“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?” – Hillel the Elder
Gornisht. Bupkis. Zilch.
That’s what we’ve gained by encouraging our progressive, open-minded American Jewish kids to leapfrog the first axiom in Hillel’s famous three-pronged quote: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” and jump right to the second one: “If I am only for myself, what am I?” In other words, by teaching our children to take care of others but not their own family, we have failed them.
In the best-case scenario, we have been too humble to teach our kids to say proudly, “The Jews have a purpose – to be a light unto the nations, to lead the charge in repairing our broken world; and that starts with being our brothers’ keepers.”
In the worst-case scenario, we have been too apologetic or too ashamed to tout our exceptionalism, so we have over-compensated, hoping that self-criticism and obsequiousness would endear us to the non-Jewish world. Either way, we’ve made a big mistake.
By failing to instill deep pride in their connection to Am Yisrael, we’ve encouraged a portion of this next generation to stand with their enemies against their own people. It’s as if some of our children have become battered spouses, who blame themselves, saying they deserve it when their abusive partners assault them. Why else would a young Jewish college student stand shoulder to shoulder with protesters who call for the destruction of their people?
It’s one thing to criticize the actions of the Israeli government – show me one Israeli who doesn’t do that – but it’s another thing entirely to call for the end of the Jewish state, along with the eight million Jews who live there.
To be fair, most of our children do not support our enemies. In fact, many of our kids actively stand up for Jews and bravely defend Israel in the toughest places – on campus, in social media, among their peers – and they deserve our gratitude, support, and investment in their future. Investing in this group must be our priority.
However, according to an American Jewish Committee study, “The State of Antisemitism in America 2023,” nearly a third of young Jews do not believe that saying “Israel has no right to exist” is antisemitic. These Jewish kids are writing letters to their Jewish schools and summer camps, slamming them for their Zionist brainwashing, and joining anti-Israel protests around the country. It begs the question: Where did we go right and where did we go wrong?
On the one hand, most of the Jewish community’s collective focus must be on educating and empowering those young Jews proudly defending the Jewish people, as well as those supportive of Israel but who feel too ill-equipped to stand up vocally.
On the other hand, we must also take a hard look at ourselves and ask how we, as parents, teachers, and Jewish leaders, have failed so many in this generation.
It’s time for an honest and uncensored reckoning of the entire American Jewish establishment for the way we’ve taught Jewish peoplehood over the last 30 years.
How did we lose our most open-minded children?
Within weeks following the Oct. 7 massacre, before Israel entered the Gaza Strip to go after Hamas, before a single Palestinian child was killed in the IDF’s operation, the world got on the antisemitic crazy train, blaming Israel for what terrorists did to the Jews – taking too many of our Jewish children along with them. How did that happen?
How did our open-minded, progressive kids come to stand side by side at protests and encampments with those condoning terrorism, murder, kidnapping, torture, and rape?
How did our social justice warriors, who fight every micro-aggression against every minority, justify the harassment and intimidation happening to Jewish kids on campus?
How did our pink-hat-wearing feminists go silent on the horrific sexual violence that was used as a weapon of war against Jewish women?
How did our truth-seeking student reporters, who loathe the alt-right’s “fake news,” believe that it was okay to blindly accept whatever data, numbers, and quotes were offered by Hamas?
How did our big-hearted, liberal advocates, who believe that everyone deserves dignity, respect, and freedom, come to believe that those who live in the Jewish state do not have a right to rescue their hostages and defend themselves?
And most importantly, most devastating, most heartbreaking: How did young American Jews, who believe every people on Earth deserves their own nation – including the Palestinians – suddenly believe that only the Jews don’t have the right to their own homeland?
What did we do wrong?
Israeli chutzpah and self-critique
One of the most inspiring characteristics of Israelis is their willingness to speak the truth. They can be frustratingly direct, which sometimes comes off as too aggressive, but it’s almost always done from a place of honesty.
Israelis are already demanding inquiries into the failures that led to the Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas. The unprecedented anger, pain, and fear that Israelis are experiencing have led them to demand answers to difficult questions. Israelis aren’t waiting for the end of the war. They aren’t waiting for all the hostages to come home. They are deeply engaged in a cheshbon nefesh of their national soul, and no one has been spared in Israel – not the IDF, not the Mossad, not the political establishment.
We have seen multiple resignations already, including Brig.-Gen. Avi Rosenfeld, head of the IDF’s Gaza Division, and Maj.-Gen. Aharon Haliva, head of Military Intelligence. Surely there are many more to come.
As fingers are pointed at everyone, from the prime minister down, there is a reckoning happening in the Jewish state – and not just because someone always needs to be held responsible but because Israel will push hard on the systemic failures to learn from what went wrong, and then make the necessary changes to ensure that it never happens again.
It begs the question: Will the American Jewish community have the courage to conduct the same scrutiny as the Israelis, to hold our leadership to account for our systemic failures, and ensure that our mistakes also never happen again?
American Jews need to ask some tough questions
American Jews need to import some Israeli chutzpah and take ourselves to task in the same way Israelis are. We must have the courage to investigate the failures that emerged after the Oct. 7 massacre on our side of the ocean – specifically, the unprecedented (and unexpected) surge in antisemitism that followed, and how our kids got sucked into it. We must subject ourselves to intense scrutiny, hold our leadership to account, and demand answers to these tough questions:
Why are so many of our kids woefully unprepared to talk about Israel’s history, defend Israel’s righteousness in this war, and fight anti-Zionism?
Why are so many young Jews not standing by the Jewish state in their just fight, and instead standing with protesters calling for the destruction of the Jewish state?
Where was the nationally coordinated, highly organized, ready-to-launch playbook that our students could have used to defend Israel the day after Oct. 7?
Why are so many of our kids not proud enough to stand up against virulent, vicious antisemitism on their own campuses?
This is the first level of investigation – looking at the American Jewish establishment and figuring out what went wrong in our own house. We also need to ask far-reaching questions of the mainstream establishment:
How did our college campuses become cesspools of antisemitism that exploded overnight after Oct. 7?
Why did so many of our local elected leaders, from school boards to city councils, have trouble unequivocally condemning Jew-hatred?
Why did our allies in progressive circles spontaneously abandon us after years of us having their backs?
How has social media become the spawning ground for a new generation of Jew-haters whose antisemitic virtue-signaling is cool among young people?
How have we allowed the curriculum being taught in places as diverse as K-12 schools to diversity, equality and inclusion workshops in corporate America to frame the Israeli-Palestinian narrative as a biased story of indigenous, occupied people of color (Palestinians) being displaced by white, oppressor colonialists (European Jews)?
Jews have become interwoven into the fabric of the American establishment, often at the highest levels of leadership. If Franklin Foer is correct in his article in The Atlantic “The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending,” that “antisemitism on the Right and the Left threatens to bring to a close an unprecedented period of safety and prosperity for Jewish Americans,” then we must examine how we have allowed the underpinnings of this Jew-hatred to fester under our noses for so long.
A plan for taking ourselves to task
Aliza Goodman of the iCenter, an Israel education organization, wrote that since Oct. 7 in the world of Israel education, “Everything has changed and nothing has changed.” She claims that the strategy we’ve been employing works, but we need to do more of it.
Despite whether or not she is right, the only way we will really know what works is if we do a comprehensive evaluation of the last 30 years of American Jewish life – a national commission of inquiry. Major Jewish foundations should fund an unbiased, outside consultant to look deeply inside our Jewish ecosystem and point out our failures.
A massive list of stakeholders – everyone who receives support from a major Jewish foundation – must be compelled to participate so the consultant can dive deep into what has been taught over the last three decades.
The consultant should leave no stone unturned, investigating a broad cross-section of the Jewish landscape, from old-timers to newbies. It should include every organization associated with the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, as well as national Jewish organizations not affiliated with it.
It should include leaders of major Jewish day schools and supplementary Jewish schools; teen professionals from Jewish youth groups and summer camps; rabbis from each denomination, as well as leaders from independent minyanim; university leadership and professors, as well as college organizations like Hillel.
It should include other groups focused on Jewish education, such as Jewish community centers, Birthright, Moishe House, and locally based groups like Wilderness Torah and Urban Adamah. It should include high school students and college kids, as well as recent graduates. It should include Jews of different backgrounds and political beliefs and be as broad as possible.
The consultant should investigate the Jewish community’s education policies, strategies, philosophies, trainings, tactics, textbooks, social media content, content providers, etc. He should discover which organizations are succeeding and the ones that failed. He should determine the practices worth continuing and those that need to be discontinued.
The consultant should make some major revelations that will determine the future direction of Jewish peoplehood education in America. And then, just as major Jewish foundations came together to create Birthright a generation ago, they should fund a massive initiative to instill deep Jewish pride in the next generation.
As a leader of a Jewish community center, I believe the JCCs need to be challenged to determine if our programming is hitting the mark or not. Collectively, we see 1.5 million people every week in North America – one million of whom are Jewish. Nothing else in the Diaspora comes close to those numbers. Therefore, we need to analyze whether our family programs, camps, after-school programs, youth and teen groups, etc., are doing enough to instill Jewish pride.
We need to examine our own Jewish, Zionist, and Hebrew curricula. We need to evaluate our strategy with the Jewish Agency for Israel, shilchim (emissary) programs, and Israel trips. If we are doing well, then much more funding should be infused into our system so we can create the next generation of Maccabees; if not, we must be called out and forced to change.
Our community cannot wave off this challenge, telling ourselves, “This is just what college kids do – skip classes and jump on the bandwagon of some issue they don’t fully understand, and when this war ends they will move on to the next cause célèbre. And in any case, in a few years when they start having kids, they’re going to return to the fold because they need services, just like generations before them did.”
We must not wave it off because this time it’s different. This time, the vitriolic hatred is not behind the closed doors of country clubs and board rooms. It is out in the open on college campuses and New York subways. The criticism of “Israel should not do this” has metastasized into the antisemitism of “Israel should not exist.” While that’s not new, what is new is that too many of our Jewish kids are embracing that demented worldview.
I am not calling for a commission of inquiry into why Jews criticize Israel or how far criticism should be permitted to go. That is not new. We have always been self-critical, and we always should be. Instead, I am calling for an inquiry into how antisemitism has spread so deeply into the hearts and minds of many young Jews and into so many progressive circles, and how the American Jewish establishment has allowed that to happen.
No one’s ego should be spared, and no organization’s legacy should be off limits. If we refuse to dig deep and to let ourselves be challenged, if we are too scared to know the answers because it will put our reputations at risk, if we can’t handle some real truth-telling because we are concerned about protecting our organizations’ big budgets, then we will only fail again.
After all, what is the use of having large Jewish organizations and big beautiful buildings if we can’t do our most basic job of protecting ourselves today and securing a safer, better tomorrow for our kids? Yes, it will be hard. It will be ugly. We will uncover massive failures that will result in leaders leaving their jobs. But we must insist that it happens.
When we finally engage in our own cheshbon nefesh, we must refuse to accept the response “This is just the age-old virus of antisemitism. It has always been there and always will be. This is just the latest incarnation of it, so there is nothing we can do.”
Zionism taught us there is always something we can do. Zionism is the belief that Jews hold the keys to our destiny and determine our own future. We are no longer the victims of history; we write our own history. Zionism is not just self-determination for Jews in our homeland but self-actualization for Jews all over the world. That’s the Zionism of today, modern Zionism, Zionism 3.0.
Just as the Israelis are undergoing a reckoning to uncover their failings to make sure Oct. 7 never happens again, so too must the American Jewish community ensure that the post-Oct. 7 failures never happen again here. If we don’t take measures to fix our errors, then we will be bound to repeat our mistakes, and I fear that next time we may not be able to recover.
To be sure, there are many in the Jewish community coming out of the woodwork to show their support for Israel and stand up against antisemitism. Many were there before Oct. 7 and many more still have emerged since Oct. 7, becoming part of the “surge.” It must be a priority to increase our investment in that group of new Jewish warriors. But we must first start with this reckoning so we can know which efforts succeeded in turning that group of Jews into strong, proud, Zionist activists, and which efforts had the opposite effect on some in our community.
By embracing this Zionist ethos of taking matters into our own hands, and by doubling down on our willingness to be self-critical, we can figure out not only where we succeeded as a community but also where we failed. We can determine why we were not successful in teaching more of our kids that it’s possible to be there for others and be there for ourselves too, as Hillel commands.
With a course correction, we can increase investment in the right path forward and exponentially grow the number of Zionist Jews who are willing to be loud and proud in the next generation.
We must do this now because indeed, “If not now, when?”
The writer is the author of Why Do Jewish: A manifesto for 21st century Jewish Peoplehood, available on Amazon. He is the president and CEO of the Oshman Family Jewish Community Center in Palo Alto, California, and founder of Zionism 3.0: The Z3 Project, Reimagining Diaspora-Israel Relations.