The primary front in this war is in southern Israel as the IDF works to defeat Hamas, secure its border, and rescue our hostages. The second front is in the diaspora. Here we are fighting a series of multi-pronged battles.
Our colleges, our high schools, our middle schools, our synagogues, our organizations, social media, our workplaces, and the streets of our cities have all become fronts in this iteration of the never-ending war against the Jews. And as our ancestors – from the Maccabees to the Warsaw Ghetto uprisers – fought for their right to live as Jews, now so must we.
We must use every resource in our arsenal to fight back, from our bank balances to our most talented thinkers. This war is not just a fight to keep Jew-hate at bay. It is a fight for the soul of the Jewish community. For our right to Jewish specificity.
A fight to authentically express our Jewishness and our Zionism without pressure from the wider world to assimilate. We must reject assimilation, which is not the same as integration. Jews living in the diaspora can – and arguably should – integrate, but without diminishing our Jewishness in the process.
Navigating dual identities
Make no mistake about it. Navigating our dual identities is difficult. Insecure about our own history, many of us are terrified of our differences. We balk at the realization that the dominant cultures in which we live may have been defining us all along.
But our difference is what makes us special. We can belong to our diasporic societies without succumbing to the canard of dual loyalty. To drive this point home, consider what we tell our children when they go out into the world: “Change so you can be accepted?” Hardly. We tell them to “be true to who you are.”
It’s time to take our own advice: a Jewish War Cabinet.
ULTIMATELY, TO win this war of self-perception, we need a Jewish War Cabinet. We need individuals from across the Jewish world to work together so we can win this war. We must do away with intra-organizational infighting and the illusion that ideological differences are keeping us apart. We must demand our right to self-affirmation clearly and categorically.
As part of this cabinet, we cannot simply enlist those who have previously held positions of power. We need a team where they, as equals, sit alongside fresh and brilliant minds who have influence and ideas. Each must leave their egos at the door. And each of us must acknowledge that we are fighting for something much bigger than ourselves. This is a battle for the perpetuation of a proud Zionist Jewish world that understands its connection to each other and our indigenous land.
In the work of the Jewish War Cabinet, Jewish Peoplehood and Jewish indigeneity must be a central focus. Our schools must incorporate it into their curricula. Our organizations must run programs on it. And our synagogues must preach it alongside more religious perspectives on the Torah.
For too long, we have allowed the wider world to define our identities. In rejecting the Nazi classification of Jews as a race, there are Jewish organizations and Holocaust institutions that refer to Jews as a religion. This is an understandable response to Jew-hate, but it is also wrong. We must remember that Jews are the only people who have the right to define Jewish identity.
While there will always be outliers and those on the radical fringes of our community, I maintain we can come to a consensus – one with flexibility and room for reasonable disagreement. We are not monolithic, nor have we ever been. But there are fundamentals we must agree on, starting with this: we are a people indigenous to the Land of Israel and have a right to live authentically while maintaining our connection to our homeland.
The Jewish War Cabinet must not simply be a talk shop. It must be solution and action-oriented. It’s about taking ideas and disseminating them to the wider Jewish community, while offering tangible support. Teacher training, curriculum creation, coaching for those who lead our organizations. Critically, it will need buy-in from communal organizations. The threat is too great not to pull all our resources and work together.
Ultimately, we are at a crossroads. Future generations of Jews will look to us and ask what we did during this latest war against the Jews. Will they see a proactive Jewish community fighting together to ensure the survival of the Jewish people? Or will they see disharmony and inertia?
It’s time to choose.
The writer is the founder of the modern Jewish Pride movement, an educator, and the author of Jewish Pride: Rebuilding a People. His new book is Reclaiming Our Story: The Pursuit of Jewish Pride.