklyn Bridge. None of my non-Jewish friends offered to join us in solidarity.

Some Jews, it seems, are easier to defend than others. On a few occasions, when the war has come up with my non-Jewish friends, they will lament that a liberal Jewish person has, say, been called a name online because she called for peace. I love my fellow Jews and believe we should strive for unity, and I too desperately want peace in the region. But I can’t help but feel that many people seem eager to deflect attention from the Jews actually harmed — “bad” Jews, because they live in Israel or support Zionism — and towards the less material pain of “good” Jews whose views are more politically palatable in America. I respect the rights of Jews, and of people more broadly, to have different opinions. But in moments of rising antisemitism, and this is most definitely one of them, it is not the secularised Jew who is at real risk — but the observant one.

In the article, she described being “spat at for being Jewish” at her first NUS conference, and referenced a speaker at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies saying “that burning down a synagogue is a rational act”. I naively assumed the piece had been published years earlier; there was surely no way this sort of bigotry and threat could be contemporary. Almost two decades later, a new generation of Jewish students is experiencing a similarly rude awakening.

Last month, a couple of weeks after Hamas carried out its attack on Israel, a flat inhabited by Jewish freshers at Nottingham Trent University was trashed and a note was left stating: “FREE PALESTINE. KYS TORY CUNTS.” (The KYS is internet slang for “kill yourself”.) Its authors were so confident in the righteousness of their cause that they even wrote their flat numbers in the corner of the A4 sheet, complete with two love hearts.

According to the mother of one of the Jewish students, the attack was the result of her daughter’s flatmate having an Israeli flag in their kitchen. “They trashed their room, tore down their lights and took the flag,” the mother tells me, before adding that her daughter later expressed relief that she doesn’t look Jewish. “I get it — she just wants to be a kid and get on with uni life. But this is what’s happening. They’re scared. They don’t want anyone to know they’re Jewish.” Indeed, every student interviewed for this article, bar one, spoke only on the condition of anonymity.

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One does not have to look far to understand why. In the month since October 7, the Community Security Trust recorded 73 antisemitic incidents related to universities across the UK — compared with 17 in the first six months of 2023 and 56 in the whole of last year.

Yet the recent attacks on Jewish students are as striking for their ferocity as their sheer volume. In Bristol, a Jewish student was told: “You and your family are money grabbing cunts murdering Muslim people.” Another in Birmingham received an Instagram message from a stranger, warning: “May a slow and painful death be granted to you and every other Zionist like you.” A university rabbi also received a direct message on the platform: “You massacred innocent Muslims — I hope you die too.” In Warwick, a Jewish students’ WhatsApp group was infiltrated by at least three different people bombarding freshers with messages — shown to me — including “FUCKING DIRTY JEWISH CUNTS”, “ISREAL [sic] GOT NO HUMANITY FUCKIN CUNNTS [sic]”, “MUDWRING [sic] BASTARDS” and “FREE PALASTINE [sic]”.

Emma*, a third-year student at the University of Edinburgh, felt she was at-risk as soon as the terrorist attack took place. “I took off anything that suggests I’m Jewish and stopped going to a lot of JSoc [Jewish Society] events to avoid antisemitism,” she tells me. She describes how a friend offered to wear her Star of David necklace to prove that she would be safe doing so. “The first day he wore it, someone did a ‘Heil Hitler’ at him.” The friend gave up after a few hours.

If the initial concerns of Jewish students — busily covering their skullcaps and Jewish-themed tattoos — were brushed off, it soon became clear that, if anything, they had underestimated the anti-Israeli atmosphere on campuses. Almost immediately post-7/10, the abuse levied at them became institutionalised, as university groups lined up to call for more “resistance”. At SOAS, for instance, before Israelis had even finished collecting the bodies of the slain, the Palestine Society promoted the right to resist “by any means necessary”. A day later, student group Warwick Action for Palestine praised “the response of the colonised” and said it stood in solidarity with “the martyrs and the resistance”. Over at the University of East Anglia, meanwhile, the Islamic Society did not celebrate the horrors, but denied they ever took place: “This never happened. Hamas never ‘decapitated babies’”, and plastered a red FALSE stamp over reports of the atrocities published in The Times of Israel and The Independent.

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Nor was this simply a student phenomenon. Last month, the University College London branch of the national University and College Union, which represents academics and teaching staff, voted for a motion calling for “intifada until victory!”. Predictably, while it went to great pains to emphasise the “British government’s support for the Israeli state”, there was little mention of the fact that the last intifada saw Israeli civilians being blown up by suicide bombers on buses and at restaurants.

Similar proposals have been tabled at Oxford and Cambridge universities, though the most egregious hotspots appear to be further north. At the University of Leicester, posters have been put up describing “heroes fighting for justice and their right to exist”. Meanwhile, the committee members of the JSoc have had to take down their names and photos from the student union website due to safety fears. And at the University of Manchester, a Socialist Worker “Victory to the Resistance” poster on a bus stop was graffitied with “KILL MORE JEWS”, while the local branch of the Socialist Workers Party created a poster headlined “Support Palestinian Resistance” with an image of a bulldozer used by the October 7 terrorists to break into southern Israel. Another shows a man brandishing two rockets and calls “for mass revolution across the Arab world”.

They’re “everywhere on campus”, says Jewish postgraduate Daniel. “I shouldn’t have to hide my Star of David in the street,” he adds. “I shouldn’t have to think about what routes to take to get to different classes safely. I shouldn’t have to walk past angry protesters calling for the eradication of the only Jewish state. If I had known how unsafe Manchester would feel as a Jewish student, I wouldn’t have chosen to study here. It’s just absolutely incessant.”

Daniel references the physical attacks — primary schools in London’s Stamford Hill being daubed with red paint and a Jewish man at a pro-Palestine protest in Los Angeles dying after reportedly being struck on the head with a megaphone. “It’s not just rhetoric,” he says. “There is a palpable fear that these slogans and chants will eventually lead to Jewish students being singled out and attacked. We’ve seen it in history. It’s how it starts, with these catchwords and slogans, and that eventually transcends into violence.” 

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Jew-hatred on campus is, of course, nothing new. Last year, the National Union of Students sacked its president, Shaima Dallali, following an inquiry into allegations of historic antisemitism. In 2012, she tweeted: “Khaybar Khaybar O Jews… Muhammad’s army will return Gaza” — referencing a 7th-century massacre of Jews and echoing a chant that has been heard repeatedly on the streets of London in recent weeks. She had also described a cleric critical of Hamas as a “dirty Zionist”. In this she was echoing one of her predecessors, Malia Bouattia, who the year before labelled Birmingham University a “Zionist outpost”.

The tragedy is that, since then, and since I was at university, student discourse on Israel has largely been stripped of any remaining sliver of nuance — leaving only the starkest of bone-headed binaries. It puts all pro-Palestinians, however violent or bigoted, on the side of the angels and, by extension, leaves the vast majority of Jews, who quietly support the existence of a Jewish homeland in Israel, on the side of every evil, from racism and colonialism to Nazism and apartheid.

But if chanting mobs can be whipped up into such blinding fervour that they find themselves unable to distinguish between rape and resistance, how can we expect them to differentiate British Jews and a government 2,000 miles away? Jewish students certainly will not feel remotely safe until they can. The late Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks stated: “The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews.” He could equally have said: “What starts on university campuses never ends on university campuses.”

* Some names have been changed.

More than anything, this perspective reflects the common Leftist belief that Palestinians are the true native people of the land, but were dispossessed of their territory by an invading army of white Europeans.

The sudden outburst of anti-colonial rancour, which glorified the slaying of children and innocent civilians, triggered a wave of condemnation, with some pointing out that Jews are also indigenous to the region. ​​“The Jewish people ruled Judean kingdoms and prayed in the Jerusalem Temple for 1,000 years,” observed Simon Sebag Montefiore in The Atlantic. Jews, wrote Rich Lowry in The New York Post, “are fundamentally identified with the land”, making them an “indigenous people”.

Some in Israel take the argument a step further, however. “When Palestinians were climbing trees, we already had a Jewish state,” Naftali Bennett, a former prime minister, argued in a debate with an Arab politician, who had chastised him as a “settler” and a “tumour” that needed to be removed. “There’s no such thing as Palestinians,” declared Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who claimed that David Ben-Gurion should have “finished the job” and forced out every Arab when the country was founded.

This rhetorical war over which ethnic group maintains authentic and historical ownership of the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River speaks to the emotional power of the “indigenous” mantle. In this framework, the justice of a particular cause is determined primarily by whether the people advocating for it are more authentically native. And as a phenomenon, it extends well beyond this conflict, rippling through Western society in recent years. In Europe, for instance, far-Right movements have spent the past decade calling for immigrants to be expelled in order to preserve the racially pure heritage of Europe’s “indigenous” communities. In America, meanwhile, Leftists now demand “land acknowledgment” rituals, which suggest that the US is merely a racist power occupying what should be sovereign tribal territory. During the deadly riots of 2020, activists celebrated the violence as an effort to “decolonise” the country.

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Long before October 7, similar disputes defined the politics that shaped relations between Palestinians and Jews. The process, in many respects, is deeply institutionalised.

Last year, I reported from Israel and Palestine, and visited a number of neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem, the largely Palestinian side of the city seized by the Israeli military during the 1967 war. Unlike the West Bank, Israel formally annexed East Jerusalem in 1980, granting Palestinians there permanent residency in Israel, but not Israeli citizenship.

The area is home to the City of David complex — part-museum, part-archeological dig, and part-propaganda apparatus for a project that seeks to exert Jewish claims of indigeneity across all of Jerusalem. The neighbourhoods are like a slow-simmering warzone. Homes are surrounded by razor wire and iron gates. Evictions of Palestinians are celebrated with banners announcing the arrival of Jewish families. The situation is tense.

The excavations and the visitor centre are the project of a group called Elad, also known as the Ir David Foundation, which seeks to increase the Jewish population of Jerusalem to limit Palestinian influence in, and claims to, the city. The project, now funded by billionaires Daniel Loeb and Roman Abramovich, among others, was set up in response to the 1993 Oslo Accords, which floated East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state. The proposal enraged segments of Israeli society and the bid to uncover artefacts showing Jewish heritage is a direct attempt to subvert Palestinian claims to the city.

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“Our aim is to Judaize East Jerusalem,” Yigal Kaufman, a spokesperson for Elad, told The New York Times in 1998. “The City of David is the most ancient core of Jerusalem, and we want it to become a Jewish neighbourhood.” Pamphlets from the group at the time openly touted the archeological dig as the “main public diplomacy body in the arena of the battle for Jerusalem”.

When I visited, our guide explained that artefacts had been found from the Biblical era, even though the dig was yet to uncover any conclusive evidence that it was the home of King David of the Old Testament. Then, about 30 minutes into the tour, the talk turned explicitly political.

“As a Jew, as a Zionist, Jerusalem for us is not a narrative,” said James Elgrod, a British-born Israeli. “It’s not just a place — it’s the essence of our identity for 2,000 years.” He flashed a grainy black-and-white photograph from the early 20th century that showed the surrounding Palestinian neighbourhood without many buildings. “Potato fields, no houses over here,” he said, adding that the mostly Arab-Muslim inhabitants had only moved to the city “60, 70, maybe 80 years ago”. In effect, Elgrod, and the broader Elad project, were hoping to use a collection of calcified pots and old coins to justify efforts to remove Palestinians from the area.

Less subtly, Elad has spent years litigating to evict Palestinian families from homes in the Silwan neighbourhood, just outside the gates of its visitor centre. Elsewhere, according to the Jerusalem-based human rights group Ir Amin, an academic from the University of Haifa reported identifying a discovery at the City of David site as Byzantine in origin, only to be dismissed by Elad’s staffers, who insisted that the discovery was related to stories from the Bible.

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A less politicised view of archeology, however, reveals a richer, more complex tale. Jerusalem is filled with artefacts that testify to its diversity, a place once inhabited by dozens of ethnic groups and tribes, a city of ancient empires and kingdoms and multiple religions. Stand at the centre of the City of David, look up, and you’ll see Ottoman Empire-built walls encircling the holiest sites of Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Like the history of virtually every civilisation, the land fought over today is filled with cycles of migration and conquest, with various groups of people settling and blending with others.

Rafi Greenberg, a professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University, told me that he no longer participates in any of the City of David digs, viewing the entire effort as an attempt to use archeology as a “weapon” to divide the people of Jerusalem. “Palestinians are entirely free to adopt any or all or none of the heritage of the land that they inhabit,” Greenberg said. “One person’s subjective view of the nature of their heritage cannot determine another’s and has no legal or moral implications for that or any other person’s human or civil rights.”

Another way to view the Israel-Palestine conflict — one that is more difficult to politicise — is to look at genetics. According to a 2020 study by a team of researchers at Harvard University and Tel Aviv University, most of the Palestinian-Arab and Jewish populations of the region share a common ancestry that stretches back to the ancient Canaanites, who occupied the territory around 4,000 years ago. Palestinians share about 80% of their ancestry with ancient Bronze Age communities of the Levant, while Iranian Jews share 90% and Ashkenazi Jews have roughly 60-70% of common ancestors.

The findings match earlier studies that show immense genetic overlap between Arabs and Jews in the country, which suggest much of the Palestinian population is descended from ancient Jews and other ethnic groups native to Israel. In that sense, archeological warfare is meaningless: the artefacts represent a shared heritage for all of Israel-Palestine’s residents, not a dividing line to justify expulsions by Israeli settlers or terror attacks by Hamas.

The divisions today, around religion and ethnicity, form a chasm that is exploited by extremists. The coloniser-indigenous arguments are little more than rhetorical devices designed to dehumanise and displace the other. A more productive narrative would recognise the common bonds that unite every Arab and Jew as members of the same community with inalienable rights.

Despite the unconscionable parallels, however, and regardless of the prevalence of Kosher restaurants and carciofi alla giudia, little in the ghetto is as it was. Few Jews, amid Italy’s population of less than 50,000, live there. The same can be said of almost every European city. After the Holocaust, most Jews, as historian Paul Johnson observed, “accepted oppression and second-class status” outside of the ghetto in return for being left alone.

To some extent, life in America was more welcoming; as far back as 1790, George Washington, writing to the Touro Synagogue in Rhode Island, went beyond upholding tolerance to embracing full citizenship as part of “their inherent natural rights”. Today, however, that credo is being called into question. Here, as in Europe, the great period of Jewish influence and efflorescence that started a century ago may be peaking. The result, once dismissed as inconceivable, is that the allure of a more separate existence, a ghetto of the spirit, may start to grow.

For now, the golden era of Jewish achievement still twinkles, but only just. Jews remain inordinately celebrated in the arts and sciences; both the Tony Award in 2023 and the Pulitzer for fiction the year before went to writers covering, somewhat obsessively, Jewish themes. The list of Jewish Nobel prize winners has also expanded since the War, constituting well over 20% of the total.

Yet such achievements cannot mask the fact that the Jewish Century is rapidly fading. On the surface, Jewish life, both inside and outside the diaspora, may seem unassailable. But just as terrorists were able to breach Israel’s supposedly impenetrable defences, the forces of antisemitism have penetrated Western society, as young, educated progressives, including a few Jews, make common cause with Hamas and its allies.

Continuing demographic retreat isn’t helping. After the war’s end, 3.8 million European Jews remained; today, there are barely 1.5 million. Even the last great redoubts of Jewish life are threatened by assimilation and the pernicious new hybrid that joins Leftist and Islamist hatred. Nearly 50,000 Jews have left France since 2000, mostly for Israel, the United States and Canada. With no likely source of new immigration, it’s difficult to envision how the country’s Jewish population will ever grow again. Likewise Eastern Europe, once the centre of the Jewish world with its 8 million Jews, is home to fewer than 400,000 today. Indeed, the only place there seems to be growth is among the orthodox — a community that may not live in official ghettos, but is still in inwardly focused and defensively minded areas.

What is driving this retreat? In political terms, at least, many Jews across the West feel abandoned, particularly by their traditional allies on the Left. In France, for instance, the Left’s most prominent figure, Jean Luc Melenchon, not only openly supports Hamas but has emphasised the role of Jews in the killing of Christ. In Germany, anti-Israel protesters have been targeting Jewish homes, firebombing synagogues and, according to German intelligence officers, calling for a second Kristallnacht.

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This antisemitic revival may be less developed in America, but places that were once friendly to Jews, such as Brooklyn, now suffer anti-Israel riots not too different from those in Europe’s banlieues. As in Europe, it’s the Left that cheers on these demonstrations. Almost all the US representatives who voted against or refused to take a stand supporting Israel came from the Left, and it was at a rally organised by the Democratic Socialists of America that a speaker crowed about how Hamas had killed some “hipsters” partying the desert. None of this is surprising, of course. Progressive groups such as Black Lives Matter have a long history of support for Hamas, while their charter labels Israel’s treatment of the West Bank as “genocide” and “apartheid”.

Now, one could easily place the blame for such bigotry on the universities that provided the oxygen for these ideas to grow. For years, students felt it was acceptable to ban kosher food and promote anti-Israel views, often with the help of generous funding from Muslim-majority states such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Few who had been on campus in recent years were surprised when numerous groups at elite Ivy schools such as Harvard openly celebrated Hamas’s pogrom, or when one Cornell professor called it “exhilarating”.

But it would be unfair to blame all this on Arab machinations; the problem clearly runs deeper. Ten days after Hamas’s attack, for instance, a poll found that 51% of adults under 35 disapproved of the United States’ sending weapons and military support to Israel — a steep shift from the 28% of Americans who oppose such a policy. In the minds of many young Americans, there is, at best, a moral equivalency between Hamas and Israel.

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And as protecting Jews increasingly becomes less of a priority, the very nature of Jewish identity will evolve with it. We could, for instance, see a Jewish future that is mostly Israeli, much as the French sociologist Georges Friedman foresaw a half century ago in The End of the Jewish People. He predicted that, over time, most diaspora Jews would melt into their host populations, Judaism largely merging with the Israeli identity, with the exception of scattered pockets of orthodox believers. Indeed, already close to a majority of all Jewish children live in Israel which, could become, by 2030, the home to a majority of all Jews for the first time since early antiquity.

Outside of Israel, though, as diaspora populations reduce in size or suffer greater harassment, we could also see the revival of a new kind of Jewish ghetto that is inward-looking and focused largely on survival in a harsh environment. The rise of orthodox populations could hasten this movement, with a greater emphasis on community-based security and welfare. It wouldn’t necessarily be as miserably constrained as Rome’s enclave, but it would provide protection from a largely hostile, or indifferent, population.

Yet there may be a more favourable, more inspiring scenario, as Jews rally to Israel’s cause and seek to defend their college-age offspring. It is not inconceivable that the rise of antisemitism, on campuses and the streets, may convince some that being Jewish is about more than indulging in family lore or traditional foods. Instead, they may embrace an identity worth preserving, even as the centre of Jewish life moves to the eastern Mediterranean. After all, the survival of the diaspora has always been built around Martin Buber’s notion of creating “a vocation of uniqueness”.

How this manifests itself will always vary, though it inevitably means standing up to antisemites on both Left and Right. We can already see how this looks in the US, as a number of Jewish donors line up to withdraw their funding from Ivy colleges. Many pro-Hamas squad members are now also having trouble raising money, while progressive opposition to President Biden’s support for Israel could further separate the Hamas crowd from the mainstream of the Democratic Party.

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Ultimately, however, Jewish survival, particularly in the diaspora, will always depend on the next generation, both Jews and Gentiles alike. Here, we can find some encouragement in the increase in support for Israel, even among young people and Democrats, following Hamas’s attack. Today, nearly 70% support Israel during this crisis — a striking reversal of a long-term trend that has seen Americans, particularly on the Left, sympathise more with the Palestinian cause.

Yet the battle is far from won and, as Israel’s armed response grows, this trend could itself peak. Even current surveys find more support for Hamas among younger people, at least until they turn 25. The only positive here is that their worldview largely stems from ignorance: most people under 25 think Israel, not Hamas, has controlled Gaza over the past decade.

In such a world, the challenge for the Jewish community, particularly the new generation, is to convince ourselves, as well as our Gentile neighbours, that the continued Jewish presence is a blessing not just to itself, but to the many countries we still hope to call home. This is the fight that awaits — and restoring the ghetto is not the answer.

Start the story at a different moment in time — 1948, say, when the grandparents of today’s Gazans were living in the area, now southern Israel, where Hamas terrorists committed their atrocities — and the crystalline certainties of the scenario above take on a different light.

But there are more than two options. We could begin our story much earlier than 1948, perhaps when the name Gaza was recorded for the first time: during the reign of the mighty, empire-building Thutmose III, 1,479–1,425 BC. By this time, Gaza had already been under the rule of the Pharaohs for several decades. The long view quickly reveals that contest is a constant in Gaza’s history. Wars surge up at intervals in great, seismic eruptions, before the territory settles into an equilibrium which in turn is shattered by another external invader.

Much of this turbulence can be attributed to Gaza’s strategic location. Hemmed in between the Mediterranean and the Sinai and Negev deserts, this coastal oasis has long been a desirable waypoint on the trade routes that criss-crossed the arid region. Both the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, in the 1st century BC, and the Arab geographer Al Muqaddasi in the 10th century AD, commented on its beauty and enviable location. Critically, as the last point before a desert crossing, it was also an essential stopping place for conquerors looking either east from Egypt or west from the Levant. All roads of conquest ran through Gaza.

Enter stage left, from the 12th century BC, among the most historically compelling of Gaza’s many occupiers: the pagan Philistines of Philistia, etymological forefathers of the Muslim Palestinians of Palestine. And here, as the Philistines came to blows with the Jewish tribes of the interior over access to the coast, arose the earliest signs of the conflict that continues 32 centuries later between the Palestinians and Israelis.

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This was the Gaza of the Bible, in which the Israelite warrior Samson was chosen by the Old Testament God to rescue Israel from the Philistines. Tricked by Delilah into revealing the secret of his strength, Samson was eventually undone, his eyes gouged out before he was imprisoned in Gaza and put to work turning a massive millstone around and around in an endless ordeal. But he had the bitter last laugh, as he pulled down the Philistine temple on himself and his persecutors, killing everyone.

This apocalyptic vision of going round and round in circles before wreaking death and mutually assured destruction endures as the defining narrative of Israel and Gaza. Old Testament smiting becomes 21st-century Israeli airstrikes and Palestinian rockets, the violence circular and never-ending.

Gaza has been completely destroyed and emptied of its inhabitants before. Alexander the Great besieged the city in 332 BC. When it refused to surrender, his forces stormed its defences, put its men to the sword, and sold its children into slavery. The Hasmonean siege in 96 BC was another orgy of slaughter and destruction, this time launched by the Jewish king Alexander Jannaeus, ruler of Judaea, to seize Gaza from the Greeks. After these explosions of violence, the transfer of Gaza to Roman rule in 63 BC was comparatively peaceful, but after Rome officially switched to Christianity in 380, and the Bishop Porphyrius became bishop of Gaza in 395, he led a mob to loot and sack a city which had remained traditionally hostile to the followers of Christ. The city’s pagan gods and temples were destroyed in a fundamentalist frenzy. Last Thursday, 17 centuries later, St Porphyrius got his comeuppance when an Israeli airstrike shattered the church, the oldest in Gaza, that bore his name.

For a time, Byzantine prosperity succeeded the Pax Romana, before wars with the Persians brought renewed strife. While these two elderly leviathans slugged it out, in surged a new, nimble and faith-filled force. Muslim Arabs conquered Gaza in 637, only five years after the Prophet Mohammed’s death; a flurry of Levantine cities, including Damascus and Jerusalem, were taken during the same campaign. In time, Gaza became a significant intellectual and commercial centre — before an Arab civil war in 796 ruined it altogether. That Muslim-on-Muslim conflict was just one among many early harbingers of the deep intra-Arab tension and disunity — Arabs call it fitna — which would bedevil Middle Eastern politics from the 20th century. But after the devastation of the Crusader conquests, Saladin restored Muslim pride and prosperity to Gaza, ushering in a long period of Mamluk and then Ottoman rule, which persisted until 1917.

But so many of these earlier wars and conquests seem like here-today-gone-tomorrow disturbances when compared with the devastation of today. Ancient disputes have, in the past century or so, sharpened into arguably the world’s most tragically intractable and bloody conflict, in which victims are aggressors and aggressors victims.

Lustick chose 1948 to begin his summary of the current conflict, but one could equally start a few decades earlier, with the British seizure of Palestine from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire in 1917. That moment ushered in a new iteration of a conflict that has arguably never ended. Energetically lobbied by the Zionist movement, which wanted a Jewish homeland, Britain made a fateful decision that year. London’s Balfour Declaration which — in the words of the writer Arthur Koestler “one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third”— promised “a national home for the Jewish people” in the land the Biblical God had promised to Israel. Mass Jewish immigration followed, accelerated by the rise of the Nazis: around 250,000 Jews came to Mandate Palestine between 1929 and the outbreak of the Second World War.

Hounded out of Palestine by the Jewish Irgun and Stern Gang terrorists in 1947, the British were unable to deliver on the second principle of the declaration: that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. Much — Palestinians would say everything — was then done by Israel to prejudice Palestinian rights. All-out conflict in 1948 led to triumph and statehood for Israel, and wholesale dispossession and disaster ­— the notorious nakba — for the Palestinians. Around 750,000 fled into exile or were expelled — mostly to the West Bank, controlled by Jordan, or Gaza, then in Egyptian hands. Prevented from either entering Egypt proper, which did not want to take in such enormous numbers, or returning to their homes in Israel, overnight they became stateless refugees.

In 1947, the UN’s partition plan, rejected by the Arabs, had proposed a Jewish state occupying 55% of the country. By 1949, Israel controlled 78% of Mandatory Palestine, leaving the Arabs occupying West Bank and Gaza, which together represented just 22% of the original territory.

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Our story of Gaza takes another tragic turn at this point. Following its victory in the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, Israel occupied Gaza, prefiguring a rise of Jewish settlements, illegal under international law, in the territory. Tensions escalated to the boiling point of the 1987 intifada, violent protests which killed more than 2,000 and which came to be emblematic — as Gaza itself has become — of Palestinian resistance. Further intifadas — killing more than 4,000 in the 2000s, and 273 in 2015–16 — surged out of the failure of the long-awaited 1993 Oslo accords to bring peace.

Meanwhile, into Gaza’s political arena stormed Hamas, making mincemeat of its secular rival Fatah. Hamas has no interest in politics or development. It clings to the dream of the destruction of Israel and has risen to power and prominence to become the face of Palestinian resistance in Gaza and beyond. As Ian Black writes in Enemies and Neighbours, a history of Israel and Palestine from 1917–2017, the Gaza Strip is “a permanent, festering — and often violent — reminder of the unresolved conflict between Arabs and Jews in the Holy Land”.

Bald statistics confirm the reality of its immiserated population. Of the 2.2 million Gazans, 68% are refugees. The poverty rate is 61%, unemployment over 46%. Over 73% of households receive humanitarian assistance, with more than 68% citing it as the main source of their income. This is what Palestinians mean when they talk about the daily violence of life under a blockade which has been in force since Hamas took power in 2007, leaving most Gazans shut in, their airspace and coastline controlled by Israel. There is no question of freedom or autonomy. This is fertile territory for resistance and hatred.

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And when Gazans consider the future, it’s hard to discern a ray of hope. They can hardly look to the occupied West Bank for a model settlement. Abandoning the armed struggle, recognising Israel and accepting 22% of historic Palestine has brought the West Bank Palestinians little in the way of dividends. Its 87-year-old “leader”, Mahmoud Abbas, head of the corrupt, enfeebled and incompetent Palestinian Authority, is known derisively in some Israeli circles as the mayor of Ramallah. Meanwhile, the two-state solution is dead and the extremists in power on both sides are dancing on its grave.

“Peace between Israel and Palestine can assume neither meaning nor substance except in Gaza, which will be both the foundation and the keystone,” wrote Jean-Pierre Filiu, Professor of Middle East Studies at Paris’s Sciences Po in 2012. A decade later, Gaza finds itself once again a cauldron of conflict. Khaled, a Palestinian friend, messages me. He fears the worst for this refuge of refugees. “For me, the unbearable human suffering experienced by Gaza is made worse by the real threat of a repeat of the historical traumatic displacement of Palestinians that Gaza embodies.”

Today, as Gaza crumbles beneath the relentless barrage of strikes, braced for another deadly invasion, a new story will begin. One can only hope, in the words of the late Lebanese poet Nadia Tuéni, writing about her beloved Beirut in 1986, that Gaza will survive: “Elle est mille fois morte, mille fois revécue.”

On the Sabbath, we are supposed to rest, and we did not have our phones. But when we got there, the dark faces were not those of a holiday, and we started to suspect that, somehow, things had got a lot worse.

“Have you seen what’s happening?” someone said. There were dozens dead, maybe more. And they were still dying.

We blessed the Torah. Like always, we read from it. And we said a prayer to remember my grandmother. And then, at the time it always is, it was the time for the sermon.

“For those of you that don’t already know,” said the Rabbi. “Israel is under attack. There are over a hundred dead.”

At that moment, a thought came, like a scream from somewhere inside me. A sharp stab.

How many times have I sat here, in the midst of our songs, of our togetherness, and heard them announce something similar? How many times have I heard the Rabbi say those words, “Our brothers and sisters have been killed”? In terror attacks in Israel, in America, in France, in Germany, in Tunisia — it goes on. It goes on too long.

I tried to remember, as the Rabbi was speaking, but I lost count. It seemed like only yesterday that the Rabbi said a prayer for Pittsburgh, 11 dead, a blessing for the Hypercacher, five dead. Because, really, it was only yesterday. The Rabbi was still speaking, but I could no longer hear him.

My wife and I are expecting a child in January. And so frightened am I, that he may not be born; that if we dare to settle on a name, as our hardwired old superstitions go, the Angel of Death may find him. I hadn’t wanted, or really I hadn’t dared, to imagine what the whole course of his life might look like.

And at that moment I did.

All my life, I have wanted a Jewish child. All my life, I have felt it my highest calling. My ultimate purpose. That I should pass this on. But in that moment, full of the fear of fatherhood, in the confusion and pain and elation of letting go of an old life, there was now something else: the knowledge that he could be killed as a Jew. That the thing I had most wanted for him, or needed from him — to be Jewish — could hurt him, harm him, could even kill him. Like the dead babies I didn’t yet know about.

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The Rabbi switched for a short moment to a verse in Hebrew. And my eyes drifted to the corner where my grandmother used to sit on holidays. She’s been dead for almost 13 years but I always see her there. She was a Holocaust survivor. And I remember when I used to think pogroms belonged to her world. Not to mine.

Ever since we first started praying for “our brothers and sisters” killed in France, not just in the Middle East, and certainly since we started doing it for those in America, the knowledge it could happen anywhere has, attack after attack, woven itself into our lives as Jews. It’s always there. In the back of my mind. That the places we pray, or the places we go, are the places where something could happen. I remember thinking pogroms could never happen inside Israel. I remember last week.

Sitting there, I realised it’s not my own enormous failings, or worries about money, or all the usual stuff that frightens me about being a father. It’s also the knowledge that I am bringing a Jewish soul into a world where not even the greatness of America, the principles of Europe or the soldiers of Israel can make this promise: that your children will not be killed as Jews.

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“This time,” said the Rabbi, “is set aside for our rejoicing, as it is written in our Torah. These festivals are for our happiness, even now at the time of our sadness. And so let it still be there, even today. Let it be a sad happiness… that we are together, that we are still here… and that we are Israel.”

I know this pattern almost by heart. The prayers we say after the sermon. The songs when I know it’s almost done. And then, like any other time, we left the sanctuary to say the blessing over snacks. It’s a particular kind of recognition you have with the people you pray with. You might never have more than nodded at them. But their faces are part of the furniture of your life.

None of us had our phones, at least openly. None of us knew that more than 1,200 Israelis were dead or about to die. This was the crescendo of the worst massacre of our kind since the Holocaust — but we smiled, said a few how-are-yous and ate the cookies. None of us knew how many people we would be texting to see if they were safe, in our own families, among our relatives, or our friends. We didn’t know that what was happening, right then, at the festival, in the kibbutzim, would chase us, in some way or another, for the rest of our lives. We only knew we were there together. In that sad happiness — that we were Jews.

How did these two movements succeed in tearing up the fabric of Western society? Neoliberalism envisioned governance for the sake of individual and corporate enterprise, rolling back redistributive and regulatory policy in the name of “freedom”. Neoconservatism, meanwhile, though later more famous as a foreign-policy doctrine, was initially rooted in a scepticism towards domestic class and racial justice. Under the auspices of both schools of thought, the state was reconceived and morality was “restored” to the private sphere of “family values”.

No intellectual better embodied this peculiar fusion of neoliberalism and neoconservatism than the late historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, who died in 2019. Indeed, she was one of the most important and forgotten ideological pioneers of our times: an intellectual who did as much as her better-known husband, Irving Kristol, to invent the neoliberal-neoconservative complex.

Himmelfarb’s origin story is revelatory for two reasons. First, thanks to the central role Christianity played in her analysis (despite her Jewish background), her work serves as a challenge to those Christians belatedly joining the Left in attacking neoliberalism, and who do not appreciate how Christianity helped to cement neoliberalism’s position in the Republican Party in the first place. Second, even more importantly, Himmelfarb’s emphasis on religion forces secular liberals to re-examine their own participation in the Reagan revolution and its aftermath — the “Age of Reagan” has been one that later Democrats such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have been pleased to inhabit. For the unholy combination of neoliberalism and neoconservatism goes much further back than the Sixties, and into the era of Cold War liberalism in the Forties — since that is when Himmelfarb got her start.

Born in New York 1922 to Jewish immigrant parents, Himmelfarb studied at Brooklyn College before enrolling at the University of Chicago as a graduate student, having met Irving in 1940 at a meeting of the Young People’s Socialist League, a Trotskyist militant group they both frequented for a time in Brooklyn, where both hailed from. At Chicago, alone after her husband departed for service in Western Europe as an infantryman, Himmelfarb was drawn to the work of the 19th-century Anglo-German Catholic liberal Lord Acton — and ended up writing what became her first book on him, published in 1952. Her aim was to push back against the emergence of an optimistic and progressive liberalism that, she feared, shaded too easily into Leftism.

Acton, born in 1834, was a strange kind of liberal in his own lifetime, and only became a canonical figure in the middle of the 20th century. He was a Roman Catholic who resisted papal infallibility, his mind fixed on eternal moral certainties in an age that placed an emphasis on the evolving nature of liberal civilisation; he was suspicious of the nation state at a time when liberals treated it as their main instrument of progress; he even became sympathetic to socialism, at a time when liberalism so often took the form of economic libertarianism.

Amid the consolidation of the Cold War in the late Forties, as the world reckoned with a rising tide of totalitarianism, Acton’s adage about the corrupting power of absolute power assumed a new currency. No less than Friedrich Hayek, the godfather of neoliberalism, suggested to Himmelfarb, on a research trip in 1946 to England, that he was starting an Actonian club to resist the “totalitarianism” of the new planning state  (which ultimately became the neoliberal Mont Pèlerin Society). For Himmelfarb, however, Acton’s revival initially served a very different purpose: to immunise liberals from dreaming big and instead recognise that politics is a scene of transgression rather than a forum of opportunity. By emphasising this, Himmelfarb helped define what later Cold War liberal Judith Shklar immortally dubbed “the liberalism of fear”, a replacement of the ambitious and optimistic liberalism of the 19th century with a more cautious, disabused and threat-oriented creed.

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Like many other Cold War liberals, Himmelfarb had a particular (and mistaken) diagnosis of how liberalism could easily self-destruct. If liberals called for too much emancipation and progress, she thought, they would connive with evil forces to bring them about. They would, in other words, easily fall for the communist promise to achieve good things through immoral means. And if they neglected Christianity’s insight into the endurance of original sin, liberals would treat the state as a workable device of liberation and progress, rather than regarding it as a malignant expression of eternal depravity. The consequences, she warned, would be devastating, giving people who are tarnished by original sin the capacity to use state power to kill millions.

Though a Jew concerned about the abuse of minorities, Himmelfarb laid extraordinary emphasis on this point, in turn making Christianity integral to Cold War liberalism. While liberals had spent the prior century often viewing religious forces as an enemy, she called for a new liberalism based on Acton’s Christian vision of sin. Acton, who had rejected “integralist” forms of Christian Right-wing politics that longed for a return to medieval theocracy, was principally important for reforming secular liberals who sought to secure freedom against secular totalitarianisms such as Nazi and Soviet tyranny. He recognised, Himmelfarb wrote, “the presence of eternal and absolute” morality, in contrast to liberals who “had no sense of the religious sanctity of those principles” and compromised away freedom.

Indeed, it was liberal Christianity, Himmelfarb wrote, that might turn out to be essential in a Cold War world that knew the threat of religious authoritarianism even as secular revolution could bring even worse oppression. “Clerics are not alone in carrying the banner of religion,” she wrote. “They have been joined by a multitude of those who, in Acton’s own time, would almost certainly have been in the camp of the opposition.” Liberals needed to get over their anticlericalism, was the message, and use religion to save themselves.

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It had to be the right kind of Christianity, of course. Acton was an Augustinian, and his vision of sin forbade excessive optimism. Humanity couldn’t save itself; man’s fallen nature made power a permanent threat. Instead, the Christianity useful for Cold War liberals saw God as the external judge on history, where the notion of secular progress supposedly leading to human emancipation was little more than an alibi for crime. For Acton, Himmelfarb explained, “history did not have a meaning or purpose in itself; it acquired meaning only by comparison with a fixed moral standard outside it, and purpose by fulfilling a moral end imposed upon it”.

This Augustinian core of Cold War liberalism is often conveniently forgotten. In an otherwise excellent recent book, for example, Louis Menand paints a portrait of Cold War liberalism as a utopia of innovative modernism, rather than one rooted in the religiosity that suffused the Forties and Fifties. One Cold War liberal icon, Oxford don Isaiah Berlin, divulged once in a letter to another such icon, American historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., that he “had never read a line” of Lord Acton’s. Yet that did not stop Irving Kristol from crediting Berlin for “assuming the role of Lord Acton” as “conscience and critic” of believers in secular progress. And in spite of his own private reservations about a faith-based liberalism, Berlin understood that it defined the age of Cold War liberalism, writing in 1952 that “one of the most notable characteristics of the literary and artistic scenes” was “the revival of religion”, whatever its “pulverisation of… all the older forms of liberalism [and] secularism”.

Here is where Himmelfarb becomes representative of broader trends. Of all the Cold War liberals of this era — including Lionel Trilling, the Columbia English professor whom she and her husband lionised — Himmelfarb knew most about Judaism, though that was not saying much. For these Jews, ancestral preservation was hardly a powerful driving force — though there was a little more in Himmelfarb’s case because of her family’s observance of custom and ritual, and she took classes at the Jewish Theological Seminary while an undergraduate. For the most part, however, the identity politics of staying true to Judaism was not a significant motivation, compared to their very explicit appeal to Christian values to serve political goals. For Himmelfarb, Augustinian Christianity was a kind of ideological training ground for the intellectualism she conceived.

During the same period, Irving Kristol, schooled by his wife, also pursued a new religious orthodoxy, including a kind of neo-Actonian Judaism that rejected the optimism towards progress so prevalent among earlier liberals. Indeed, Kristol’s engagements with Christianity, with its emphasis on the permanence of sin, fed his epic denunciation, in January 1948, of modernising accounts of Judaism that presented it as a progressive social ethics rather than an acceptance of the strict limits that evil places on human possibility. This wasn’t because either Himmelfarb or her husband ever embraced observant Judaism, let alone converted to the Christian faith. It was because they believed Acton’s neo-orthodoxy was politically useful.

Both, in other words, fit well with Hannah Arendt’s quip that Orthodox Judaism was the Judaism that she didn’t practice. We can broaden her serious joke to the observation that, for a striking number of Cold War liberals like Himmelfarb and Kristol, Augustinian neo-orthodoxy was the Christianity they wanted everyone else to adopt. It would save them from the enthusiasm and naiveté of trust in the state.

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Himmelfarb’s dalliance with Acton, and her Christianisation of liberalism, was fateful in the long run. It morphed, after all, into the successor views Himmelfarb soon adopted, neoconservatism and neoliberalism, with an emphasis on “family values” as the crucible of morality and the state as dangerous or fickle. Yet this wasn’t an immediate journey.

That Himmelfarb wasn’t immediately a neoconservative or neoliberal prepared to indict the welfare state in the name of Hayek’s market fundamentalism is made clear by two facts. First, in her early studies, she saw Acton as the great alternative to Edmund Burke, whereas Hayek saw them as equally inspirational. “When Liberals finally came to admit that Conservatism might be a store-house of political wisdom,” Himmelfarb complained as late as 1953, “they settled upon Burke as the arbiter of politics and morality. But the insights of Conservatism might have been more readily found in… an Acton, who set absolute morality against history.” Second, she registered that Acton’s liberalism could support social reform. Acton had come to insist that property was not absolutely sacrosanct even in a liberal state, and even repudiated — at his “most radical”, Himmelfarb said — the affection for laissez-faire economics of his youth. For a time, she outright rejected Hayek’s competing appropriation of their common sage.

Clearly, then, it would require a step beyond Cold War liberalism in a Christian key for Himmelfarb to reach her mature neoconservatism. While continuing to appeal to morality, she gave up her insistence on Acton’s liberal Christianity, even as she emphasised Christianity as a cultural force (and a source of many evangelical voters). By the Eighties, she was a crucial contributor to the intellectual destruction of the welfare ideals that were actually triumphing after the Second World War, while she was rifling through Acton’s writings. An activist state, she insisted, “consigns” the poor “to a culture of dependency and degrades those it professes to help”.

But everything — including the political movements Himmelfarb helped to rationalise, and which continue to warp the world — has to start somewhere. Easily the most consequential move in Himmelfarb’s evolution was her redefinition of liberalism in a Christian key, because it was only a short step from there to her mature views. If the trial of neoconservatism and neoliberalism continues in future years, Himmelfarb’s case suggests that the inquest will have to reach Cold War liberalism too.

During the Thirties and Forties, four brilliant but unknown young thinkers — Simone Weil, Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt and Ayn Rand herself — were obsessed with questions about the individual versus the social world. Unfamiliar to each other, they wondered how best, in Beauvoir’s words, “to make oneself an ant among ants, or a free consciousness facing other consciousnesses”. Their respective philosophical conclusions and the surrounding life events that helped give rise to them are the subject of a wonderful book, The Visionaries by the German author Wolfram Eilenberger.

No member of this quartet was a natural team-player; all were fiercely non-conformist in their own ways. The book depicts them living through a tumultuous decade (1933-43) that included Stalin’s Holodomor, the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Hitler. To Arendt, history resembled not so much an arc bending towards justice as something more like the vision of her suicidal friend Walter Benjamin: “one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage”. Weil accused the “whole of the 19th century” of believing, wrongly, “that by walking straight in front of one, one necessarily rises up into the air.”

Metaphysical questions assumed to be long settled took on new political urgency as legal rights were repealed, hostilities stoked and the death camps built. The challenge, as far as Arendt was concerned, was for Jews like her to “fight like madmen for private existences with individual destinies” against the forces that would dehumanise them. From 1933 on, she wandered rootless and alienated across Europe, settling uneasily for a while in Paris before being forced to move on again.

Like Arendt, Rand and Weil were also Jewish, relegating them to the status of metaphysical Otherhood in the eyes of many. Rand’s prosperous Russian family had lost nearly everything during the revolution. Weil, assimilated (at least superficially) in a bourgeois French family, suffered less from antisemitism than the others, but still was forced to leave for England in 1942. As a non-Jew, Beauvoir underwent the least personal upheaval, but even she had a breakdown during a flight from the Germans in 1940.

Between them, these thinkers produced a fascinating spectrum of philosophical positions, each inflected by thoughts and feelings about the chaos around them. At one pole was the atheist Rand, arriving in the States aged 21 with a visceral hatred of totalitarianism, and with a self-willed, asocial, rational egoist in mind as a moral hero — someone a bit like her, it seems. Autonomy was everything, suffering was pointless, and the self was most free when alone.

Rand rejected any Christian or socialist calls to altruism or “equality” as vehemently as she rejected tyranny from the Russian state. Equality meant only interchangeability, which meant a descent into mediocrity and nothingness. Refusing modesty as a refuge of the feeble-minded, she would declare in her diary that “Nietzsche and I think…”. She dreamed of becoming completely impervious to other people’s opinions — to “refuse, completely and uncompromisingly, any surrender to the thoughts and desires of others”, as she put it for one of her fictional protagonists — and very nearly managed. In 1943, as her family still starved back in Leningrad, her novel The Fountainhead finally took off. She negotiated an unheard-of sum of $50,000 for the Hollywood film rights and bought herself a mink coat.

At the other end of the spectrum was the admirable Weil, equally eccentric and passionate in her attempts to make a moral art out of living, and the real star of the book. During a short and intensely lived life she moved from Marxist-inspired socialism to ascetic Christian mysticism, but was always drawn to self-sacrifice and suffering as a means of understanding others. She sent all her spare money to the poor; wouldn’t eat at her parents’ house unless she could leave the cost of a restaurant meal on the table afterwards; and worsened her already fragile health by getting a job in a factory, in order to better understand the experience of workers. During the Spanish Civil War, she became the International Brigade’s least useful volunteer, determined to carry out secret missions for the Republic but short-sighted to the point of near-blindness and unable to shoot a rifle.

Physically emaciated and tortured by terrible headaches, she deliberately sought out sacred music in churches to transform her physical suffering into meaning. By the end of her life, Weil was advocating total selflessness and renunciation of will, and framing the act of suffering as a direct route to communion with God. But even as she lay dying in a Kent hospital in 1943 — muttering verses, refusing food to the frustration of her doctors, and telling nurses to send her allocated milk to the starving — she still found the energy to write to the leaders of the Free France movement, remonstrating about their failure to send her behind enemy lines on a solo mission.

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In between these two characters and outlooks are placed the more moderate Beauvoir and Arendt. Partly because of the persecution she suffered, Arendt appears the more sympathetic one here, and the more politically serious. While being chased across Europe, she agonises about Jewish identity and the self-destructive futility of trying to “assimilate”, feeling lonely and unwelcomed wherever she fetches up.

Living precariously as a refugee after escaping from a French internment camp, she starts to articulate the ideas that would later inform her famous analysis of totalitarianism as an émigré to the United States. Internees in camps were not being arrested for anything they had personally done, she noticed, and no difference was made between the innocent and the guilty. The individuality and inner life of a person was irrelevant — was treated as non-existent, even. The Nazi plan, embraced by collaborating French too, was to turn “every individual human being into a thing that would always behave the same way under identical conditions”.

In comparison to the travails of Arendt, the life of the young Beauvoir can’t help seeming slightly decadent. Granted, she waxes enthusiastically about the importance of “metaphysical solidarity” with others as a precondition of personal freedom, but makes it sound all rather grubbily transactional — I’ll grant you recognition, if you grant me some. While, by force of circumstance in the Paris of 1936, Arendt and her fellow refugee lover are living hand-to-mouth in sparsely furnished hotels and wandering aimlessly between cafes during the day, Sartre and Beauvoir are doing the very same thing — by choice, for kicks.

The immediate focus of both Sartre and Beauvoir is not the suffering millions, but their shared “family”, composed of young lovers and acolytes. When not reading or writing, Beauvoir conducts a complicated romantic schedule that would make the average polycule these days feel inadequate. Resembling Rand in her rather sociopathic detachment from other people’s feelings, she treats this quasi-incestuous group as a psychological testing chamber through which she can analyse various permutations of what the existentialists called “Being-for-others” — and then set them within her novels.

One of Eilenberger’s strokes of genius is to reflect the book’s content in its form. Just as hidden aspects of the self are revealed only in a process of comparison with others, so too do elements of each woman’s life and outlook emerge in fascinating relief by juxtaposition with the other three. As the episodic narrative unfurls, strange harmonies and discords between the thinkers appear as if in musical counterpoint.

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Poles apart, Rand and Weil both end up thinking of social life as a source of evil, though for different reasons. For Weil, Plato’s “Great Beast” — public opinion — can only lead us away from God. For Rand, it can only lead us away from the god-like self. Arendt embraces love between two people as the antithesis of totalitarian impersonality, while Weil treats romantic love as “manifestly unjust and morally random”. Just as Arendt argues that Jewish assimilation into society requires a destructive embracing of antisemitism within the self, so too will Beauvoir eventually go on to argue in The Second Sex that the assimilation of women into a universal “humanity” requires something similar — but with misogyny taking the place of antisemitism. Meanwhile Rand, Weil, and Beauvoir all think of themselves as adopting masculine roles.

The basic philosophical questions addressed so ardently by these iconoclasts have not gone away. Invasion and war are back on the continent, along with dehumanising war crimes and the strategic othering of ethnic and national populations — all encouraged by leaders who sneer at democracy. But even without all that, there are quieter and more everyday invasions: of your mind, for instance, filled up by other people’s thoughts and feelings every time you look at a screen.

The boundary of the self in relation to others has never been more porous. Resistance to the “Great Beast” is increasingly difficult, even if we now answer to bureaucrats in HR departments and not to party apparatchiks. In an age of virtual and machine-mediated relationships, we invent new selves online for the benefits of imaginary beings but take every opportunity to avoid other people in the flesh. In doing so, we avoid ourselves. Indeed, for some of us, lost in online worlds, Being-for-others in Beauvoir’s sense barely gets going. And destructive ideology can easily seep into the gaps where human contact used to be.

Equally, the public square has also got a lot noisier since 1943, and it’s even harder to tell who the bad guys are. Widespread cultural familiarity means that, perversely, the narrative of a minority being cruelly dehumanised can be cynically recycled by pretty much any group seeking power or attention, no matter how ludicrous the claim at face value. (“Acephobia”, otherwise known as discrimination against asexual people comes to mind — indeed, surely it’s only a matter of time before some bright spark reclaims Simone Weil as an early fighter for asexual rights). Tap into the right tropes and it’s a work of minutes to persuade the guilt-ridden and the gullible that a new identity group is being persecuted horribly, simply because rampant political ambitions are being criticised. The book-burners and censors these days do it in the memory of past victims of totalitarianism, and many onlookers don’t know which side to take. Even worse, the phenomenon of confected-grievance-as-power-grab allows many to dismiss genuine social ills in the same light.

Still, despite the epistemic confusion, we have to keep on trying. As Arendt wrote presciently in 1951: “The self-compulsion of ideological thinking ruins all relationships with reality… The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (the standards of thought) no longer exist.” In other words: technologies may come and go, but the challenge of staying an individual in the face of the mob is always with us.