Passover and the Crisis of Jewish Identity

Every year at the Seder, we read about four sons. The Fourth Son is the one who does not know how to ask. He is the one sitting in our universities, our newsrooms, our communal institutions, and sometimes at our own Seder tables.

He is the one my non-Jewish friends ask me about: We expected hostility from the usual places. What we didn't expect was Jews making the case against their own people better than Israel's enemies ever could. Can you explain this?

Their confusion is not political; it’s moral. They struggle to understand how a people forged by persecution could so readily supply the language used to delegitimize their own survival. Jewish students organizing anti-Israel protests. Jewish academics signing letters accusing Israel of genocide. Jewish public figures condemning Jewish power more fiercely than Jewish enemies ever have.

This is not a fringe phenomenon. It is visible, documented, and growing. And it demands an honest explanation.

The Haggadah offers one.

Rudderless

The Fourth Son is traditionally understood as disengaged or uninformed. But in our generation, his condition looks different. He is not empty of Jewish identity. He has fragments of it. He knows he is Jewish. What he lacks is a rudder — an internal framework that allows him to think, question, and interpret the world through a Jewish lens.

He feels Jewish but cannot articulate what that identity stands for. So when pressure comes — social, moral, institutional — he cannot resist it.

He has symbols without substance, memory without meaning, ethics without peoplehood. He feels Jewish but cannot articulate what that identity stands for, what it demands, or how it should shape his judgment when the pressure comes.

So when pressure comes — social, moral, institutional — he cannot resist it. The loudest voices, the strongest consensus, the greatest social rewards end up deciding for him. His Jewishness does not guide his judgment. The world around him reshapes it.

The Fourth Son is rudderless at sea; the strongest waves decide his direction.

After Oct 7

Since October 7, the pressure on Jewish identity has been unlike anything most living Jews have experienced. Jewish students have reported feeling compelled to publicly disavow Israel simply to maintain social standing. The price of Jewish particularity — of saying we have a right to exist and defend ourselves as a people — has risen sharply in elite cultural and academic spaces.

For Jews with a strong internal framework, this pressure is uncomfortable but navigable. They can criticize Israeli policy fiercely, hold genuine moral tensions, and still maintain clarity about what Jewish survival requires. Judaism has always welcomed fierce self-critique. The prophets rebuked Israel. The Talmud argues endlessly. Cheshbon hanefesh, honest moral accounting, is a core Jewish practice and strength.

But there is a crucial difference between these two statements:

"We need to do better."
versus
"We are the problem."

The first is moral responsibility, the second is something else. When Jews reserve their harshest judgment for other Jews, adopt the language of those who deny Jewish legitimacy, and treat solidarity with their own people as suspect, critique has crossed into something the German-Jewish philosopher Theodor Lessing identified nearly a century ago: Jewish self-hatred.

As A Jew

In the modern era, Jewish self-rejection has acquired a distinctive voice: "As a Jew…"

"As a Jew, I must condemn…" "Jewish ethics demand we oppose…" "I'm Jewish, and that's why I say Zionism is the problem."

Jewish identity is invoked not to express solidarity, but to legitimize distance from the Jewish people. Jewishness becomes a credential, a way of saying I am not one of those Jews. These statements, eagerly amplified by Israel's enemies, provide cover for accusations that would be recognized as antisemitic if they came from anyone else.

This is not, for the most part, driven by malice. Many of those who speak this way are sincere. They are compassionate people responding to genuine moral pain. But moral reasoning does not develop in a vacuum. When Jewish power is consistently framed as suspect, when Jewish self-defense is treated as uniquely requiring justification, opposition to Jewish sovereignty can begin to feel like ethical clarity rather than adaptation to a hostile moral framework.

What begins as ethical concern can harden, over time, into internalized condemnation not of specific policies or leaders, but of Jewish peoplehood itself.

Open the Door

The Haggadah's response to the Fourth Son is not argument or rebuke. It is an opening.

What this moment asks of us is clarity — knowing who we are, where we come from, what we have carried for three thousand years, and what we are still here to do.

The Haggadah says, “You open for him.” You don't wait for curiosity to emerge. You don't win him back with polemics. You give him language, belonging, and a place inside the story, before the distance hardens into something more permanent.

What this moment asks of us is clarity — knowing who we are, where we come from, what we have carried for three thousand years, and what we are still here to do.

Jewish identity, held clearly and carried with confidence, is not a moral burden to be managed or explained away. It is a moral inheritance to be proud of.

The Fourth Son needs to digest that.

This Passover, open the door.

The ideas in this article are drawn from my forthcoming book, The Fourth Son: Jewish Identity, Self-Hatred, and the Courage to Stand Alone, scheduled for publication at the end of 2026.